Saw it Friday night, which made it the first movie I’d seen on opening day since … Chicken Run, I guess, maybe South Park. Hmm. That’s an odd combination of films, innit?
Heist is exactly what I was expecting, and that’s a very good thing. I didn’t expect a con-man movie, Ricky Jay’s presence notwithstanding. I didn’t expect natural-sounding, free-flowing dialogue, but what I got was (happily) a little less stilted-sounding than Mamet usually comes across.
I expected fun and got it. I expected attention to detail and got it.
Maybe not Mamet at his best–but Gene Hackman was good and I agree that it was nice that the dialogue was less stilted. It actually made the stilted one-way dialogue in the phone conversation that Fran has mid-movie very effective–much more so than Mamet’s usual constant hammering with his dialogue style.
And about 2/3 of the way through it got **really ** interesting.
I liked it. Some interesting turns of phrase, as you might imagine.
I was able to check out a sneak preview with a local radio station. I think this movie is much more “mainstream” for Mamet, than say, The Spanish Prisoner, which was his last movie that I saw. I think this has potential to be a bigger moneymaker with the general public.
Not a spoiler, but I liked the phrase “quiet as an ant pissing on cotton”. I’m going to try & work that in my regular vocabulary.
My one nitpick: enough with the old guy and the youngster wife already. (of course, if it’s Gene Hackman, I may make an exception…)
Who’s idea was it to have the entire cast talk in similies through out the whole film? It was beyond asinine.
“I’ll be as quiet as an ant pissing on cotton.” Gimme a break. A few here and there are fine, but every goddam sentence has to have one of these ridiculous contortions of language in it. Trust me folks, bank robbers are not that clever.
I thought the woman was a line-reciting robot. She didn’t do any acting.
The “twists” were contrived and predictable about half way through. You could tell the writers were thinking “OK, now let’s change THIS!” every five minutes.
I feel for you, friedo. I know how you feel, anyway. That’s exactly how I felt after I finally got around to watching House of Games for the first time. Mamet’s dialogue is, from my limited experience, something it takes quite some time to get used to. But I have to say in his defense: it’s not bad writing, it’s just his style. And, as I pointed about before, it’s thinned out considerably in Heist. Half the time, his characters speak almost entirely in aphorisms and epigrams. Check out the “memorable quotes” pages for House or The Spanish Prisoner for a sampling.
You’ve also said you liked “The Score”. I did too, very much. But didn’t you think the ending was rather predictable also? FWIW, as soon as Ed Norton’s character pulled a gun on De Niro and took the scepter, I thought of the fake scepter shown earlier in the movie, and immeditately knew the outcome.
Actually, I think what friedo considers “contrived and prectiable” plot twists are the same elements I consider to be “attention to detail.”
A caper flick is something you go into expecting the plot to be filled with feints and misdirection in the same way you go into a love story expecting at some point for the two principals to be separated at some point or other only to get back together in the long run. Whether they then stay together or not is merely a function of when the story ends. In a caper flick, the suspense comes from waiting to see how many times the bag will change hands before the credits roll.
I can’t elaborate without breaking my own “no spoilers” rule, but let me say just that Mamet’s attention to gravity kept my interest piqued throughout most of the film. Maybe bouyancy at a couple of points, too, now that I think of it.
I saw it today and thought it was terrible. Probably one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. It was too predictable and I just couldn’t get into the dialogue of the film. It didn’t flow and the actors seemed like they were “acting” instead of just being the character. Who didn’t know they were playing Jimmy Silk (Sam Rockwell)? And how many times did they fool him? How many times did he do them? They didn’t just do it once or twice, that was the whole movie! He pulls one on them, they pull one on him, and so forth. It got to the point where it became laughable instead of really interesting.
This movie just shows that even talented actors can’t pull off crap (IMHO). I’ll stick with The Score thank you very much.
I’m a big Mamet fan. Most of the things that people don’t like about his work (the contrivance, that style of dialogue, the Mamet view of what actors are for) are things I actually enjoy. So shoot me.
Heist. Saw it today. In my view, not his best, by a long way. In a heist caper, with an open agreement between writer and audience that there will be some twists that reward attention, I can accept and even welcome some degree of contrivance and switchback plotting. But it’s all a matter of degree, and I just didn’t think the balance was right here. There are just too many scenes with people saying and doing things for no reason except to add one more twist to the tale.
Now, can anyone help me with this? I did enjoy The Spanish Prisoner, but…
What is ‘dog my cats’ all about? Does it mean anything at all? It lost me completely.
I saw this move knowing nothing more about it than the title and the major actors. I thought it was the worst movie I’ve seen in a long time. In fact, at the end of the movie the theatre broke out in laughter. I cant help but feel that the real “heist” was taking $18 of my hard-earned money and wasting 2 hours of my time…
Oh, and I’ve been meaning to thank everybody for abiding by my “please, no spoilers” request. Even those of you who disliked the movie can appreciate, I hope, that people who haven’t seen it yet should have a chance to form their own opinions.
I thought Heist was pretty good, but man oh man, Rebecca Pidgeon absolutely cannot act. She’s just awful; Mamet’s insistence on giving her roles (they’re married) is every bit as damaging to his movie as casting Sofia Coppola was to “The Godfather, Part III.”
