The Screengrab : the italian job

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Jan. 24-30, 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Hey, movie lovers. Screengrab’s newest intern here, bringing you the highlight reel for the week that was. And what a week, am I right? Personally I could have done without it, but what are you gonna do? By the way, does anyone out there want to take over the Morning Deal Report? I’m not saying the position is necessarily open…but hit me up at my PayPal account and I’ll see what I can do.

The hottest thing going this week is Smells Like Indie Spirit: Our Favorite Sundance Films of All Time (Parts One, Two, Three, Four and Five), but there’s some other great stuff as well. Let’s give a warm welcome to the newest Screengrabber, Nick Schager, who makes his debut this week reviewing Medicine for Melancholy and Serbis. We’ve also got the two latest Unwatchables, A*P*E and Meatballs 4. And I’m just getting warmed up! Be sure to check out:

Sundance Do-Overs: When the Buzz Turns to Fizzle

Science! Solving the Italian Job Cliffhanger

Screengrab Review: The Shark Is Still Working

David Lynch Will Teach Your Children to Fly

The View Through The View-Master: Peter And The Wolf

Science! Solving the "Italian Job" Cliffhanger

Phil Nugent — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 16:30:00 GMT

The 1969 British caper movie The Italian Job, starring Michael Caine as the thieving brainiac Charlie Croker, with a supporting cast that included Noel Coward, Raf Vallone, and Benny Hill, is a much-loved classic in England, but its commercial failure in the U.S. at the time of its release doomed plans for a sequel. (The movie did eventually inspire a sleek Hollywood remake in 2003.) Which meant that the movie's ending--a cliffhanger designed as a set-up for a "part two"--has been hanging there for almost forty years. In the movie's last scene, Caine and his gang are heading for Switzerland with their stolen fortune in gold when the vehicle they're in goes into a skid on a winding mountain road; they wind up in a Laurel and Hardy routine, trapped in their getaway bus as it teeters on the edge of a cliff, with the robbers on one end and the gold inching towards the open doors at the other end. Is there any way our heroes can escape with their lives and the swag? "Hang on a minute lads," Caine announces, "I've got a great idea!" And there the matter stands, Or stood, until last fall, when the Royal Society of Chemistry put out a call for proposed solutions to the problem, setting only the stipulations that submissions should have "a plausible basis in science," should not require "more than thirty minutes, and not use a helicopter." (The timing was inspired, it turns out, not by the movie's fortieth anniversary but by the hundredth anniversary of the periodic table. Of the elements comprising that table, gold is Number 117. Don't you tell me this site isn't educational.)

The winning entry came in from a fellow named John Godwin, a self-professed lifelong fan of the movie, so he may have gotten a head start of a few decades on trying to work out the details of his master plan. Here's how USA Today broke it down:

•Break the windows at the back to reduce weight.

•Break two windows at the front, hold one gang member upside down out of the window to deflate the front tires and stabilize the vehicle.

•Drain the rear fuel tank through an access panel at the bottom of the bus.

•Gang members leave one by one from the front, collecting stones to replace their weight.

•Keep adding stones until someone can safely go to the rear to retrieve the gold.

Amusingly, the film's producer, Michael Deeley, who came up with the original ending after rejecting a number of other possibilities, had a vision of how the problem would be solved at the start of that sequel that never got made, and it depended on--yes, a helicopter. The whirlybird would contain Mafia soldiers, who would rescue the bus, reclaim the gold, and set up a plot that would have the robbers chasing them so they could steal it again. (It would of course be plausible that the gangsters wouldn't kill them, because even the Mafia likes Michael Caine.) A few years ago, Caine himself offered a solution, though it's not completely clear whether he was describing something that was considered for filming or even something that had been filmed and discarded, or just recounting a daydream he'd cooked up during a slow day on the set of Hannah and Her Sisters. Caine said that in his own alternate cut, his character would "crawl up, switch on the engine and stay there for four hours until all the petrol runs out... The van bounces back up so we can all get out, but then the gold goes over" into the ravine, where it is collected by the Mafia, and then the heroes have to run after them to steal it back. Of all these solutions, Godwin's has the virtue of ending with the heroes and the gold in pretty much the same place, with no spoilsport Mafiosi in sight. It remains an open question which of the gang would be deputized to walk down the mountain in search of a gas station so they could refill the fuel tank. But who am I kidding, it'd have to be Benny Hill.

Morning Deal Report: Coen Brothers Get Serious

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:30:00 GMT

I have misled you once again. The Coens’ follow-up to Burn After Reading is actually described as a black comedy in this Variety report, but it is titled A Serious Man. Stage actor Michael Stuhlbarg and former Spin City regular Richard Kind will star. (I know, not exactly Pitt and Clooney, right?) “Set in 1967, story centers on Larry Gopnik (Stuhlbarg), a Midwestern professor whose life begins to unravel when his wife sets out to leave him and his socially inept brother (Kind) won't move out of the house. Shooting is set to start at the beginning of next month in Minneapolis.”

Here’s a sentence from the Hollywood Reporter that shouldn’t exactly shock anyone: “As Tom Cruise goes about writing the next chapter in his career, he's developing an interest in comic book movies.” Cruise is teaming up with Spider-Man maven Sam Raimi for an adaptation of Sleeper, and we can all be thankful it’s not a remake of the Woody Allen comedy. “Written by Ed Brubaker with art by Sean Phillips, Sleeper, which ran from 2003-05, centers on an operative whose fusion with an alien artifact makes him impervious to pain and allows him to pass it on to others through skin contact. He is placed undercover in a villainous organization by an intelligence agency and falls for a member of the group, named Miss Misery.” I smell Cruise’s Battlefield Earth.

Yet another graphic novel headed for the big screen is Julius, to be directed by F. Gary Gray (The Italian Job). Sadly, it’s not a biopic about the founder of Orange Julius, but rather an urban crime thriller based on Julius Caesar. Per Variety, Gray “has a vision for this adaptation that will satirize obsessive consumerism while providing a thrilling ride for audiences.” Good luck with that.

Related:
"Freaky Little People": The Coens Burn On
Tom Cruise Still Creepy, Still Not Funny

Cracking the Heist Movie

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 18:00:00 GMT

With The Bank Job due in theaters on Friday, Terrence Rafferty takes a look back at the long film history of "small groups of very intense people stealing stuff from banks, art museums, racetracks, casinos, high-end jewelers, armored cars and railroad trains." His piece in the New York Times dissects the heist movie and its enduring popularity.

There are two words that appear in the plot descriptions of most successful heist pictures: "gone awry." As Rafferty explains, that's a big part of the fun. "Although the planning of the crime — the recruiting of the team, the diagrams of security systems, the blueprints, the maps of getaway routes — usually takes up a fair amount of screen time and is often terrifically entertaining, nobody in the audience really wants to see the job go exactly as the thieves have doped it out. That would be kind of redundant, and worse, it would feel uncomfortably impersonal. Heist pictures are all about process, technique, mechanics; the blind accidents are what keep them human."

The complexity of the plan is a huge part of the appeal as well, particularly if it is depicted in a visually arresting manner. "Film is extremely good both at laying out the details of complicated processes and at capturing, on the fly, moments of spontaneity; the balance between them is never more evident than it is in a first-rate heist picture, because elaborate crimes are among the few human activities that movies dare to show us the step-by-step process of. Writing a perfect sonnet is at least as difficult as knocking over a bank — and as susceptible to the mysterious operations of chance — but who wants to watch Yeats stare out the window and scratch his head for 90 minutes, even if, in the end, he pulls off ‘Leda and the Swan'? All in all we'd rather look at guys digging tunnels and emptying safe-deposit boxes."

Rafferty finds most of the recent entries in the genre more comic than tense; there's not much nail-biting in the Ocean's pictures or the remake of The Italian Job. He also can't help but notice that the criminals are getting away with the loot more often than they did in the past. In these respects, The Bank Job "is something of a novelty these days, a throwback to the good old days of the heist movie, when the purloining of large quantities of money and/or valuables from heavily guarded institutions seemed at least a little, I don't know, dangerous."