Things start not going as planned in, "The Killing"

Buried beneath the mountain of classic Stanley Kubrick movies like A Clockwork Orange, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Dr. Strangelove is a gem of a heist movie called The Killing.

The story is very simple – a group of crooks plan out a robbery at a horse-racing track. Only, of course, things don’t go as planned. Originally, I was planning on screening Invasion of the Body Snatchers but frankly, I’m not in the mood to watch a bunch of people eat it (literally) thanks to an army of pod people. And damn did they make some long movies in 1956! Among the more popular titles are the nearly four-hour Ten Commandments, the three-and-a-half hour adaptation of War and Peace starring Audrey Hepburn and the three-hour David Niven movie, Around the World in Eighty Days. And of course there’s Giant, the three-and-a-half hour George Stevens epic that marks the end of James Dean’s movie career. (Well, actually the car crash had a little something to do with it.) And speaking of last movies, you’d have to throw in the musical comedy High Society, Grace Kelly‘s last movie.

Kind of reminds me of the beginning of "The Dark Knight"... or "Point Break" minus the Presidents masks.

But getting back to Killing. This is one of those movies that if anybody in Hollywood were to remake it, I would trust it in the hands of Quentin Tarantino. Sure, there’d probably be more bloodshed and a few more F-bombs, but it’d still be an awesome modern adaptation of a genre that QT is a master at. Looking forward to tomorrow, I’ll be screening a movie I’ve never seen, which is something I haven’t been able to say for a while now. I will be Witness for the Prosecution!