CinemaFunk

Charmingly Comedic

The heist gone wrong story is timeless. Even more timeless is The Lavender Hill Mob. A British comedy directed by Charles Crichton (A Fish Called Wanda), the The Lavender Hill Mob has a slow, early plot points that take on appreciated value as the films moves along, particularly with the ending.

Mr. Holland (Alec Guinness) has been directing gold bullion deliveries for over 20 years and has become a fixture at his London bank. His neurotic work habits develop a keen eye on the details of how the gold in formed into bars and to safely deliver gold ingots each day.

Mr. Holland meets Pendlebury (Stanley Holloway) who owns a foundry. When Mr. Holland realizes that the steps involved in making Pendlebury's Eiffel Tower souvenirs is exactly the same as to make gold ingots the two concoct a plan to steal and smuggle the gold in a hilarious and charming heist that almost goes right.

Since I saw Signs I lost interest in M. Night Shyamalan. The recent critical bashing of The Last Airbender and my recent bashing on The Happening shows that M. Night is very much out of favor with audiences and the more intelligent studio executives. After my screening of The Happening I swore that I would never view a M. Night film again. A brief discussion with a friend urged me to see The Village, saying that it is a misunderstood film.

No, it is well understood that M. Night's typical excellent premise with sordid execution continues. The Village begins in 1897 at the funeral of a child. Unknown creatures are held at bay in the surrounding forest while the village enjoys their safe harbor. Dead animal skins are littered around the village prompting worries. Lucius (Joaquin Phoenix) and Ivy (Bryce Dallas Howard) begin a love affair and their expectations of marriage is known throughout the village. When Noah (Adrien Brody), a man with developmental problems stabs Lucius, Ivy enters the forest to look for towns outside the village for medicine and other supplies.

A new staple of American film history.

Every few years there comes a science fiction film that mends a variety of cinematic staple elements and pushes the boundaries of what cinema can present to the viewer. Inception is just that. The financial and critical success of The Dark Knight gave Nolan enough momentum to acquire a near-carte-blanche production budget for Inception, an idea that he had been pushing for years. By converging science fiction and heists elements into a cerebral, multi-layered story arc, Christopher Nolan has continued his streak of high-quality films that attracts a mainstream audience.

Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is an expert at extraction, the finding of secrets and information inside someones dream. So much that he must prove to a potential client his unique talent in an extraction audition in the opening scenes. Cobb and his team featuring Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are able to impress Saito (Ken Watanabe), the man whose dreams they had just occupied. Saito hires Cobb and his team to not extract information. But this time to induce inception, the act of planting an idea into ones deep subconscious, enough to provoke them to think of the idea and claim as their own.