Tag: Books & Movies

Wrong 10

Books & Movies, Crime

Yeah I know, it’s another piece of A.I. garbage, masquerading as thoughtful critique, but this take on the 10 greatest heist movies gets it wrong.

To save you the time of watching the video, with its fake voice and faker conviction, here’s its list:

10 – Oceans 11 (no argument;  the first and best of the Oceans franchise, and far better than the original Rat Pack version)
9 – The Italian Job (with Michael Caine;  also no argument)
8 – Inception (nope;  it’s not a heist movie, but sci-fi)
7 – Rififi (no argument)
6 – Inside Man (no argument)
5 – The Sting (nope, it’s not a heist movie;  it’s a sting, just as the title suggests)
4 – Reservoir Dogs (nope, it’s not a heist, just as the “narrator” suggests)
3 – Heat (no argument)
2 – The Town (haven’t seen it yet, so no comment)
1 – Goodfellas (nope;  it’s not  even remotely a heist movie)

You see, there’s a framing problem, here.  The definition of a “heist” movie is that it’s about criminals stealing stuff from an institution, not from people.  It has to be about the actual robbery, in other words, and not about the aftermath (Reservoir Dogs) or just an aside to the plot (Goodfellas), or about robbing an individual (The Sting, Inception).  That’s not to say that the above are not good movies — they’re all absolutely brilliant — but they’re not about heists, according to my definition.

So if we delete the unqualified, it leaves four spots open on the list.  Here are my modest suggestions for inclusion, in chronological order:

The Lavender Hill Mob (1951, Alec Guinness)
Charley Varrick (1973, Walter Matthau)
Thief (1981, James Caan)
The Score (2001, Robert De Niro, Ed Norton)
Heist (2001, Gene Hackman)
…and we could add either or both of the Thomas Crown Affair movies, with absolutely no argument from me.  Even Snatch could conceivably be included, as it begins with arguably the funniest robbery ever filmed.

To be frank, though, heist (or “caper”) movies are not my favorite genre, so there may be others that are worthy but that I haven’t seen, so feel free to add your own suggestions in Comments.

Afterthought:  I suspect that not many have seen Jules Dassin’s Rififi, but I would earnestly recommend that you do so.  When the entire spectacular heist is filmed without dialogue or music, you have to know… so that poxy A.I. list got at least one thing right.

Talent, Gone

Bad News, Books & Movies

I see with immense sadness that writer Len Deighton has died.  Granted, the man had a long and fruitful life and career, but that doesn’t stop it from sucking.

While Deighton was best known for his espionage novels like The Ipcress Files and Funeral In Berlin (both made into memorable movies starring Michael Caine), my personal favorite was actually a WWII novel, Bomber, which if you haven’t read before, you should.  Be warned:  it is an absolutely heartrending story.

R.I.P.

Quote Of The Day

Books & Movies, QOTD

Via Insty:

“[Kathleen Kennedy] gambled some of the biggest franchises in Hollywood history on the modern audience. And wow, did she lose big. To paraphrase Chris Gore, she took boy brands that everyone could enjoy and turned them into girl brands that nobody enjoyed. Men felt excluded and disrespected, and women felt patronized and pandered to. The modern audience had failed to show up, and the existing audience was abandoning ship. Kennedy’s greatest gamble had failed, and inevitably it all finally caught up with her.”

Can I be frank here for a moment?  I grant you that the destruction of these comic-book “franchises” leaves me totally unmoved because I have never been in the target audience for these infantile fantasies.  So to Star Wars, Star Trek, all those ur-Nordic fairy tales, Justice League and all the nochschleppers… good bye, fuck off and good riddance.  Ditto to the directors and producers, and indeed likewise to the actors and actresses, all of whom have made billions of dollars from filming this silly, inconsequential oeuvre  of fluff and nonsense.

A pox on all their houses.

Let me add to that the opinion that I will be really, really glad if none of these fantasies see the light of day for a generation or two so that maybe, just maybe some of those bloated production budgets might instead make their way into the production of decent movies with grownup storylines, good acting and productions that don’t rely on the deafening of their audiences.

But I risk being as naïve as the franchises’ audiences if I truly believe that any of this will ever happen.

Thank goodness for my DVD collection, which grows monthly.

Classic Beauty: Melina Mercouri

Classic Beauty

I always worshipped Greek actress Melina Mercouri, ever since I saw her in the brilliant 1960 movie Never On Sunday.  I have no idea how I got to see it during that year, being only six years old, but my memory is watching it at the drive-in theater while my parents snored on the front seat of the car.  The subject matter and storyline would have horrified my mother, had she been awake:  the promiscuous prostitute who was being swayed from her debauched life by some goody-two shoes American, with loud and sometimes violent opposition.

I didn’t understand any of it, of course, being only six years old.

But I fell in love with Melina’s character:  her blonde hair, her huge, flashing eyes, that wide, sensuous mouth and her fiery spirit.  (I adore Italian actress Anna Magnani for precisely the same reasons.)

The thing is that Melina wasn’t really acting.  When the “colonels” came to power in Greece, overthrowing the elected government of the time, she went crazy in attacking them.  And when they revoked her Greek citizenship, her response was classic:  “I was born a Greek and I will die a Greek.  They were born fascists and they will die fascists.”

Then after sanity prevailed and democracy returned to Greece [irony alert], she was made Minister of Culture — the first woman in male-dominated Greek politics ever to reach Cabinet rank.  She stayed in that position for eight years, most probably because by then she was an icon, and everybody was probably too afraid to oppose her.

And now on with the show:

Color?  Of course:

And here she is, going Full Melina:

Magnificent.  And scary.  And, of course, sexy as all hell.

Turning Back A Page

History

As you may remember, I went back to university in my mid-fifties to get a college degree, ending up with a B.A. in Modern Western European History.  There’s no reason for having specialized in that as opposed to say Classical History (which I had studied before, many years ago), because to me, pretty much all history is interesting.

Anyway, one of the courses I took was on the French Revolution, delivered by one of my favorite professors, Michael Leggieri*.  He opened the course by giving a single lecture on what exactly the French were revolting against.  It wasn’t just the monarchy and the Church they hated so much (with, it should be said, considerable justification), but theirs was a reaction to the entire societal structure, which was largely still medieval and had the effect of not only grinding the noses of the common people into poverty, but preventing them from ever rising out of that miserable state.

Small wonder they went all French (i.e. overboard) and took a long trip down Guillotine Road.  I might have done the same, in their position.

Anyway, Leggieri’s lecture lit a spark in me (as so many did), because I had no more than a passing acquaintance with the period between the Dark Ages and said Revolution in Europe.

Sadly, Life intervened and I wasn’t able to devote much time to studying that period… until now.  I was chatting to New Wife the other night, and told her that I’d been doing a lot of reading while she was gadding about Seffrica with the Beloved Grandchildren.  When she asked me what I’d been reading and I told her (history, duh), she ordered me to go to Half Price Books and get more because Aren’t You Sick Of Reading About The Same History All The Time?

Well, no;  but the point was a valid one.

So off I went, and the first book to catch my eye should be a decent gateway, I think, into further study:  the New Cambridge Modern History VII:  The Old Regime 1713-63.  It’s seems like a fairly comprehensive study, I think (after but a cursory glance at the contents pages), but it should set the scene properly.  This work was first published in 1957 so it may be free of modernistic cant, but we’ll see.

And now, if you’ll excuse me… this book isn’t going to read itself.

*I see that Mike Leggieri has left U. North Texas and ended up at the University of Florida as Professor of War, Strategy and Statecraft at the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education.  They are lucky, because he’s one of the best — and that’s not just my opinion, either.  (He’s also very conservative, which helps.)

Never Stopped

Entertainment, Music

Via Insty, this happy tale:

You probably know the feeling — you’re in the mood to watch a movie, so you open up Netflix. The next thing you know, two hours have passed, and you still haven’t decided what to watch. Even when I go on a streaming platform, knowing what I’m looking for, it’s easy to get distracted by a homepage flooded with endless recommendations. Eventually, it starts to feel overwhelming and all that content just blurs together into one giant, forgettable backlog.

That’s why I’ve started buying CDs and DVDs again. I recently revived some old PC setups, so I thought it was time to try taking a similar trip back in time with my music and movies. What started as a passing interest in physical media ended up highlighting everything I’m missing out on with streaming.

And the rest, as they say, was history.  It’s a lovely story, so haste ye thither and peruse the thing in its entirety.

Longtime Readers will know full well that I’ve never stopped doing that.  I’ve always had a large collection of DVDs and CDs on hand, precisely for the reasons stated in the article.  Only the recent move by media companies [spit]  towards sunsetting access and availability — not to mention editing the original releases into something… well, less — has reaffirmed my preference toward ownership over subscription.

So to all those — Olde Pharttes, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z, whatever — who decide to make a similar lifestyle decision:  welcome to the club.

It’s a decision you will never regret.