This movie is destined to be a hit and a classic. They have the advantage of basing the plot on a true incident, and it shows moment to moment throughout. This movie cashes in on a wealth of detail and allegory impossible to spark by imagination alone. I mean that and, hey, I’m a Tom Clancy fan. “The Bank Job” propels type-casting into the new century by making every character actually believable. In this, they succeed so well that by mid-movie you can’t tell the Earls and Viscounts apart.The scenes surge ahead with such consistent momentum it would bring a tear to Capote’s eye. Where Hollywood would have wasted an hour of footage drilling the stupid tunnel, “The Bank Job” has that biting element of realism only made possible by non-fiction. With a twist, some amateurs are set up to crack a vault. They stumble around in typical Brit fashion and (because the authorities do the same) actually succeed.
The movie beautifully sidesteps the injection of dreary American sub-plots. That alone makes it a gem. No divorcees, homosexuals or therapists; just a short motherhood scene and one stripper bar convention, this time by the bad guys. The movie has a typically European attitude toward naked breasts, especially young, firm specimens. It took 90 years, but someone finally says the “c” word.
My favorite clip is the bank manager telling a lady he would look into it if she could give him a list of what was missing. Her immortal reply, “The reason we have safety deposit boxes is so that people like you don’t know what is in them!”
Go see it. It is worth the evening out. I barely recall hearing of the real robbery as a lad, but remember it as the time I learned banks could under-report that amount of money stolen. If you are ever robbed by a gang, always report $100 more (“a one-hundred dollar bill I keep for emergencies”) than was stolen. Why? Because if caught, they may share the same cell. Get it?
Don’t get the impression I spent the day at a theater. I combined the trip up to Oakland with getting supplies and a stop at the Barnes & Noble. That place is immunizing me to Starbucks coffee. My research into Quickbooks shows that most people like if for the very reasons I do not, my biggest peeve is that the transactions are never shown, just entered. This means a rigid set of rules get applied to a nowhere near rigid world, something the kid who mows lawns will tell you is a bad idea to begin with.
I read an article on “eigenfaces”. These are the blank human faces that are being developed for computer recognition. There are not that many variation [of faces] and the complete set , sixteen faces, looked rather like death masks. These eigenfaces are designed to help computers deal with different lighting situations.
The technology is ready, with each person’s face being sampled 16,000 times, of which only 100 are needed for positive identification. Am I against it? Yes, because they never stop at just identification. As soon as it becomes possible to prosecute people using this information, innocent people who don’t want to be mapped will be treated as uncooperative suspects with something to hide.
The reason we have private faces is so people like you don’t know what is in them?
