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The Sting
... movie reviews , spoiler_low
tue 2005-jul-05 18:21:08 pdt
... permalink
Sunday night we watched The Sting.
I had seen it maybe seven years ago or so.
<spoiler detail="low">
So it was interesting seeing it already knowing the "twist". It felt
like not very much was actually affected by it. By which I guess I
mean, not that many scenes turned out to have a different subtext the
second time. Or at least, I think. It was, as I said, many years ago
that I saw it the first time. (I'm avoiding actually saying what the
twist is, since I figure that the fact that there is a twist is less
of a spoiler than what the twist is.)
But the fact that it was sort of the original con artist film, and so
as a result so many other more recent con artist films also include
some sort of twist, so that you know going in that they're going to be
trying to trick you, so you look for the twist, and maybe you figure
it out and maybe you don't... Um, not sure where I was going with the
phrase "the fact that" at the beginning of that non-sentence. I guess
that fact makes this not a very big spoiler.
</spoiler>
Anyway, you know, it's a classic and all that. It certainly deserves
that status -- it's really well done. Paul Newman and Robert Redford
are good of course, but Robert Shaw I thought gave an even better
performance, albeit in a smaller role. Perhaps most worthy of note is
that the script (and the film in general) still holds up as well as it
does when compared to its more recent counterparts -- unlike certain
other films from the 1970's, you don't have to point
out how ground-breaking it was "back then".
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