Awakenings
Dances with Wolves (winner)
Goodfellas
The Grifters
Reversal of Fortune
Showing posts with label The Grifters. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Grifters. Show all posts
Friday, April 3, 2015
Friday, October 31, 2014
Sunday, December 22, 2013
The Grifters
Film: The Grifters
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.
I really like The Grifters. I’ve always considered this to be the movie where John Cusack graduated from teen comedies (even some pretty good ones) into adult fare. The Grifters is a film that doesn’t pull any punches. It’s a brutal film. What it reminds me of more than anything is a film like The Sting, but run through a very gritty, ugly filter. This is neo-noir at its finest, featuring not one, but two femmes fatale and a host of characters, all on the take from somewhere.
Our three main characters start with no connection, but are soon united. First is Roy (John Cusack), a commission salesman who supplements his income liberally with short con games, such as showing a bartender a $20 bill and paying with a $10. He tries this once too often and gets a slug from a baseball bat in the gut. Second is Lilly (Anjelica Huston), whose job is to go to racetracks and bet heavily on longshots to reduce the odds, making the payouts far easier to handle. Third is Myra (Annette Bening) who uses sex as liberally as possible to get what she wants. It’s not too long into the film that we discover that Roy and Myra are not quite an item but are frequently in each other’s company and that Lilly is Roy’s mother.
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