Tag Archives: Zoe Saldana
The usual suspects
Here’s something fun I came up with as answer to John’s new challenge: Crime Cast-A-Thon! You can check his post for the details (and rules) but long story short you need to put together a crew of expert criminals to steal the Maltese Falcon, which has been recently discovered and will be displayed at the MacGuffin Museum of Ancient Artifacts. 
After long pondering and evaluating strengths and weaknesses, here is my dream team of criminals to pull this heist.
Aisha is resourceful, smart, charming and deadly. Her attention to details happily complements her ability to see the big picture and plan ahead, which makes her the perfect choice to be the brain of the operation.
Every leader needs a capable right hand who keeps track of who is doing what and makes sure everything goes smoothly. Rusty is the man for the job bringing to the table his smooth-talker skills and his ability to read people.
In this day and age, you cannot plan a heist without a IT expert but why choose your average brilliant nerd when you can have Mai Linh who’s not only tech savvy but has mad fighting skills!
Organising a “job” always requires all kinds of materials, devices and vehicles so who better than Red to provide anything the crew might need? If he can do it in jail he will thrive in the free world.
A mind for business and a body for sin, con-artist extraordinaire and perfect lure Sydney Prosser will charm your wallet, bank account, personal passwords or whatever she needs out of you… with style.
Last but not least, a wheel man with unparalleled skills, steel nerves and good in a tight spot: the Driver. He goes like the wind and he never gets caught, plus he can keep his mouth shut.
Filed under Odds and ends
Out of the Furnace
Director: Scott Cooper, Main Cast: Christian Bale, Casey Affleck, Zoe Saldana, Woody Harrelson, Sam Shepard, Willem Dafoe, Forest Whitaker;
A story of brotherly love and loss in a small town of America’s Rust Belt. Russell Baze (Bale) works a dead-end job at the local steel mill, takes care of his very sick father with his uncle’s (Shepard) help and his younger brother Rodney (Affleck) has been stop-lost and will soon go back to Iraq. Being a decent, hardworking man and wanting to built a life with his girlfriend (Saldana) is not something that is usually rewarded in life and Russell’s fate is only about to get worse. He ends up in prison for drinking and driving, after being involved in a car crash in which people lost their lives. When Russell has finally paid his debt to society, a few years have gone by and his world has changed: his father is dead, his girl has moved on and shacked up with Wesley Barnes (Whitaker), the chief of Braddock’s police, and his brother is broken, lost and in deep with the wrong crowd, after coming back from his tour in Iraq. Since the audience has met early on both the town’s small-time crook Petty (Dafoe) and the ruthless, all-round criminal DeGroat (Harrelson) from up north (Bergen, NJ), it is very clear that things will end bad, at this point it is just a matter of seeing how grim the story will turn out. Rodney is using his fighting skills as bare-knuckled boxer in illegal matches, trying to earn money to pay back a debt he has with Petty and have something left. Once he goes up in the Ramapough Mountains to fight in a match organised by DeGroat, he will never come back. This sends Russell over the edge and on a path of revenge but as Confucius said: “before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves”, which is quite an apt description of the ending. The slow burning pace of the movie, along with the rural and desolate settings, increase very effectively the foreboding mood of the story and a good characterisation keeps the viewer engaged. Although all the cast is excellent, I’d say that this is a Bale and Harrelson film, the latter in excellent form as the villain of the piece. Relentless —7/10
Buy it from Amazon:
Filed under Seen at the cinema
Ramblings of a cinephile 