Catch Me If You Can (2002)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
A true story about Frank Abagnale Jr. who, before his 19th birthday, successfully conned millions of dollars worth of checks as a Pan Am pilot, doctor, and legal prosecutor. An FBI agent makes it his mission to put him behind bars. But Frank not only eludes capture, he revels in the pursuit.
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The opening credit sequence of Catch Me If You Can (by graphic arts company Kuntzel & Degas) harks back to the animated geometric lines of Hitchcock's North by Northwest, and its main character, Frank Abagnale, Jr., reminds of that film's Oedipally arrested chameleon Roger Thornhill.
As a possible career pinnacle, Catch's closest analogue is Hitchcock's 1959 North by Northwest.
It's a jaunty mix of light suspense, romance and comedy in the vein of To Catch a Thief or Donen's Hitchcock pastiches.
Spielberg is only five years younger than Hitchcock was when he made Northwest; and of course, the Master of Suspense followed that movie with a picture that was its tonal opposite, and which revolutionized movies: 1960's Psycho.
The star's charm, Spielberg's slick visuals, and a couple of well-placed swing hits (including Frank Sinatra crooning "Come Fly With Me") combine in seductive sequences that evoke Rat Pack cool and the Newman/Redford spark of " The Sting ".
We honest folk enjoy hearing tales of cleverness and thievery, from "The Sting" to "Ocean's Eleven," particularly when the bad guys don't hurt or kill anyone.
Very much in the spirit of films like "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "Catch Me" is just as vivid in its characters' emotional depth as it is in depicting Frank's funny, seat-of-his-pants survival in his doctor and lawyer identities through gleaning what information he can from episodes of "Dr.
Try Tony Curtis in The Great Impostor (1961), also based on a true story about a conniver named after his father.
The story is very close to the 1961 Robert Mulligan movie "The Great Impostor," which starred Tony Curtis as Ferdinand Waldo Demara, a real-life chameleon-crook who successfully posed as -- among many other things -- a surgeon, a naval officer, a Trappist monk and even a prison warden.
With a Scorsese and a Spielberg film in release in the same month and having secured the title role in Baz Luhrmann's upcoming Alexander the Great, DiCaprio's star is once again one of the brightest in the sky.
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Even the opening title sequence brings back memories of those clever 1964 titles introducing The Pink Panther.
In fact, the film reminded me quite a bit of Steven Soderbergh's remake of "Ocean's Eleven."
As Steven Soderbergh pointed out in Ocean's Eleven (Yea!) and with Full Frontal (Boo!), everybody needs a release.
He followed those two probing social dramas with the marshmallow-like retro-caper Ocean’s Eleven.
We honest folk enjoy hearing tales of cleverness and thievery, from "The Sting" to "Ocean's Eleven," particularly when the bad guys don't hurt or kill anyone.
Filmmaker Steven Soderbergh literally competed against himself for Oscar laurels after both Traffic and Erin Brokovich opened in 2000.
It's a tribute to Spielberg's gifts as a director of suspense sequences that it doesn't matter that, as in Citizen Kane, the beginning of the film gives away the entire plot (with cheesy TV game show To Tell the Truth standing in for News on the March).
Catch Me if You Can is one of those deceptively slight offerings that manages to reveal more about its maker than the intended masterpieces often do -- it has that Between Important Pictures feel of Ford's The Quiet Man, Kurosawa's Yojimbo, Coppola's The Conversation, or Scorsese's King of Comedy.
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It's a fairy tale this country of over-workers rarely tires of revisiting, whether "the art of the steal" (the name of one of Abagnale's books) is worked by an escape artist like perennial bank robber Willy Sutton or in effervescent amusements like "Paper Moon" and "The Sting."
This is, famously, Steven Spielberg's ( Catch Me If You Can ) first film, originally made for TV and later released theatrically, and what it is is really his first monster film, that menacing truck a forerunner of the T. rex in the sideview , of the shark eating Robert Shaw, maybe mostly of E.T.'s pursuer with all the keys on his belt: a creepy, inexplicably motiveless hazard (or at least apparently so to the pursed), one to be avoided at all costs, because you know nothing good will come of a meeting.
Scrutiny, in fact, is the last thing his films can withstand--something that early escapist fare from Spielberg like Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, all the way back to Duel, understood.
His 1970s films were largely set in the present, from Duel through Jaws to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but then he took off in time and has rarely returned.
The movie, for all its location shifts and elaborate scams, is essentially a feature-length chase, which puts it in the league of early single-minded Spielberg entries like Duel and especially The Sugarland Express.
Spielberg's told enough stories of hopelessly broken homes (Close Encounters, The Color Purple), guys proving their worth (Duel, Schindler's List), and innocents making their way in a corrupt adult world (E.T., Empire of the Sun).
That it's a chase picture is only another of the film's many plusses – from Duel to Jaws to Minority Report Spielberg has shown time and again his rapturous love of the chase, and when he's on top of his game, as he is here, precious few do it better.
Scrutiny, in fact, is the last thing his films can withstand--something that early escapist fare from Spielberg like Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, all the way back to Duel, understood.
Making a movie about a wunderkind of deception, Spielberg must've tapped into his old self, the big-fibber and fantasist who told great lies like Jaws and Close Encounters and made us believe them.
There's also none other than Mr. Spielberg ("Minority Report," "Jaws") behind the camera.
That it's a chase picture is only another of the film's many plusses – from Duel to Jaws to Minority Report Spielberg has shown time and again his rapturous love of the chase, and when he's on top of his game, as he is here, precious few do it better.
All of this surprised even a hard-boiled adrenaline addict like myself, who thought Spielberg hadn't signed off on a good movie since Jaws bit off a piece of box-office history twenty-five years ago.
His 1970s films were largely set in the present, from Duel through Jaws to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but then he took off in time and has rarely returned.
Spielberg displays here the same sensitivity to this sense of family tragedy and childhood angst that he brought to E.T. ; it runs like a minor theme through the bouncy plot of the film.
Broken families have long been a recurring motif in Spielberg's work: in "E.T.," Henry Thomas' Elliott was depressed about his father running off to Mexico with a girlfriend; Christian Bale's Jim lost his family amid the chaos of war-torn Shanghai in "Empire of the Sun"; Haley Joel Osment's David was an android abandoned by his adoptive mother in "A.I."; cop Tom Cruise used drugs to avoid dealing with the tragedy of his son's murder in "Minority."
Spielberg's told enough stories of hopelessly broken homes (Close Encounters, The Color Purple), guys proving their worth (Duel, Schindler's List), and innocents making their way in a corrupt adult world (E.T., Empire of the Sun).
Scrutiny, in fact, is the last thing his films can withstand--something that early escapist fare from Spielberg like Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, all the way back to Duel, understood.
With this and the excellent Minority Report, he's finally managed to repeat the bang he gave us back in 1981 with Raiders of the Lost Ark.
The movie, for all its location shifts and elaborate scams, is essentially a feature-length chase, which puts it in the league of early single-minded Spielberg entries like Duel and especially The Sugarland Express.
Spielberg gives the movie a snappy, glitzy gusto of the type that he gave his early chase films like The Sugarland Express and 1941, and it's refreshingly lacking in that heavy nobility he injected into The Color Purple and nearly every film since.
Spielberg gives the movie a snappy, glitzy gusto of the type that he gave his early chase films like The Sugarland Express and 1941, and it's refreshingly lacking in that heavy nobility he injected into The Color Purple and nearly every film since.
Spielberg has never been adept at full-on comedy (Exhibit A: 1941), and though he shows a lot of fizz and relish in depicting Franks ingenious scams (which are carried off by DiCaprio with brio and charm), you have to sit through some draggy parts to get to them.
As for director Steven Spielberg, well, recall that he made Jurassic Park and Schindlers List in 1993 and The Lost World and Amistad in 1997.
List, Amistad , Saving Private Ryan , A.I. , and Minority Report .
These two films showed a maturity even beyond that of Schindler's List or Amistad because they showed Spielberg's ability to provoke deep thinking AND be a masterful entertainer.
As for director Steven Spielberg, well, recall that he made Jurassic Park and Schindlers List in 1993 and The Lost World and Amistad in 1997.
He is not quite going from Jurassic Park to Schindler's List , but the understated and decidedly retro Catch Me If You Can is quite a contrast from its predecessor, the virtuoso and darkly futuristic Minority Report.
“Catch Me If You Can” has the potential to bring him out of his slump the way “Jurassic Park” and “Schindler’s List” did in 1993.
While "Schindler's List" and "Saving Private Ryan" demonstrated that he can successfully make movies with serious themes, such uneven projects as "A.I.
With Schindler's List, Spielberg made two major changes in his familiar approach: He dropped his usual tics like dolly shots and Close Encounters backlighting, and he took on cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, who's been with him for almost a decade now.
Spielberg's cinematographer alumnus, two-time Oscar winner ("Schindler's List" and "Saving Private Ryan") Janusz Kaminski, keeps things brisk and crisp that helps the film sustain its two+ hour run time.
“Catch Me If You Can” has the potential to bring him out of his slump the way “Jurassic Park” and “Schindler’s List” did in 1993.
His favourite period is WWII (when most of the Raiders films, Empire of the Sun, Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan are set), followed by the near future (two Jurassic Parks, Artificial Intelligence: A.I. and Minority Report).
Like Bradbury's thief, Spielberg is getting away with murder in most of his films post- Close Encounters of the Third Kind (particularly A.I. , Minority Report , Schindler's List, Empire of the Sun,and Saving Private Ryan) until self-doubt and paranoia consume him, seducing him to a fatal eleventh-hour appeal.
His 1970s films were largely set in the present, from Duel through Jaws to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but then he took off in time and has rarely returned.
Except for "Jaws" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," he usually wraps production in a timely manner.
Spielberg's told enough stories of hopelessly broken homes (Close Encounters, The Color Purple), guys proving their worth (Duel, Schindler's List), and innocents making their way in a corrupt adult world (E.T., Empire of the Sun).
Spielberg gives the movie a snappy, glitzy gusto of the type that he gave his early chase films like The Sugarland Express and 1941, and it's refreshingly lacking in that heavy nobility he injected into The Color Purple and nearly every film since.
Broken families have long been a recurring motif in Spielberg's work: in "E.T.," Henry Thomas' Elliott was depressed about his father running off to Mexico with a girlfriend; Christian Bale's Jim lost his family amid the chaos of war-torn Shanghai in "Empire of the Sun"; Haley Joel Osment's David was an android abandoned by his adoptive mother in "A.I."; cop Tom Cruise used drugs to avoid dealing with the tragedy of his son's murder in "Minority."
Like Bradbury's thief, Spielberg is getting away with murder in most of his films post- Close Encounters of the Third Kind (particularly A.I. , Minority Report , Schindler's List, Empire of the Sun,and Saving Private Ryan) until self-doubt and paranoia consume him, seducing him to a fatal eleventh-hour appeal.
Spielberg's told enough stories of hopelessly broken homes (Close Encounters, The Color Purple), guys proving their worth (Duel, Schindler's List), and innocents making their way in a corrupt adult world (E.T., Empire of the Sun).
His favourite period is WWII (when most of the Raiders films, Empire of the Sun, Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan are set), followed by the near future (two Jurassic Parks, Artificial Intelligence: A.I. and Minority Report).
Algo poco usual en un filme de Spielberg es el uso de canciones populares como parte del soundtrack (quizá Always sea su única cinta donde una canción es parte de la trama), y aunque John Williams realiza un score que en mucho refleja el estilo de jazz experimental que se daba por aquellas épocas (con un sonido a la Henry Mancini, para cuya orquesta tocó Williams en sus años mozos), Spielberg opta por incluir temas que ayudan enormemente a crear el estado mental que se necesita para ubicarse en la época: The Girl From Ipanema (de Stan Getz y Joao Gilberto), Embraceable You (Judy Garland), The Christmas Song (Nat King Cole) o The Look of Love (Dusty Springfield).