News You Can Bruise for 2021 July 4

(2) Sun Jul 04 2021 21:00 June Film Roundup: It's been a heist-filled month, and not just because of our continuing leef-peeping drive through the Fast & Furious series. Why, just look behind you—I've stolen your priceless Blue Period Picasso! Heist-tastic!

• Bob le Flambeur (1955): Minute by minute I didn't have the best time watching this movie, but that's mainly because of all the Hamlet cliches. AFAICT Bob le Flambeur invents both the French New Wave and the modern casino heist movie. On top of that, it's got an amazing twist ending that you'd only see in a casino heist movie with a French New Wave sensibility. I respect the movie as a whole, but no Hamlet cliches in that ending; it feels totally fresh even after 55 years of casino heist movies. Reading up on the movie afterwards, the twist has been used a couple times since, but not nearly as often as building the team, practicing on a copy of the safe, etc.

  This film has a lot of low-budget tells I recognize from MST3K movies. I'm no snob but I do not enjoy a shot of someone at a desk having a phone conversation in an apparently unfurnished room. Film pros seem to count this in Bob le Flambeur's favor for reasons that IMO boil down to "give Jean-Pierre Melville a break, filmmaking is hard." But I'm gonna double down: although Bob le Flambeur is a really good movie it would also work well on MST3K. Maybe the RiffTrax folks should branch out a bit.

• Le Circle Rouge (1970): Melville has a much bigger budget here than for Bob le Flambeur, and he avoids the MST3K tells, but this is more on the level of popcorn noir for me. A dialogue-free jewelry store heist? We've all seen Rififi (1955), my friend. Melville claims he originally wrote this heist in 1950, which gets him my sympathies, but that and five francs will buy you a pack of Gauloises.
• A New York Christmas Wedding (2020): After restoring the Film Roundup Screening Room to its former glory we found this on our Netflix list, probably from some late-2020 Happiest Season-inspired list of queer Christmas romance movies. It's fine as far as it goes, and gives you a view into what people who live in Manhattan secretly think of Queens. But the fantastic element, which combines religion, alternate universes, and time travel, nerd-sniped us to the point where all I can think about is simpler ways of telling the story.

  Gotta share our best riff, as an angel gives a sappy speech:

  L: What is this 'Live, Laugh, Love' crap?

  S: He read that on a Celestial Seasonings tea bag. You know, they just call it 'Seasonings'.

• Fast and Furious (2009): The film so forgettable... I forgot about it when I originally wrote this Film Roundup! Probably not fair given that we were watching one of these very similar films every day, rather than treating the series as a reason to go to the mooovies every couple of years. But even now, having refreshed my memory after looking at the Wikipedia page, I don't really have anything to say about this movie except, this is the one with the minecart level.
• Fast Five (2011): OK, now we're heistin'. The Rock finally shows up to play the likeable antivillain to Vin Diesel's likeable antihero. It's like a 007 movie where Blofeld is also really fun.

  The downside of the series finally moving from "we drive cars way too fast" to "we steal huge amounts of money" is the introduction of firearms and massive body counts. Sumana really dislikes this and I'm not a huge fan either. I tried to mollify her by pointing out that in the Fast & The Furious universe it seems impossible to die in a car crash, per se. Someone has to shoot you or the car has to explode afterwards. This helped a bit.

  Continuing the fine tradition of "crime pals or gay couple?", this movie hints really strongly that Leo and Santos are a couple, but the fan wiki says they're just Kashi Good Friends cereal. What is this, the 1960s?

• Fast & Furious 6 (2013): The escalation of the stakes and the increasing brutality of the PG-13 violence finally surpass the limit of my personal suspension of disbelief. A couple movies earlier I predicted the crew would drive a car out of a cargo plane, and it happens here but not in the cool way I imagined. Sung Kang is always fun, though, and he's on the F9 poster so I assume they eventually pull a comic-book retcon on Han Lue's death. I'm super comfortable saying this because the same thing just happened in this movie.