Word: capered
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...chief among filmmakers championing hometown stories, and his latest work, Sparrow - a stylish pickpocket caper starring Simon Yam that premiered in February in Berlin and opened at the top of the box-office list in June in Hong Kong - is infused with an affection for Hong Kong's people and cityscape, as well as concern for threatened urban landmarks (a very topical preoccupation). "The movie is a way to gently vent my protest," To says. Among other directors, Sylvia Chang's accomplished triad-cum-family drama Run Papa Run, released in April, covers decades of Hong Kong's social transformation...
...attached to a new film, a few fond hopes. Think of Robert Donat, suave fugitive of The 39 Steps, double-talking his way out of a political rally and into the clutches of the man with the missing fingertip. Or Cary Grant doing anything in almost any Hitchcock caper: wooing Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief, dodging a malefic crop duster in North by Northwest. Grant also adorned the genre's apogee, Stanley Donen's Charade, in which the star has five identities and a protective lust for Audrey Hepburn. Neat plotting, chic dialogue, a funny-grotesque supporting cast...
...much of a chance? The perpetually sly Ickes of course won't say, preferring instead to marvel that the game isn't over yet--and he might have as long as four more months to caper on her behalf (although he predicts the fight will be resolved by mid-June). "For those of us who have been hanging around presidential politics for years," says Ickes, "there's never been a nominating process quite like this...
...Jules Dassin, who died this week in Athens at 96, you could say he was the prime developer of the movie crime caper, and leave it at that. His 1955 Rififi, with its wordless, minutely-detailed, half-hour jewel robbery, and the 1964 Topkapi, with an even more elaborate heist, inspired dozens of imitations, in films from The Killing, Ocean's Eleven and The Italian Job to The Usual Suspects, Mission: Impossible 2 and that mini-masterpiece of stop-motion animation, Wallace & Gromit in The Wrong Trousers. If some star is hanging from a rope over riches protected...
...Rififi, in which four men break into a jewelry store through the ceiling, codified the caper plot: it shows how they plan to do it, then shows how they do it, then shows how they get caught. Except for the gimmick of the silent half-hour, and broad comic turns from a few supporting players, the film plays the material straight. Epiphanies emerge naturally, like the moments when the gang, in the apartment above the shop, chisels a hole in the floor, and we get our first, eerily surreal view of the jewelry premises, as an umbrella is lowered through...