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Small Time Crooks

Small Time Crooks

List Price: $14.99
Your Price: $13.49
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 2 stars
Summary: This movie was pretty funny... for the first 45 minutes.
Review: I found this movie amusing until it suddenly skipped ahead to 1 year later. At this point, half of the main cast (all of the hilarious supporting characters) was no longer in the movie. The movie sort of went downhill from there. Sure, the remaining characters became rich and famous, but the movie was no longer funny or enjoyable.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: How could it get any better?
Review: Me and my boy, Louie, just checked out this fresh and exciting movie from Woody...the name of my second son, by the way...and the crew. Oh-my -gosh I haven't laughed like that in several years. Thank your lucky stars that this was made in our lifetime.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Rags To Riches To Rags - Very Funny and Heartwarming
Review: This is such a funny movie. Woody Allen and his partners in crime play up their bumbling idiot characters so well! Tracey Ullman is a genius - She can play any character and make it believable.

This rags to riches to rags story is funny and heartwarming and just fun to watch. This was also the first time I saw Hugh Grant playing such a loathsome character - he was great! What can I say about Elaine May except she is so good that it looks like she's not even acting!

The comedic acting was very good in this movie and I can't wait to own it on DVD so I can sit back and enjoy over and over again.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: If you liked "The Castle", then you may enjoy this movie
Review: I've always liked Woody Allen movies, especially his early funny ones, and I just sorta ignored the awful "serious" ones, like "Stardust Memories". But this is a comedy, and it's dreadful. Thank heaven it cost me only five bucks.

OK, so Woody and his wife (Tracy Ullman) become rich and she wants to buy "class". The movie becomes a sneering put-down of her pretensions. It's just plain ugly.

Elaine May is terrific, though, and I'll give the flick an extra star for her performance (as the wife's cousin).

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Two movies from Woody Allen
Review: There are two stories in one. The first one is more hilarious, with a goofy Lovitz, a teenager-type Rappaport, and Woody, who thinks he's the brain, but--like in "Take the Money and Run"--he's very incompetent. As funny as their situation is though, Ullman matches all three of them with a fascinating New York accent (I'm always amazed wht English people change their already strange accents) and rapid one-liners that had the audience laughing.

In the second part, the movie goes back to Allen's usual boy-nearly-loses-girl as Ullman and Allen struggle as nouveau-riche white trash trying to mix with the blue-blooded elite. There is somewhat of a message that being rich is worhtless unless you can somehow keep the life and loves you had before. Less funny than the first part (in no small part because we lose the Marx Brothers: Allen, Lovitz, and Rappaport), but it still produces laughter. Ullman becomes less funny, but even more sympathetic. Elaine May is funny as the slow but perceptive friend.

This movie can be another Woody Allen classic. What's great about it for me is that it's not only funny, but it's not so vulgar and rife with sex jokes that I would let children and my parents watch it. It's a simple story, reminding me of the Marx Brothers in "Go West." Very simple and pleasantly funny.

Though you might want to keep a lustful eye out for 1) Tracy Ullman's VPL in the first half and 2)During the final party scenes, Elaine May's breasts are pouring out of her dress, heaving while Allen tries to rob the safe and shown from above when the two leave.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A Perfect Woody Allen Film!
Review: Woody Allen and Tracey Ullman are so funny in this movie. Just the mention of his being a dishwasher at the start of the movie and her being a topless dancer when they first met always has me cracking up already. It takes new directions throughout the film and is funny from start to finish.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: It's not funny.
Review: This is not a funny movie by Allen. The good part is that he really tried to make something light, enjoyable, happy ending, not using instrospectiveness all the time. Also, Allen himseld says, on the DVD extrar, that the main reason for the success of this movie was that Dreamworks promoted it with energy, a thing that seldom occurred before.

There are simply not enough jokes here. You'll feel comforable watching it, but not laughing. Two-third of the csat disappears before the middle of the movie (Michael Rapaport and Levitz), and at least we get an Elain May in top form.

This is more like a "study" than a real movie by Allen.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Rags To Riches To Rags - Very Funny and Heartwarming
Review: This is such a funny movie. Woody Allen and his partners in crime play up their bumbling idiot characters so well! Tracey Ullman is a genius - She can play any character and make it believable.

This rags to riches to rags story is funny and heartwarming and just fun to watch. This was also the first time I saw Hugh Grant playing such a loathsome character - he was great! What can I say about Elaine May except she is so good that it looks like she's not even acting!

The comedic acting was very good in this movie and I can't wait to own it on DVD so I can sit back and enjoy over and over again.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Woody Rips Off Car 54
Review: Why?

Why did you do it, Woody? Sure, the premise of Small Time Crooks was interesting - but then I felt the same way when I saw it the FIRST time on television - on Car 54, Where Are You? back in the 1950s! Created by Nat Hiken (who also wrote many episodes), that classic cop situation comedy had many very funny plots.

Plots that included the one about the small band of crooks, three male and one female, that open a business next to a New York bank in order to break into the vault next door. But business gets too good, proving to be a huge distraction to the original plan of emptying the bank of its big bucks, and hilarity ensues.

Sound familiar? It should - since Woody obviously lifted that entire scenario in order to make his far-inferior STC film! At first I thought maybe he wrote the original Car 54 script in question, and can therefore do whatever he wants to with his own property. But I checked it out, and no, he did not write that Car 54 script.

(BTW, Tracey Ullman is also particularly terrible in this - she's a Brit playing an Italian who's named Frenchy - try figuring out THAT cultural mess!)

So what happened Woody? Was the white paper in your typewriter that blank? Was your writers' block that insurmountable? Sure, one can always say it's not exactly script-stealing as long as a writer at least slightly changes a plot twist or a line of dialogue here or there, but c'mon, Woody, who did you think you'd fool?

You're not known as a hack writer - you were once considered to be one of the premier comedy talents of the movies, not just in acting but in writing too!

So again, we must all ask, Woody... why?

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: A minor Woody Allen effort made notable by Elaine May
Review: When you learn that Woody Allen made a film with Tracy Ullman as his leading lady, then you say to yourself that you would like to see that movie. But when you are finished watching "Small Time Crooks" the two people you are probably going to be talking about the most are Elaine May and Elaine Stritch, who pretty much steal every single scene in which they appear in this film. However, this makes sense, because "Small Town Crooks" is a film where about five minutes in your figure out what the twist is going to be, but then you discover that is going to be the first of several twists that keep you spinning around from start to finish in this film. Allen's nebish this time around is Ray Winkler, a former crook who conceives of a self-admittedly "brilliant" plan for robbing a bank, which requires his wife, the former exotic dancer "Frenchy" Fox, to open up a cookie store as a front while Ray and his bumbling buddies attempt to execute his master plan so he and Frenchy can go to Florida and live the good life that has so long elluded them.

"Small Town Crooks" is certainly a break from Woody Allen's usual fare in recent years, but it ends up being a second tier comedy for the writer-director (operationally define as a film you watch once and determine that is enough). I also came to the conclusion, given Allen's tendency to work improvisationally, that all of the great lines spouted by Elaine Mae came from her own fertile comedic mind. This does not take away from the disappointment of not seeing Ullman finally go long on the big screen, but it is certainly a source of solace. I also would not have minded seeing more of Allen's version of the gang that couldn't do nuttin' right, made up of actors Michael Rapaport, Tony Darrow, and John Lovitz. Still, "Small Time Crooks" does provide another example of Allen in an optimistic mood, albeit on a minor level.


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