No, it’s not my birthday today, or tomorrow; it is still the 28th of September, but the world of audiovisual media seems to have already known that, so get on the ball already, willya? Band-crush TV On The Radio drops their next album – Dear Science, – on the 23rd of the month (and yes, the comma is in the title; I like that creative choice) and The Fall, a little-seen movie that I believe is the best movie of the year so far (don’t look so indignant, WALL-E and IMDb number one Dark Knight, you guys were great too), comes out on DVD on September the 9th, plenty of time for me to show it to everybody! Don’t roll your eyes, dammit, it’s a great film!
Anyway, The Sting is one of the all-time classics, so I’m told, directed by George Roy Hill and starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, AKA two of the all-time Hollywood pretty boys who could act to boot. Their other great duo feature was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, also directed by Hill. The two movies have a little similarity in the way the two leads play off each other – in both, Paul Newman plays the wisecracking, confident senior partner, while Redford plays the roguish, dashing young gun with a chip on his shoulder. Hill’s directing probably has a lot to do with it, since lots of the looks these guys give are the same – the looks, I feel, are more a director’s influence than the delivery of the lines, since it’s harder to control the way an actor says each word than whether or not he raises his eyebrows, and here it’s Newman’s smirk and his sideways glance, and the way Redford looks down, rolls his eyes and grits his teeth when he gets shut up or has to take an earful.
If you think that analysis was a little too subtle, then you probably think that The Sting‘s greatness is a little too subtle, because on the surface, it’s like an older, smaller-scale Ocean’s 11 – a movie about con men getting personal, getting dangerous and looking good doing it. But where the latter movie is the slickest of slick entertainers, the former is gritty and more believable. In Ocean’s 11, you never really feel any sort of danger for the characters; Terry Benedict seems intimidating, but he’s more comical than anything. Robert Shaw (also known as Quint from Jaws) is downright scary as Doyle Lonnegan, and in other scenes, you really think there’s a chance Redford’s Johnny Hooker could die at the hands of Lonnegan’s men.
You also never lose the feel of the Great Depression era that the film is set in. That’s why it won/got nominated for all the technical Oscars; it had an authentic feel, even if it was inaccurate (and I didn’t look it up, so I don’t know. I’m not a Wikipedia fiend all the time, like some people). The music was also great, and it won a terribly-worded Oscar for that as well, so I’m not sure what its qualifications were.
I actually don’t have much else to say about this movie, because it was so straightforward, which is I think what people dig about it so much – it didn’t try to make anything more artistic or more stylized than necessary to tell the story well, and the film is really carried by the actors. Other than the three that I previously mentioned, who were all incredible, Charles Durning was great as the Joliet crooked cop who goes a little overboard and winds up in over his head. If you recognize that name from something recent, it’s because he won this past year’s Lifetime Achievement Award from the Screen Actor’s Guild. As a character actor whose IMDb page is too long to believe, he really did deserve it, and I can’t wait to see the movie that he’s most famous for, Dog Day Afternoon.
I’ll see if I can knock one more movie review off tomorrow before I get back to random combinations of music and movies. Also, keep on the lookout for some more guest contributors making their debut, because I’m looking forward to them probably more than you guys all are.
I Ate My DVD Collection 