Normally, when you buy stolen goods, you don't legally own them. The person they were stolen from still does. Unless: Until 1995, if you bought them in
Bermondsey Market, London, between the hours of sunrise and sunset, they would then belong to you, even if
clearly stolen.
posted by Zarkonnen
on Feb 8, 2012 -
32 comments
Both an ingeniously choreographed crime film and a moral drama influenced by Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment
, Pickpocket
marks the apotheosis of Bresson's stripped-down style. There’s little or no psychological realism or conventional drama at work in Martin La Salle’s portrayal of a master thief who plies his trade at the Gare de Lyon and easily outwits the cops who seek to ensnare him. See it once to appreciate the spare elegance of the pickpocketing scenes, and then a second time to appreciate how subtly Bresson accomplishes the story of a man’s self-willed corruption, his liberation through imprisonment and his redemption through love, all in less than 80 minutes.*
[more inside]
posted by Trurl
on Jan 6, 2012 -
11 comments
Although [Michael] Mann has said he was inspired by a true story from Chicago in the late 1960s, the film is no gritty realist number about desperate thievery. Rather, HEAT is a high-gloss creature of its time, utilizing the classic "duel between cop and robber"... to thematize lifestyle issues in the mid-1990s. Specifically I argue that, for all its slickness and emphasis on style and personality, HEAT is a film about work and its increasing personal costs. For the characters in HEAT, work provides excitement* and challenge, but it ultimately excludes any emotional life outside of the demands of the job. *That's the shootout scene
posted by Trurl
on Nov 21, 2011 -
108 comments
After 25 years I revisited To Live and Die In L.A. (1985), William Friedkin's cynical, fatalistic, hardboiled and high-energy crime noir about corruption and survival in the city of no angels. The script is literate, the characters are believable, the performances are brutally honest, the unpredictable twists keep coming, the action never stops, and the car chase is shot for real without any fake process. (spoilers)
posted by Trurl
on Nov 4, 2011 -
60 comments
Caravaggio's crimes exposed in Rome's police files: "Four hundred years after his death,
Caravaggio is a 21st Century superstar among old master painters. His stark, dramatically lit, super-realistic paintings strike a modern chord - but his police record is more shocking than any modern bad boy rock star's. An
exhibition of documents at Rome's State Archives throws vivid light on his tumultuous life here at the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th centuries."
[Via] [more inside]
posted by homunculus
on Feb 18, 2011 -
50 comments
Art Crimes is a fascinating site about the history of vandalism in the fine arts, recently revived by a Frenchwoman who left a
lipstick imprint on a 2 million dollar painting by
Cy Twombly. Other examples include a
British suffragist attacking a Velazquez with a knife, an
installation vandalized by the Israeli ambassador to Sweden,
two Chinese performance artists who urinated into Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, and a
Canadian art student who vomited blue gelatin on a Mondrian. Oddly enough, the artwork that has weathered the most attacks is Rembrandt's
The Night Watch, which has survived two knife attacks (one by an unemployed teacher with a butter knife) and an attack by a mental patient who had a compulsion to fling sulfuric acid at fine artworks. Other art vandalism methods, including glass cutters, hammers, scissors, guns, and ink, are discussed
here.
posted by jonp72
on Jul 26, 2007 -
38 comments
Borf is dead. The
masked mystery whose ubiquitious
graffiti has confused Washington for months is revealed to be an 18-year-old anarchist. He had a good run, though, getting his work on dozens of locations in
D.C., then going on tour through
Raleigh,
New York and
San Francisco, inspiring an
internet following in the process. And while his work wasn't brilliant enough to match the romantic counterculture image he tried to create, there's a truly sad story behind his pseudonym and
icon: both belong to a friend who committed suicide two years ago. Of course, that's unlikely to arouse the sympathy of the various city officials spending (I would assume) hundreds of thousands of dollars to remove his work.
posted by gsteff
on Jul 15, 2005 -
62 comments
