The Television Will Not Be Revolutionized."

The Television Will Not Be Revolutionized."

Saturday, June 13, 2015

"A Heist is Not a Prison Escape." Or, "Open Letter to Governor Cuomo."

I read a piece in the Times of London about the two murderers who cunningly escaped from a prison in upstate New York, that so-called "Little Siberia". It had a remark by Andrew Cuomo who made a rudimentary error when he commented how "It could have been a plot from a movie... if there was a pot of money at the end of the rainbow."

Guy's fudging movie genres.
Guy's fucking up royally –– and doing so publicly.

Let me explain something to you, Governor Cuomo. A little Kinema 101 let us call it.

These are two separate genres you're talking about: heist movies and prison break movies. Perhaps they are similar, perhaps they are favoured by certain primo noir directors particularly from Hollywood and France, but they are separate nonetheless. In heist movies, a group of guys, regular "Johnsons" perhaps or "Yeggs" equally, determine to rob some joint (race track, bank, jeweller'sand it usually fucks up in some tragic way. Sterling Hayden collapsing in the field with the horse in, or having the meltdown at the airport. Bob Ryan and Harry Belafonte blowing each other up in Hudson, NY. You ever see that great movie, Odds Against Tomorrow? Well then perhaps you also seen Bob Le Flambeur, Kansas City Confidential, Le Doulos, The Killing, The Asphalt Jungle and Le Cercle Rouge. Becker's totally chouette Touchez Pas Au Grisbi concerns the sequel to a heist. They put on a heist season at Film Forum a few years back and it was one of the best things to happen ever, and I must have attended nearly every film I could have, but still even they neglected to include the magnificent Big Deal on Madonna Street, and that's a heist film too. Some of my favourite films are heist movies and some of yours are too.

Ditto prison escape movies, but they're diffunt is my thesis. A Man Escaped (Bresson), Le Trou (Becker), and less successful in my view, Jules Dassin's Brute Force. Something dumb about the end of that movie but I can't remember what now.

One is about escape, the other is about trying to get money without working for it, at least not in a conventional legal way. Oftentimes there is a lot of mental acumen and ingenuity exhibited by the heisters, which almost makes you think, "Ah fuck it, they deserve the cash after coming up with such a beautiful graceful scheme to rob the bank. And who loses after all, why it's just the taxman." But after all who pays the taxman? You and I!

I said to my dad in the car today, "I been engaging the taxman in an intricate dance of my own devising for a very long time now."

The same goes for the prison escapees. These are disgusting criminals, but in another sense we are rooting for them to beat the system and get out of there! It's an existential analogy and again they evidence some canny thinking when they plan the escape.

Like the killers on Columbo. You have to admire them for their creativity and thoroughness, even though murder is a horrible sin, but Columbo always catches them out somehow.

Criminals plan heists, and criminals escape from prison. In both cases they show great invention and originality and pluck and spunk and derring-do. Yet still a heist movie is not a prison break movie. Two different things, Governor Cuomo. People could fumble a heist, get sent to the hoosegow, and then escape that same hoosegow, and they'd have done a heist and then a prison break, but show me the movie where both things happen sequentially. It's one or it's the other. Yet Governor Cuomo has them all happen in one movie in his addled brain. These two guys escape "Little Siberia" and then promptly engage in a heist.

Cuomo went on to compound his sin of film ignorance by remarking that it was like The Shawshank Redemption except that the hero of that shitty film was a great guy and these guys were not so. These guys were cold-blooded criminals.

That may be so, but it's a boring thing to say!

Boring comment to make!

Plus this guy Cuomo emails me about on average at least once a week, even though it's been a year since I lived in the great city of New York.

Has it really been a year?

Sunday, June 7, 2015

Columbo: "If Thine Eye Offend Thee."

You know what's great about Phil Columbo, he's never a bum to a working stiff.
Blue-collar guys, some of them anyway, come up to him and try to exercise their feeble impotent superiority on him because they assume wrongly that he's one of the few microorganisms inferior to them. He's got a fake eyeball and a dirty trench-coat. Then he reveals to them that he's a homicide lieutenant, but he always does so gently. He doesn't crow. He doesn't lord it over them. He doesn't trumpet uproariously like Chanticleer in the revelation. He is like the Buddha or Odin, walking down the country road dressed as a degenerate, a vagrant.

NB and uncoincidentally Odin also only had one eye.

I was talking about it to Pricey. About Columbo's modesty and majesty.
I said, "He's like Zatoichi. That rare thing, a humble hero."

(Zatoichi had no eyes –– or rather he had two eyes, but neither one worked a lick since childhood.)