Monday, September 11, 2006
The Sting (1973)
Ooh. Classy. Stylish. Probably the first of its kind. There's just always something satisfying about a good heist movie... Even if it takes a long time getting to the end, watching the bad guys get what's coming to them makes me go "YES!" and feel like all's right with the world. This movie was full of those "YES!" moments, all the way through to the lovely ending of it. Newman and Redford are both fantastic in their roles. The dialogue was wonderfully snappy. The heist was beautifully executed. The ragtime music set the tone perfectly. I'm using a lot of adverbs here, but it's because although these aren't my FAVORITE genre of movies... they just don't get much better than this. 4 stars.
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My mom turned me onto the two Newman/Redford movies during my adolescence and I quickly fell in love with both of them. I love everything about 'em. I love when Hooker meets Gondorf ("I already know how to drink"). As much fun as it is to watch Newman and Redford, I always enjoyed Robert Shaw's performance as Doyle Lonnigan. In fact, he has probably my favorite moment in the entire film when he blows up to his underlings after the card game: "What was I supposed to do? Call him out for being a better cheat in front of the others?!"
I took Drama I as a freshman in high school. Most of my classmates were upperclassmen, but I held my own. I was discouraged in general from such things so I deferred Drama II to my senior year as a sort of reward for slogging through the rest of high school. By the end of my sophomore year, however, the drama teacher moved to Texas. I didn't really have much of a good feeling about her successor as a drama teacher so I decided not to bother taking Drama II as I had told myself I would. Still, at the very end of my junior year, I stopped by her classroom and suggested that perhaps The Sting would make a good choice for the next Fall's play.
Despite not knowing me at all, she actually went through with that idea and sure enough, my senior year the high school staged The Sting. I auditioned and was cast as Man in Raincoat. If I had stuck with it after my freshman year, I probably would have had one of the leads but I was rusty, plus I was an outsider by then, my drama class work having been seen mostly by a teacher and other students who had already left.
Once the cast was in place, she had us all stay after school one day to watch the film to better understand just what the story was. It was painfully obvious to me that no one there got it or appreciated its brilliance, and I felt such an outsider that I withdrew then and there.
I've never really regretted bailing on it, though I do sometimes regret not having stuck with Drama.
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