The Rake Magazine

The Nativity Story and Jonestown: The Life and Death of the Peoples Temple.

The Nativity Story, 2006. Directed by Catherine Hardwicke, written by Mike Rich. Starring Keisha Castle-Hughes, Oscar Isaac, Hiam Abbass, Shaun Toub, Ciaran Hinds, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Stanley Townsend, Alexander Siddig, Joe Pesci look-alike Nadim Sawalha, Eriq Ebouaney, Stefan Kalipha, and Farida Ouchani.

Now showing in theaters around town.

In Catherine Hardwicke's The Nativity Story, there is a moment where Mary, played by the normally combative Keisha Castle-Hughes, receives a vision from an angel that looks, as my colleague pointed out, like something from Xanadu. This heavenly creature has long flowing curls and radiates with the glow of Olivia Newton-John magic, and kindly tells Mary that she's going to be impregnated with the son of God. But Mary doesn't seem altogether baffled; she does not seem angry; she doesn't question whether the wine has gone to her head, whether this is a demon, anything--she merely accepts that this is an angel, and she's about to become the Virgin Mary. All in a day's labor, I guess.

The Nativity Story is a visually arresting film and is chock full of very good and very decent actors from varying cultures and races (Hardwicke and Co. should be lauded for avoiding a Charleton Heston or Jim Caviezel in any of the roles). It is also stultifying, a film whose tedium grates after about an hour, and one whose spiritual power can almost be matched by a Christmas card at your local Hallmark store.

The story is the right from your Bible-school: Herod rules Israel with an iron fist, taxing the living hell out of the Jews, taking their land and their children if the poor folks fail to pay their tariffs. Hardwicke gives us an excessively idyllic scenario and, as is the tradition in Hollywood today, ladles on the verisimilitude: there are scenes of winemaking, of cheesemaking, of housemaking, and etc. Mary is a happy, devout, and headstrong--her arranged marriage to Joseph (Oscar Isaac) gives her the serious grumps. According to Jewish law, the couple must wait one year before shacking up together and consummating their marriage.

Of course, it's going to be one tough year. Mary will be out in the olive groves when our angel comes, and afterward, decides in the meantime to visit her aunt Elizabeth (Shohreh Aghdashloo), an elderly lady who is bearing the future John the Baptist. Joseph is concerned that Mary won't come back to him to start a family--he can tell that she's displeased with an arranged marriage. But off she goes, and aunt and niece laugh and share prophecies and all is well... until Mary returns home, not a little pregnant.

The problem is that none of the characters seems overly troubled about any of these plot twists. I don't think I've seen a movie in recent memory that so often explains its tension away through dialogue. "Mary, you could be stoned for this!" her father warns her upon her return, when she's great with child. It's important to hear this, because nothing we've seen suggests anything more than mere displeasure. Her family can only screw up its face at the news, Joseph ruminates for only a moment before deciding to accept her pregnancy, and the townsfolk who supposedly want to beat her to death simply turn their noses when she delivers cheese to their door.

The Nativity Story is clearly a response to the bloodletting of Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, so much so that it seems almost as though the filmmakers also thought that excessive tension was to be avoided as well. It also appears as though the studios were busy eyeing the box-office take of The Passion, and trying to remind Hardwicke that Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ was a bomb--for the innocuousness of Nativity Story eventually devolves into a spectacle worthy of the 1950s religious epics. Herod, played by the normally brilliant Ciaran Hinds, does little more than gnash his teeth and make evil pronouncements, while his evildoers ride through villages in slo-mo while the holy people wail. When the three wise men--who, at this point, have been a trio of happy bickerers, carrying on as if they were on some kind of sitcom--arrive in Bethlehem, the star that shines down on the baby does so with the subtlety of a Hollywood arc lamp announcing a new strip club. Despite the so-called realism of the film, Joseph and Mary, despite sleeping outdoors, fighting rivers, and barely eating, look gorgeous in the manger, their hair perfect and clothes unstained.

Most tragically, though, is the question of faith. At one point, upon seeing the arc lamp illuminating the baby Jesus, one of the three wise men turns to another and says, "How is your faith now?" But faith in The Nativity Story is never questioned. From a business-perspective, it's true that being as controversial as Last Temptation means nothing but bad press and miniscule box-office, but this movie seems almost intent to offend no one. Oddly enough, Castle-Hughes was well-nigh brilliant in Whale Rider, a similar role, really, as a girl who provokes and eventually transforms her community by being the next in a line of chiefs, who at that point have been all male. Her performance there was combative, confused, and touched with moments of humor and pathos. Her Mary is a cipher, a woman who seems to have more trouble accepting that her husband was chosen for her than God himself is going to impregnate her. Would it be too much to show her buckling at times under the yoke of this responsibility? Or to have the family infuriated, as opposed to simply appearing slightly irked? Or have the Jews so riven by the forces of Rome that they've become so entrenched in their faith that visits from angels have become commonplace? Or perhaps that Rome might appear too much like a current superpower, and the Jews too much like another devout culture moved by its religious beliefs to resist? If the filmmakers wanted to avoid all controversy, they succeeded. But even Mel Gibson courted controversy, and his movie, grotesque though it may be to some of us, will be watched by its faithful years from now. The Nativity Story seems almost afraid of its subject, unwilling or unable to touch even a modicum of the passions and beliefs of its time.

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Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, 2006. Directed by Stanley Nelson, written by Marcia Smith.

Showing for one week only at the Oak Street Cinema.

Most of us know the story of the Peoples Temple and Jim Jones, the man who led over 900 confused souls to their death by poisoning in Guyana in November 1978. For some of us, the images--of the dead, face down on the grass and holding one another--have haunted our consciousness for decades. I still have bad dreams every once in awhile, still recall the newscasts that conveyed the popping of the gunfire that killed a cameraman and a congressman, the bodies of young babies between their parents making me wonder what in God's name could people do to one another, when they think they're working in God's name.

Jonestown: the Life and Death of Peoples Temple is not, in cinematic terms, a great film. It is probably not a movie that needs to be seen on the big screen, although watching it on a cold night, huddled with dozens of other curious people, might make this intense film even more intense. The strength of Jonestown lies in its utter respect for its subjects and its expert weaving of interviews with the numerous footage at hand. Jones and his followers could be presented as freaks, as people who were somehow a part of the San Francisco hippie culture who took a serious nose-dive into insanity. I would guess that many people looked upon these folks in that manner--I did, until a New Yorker profile of Jones' sons years ago changed my mind. Here, the director, Stanley Nelson, shoots his subjects with patience, and allows them to reveal, carefully, in their own time, just what brought them to Jones and kept them in his clutches. The pain that resonates from these subjects is palpable to the point of almost being too much to bear--by the end, it would take only the most hard-hearted and cynical person not to fall into a wealth of conflicted feeling and tremendous melancholy. We see a man who could not stop his wife and baby from drinking poison, but who could not drink it himself, and must live with this decision for the rest of his life. An addict for whom the Peoples Temple saved his life. And moments that seemed truly like bliss, where a group of kind and caring people tried their damndest to make this earth, this life, a place of considerable joy. The result is a moving film of a people sickened by what they saw going on in the world around them, and who were taken in by a man who was, at one point, moved by his faith, bent by paranoia, ruined by society, and by a hunger for control. And as one of the survivors breaks down and weeps, mourning that the notion of heaven, either here or in the afterlife, has left her completely, we are left with the chilling understanding that sometimes the reach for absolute faith can leave one tumbling into an abyss.

It's simple, really: when I'm feeling intolerably blue, when the skies cannot seem to shed that husk of gray and the sun is merely a dim memory, and when all of life feels hollow and miserable, I turn to movies. And one in particular, one that conjures up better days and reminds me of people that I love, like my Grandmother Schilling, my father, friends, and the three transvesitites I sat behind, who, at the Oak Street Cinema, wept with joy at the close of this favorite. These people all laughed with me and our spirits were saved when Gene Kelley and Donald O'Connor sang:

Moses supposes his toeses are roses
but Moses supposes erroneously
and Moses he knowses his toeses aren't roses
as Moses supposes his toeses to be...

and danced circles around Bobby Watson, the fussbudget diction coach while yelling "Hupidubidu! "

Of course, that movie is Singin' in the Rain.

It is nearly impossible not to laugh at that scene, or Jean Hagen trying to say "I cann stann 'em" to her diction coach. Or O'Connor's "Make 'Em Laugh" sequence (and his terrifying backflips, which don't work on mattresses turned on their sides... trust me on that one). Or Kelley's Don Lockwood earnestly going on about 'Dignity", when we know better... Or any number of the moments in this beautiful film.

Betty Comden, who with Adolph Green, wrote this silly and sublime masterpiece, died on Thanksgiving Day. Apparently, they enjoyed an amazing career, writing a string of muscial hits for MGM and Broadway, collaborating for nearly six decades. But if they never did anything but write Singin' in the Rain, well, it goes without saying that they gave us a present that will last as long as there are movies.

For that gift of laughter, for the gift of making the people I care for laugh, I am eternally grateful.

Casino Royale, 2006. Directed by Martin Campbell, written by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and the ubiquitous Paul Haggis. Starring Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Mads Mikkelsen, Judi Dench, Giancaro Giannini, Jeffrey Wright, Isaach De Bankole, and Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson, who seems obliged to poke his ugly mug into all the big-budget movies.

There's a moment in the opening of Casino Royale, when our hero, James Bond, is shown dispatching his very first victim in the sink of a public lavatory. Shot in black and white, the blacks as rich as India ink and the whites as glaring as a flash bulb, the scene is notable for its wretchedness, and an early signal that this isn't Pierce Brosnan's world anymore. Apparently, a double-0 agent must waste two enemies before reaching such exalted status. The aforementioned kill is shown in flashback, and now our hero, played by Daniel Craig, sits patiently in the office of his next victim, who assures him that the second kill is easier. Actually, he tries to assure Bond, but is blown through his chair by a single bullet before he can finish that sentence.

Of course, if Martin Campbell had any wit about him, this opening scene wouldn't have been in monochrome, but in the sun-drenched technicolor of the 60s, taking us back to the real beginning. But no one has ever accused a Bond film of excessive imagination.

Casino Royale is supposedly a return to the old-style Bond, the "literate" Bond from Ian Fleming's potboilers. As it stands, it is not a stretch to say it's the best Bond in ages, though context is everything: there has literally not been a decent bond since Sean Connery flexed his golden torso in Thunderball, which itself was nothing but fluff. But the comparisons should end there, for Connery's Bond was at least a product of its time, its politics somewhat reassuring to the zeitgeist of the 60s. The new Bond seems content to give us creaky imperialism, the usual idiotic women, gadgets that, in this world, now seem like nothing any third world country with a few bucks doesn't own. Worse, Casino Royale has an overlong plot, ham-handed direction, and makes the especially tragic mistake of being, quite simply, in its second half, the most dull big-budget film of the year.

After the hideous credit sequence has run its course, we open with the usual gangbusters: Bond is sweating away his afternoon in some tropical locale, this time Uganda, watching a mongoose and a cobra fight to the death while a fire-scarred villain waits for his opportunity to make some shady deal. Soon, their cover is blown, and Bond races after the bad guy in a spectacular chase through a construction area... killing scores of innocent Ugandans, whose lives, considering their lack of close up, seem to be less worthwhile than the mongoose or snake. The bad guy is an amazing creature, possessed of the dexterity of a flying squirrel and Jackie Chan, leaping and pirouetting off girders, elevators, cranes, you name it. Finally, Bond chases him down, waltzes into an Embassy (from who knows where), shoots the villain down and razes the building.

What justifies such wanton behavior on the part of the British government? Apparently, this Scarface was a terrorist, which is enough for us. The new Bond tosses the 't' word around with more aplomb than the Republicans before election day. Who the hell is this Ugandan guy? Instead of the story of a man who undoubtedly grew up living in abject poverty, who turned into a terrorist and somehow managed to morph into this gravity-defying creature, we get... James Bond. And how he learned to love martinis and lose his soul.

The story is the usual silliness: an uber-villain named Le Chiffre, who weeps blood, makes tons of money by arming the world's terrorists. Somehow, it is suggested, he made a figurative killing off 9/11, apparently by unloading boxcutters at a low rate. Anyway, Le Chiffre's latest plot was thwarted by Bond, in a chase scene whose best moments were stolen from The Road Warrior. Having lost his shirt, Le Chiffre must win back his money in a high-stakes Texas Hold 'Em tournament in Montenegro. Bond is the best card player, so naturally he's called upon to prevail. Along the way he meets the supposedly intelligent though regally daft Vesper Lynd, played by a beautiful woman named Eva Green, who is slathered under some of the worst makeup since Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? Worse, Green is an actress with the range of a sock puppet, draining what little life there is from this film in every scene. Eventually, Bond beats Le Chiffre, is abducted and has his testicles whacked (literally), and finds a traitor in his midst.

The film is being called 'dark', in that Craig's Bond can be seen brooding, is testy, then falls in love with Ms. Lynd, and has a supposedly grim ending that references Titanic, of all films. Of course, a decent filmmaker can use lighting and camera angles, set design and editing to suggest despair, so it's difficult to feel the angst in a film so harshly lit and pedantically shot. The film takes its sweet time going anywhere, and then just when you begin to get bored, screenwriter Paul Haggis steps in to pour syrup on the audience. Bond falls in love, Bond loses girl, Bond becomes jaded. Two and a half hours later the film comes to a close, and you wander out stunned, wondering just when you'll stop being fooled by the hype and watch something original for a change.

Earnestness is the raison d'etre of Casino Royale, which is a real shame, because there's so much you could do to tweak this ridiculous scenario--from Britain's always failed attempts at outdoing its American counterparts on the foreign policy front, to the fact that nowadays your average teenage hacker has better gadgets than Bond and Company. Not to mention the fact that maybe they could give Bond a woman who is a real foil. Perhaps a lesbian. Or perhaps Bond could be black.

God forbid this franchise should acknowledge the 21st century.

The old Bonds reassured us and gave us some needed confidence during a cold war that had everyone on the edge. We often forget that the first three Bonds were testaments to ingenuity--they were big moneymakers made on virtually no budget whatsoever. From Russia With Love could be considered the most literate, and even it had a sense of camp that was evident in its day. We can look now at the dopey blondes and brunettes that hung on Connery's every smirk, but what do these silly women and their swinging bustline do for us today? Vesper Lynd isn't fun or funny, and her barbs lack bite (and she certainly isn't brainy). Above all, why should we give a rat's ass about James Bond, about his development as a killer and a man, his learning not to trust people, or even about his dispatching villains, most of whom are from third-world countries? If Uganda's the worst you can throw at us, you might as well resurrect S.P.E.C.T.R.E.

Judging from its box-office take last weekend, this series will be around for a long time, the machine pumping out these witless packages every two years. But if it's nostalgia you want, rent the originals. If it's action you want... I guess you could still rent the originals. See Casino Royale if you're a Bond addict, if your DVD player is broken, or you're stuck in a small town and it's a choice between this and, say, Happy Feet. Or read the book. Your own imagination can certainly do no worse.

Fast Food Nation and For Your Consideration.

Fast Food Nation, 2006. Directed by Richard Linklater, written by Linklater and Eric Schlosser. Starring Catalina Sandino Moreno, Wilmer Valderrama, Ana Claudia Talancon, Greg Kinnear, Ashley Johnson, Bobby Cannavale, Paul Dano, Esai Morales, and, in small roles: Ethan Hawke, Patricia Arquette, Luis Guzman, Avril Lavigne, Lou Taylor Pucci, and Bruce Willis.

Now showing in theaters around town.

By now you'd have to be an utter fool not to know that fast food is a truly awful substance. For years we've heard the warnings, seen films like Super Size Me, watched 60 Minutes, read health reports and warnings that the burgers we consume are filled with toxins, deadly fats, and perhaps even traces of shit.

Filmgoers looking for a righteous tirade against the fast food industry are going to be sorely disappointed by Richard Linklater's Fast Food Nation. Never has such a cynical, pessimistic film on such a charged subject been made with less urgency. Fast Food Nation has been compared (favorably) to Fahrenheit 9/11, which is absurd--where Michael Moore sought to condemn the Bush administration for every random sneeze (and attempt to create the image of himself as a hero of the masses), Linklater's film simply and patiently reveals the inner workings of a machine that devours people and cattle with equal indifference. And in doing so he creates a picture of surprising strength and durability.

Fast Food Nation is splintered into three distinct stories: that of a fast food executive, sent to Texas to find out why the "fecal colorform is off the charts" in the burgers (shit in the meat), and in the process discovers his soul; of a young woman trying to put her way through school while working at the local burger joint; and, most poignantly, a group of Mexican immigrants trying to keep their heads above water while working at the meat processing plant.

Greg Kinnear plays the executive, a happy-go-lucky guy whose eyes are slowly opened to the horrors that surround him. He's the kind of a fellow who gets a real thrill over having invented the Calypso Chicken Tenders, and who laughs with his wife that lesson one in the corporate world is "don't kill your customer". Ashley Johnson is the young woman whose job at Mickey's (the stand in for McDonald's) begins to weigh on her soul. Eventually she will abandon her job to join forces with a ragtag group of campus radicals, whose work borders on the futile. Finally, Wilmer Valderrama (of That 70s Show fame), Catalina Sandino Moreno (from Maria Full of Grace), and Ana Claudia Talancon (a star in Mexico) play a family that escapes the crushing poverty of their home country to work in the states. They are a resilient bunch, happy to have the modest dough from their jobs, giving them the possibility of the American dream--pizza for dinner, a new truck in the driveway. While their paths never cross, these characters' struggles encapsulate our own desperate attempts to find meaning in our jobs, and in our attempts to make the world a better place.

There is a real mystery in Fast Food Nation, and the real story isn't simply that fast food is garbage and the people are crushed who work in its production. No, the real story is how do we exist in a world that crushes the soul, and whose systems--in this case, food-production (though it could be about the auto industry, banking, government) have grown to an unmanageable size. Fast Food Nation poses an existentialist dilemma that pundits like Moore and Spurlock would never touch: Linklater understands that there are no enemies in human form, just people stuck in situations beyond their control. As usual, Linklater allows his characters the freedom to express themselves through conversation: like Slacker, Waking Life, Before Sunrise, Fast Food Nation celebrates its people, giving even Bruce Willis' corporate hack his due, and his dignity. In my interview with Linklater, he stated that his goal was honesty--if you make one man the personification of evil, you are, as Linklater said, "giving that one guy a lot of power he doesn't really have." This suggests that we're all culpable, which is, in reality, more terrifying than the killing floor of the slaughterhouse.

The movie boasts some wonderful performances (as usual with Linklater, who deserves the title "actor's director" more than Altman ever did), and it saves its gore for the end, and even then it's subdued. My guess is that Fast Food Nation is bound to be unpopular, and will please few people. Those who want to ignore the fast food crisis would never see it, while those who have Eric Schlosser's book highlighted in a hundred spots will feel the film has softened its considerable message. But Linklater has taken a page from the great paranoid classics of the 70s, films that assumed we had brains and sought to make our world a better place. Watching Fast Food Nation, the impetus is on us, not necessarily to topple the great machine, but rather, to live without the machine. Then, and only then, will its gears slow, stop, and finally release us from its grip.

...

For Your Consideration, 2006. Directed by Christopher Guest, written by Guest and Eugene Levy. Starring Catherine O'Hara, Parker Posey, Harry Shearer, Christopher Moynihan, Christopher Guest, John Michael Higgins, Carrie Aizley, Ed Begley Jr., Whitney Taylor Brown, Michael McKean, the great Jane Lynch, Fred Willard, Eugene Levy, and Michael Hitchcock and Don Lake as a great Ebert/Siskel pair, and Office creator Ricky Gervais.

Now showing in theaters around town.

Who would have thought that when Spinal Tap hit our screens over twenty years ago, that it would spawn a whole new genre? In fact, the mockumentary may have reached its zenith, with The Office pulling in audiences, to Tap's Nigel Tufnel rocking out for VW (usually during the show). Christopher Guest has made a series of these films, utilizing a tight-knit crew so professional they can improvise most of the dialogue and make it seem both hilarious and painfully real.

For Your Consideration breaks slightly with this trend. While it employs the verite camera style, it is not a mockumentary, eschewing for once the onscreen interviews. It is the story of the making of a straight-to-video clunker called Home For Purim, and what happens to its idiotic crew when rumors abound that it will garner some Oscar nominations. Home For Purim is unbelievably bad, its actors kind-hearted but daft, and the movie is filled with more achingly funny moments than we've seen in a Christopher Guest film in ages. Then again, Hollywood is an easy target, and while For Your Consideration certainly stands as one of the better comedies of the year (if not the most hilarious, but it's been a weak year), it could use more vitriol--or it could be more sweet. When Catherine O'Hara's character finally flips out, it's more depressing than funny, for we've come to know her as a kind lady, not some hag who needs her face carved into by a plastic surgeon. And when Home For Purim really does garner a nod or two, one can't help but recoil--no film this bad would ever get even a trickle of consideration. And there have been lots of horrible Oscar nominees.

Nonetheless, For Your Consideration is a welcome night at the movies, an evening of almost guaranteed belly laughs and repeated moments after the show. See it for its joy in celebrating comedians of all feathers, working with a decent script, playing off one another, for the sheer fun of it. Sometimes, that's all we need.

Rififi, 1955. Directed by Jules Dassin, written by Dassin, with Rene Wheeler and Auguste Le Breton. Starring Jean Servais, Jo le Suedois, Robert Manuel, Jules Dassin, Marie Sabouret, Janine Darcey, Claude Sylvain, and Marcel Lupovici.

I know what they say: they say that crime doesn't pay. And it doesn't I suppose. After all those years of hard living, you don't come away with anything but the worst regrets. The stress kills you, the lies kill you, every little thing kills you, like going from good times to bad in a day. Shit, I literally had an apartment across from Central Park in Manhattan, had it for eight months, furnished, great view, full bar, and then, on December 11 (I can't forget the date), I spent the night in a homeless shelter in the Bowery. But it can be just as bad going up, you know--Christ, you come across a bundle, you can leave the dregs for a great new place, but how do you furnish the thing? How do you get in with the neighbors, the respectable people? They know something's up.

Throw kids in the mix and it's worse. I had a little girl. Still do, I guess. But she hasn't spoken with me in years. Never will, either.

I love Rififi. Watch that movie, and you'll see how it was with a gang I was involved in. We didn't do anything with safes and busting in like in the picture, though maybe that would have been more noble. Stealing from some wealthy bastard instead of televisions and radios out of some poor guy's basement or warehouse. But my pals, we had that loyalty, like in the movie. Shit, I guarantee that's the only French movie I could ever watch. Influenced me to no end when I was younger. Back then, when I first saw it, I was one of those shitheads who couldn't do anything right--I'd steal, lie, cheat, but I had a heart, I knew, my pals knew it. I remember once, when I sold a pal's saxophone right out from under him, I was holdin' it while he spent a month in the pen for trying to buy some heroin off a cop. He gets out, comes to me, finds the axe is gone. We both cried, you know that? And he says, he says, "You know what Max, you're the kind of guy you can trust with your life, but not your money." Then he gave me a hug, went to go buy his sax. Never saw him again. That really hurt. But it was true. I guess the truth hurts more than anything else, doesn't it?

Rififi hit me hard. I saw it in Times Square, at the Rialto. It wasn't long after I lost that sax. I was really bumming, selling dope, stealing those televisions, doing whatever I could. So I saw Rififi, about the great jewel heist. I've seen this thing a hundred times if I've seen it at all. I own it now, watch it with friends, and they don't like it, don't like that it's in French. So what? You wouldn't ignore a beautiful woman if she spoke French, right? That's how I feel about this movie.

See, what got me wasn't the heist. That I could take or leave. I mean, it's exciting, yeah, but real? No way, that's all Hollywood. I'm not going to break safes and climb through holes in ceilings. But those guys, those thieves, they stuck together, and that's what I liked. The main guy, Tony the Stephanois, he's coughing throughout the flick, he's going to die. Going to die because he's old and let himself get locked up, taking the rap for his young friend, who had a kid. In the joint he caught some lung disease, tuberculosis, something. The kid was too young to do hard time, Tony figured, so he didn't fink on his friend. I remember sitting there, in the dark, sucking on my Coca-Cola, and thinking, "son of a bitch, I'd never do that!" But then the movie progresses, and these guys all stick together... except one, and he brings it all down. I hate him still, just to talk about him now.

There's one scene that gets me: when they're opening the safe. They're going to go in from the back, so these four guys lower the thing down so the safecracker can work on getting in. Of course, it's heavy, hard, hard work even for four men. And you know what? It looks just like the soldiers raising the flag of Iwo Jima, except going the opposite way. All working together like that. Of course, there's no glory to it, they're robbing after all.

But that's the thing with a movie like Rififi. Crime doesn't pay... they all have to say that. But it does, kind of. You come out of a theater after seeing a show like that, and the sun's so bright, and it seems like it's shining especially hard on your prospects, and they're not good. It feels like you do an honest day's work and you come home broken. And where's the thrill? When does your heart ever beat like it does when you're doing something wrong, stealing something, wonderin' if those footfalls are the cops or just some lunk out wandering? I'm here to tell you the heart doesn't ever beat that way. And if you win, you're sitting on a throne, a holy throne.

For us it became hot merchandise, like I said, tv's and radios, whatever we could steal and resell, and very little violence. I made some friends, close friends in the business, got in with a group of guys like in Rififi, only not like Rififi, because you know life is never like a movie. But close, real close, and when they go to jail, it kills you. And when they die, it hurts even in your sleep. And the shame of it all, you get to share it, and the miseries you share, and the highs, you certainly share those. But we stuck it out, the four of us.

Now they're all gone. Two died young, one at the hands of a cop who thought my pal was packing a piece. One's in jail forever. I still write him, but I'm too old to visit. Sent him to a joint in Virginia. No one sees him. But I hear he's healthy.

This'll sound disrespectful, but sometimes I think it's like soldierin'. You go through the good and bad with a guy, highs taller than the Empire State Building, and lows lower than the bottom of the Atlantic. And even though it makes you sick to think of some of the casualties, how could you have lived any different?

Me, my biggest regret's family. I do see the guys in the park, walking with their grandkids, the life of a sucker peaking with a beautiful child in their arms. Maybe that's the gold at the end of the rainbow, I don't know. I saw Rififi just the other day, and it's true, with this life there's never any future. I'm lucky to be this old and not talking to you in a jail cell, or not talking at all 'cause I'm dead. My pal who died on the job, you know, I thought about how in Rififi Tony stays with his pal, stroking his hair because he's sad as all hell. Man, I wanted to say good-bye to my friend, Cinch was his name, but I had to beat it for the cops. That certainly wasn't like the movie. I hope Cinch was already dead, and not alone in his last moments...

Politicians and Professors will never understand, though: crime's never going away, because real life's like the movies just enough to keep us coming back for more. That's awful I know, but it's what I believe.