Catch Me If You Can

Genius is a word we use carefully here in JM, because otherwise, anybody who is not average would be labled "Genius" and that's not the right way to use it, but Frank Abegnale was a true genius a guy who managed to make millions of dollars, pose as a Panam pilot, a district attorney, and even a pediatrist and go around the world, before he was nineteen years old and Spielberg made a movie based on the events of his life and that's "Catch me If You can).

Frank Abagnale (Leonardo Dicaprio) is a teenager in New Jersey, living an upper middle class life, his Father (Christopher Walken) is quite successful in his business, and his mother (Nathalie Baye) is French, whome his father met while he was serving in WW2, the couple can't resist some troubles they have, and they end up divorcing, the super sensitive, super intelligent Frank doesn't take it well, and using some wisdom provided by his father, he manages to fool everybody, from Airport authorities, to respectable hospitals, to the US attorney office, using innovative forgery techniques, and a superiour self confidence, and to make so much money doing forgery stuff wherever he could.

On the other side is agent Handratty (Tom Hanks) the chief of check fraud branch in the FBI local office, and he is the one hunting him, Handratty is a good guy, paternal, intelligent and understanding, soon enough a strange bound forms between him and Frank, and this bound is the wire that connects the movie together, at the end Frank is a troubled child in a broken home, he needs to prove himself to the world around him, and to some persons in particular, and Handratty understands that, but will it be enough to catch him ?

One of my personal favourites, it's a brilliant movie, much praise goes to DiCaprio's performance, as Abagnale, this guy didn't replace DeNiro in Scorsese's world for nothing, there are other great preformances, Hanks as always is very good, but i think the best of them all is Walken as Frank's father, this performance should have got him several awards, he got the nominations but he was more then good.

A swingy score by John Williams and the traditional brilliant cinematography by Janusz Kaminski complete the atmosphre of this film, and compared to many movies set in the sixties this one is so superiour, because it does not fall into the trap of nostalgia but focuses on the characters and their relationships, Jennifer Gardner plays a role which is hard to forget of a prostitute who ends up paying her client for her services, this movie was good when it came out, it stands the test of time, it's not a masterpiece like the other three or four Spielberg made, but it's close to that status, brilliant people make the most difficult things look effortless, and this movie is an exemple of that.

Minority Report

In a near future, crime fighting agencies have a major asset, they have a means to know about and prevent a crime before it even happens, this is the mission of a Precrime a government agency led by John Anderton (Tom Cruise) who has achieved remarkable results in the district of Columbia, which is supposed to encourage the whole country to endorse this method which combines police efficiency, high technology and parapsychologic powers focused around the powers of three oracles, the twins and Agatha (Samantha Morton).

Precrime being the center of a major media attention, the department of justice dispatches Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell) an ambitious suit with enough authority and insolence to irritates the established order, Anderton is not happy because he has skeletons in his closet caused by a close family member of his involved in a tragic happening, which jeopardized his stability, and made him prone to dishonourable behaviors.

To make everything worse, John is the next target of his team, since He is about to be part of a crime, now this can be either a ploy to take over his service, or that he has good reasons to go on the other side of the law, this is the central conflict of «Minority Report»

Anything Spielberg does has the potential to attract movie audiences and movie lovers alike, because the man has the hidden talent to make movies that attract both, in his first collaboration with Tom Cruise, and over a script based on a short story by the legendary Philip.K Dick it even has the potential to become a cultural event, something that would be in the same drawer with «Blade Runner» as one of the Sci-Fi classics, this movie doesn't manage to do so, but It fails honorably, because it doesn't laugh at iteslf, and it respects the audience's brains.

Anderton quest to discharge himself from this criminal involvment that did not occur leads him to realise that this whole mess is political and involving very influencial people, as he learns from his mentor Max Von Sydow (Director Lamar Burgess), who was the mastermind behind Precrime, and as we follow him through a futuristic Washington D.C, we have a glimpse of the future without the cheap tricks that we became tired of, but in it's essence it's a thriller, it doesn't really dig deep in the soil of big brother issues, and private life, , Anderton wants to know the truth, to do so he crosses the middle line between good and evil back and fourth, and visits the underworld and it's identity concealing technologies to do so.

When I say «fails honourably» it still means that it is head and shoulders above stuff like «I.Robot» or even «A.I» by the same director, the way Anderton uses the interface of Precrime was as overused as the Matrix's bullet time effect, We wish it would dig deeper into the territory of the conflicting man-machine relationship, and how new technologies are altering our free will, but this movie is here to entertain, and it does it brilliantly, it is not the best Spielberg but it's quite good, and it gives him another success to add to the many he had in his rich creative life, casting choices are good, the cinematography splendid, we just hope that summer blockbusters with A-List stars had this quality controls, but when you see «Transformers 2» being so popular while being so bad, you wonder if American movies have went again through the downward spiral of lucrative mediocrity, and even if it does, we'd still have the underground Sci-Fi movies.