BEFORE: It's a terrible feeling, knowing that I have a job interview in a week. What if it doesn't go well? Worse, what if it DOES go well, and I get the job, and I fail at it? It's too horrible to contemplate - I feel like my only path is practice for the Zoom interview, maybe type out some answers to the questions that I think I might get asked. That's OK, right? I mean, I don't want to READ my answers to the interviewer, but I think typing them out before-hand might help me organize the things I want to say to pitch myself for the job. I can't even think about what's going to happen if I land it, and then quit my current job, that's not going to be easy to do, because I've been there so long and my boss depends on me. But I can't let that hold me back - also I don't want to get too far ahead of myself, so I should just focus on thinking about what I should say in the interview, and make sure I remember to say all of that. Will update you on this at some point.
I should take inspiration from actors, maybe - they work on a film, then when it's done, they move on to the next film - and if there's no next film, they take time off or go do something else. I should be more like that, this animated film I worked on is about to be done, I should just pack up and move on and do something else, if it feels like a better opportunity has presented itself.
Michael Caine carries over from "Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind".
THE PLOT: A crew of retired crooks pull off a major heist in London's jewelry district. What starts off as their last criminal hurrah quickly turns into a brutal nightmare due to greed.
AFTER: Or I could join a gang and commit a jewel heist - that looks like fun, doesn't it? You just need the right set of blokes with non-overlapping skills like drilling and disabling alarm systems, or keeping watch from across the street, and then you also need somebody to fence the diamonds, but once you have everything in place and you put in a bit of work, there's a big payoff, right? RIGHT?
Well, not exactly. The robbers here are all, well, older gentlemen, shall we say. So there are inherent problems to being in the robbery game for so long that you just know that if you're caught and you have to serve time, at least you don't have to worry about what you're going to do when you finish serving your time. If these guys go into lock-up, some of them are just NOT coming out - well, there's their motivation to not get caught, I suppose. But there are other problems, too, like they all have a few extra pounds on their frames, so who's going to crawl through the small hole they drilled into the vault? And then there's the lookout in the building across the street, he keeps falling asleep - well, he is OLD and he's used to being in bed by 8:00 pm, probably.
Let me back up a bit, the mastermind here is Brian Reader, who re-connects with some of his old mates at his wife's funeral, and while they're chatting the idea of hitting the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit comes up, the old boys all regret never that they never took a crack at that vault. They meet up with Basil, a younger (well, come on, who isn't?) man who's an expert on alarm systems and has chanced upon a key to the building containing the vault. (Someone hired him to access their vault, and he never returned the key, or made a copy perhaps.). The old men dress up like gas repairmen, because who would even notice a bunch of older, paunchy gasmen driving a lorry through the Financial District? And who's NOT going to let a bunch of repairmen into a building, because if there's a gas leak, well, it's a good thing those repairmen are on the scene.
They drill into the vault, but the hydraulic jack they're using to tip over a cabinet of safety deposit boxes isn't up to the task, so they have to stop for the night, come back the next night and hope that nobody has noticed the big hole in the wall. But Brian, the mastermind, thinks it's too risky to come back twice, so he decides he's out. But he gives Basil, the young alarm expert, the numbers of the deposit boxes with the best diamonds in them, and just wants half of his share of the proceeds.
After the job is done, the men meet up to count and split the take, only the olds decide to cut Basil out, they offer him a smaller share to just get rid of him, and if he doesn't take that deal, well, there are other more permanent ways of making sure he keeps his silence. By then the group's down to just three loyal members, only how loyal are they all? How long before they turn on each other, or one decides that the others can't be trusted? Before long you realize this film has managed to combine the plot of "Going With Style" with elements from "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre".
Also, these are senior citizens committing this heist - they still act and function as they did when they were robbing at their prime in the 1970's, so they maybe didn't realize that the world today is full of security cameras, even out on a public street. So when the police start reviewing traffic cams and hidden camera footage, the fact that the gang members disposed of the getaway vehicle is irrelevant - the cops are able to check all the license plates of the other cars in the cam footage, like come on, who drives their OWN CAR to a crime scene? And you know the cops can look up the plate numbers on computers now, and once they figure out one person of interest, they can just scroll through that guy's "known associates" and determine the other members of the gang pretty quickly.
This is based on a true story, a heist that took place in April 2015, planned and carries out by six elderly men who were experienced thieves, and the total value of the stolen items was estimated to be up to 14 million pounds (currency, not weight) and so far only 4.3 million pounds of it has been recovered. Old people just love to collect stuff, but then it seems they tend to forget where they put it all. The heist took place over the four-day Easter Weekend (including a bank holiday), and after the job was done, the police didn't learn about the robbery for five days. Jeez, in five days a bunch of crooks could scatter across the world - only not if they're super old and they don't like to travel. They just want their stolen diamonds and then a nice Sunday joint, maybe a nap in front of the telly. A cuppa later on...
The flashbacks used in this film were quite gimmicky, I'm not sure how I feel about them. There was one set of flashbacks to show all the old cars that the gang members recall driving, back in the day. This seems like a cheap way to use stock footage from other movies and TV shows, just to, what, make a point? And that point is that these guys remember driving? Cars were way cooler back in the 1970's? WHAT are you trying to say here?
Then later the film uses other clips from other heist movies to show what these same men looked like in the 1960's and 70's, this is a much cooler idea. For Michael Caine, they use footage from "The Italian Job", for Tom Courtenay, a 1963 film called "Billy Liar", and for Ray Winstone, the 1979 film "Scum". In some other films, to show what a character looked like decades before, they'd have to hire another actor that looks a bit like him - but damn, if there's already footage of a young Michael Caine pulling a diamond heist in another movie, why not just use THAT? A very clever work-around.
Last December, I watched another film about a jewel thief, "Lassiter", which co-starred Bob Hoskins. That led me to "Mona Lisa", another film with Michael Caine in it - and I had a few more Caine films on the list, only what I didn't have was enough slots to watch them in. Christmas was coming up fast, with only room for five more films I just didn't have any space to spare. So it took a few months, but I finally got to those outstanding Michael Caine films, and next week I'm going to get to another crime film, "The Long Good Friday", which also has Bob Hoskins in it, and that one's programmed to lead in to Mother's Day weekend. Proof that I will link to every film if you just give me enough time.
Also starring Jim Broadbent (last seen in "An Accidental Studio"), Tom Courtenay (last seen in "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society"), Paul Whitehouse (last seen in "The Personal History of David Copperfield"), Charlie Cox (last seen in "Spider-Man: No Way Home"), Michael Gambon (last seen in "Judy"), Ray Winstone (last seen in "The Gunman"), Andy Gillies, Francesca Annis (last seen in "Cleopatra"), Matt Bardock (last seen in "Cassandra's Dream"), Claire Lichie, Ann Akinjirin, Tim Lewis, Ingrid Lacey, Adam Leese (last seen in "The Kid Who Would Be King"), Kellie Shirley (last seen in "Wimbledon"), Sarah Lowe.
RATING: 6 out of 10 hearing aids
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