Welcome to Collinwood

Year 15, Day 28 - 1/28/23 - Movie #4,329

BEFORE: Day 2 in Massachusetts, we spent some time today with my parents in their assisted-living apartment, had lunch with them in their facility's dining room and then watched most of "Star Wars: Episode VII" with my mother while my father tried to take a nap. My mother's got some kind of progressive dementia, so she asked a lot of questions about Kylo Ren and Rey and how they're related - I know she's seen all of the "Star Wars" films before, but she doesn't remember the most recent sequels, which is maybe for the best. It's a terrible condition to have, in most ways, but she does get to experience movies that she's seen before as if she's seeing them for the first time.  I've seen the "Star Wars" films so many times that I'm almost envious of her, getting to watch them as if they were new.  Almost. 

I'm kidding of course, using humor to deal with a very dark subject, and now of course I have to wonder if I will inherit the condition, if there will come a time when I'll forget every movie I've seen, every book I've read, etc. I guess there's not much point in worrying about it now, because there's not much I can do to improve my chances in the long run. Yeah.

 Sam Rockwell carries over from "See How They Run". 

THE PLOT: Cosimo gets a plan for a huge job from his cellmate. He asks his woman to find a patsy for his bungled car theft, offering $15,000. Suddenly, 7 are involved.

AFTER: This caught my attention because it's an early film directed by the Russo Brothers, who made "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" and "Captain America: Civil War", followed by 2 Avengers movies, "Infinity War" and "Endgame".  Those are some of the biggest movies of the last few years - also, they directed "The Gray Man" which I watched earlier this week, and gave a respectable rating. So why is this film so weird?  Not BAD, per se, though it might be, but it's just WEIRD.  

Maybe because it's about incompetent criminals, and I have to wonder if it was strongly influenced by "Fargo", which was released six years before. Maybe they started developing it right after "Fargo" was a hit, and it took a while to write and direct it, Hollywood sometimes has a lag time for copycat movies, after all. I can't really think of any other reason WHY this film got made, but maybe I'll read up on the IMDB trivia and the Wiki listing to see if I can get any insight... Ah, this is essentially a remake of an Italian film, "Big Deal on Madonna Street", but I'm guessing that "Fargo" and maybe "Small Time Crooks" were also influences.

For George Clooney, this film was released after "The Perfect Storm" and "O Brother, Where Art Thou?", also between "Ocean's Eleven" and "Ocean's Twelve".  So he was a big star already, why was he slumming in this under-the-radar movie?  Maybe it was made earlier and sat on the shelf for a while before getting released. Or maybe he lost a bet or owed someone money from a friendly poker game, who knows?  William H. Macy would have been known for "Fargo", of course, but also "Magnolia", "State and Main" and "Jurassic Park III", again it doesn't seem clear why he stooped low to be in this film. And look, I love almost everything Sam Rockwell has been in, but he'd done a few heist films before this, like "Safe Men" and "Jerry and Tom", maybe he just felt comfortable making that same kind of movie, over and over?  Who can say? 

Bear in mind that Clooney's only in this for a few minutes, his scenes were all shot in four days, I guess that's all the Clooney they could afford?  Clooney plays the safecracking expert who tries to teach this gang of four criminals safe-cracking skills, then once that's done he's out and you have to watch the rest of the movie Clooney-less, so good luck with that.

It's hard to justify rooting for all these perennial losers and wanna-be thieves, unless us laughing at their misfortunes is designed to make the audience feel better about themselves, like at least we have jobs and places to go and people to be with and we're not just hanging around in the ass end of Cleveland waiting for something to try to steal.  There's a whole language that seems to have been invented for this film, also - a person willing to take a criminal rap for you and serve out your sentence is a "Mullinski", and a golden opportunity to steal something that nobody else knows about is a "Bellini", and it goes from there. Does anyone anywhere really talk like this, or was this slang created just for this movie? 

There might have been a solid heist plan at one point, the way the gang steals the camera was quite inspired, as was using that camera to record the man opening the safe from across the way, but they couldn't get an image of the last number in the combination.  I feel the need to call a NITPICK POINT here, because the expert safecracker should have known that if you know the first two numbers of a safe's combination, it would be easy to open the safe, you would just have to turn the dial one click at a time and try every number as the possible third number, that shouldn't take too long.  (Physicist Richard Feynman wrote in his book a number of safe-cracking techniques that he used during his time working on the Manhattan Project, he could break into any safe just by trying various combinations of numbers, sure, it took time, but he could do it in a pinch if you gave him a few hours.)

But the gang's plan got torpedoed by a number of unexpected difficulties, like one member falling in love with the woman he was supposed to seduce, and one gang member falling in love with another gang member's sister, and suddenly wanting to get a real job so he could deserve her. Then another guy gets his arm broken on the night of the heist, another one can't seem to keep his pants on, and basically everything that CAN go wrong during the heist goes wrong.  I don't know, you may find this all quite amusing but it all just hit me as really sad.

Also starring William H. Macy (last seen in "Trust Me"), Isaiah Washington (last seen in "True Crime"), George Clooney (last seen in "The Good German"), Michael Jeter (last seen in "The Gift" (2000)), Luis Guzman (last seen in "Cleaner"), Patricia Clarkson (last seen in "The Bookshop"), Jennifer Esposito (last seen in "I Still Know What You Did Last Summer"), Andy Davoli, Gabrielle Union (last seen in "She's All That"), John Buck Jr., Brett C. Leonard, Frank O'Donnell, Peter Veneziano, Bernard Canepari, Art Oughton, Ray Calabrese, Annie Kitral, Lissy Gulick, Dorothy Silver (last seen in "Promised Land"), Maryanne Nagel (last seen in "My Friend Dahmer"), David Warshofsky (last seen in "Blonde"), Don Kost, Basil Russo, Rae Sunshine Lee, Blaine Pate, Ann Russo (last seen in "Captain America: Civil War").

RATING: 4 out of 10 brick buildings on Chester Avenue