The Bank Job (2008)

Sometimes all I want out of my screwdriver is the ability to screw.

Enjoy the veiled sex joke and come back when you're ready to be a little more serious. Thanks.

Seriously, I don't need built in levels, attachments, rubberized grips and tempered steel shafts (man, this is getting a bit too much). I mean, that's all nice and everything, but ultimately all I really care about is, can the damn thing screw and unscrew?

The same goes for genre movies, and part of the refreshing thing about THE BANK JOB is it eschews flashy camera moves and unrealistic color palettes to focus on the hard mechanics of a heist movie. This isn't a Guy Ritchie flick, although Ritchie regular Jason Statham does star. What you see is what you get from director Roger Donaldson - a plot-driven heist film that tells the story it wants to tell and then gets the hell out of there.

The story is built around the true-life robbery of Lloyd's Bank on Baker Street, London in 1971, where millions in money, jewels and documents were stolen and never recovered. In real life, the British authorities issued something called a "D-Notice" which essentially classified the case, where it remains to this day. THE BANK JOB takes this bit of British history and weaves in a story about corruption at Scotland Yard, blackmail concerning a member of the Royal Family, and a nasty bit involving murderer and drug dealer who fancies himself the new Malcolm X.

Sound a little complicated? Not really. Besides some nonsensical jumping back and forth in time in the opening moments THE BANK JOB runs in a very linear fashion. Donaldson doesn't play the 70's time frame for laughs or nostalgia, instead keeping things relatively muted while grounding his characters in a way that would work in any time frame. Statham does a solid job despite being saddled with the silly name of Terry Leather, a small time crook trying to go straight. When the opportunity to pull off the heist presents itself, his motivation is to get out of debt and provide a better life for his wife and two daughters, something we wouldn't expect from a typical Statham vehicle.

And what of the hesit itself? While not as memorable as classics like THE ASPHALT JUNGLE or THE GREAT MUPPET CAPER, it works because the film doesn't let you forget that these guys are small time amateurs. So they screw up. A lot. part of the charm lies in the quirks and character flourishes each supporting member brings to the crew. Dave, who in his spare time does a little porn for one of the main villains in the movie orders fish and chips to be delivered to their hideout/cover. Terry employs Eddie, his employee from the car dealership as a lookout, and between the two of them names and more sensitive information is constantly spilled out over walkie-talkies. There's too much noise with the drill (they're tunneling underground to reach the bank vault). All of this leads to their eventual discovery, and the fun isn't in the robbery as much as it is in how this inept crew deal with (or not) what happens next.

THE BANK JOB falters a bit toward the end when, after placing so much emphasis on their small time status Statham suddenly becomes a master manipulator, moving all the pieces into position to ensure his and his friends' escape. The temptation to use Statham's physical prowess was also too great; he easily beats the tar out of two people in the film's climax, which opposes an earlier scene where he stands helpless while some thugs smash the car windows at his dealership. But these are small, forgivable things for a film that sets out to do one thing and sticks to the plan. I don't know if I'm ready to put THE BANK JOB down as a modern crime classic, but it's a solid movie that delivers on it's promise.

The Stockpile Syndrome: Pursuing Goals at 24fps

Bear witness to my shameful admission: I have a serious problem with stockpiling. Movies, music, books...my house is a virtual Barnes and Noble for the Missus and I. Always afraid a moment will come when I won't have something to do, I frantically collect everything I have even the slightest interest in, fearful that if I don't get it now, it will dissipate into the ether forever, and my soul will be the poorer for it.

DVDs, with their succulent cover art and ever-expanding set of additional features are the biggest bullies in the bunch, which is particularly odd because movies have the least excuse for stockpiling. It's a law of the physical universe to be no further than 3.2 miles from the nearest Blockbuster Video, I've been a member of Netflix for almost eight years, and films are readily available in the local branch of the library (legally) and online (somewhat less legally). And yet my stack of unwatched DVDs climbs on, reaching new heights of intimidation and shame while ever-beckoning my son to come a little closer to its teetering verticality (huh?) so that it may crush him under its massive weight.

I tried watching a movie a night to whittle down the numbers, but every Tuesday brings new reasons to feed the beast. Every review or recommendation must be pursued so that I can comment on it before the novelty wears off. Every film book offers a new director, a new film to be devoured, digested, and ultimately excreted in conversation or commetary online. Recently I've taken to throwing out the plastic cases and storing most of my DVDs in leather binders, and even that's starting to take up too much space, as well as making the physical pile of discs, well, angry...

But I can't help it. It's a vicious circle I willingly subject myself to. If there is a perfect adjective to describe my fixation it's "adore." I adore movies. The more I see, the more I want to see. And it's not enough to see and walk away - I want to understand, to know why certain scenes move me the way they do, what a particular lighting choice or a framing device means in both the scope of the story and the larger themes at work. When I read something by people like (but not limited to) Roger Ebert, Jim Emerson, Pauline Kael, Harry, Moriarty and the cads over at Ain't It Cool, Keith Uhlich, Matt Zoller Seitz and the incredible group of writers over at The House Next Door or Dennis Cozzalio at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, the intelligence and style is tremendous but overshadowed by their abundant and obvious love for movies of all kinds - the obscure independent foreign feature to the latest summer blockbuster. It's this giddy joy and exuberance that thrills me more than anything else, because I know it's a feeling shared by all of us who, whether under cover of darkness or loud and proud wear the hat of the movie lover, the geek, the (dare I say) cineaste.

I harbor no illusions concerning my own writing about movies. Like everything I've written on the web it's a striving to express, as cogently and accurately as possible, my thoughts and feelings on the subject at hand. After a couple years I'm still finding my voice, taking tentative steps toward fresh perspectives and ideas, and slowly piecing together an identity that complements what I want to say. A lot of the reviews on this site are okay, a very few are, in my mind, more than good. There's more than a couple that are complete shit. You and I will in all liklihood disagree on which are which. And that's totally fine.

So I'm going to try and keep the Beast at a reasonable size by watching, and writing, whenever I can. And whether it's a classic from Criterion, a low-budget horror flick, or the latest hit at your local theater I'll endeavor to bring something worthy of the film and of myself to each review or article. I'm pretty notorious for throwing posts up with little to no editing, only to go back a day or two later to refine and correct, and I guarantee that'll be the case here. There's a great article by Evan Derrick over at Movie Zeal entitled "10 Ways to Become a Better Film Critic" and the ideas he illustrates are things I'm trying to incorporate more into my own writing.

But none of that really matters if this all exists in a vacuum. So any feedback, agreements or disagreements, ideas, questions, anything is greatly appreciated. In the meantime I'm making a bigger effort to be a presence at some of the better known sites, and am looking forward to continuing to be inspired by movies and the people who write about them.

And if the preceding paragraph wasn't enough if a Hollywood Ending for you, may I present THE SEARCHERS.

Book #29: Poet in New York

Much of what I read is colored by the environment or circumstance surrounding it. How I came across the book, where I read it and what was going on around me as I read have as much to do (for better or worse) with my final impression as the text itself. Even the cover to a particular edition will change the way I view something. I distinctly recall being unable to get through more than 80 pages of my mass market paperback of The Brothers Karamazov, yet once I opened a substantially yellowed hardcover (translated by the same person) I devoured the book over the course of a few short days.

All this to explain that my thoughts on Poet in New York, the punishing collection of poetry drawn from Federico Garcia Lorca's time in the Big Apple during 1929-1930 are intertwined with the circumstances surrounding its purchase. I had just spent a lengthy afternoon in a Manhattan sushi bar, consuming vast amounts of raw fish and numerous bottles of Sapporo lager with my former employer. Afterward saying our goodbyes outside the bar, I meandered back to the train station, opting for a long walk rather than a subway ride.

Walking in Midtown is always interesting, but doing it in 90 degree weather at the end of the week after 4 beers led me to take more notice of how oppressive the city can be. When you have hundreds of people bumping and shoving you, when every block is a dozen or more people selling something you don't want, when every conversation melds into a large thrum of impatience, and you don't take the heat too well to begin with, you begin to get a little discouraged.

Or I do, anyway. I hustled my way to the train station and the relative comfort its air conditioned crowds. I missed the previous train (thus kicking me into Peak as opposed to Off-Peak and upping my fare), and had about 15 minutes to spare. If you're never been to Penn Station the main thoroughfare is a tunnel of shops and eateries, where everything echoes and the people are easily segregated into those coming and those going. Nestled inside like an oasis for the literary-weary is Penn Books, a small hodge-podge bookstore that seemingly carries everything within its tight confines. Bestsellers, art books, limited edition chapbooks - it's the type of place you go in with no expectations or goal, and come out with something you never expected. The last time I was there I got a limited edition of Jonathan Lethem's The Disappointment Artist. This time the heat and the pulse of the city drew me to Lorca's book, which I previously had little interest in.

Poet in New York was written during Lorca's nine months spent in New York during one of its darkest moments - the Stock Market crash of 1929. Lorca's verse for the city is a combination of horror, disgust and sadness - it's obvious that he didn't enjoy his time spent in the city:

Dawn arrives and no one receives it in his mouth
because morning and hope are impossible there:
sometimes the furious swarming coins
penetrate like drills and devour abandoned children.

But embedded in that visceral disgust there is (as evidenced above) a lyrical beauty that I can feel but cannot express. A large part of this is my admittedly poor grasp of poetry (something I am trying to rectify), but there's also an abundant use of surrealism in the images Lorca uses to convey his New York, the collision of images is undeniable in its effect to startle, but reading it on the train back home with the beers creating a hazy, "go to sleep" vibe probably made it harder to understand than it actually was.

But I think that's one of the benefits of such a slim book of poetry (approx 85 pages): it's think enough to keep around a go back to when the mood strikes. Re-reading some of the verses in preparation for this quasi-review I realized there was a lot that warranted re-visiting both Lorca and Poet in New York again.

No one is sleeping.
But if someone grows too much moss on his temples during the
night,
open the stage trapdoors so he can see in the moonlight
the lying goblets, and the poison, and the skull of the theaters.

What Happened to Fantasy?

For me it definitely started with The Hobbit. I have the copy my father gave me when I was a kid, and it's the same book he had as a teenager in 1966. The binding's starting to give, the top of the pages are beginning to gently yellow, but it's in good enough shape that I'm hoping I can pass it on to my son when he's ready (and willing) to read it. I couldn't get enough of Bilbo Baggins and his adventures with Gandalf and the Dwarves as they fought trolls, spiders, goblins, and the wonderful bloated menace of Smaug. I read The Hobbit over and over again, until my father decided I was old enough to tackle something weightier, and The Lord of the Rings is where I really discovered J.R.R. Tolkein.

Thanks to Tolkein and games like Dungeons & Dragons (remember, this is back in the early 80's) I began a steady process of devouring fantasy series and novels. The Lord of the Rings stayed as the epicenter of my fantasy world, but along the periphery I found C.S. Lewis and The Chronicles of Narnia, Terry Brooks and the Shannara series, the Xanth novels of Piers Anthony, the Riddle-Master trilogy by Patricia A. McKillip, and perhaps at the head of the pack, the wonderful Amber novels by Roger Zelazny, which for a time challenged the top spot in my heart for best fantasy series.

But then something happened. Fantasy kept giving me the same old thing, but there was a new kid on the block, wired and interstellar and ready to launch expectations into another universe entirely. I can't remember when I first became aware of science fiction as literature, although, like millions of others, I'm sure STAR WARS was the initial kick that sparked my interest. But the wealth and depth of writing from folks like Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury explored so many aveunes of the human condition, entertained so many exciting concepts and ideas that fantasy began to seem a little, well, childish. Especially to a teenager obsessed with all the things a teenager becomes obsessed with in the late 80's. The early 90's saw the advent of the Internet and the expansion of what was possible through technology, and thanks to Neal Stephenson and William Gibson novels like Neuromancer and Snow Crash ushered in an entirely new kind of writing, and it was writing that I couldn;t devour fast enough. But why did my taking to science fiction so passionately leave fantasy along the wayside? Was it really something about the perceived maturity of dragons and elves? The few authors I tried - R.A. Salvatore and David Eddings - left me cold and feeling like I had grown up, but fantasy writing had stayed the same age.

Fast forward another 15 years or so.

It's 2008. A young boy with glasses and a lightning-bolt scar has completely transformed the landscape of fantasy and literature for young adults. Whereas in the 80's I had to get my fantasy kicks from the normal science fiction/fantasy shelf in the local store, now there are whole sections devoted to what's known as "Young Adults". Scores of novels and series dedicated to fulfilling the promises that Lewis and Tolkein did for me when I was younger.

And that's great, but who and where to turn now for "adult" fantasy (insert your own sex joke here____)? In a world where almost everyone is reading Harry Potter and lesser known (but equally for kids) entries like the Artemis Fowl and Eragon series, is there such a thing as "mature" fantasy? The last big fantasy series for adults I could recall was The Wheels of Time by Robert Jordan, but a couple quick glances didn't seem to show anything promising, although judging by the sales I could be wrong. I began asking people for recommendations and checking out web sites and blogs dedicated to the genre to see what's been going on and who's considered the Big Boss of fantasy nowadays.

Turns out a lot's been going on while I slaved away with interstellar wars and positronic brains. The "new masters" of fantasy have in turn taken aspects of history, religion, comedy, romance, and even a little SF in order to freshen the sword and sorcery pot. A few names I keep seeing over and over again are George R.R. Martin, Terry Goodkind, Raymond E Feist, David Gemmel and Elizabeth Moon. I've read the first two Discworld books from Terry Pratchett which were good, although I've since heard that the series as a contained world doesn't really get going until Mort, and it turns out Charles Stross, who writes some very good horror (The Atrocity Archives) and science fiction (Glasshouse) has a skewered fantasy series called The Merchant Princes.

So it seems "a lot" has happened to fantasy, but where to begin? If anyone out there has some opinions on the above authors or, better yet, a great starting place to get "back" into fantasy, sharpen your +3 pole arm and let me know. If nothing else it's your opportunity to sound off on some of your favorite writers.

Remember when every fantasy book had to have an illustration by the Hildebrandt Brothers? Man I loved this stuff when I was a kid!

The Next Morning...

Still a lot to take in. We left the theater last night around 10:00 PM and immediately wanted to see it again. Full review forthcoming, but a couple thoughts and impressions:

1. Heath Ledger: Wow. I worried that the performance wasn't going to live up to the hype. The opposite was true: the hype still doesn't match just how incredible he is in this movie.
2. Gotham City: It feels a lot more like a city this time around instead of a set. Everything benefits from a very practical, organic feel. Yeah, you see a lot of it in daylight, but that doesn't hinder the menace and gloom that pervades the city's soul.
3. The "Superhero" Element: If you take out all the superhero elements from the film, you would still have an incredible crime/thriller akin to movies like HEAT. In an odd way, this kind of acts like a double edged sword (more forthcoming).
4. The Ending: Uh, can anyone say EMPIRE STRIKES BACK? Damn! Harvey Dent's line from the trailer "It's always darkest before the dawn" plays heavily into the structure of the film and the (assumed) third movie.
5. Third Movie: Can't wait, not only because of how THE DARK KNIGHT sets up the events that need to transpire in the final film, but how Christopher Nolan and his team are going to get around the seemingly insurmountable hurdle posed by the tragic death of Ledger.

The weird thing is, despite all the thrills and chills and agreed on excellence displayed in the movie, neither the Missus nor myself left the theater with the same sense of "HOLY CRAP" we did after leaving BATMAN BEGINS. I'm thinking it's because there was so much there to digest that it's the kind of film that's going to seep in over time.

Dunno. That's why I'm taking an extra day or so to think everything through before writing a full review. But it was one hell of a movie.