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The Art of The Steal: Canadian take on art heist caper flick, The Art of The Steal in Canada

The Art of The Steal in Canada

Stamp’s role isn’t the only odd job. Everybody feels like they’re in their own movie, popping in and out like critters on a whack-a-mole board without any sense of fitting together. Fresh off its TIFF Gala slot, Jonathan Sobol (A Beginner’s Guide to Endings) writes and directs the overly ambitious, very busy and occasionally quite funny The Art of the Steal, starring Kurt Russell (Deathproof, Escape from L.A.) as Crunch Calhoun, who is struggling to get over his bitterness at being forced to do time for his slick-talking half-brother Nicky (Matt Dillon) in a botched job involving a bogus Gauguin seven years previous.

The Art of The Steal: Canadian take on art heist caper flick

The Art of the Steal

Starring Jay Baruchel, Matt Dillon, Kurt Russell, Terence Stamp, Katheryn Winnick, Chris Diamantopoulos, Kenneth Welsh, Jason Jones. Directed by Jonathan Sobol. 90 minutes. Opening Sept. 20 at major theatres. 14A

A Canadian homage to star-studded 1960s European-set caper flicks like Topkapi and The Italian Job, The Art of the Steal is an international art heist comedy which gets its globe-trotting cred with lesser lights — stops in Niagara Falls, Ont. and Detroit.

Fresh off its TIFF Gala slot, Jonathan Sobol (A Beginner’s Guide to Endings) writes and directs the overly ambitious, very busy and occasionally quite funny The Art of the Steal, starring Kurt Russell (Deathproof, Escape from L.A.) as Crunch Calhoun, who is struggling to get over his bitterness at being forced to do time for his slick-talking half-brother Nicky (Matt Dillon) in a botched job involving a bogus Gauguin seven years previous.

Crunch has sworn off the game for a quieter life, working the circuit as a motorcycle stunt rider, dressing like Elvis and taking dives off his bike for a few hundred extra from the boss.

He’s got his wife, Lola (Vikings’ Katheryn Winnick) and protegee Francie (Goon’s Jay Baruchel) to keep him company while he heals from his latest stadium bone-cruncher. So when Nicky suggests one final job involving a rare Guttenberg volume, he’s hardly a pushover.

Enter running mates from Crunch’s criminal past, each of whom has a job to do in the jammed story.

“We’re not the A Team here, guys. I peg us at a D-minus,” Crush observes.

A side plot with a pair of Interpol investigators (“Interpol is a real thing?” Francie marvels) gets us some screen time with Terence Stamp, who plays a former art thief working off his parole by helping the agency. His part feels like a latecomer to the party and makes for a poor fit with the rest of the increasingly busy story.

Stamp’s role isn’t the only odd job. Everybody feels like they’re in their own movie, popping in and out like critters on a whack-a-mole board without any sense of fitting together.

Things get complicated with double and even triple crosses, plus the addition of a piece of representational sculpture played for weak laughs.

The Art of the Steal

We’re a little more than two months from the November 8 th election and everyone knows that all Democrats, a good number of Republicans and conservatives, and almost the entire media have been agonizing over and militating against the fact that billionaire businessman Donald Trump is the last man standing in a contest that pits him against Crooked Hillary for the presidency of the United States.

But why are no professional political commentators—on TV, radio, or in print—explaining exactly why Mr. Trump is such a mortal threat? After all, he has proven himself to be an upright citizen, a wildly successful businessman, the bestselling author of over a dozen books, a philanthropist, the father of five respectful and loving children the eldest of whom are also impressively contributory members of society, the representative of every value Republicans and conservatives traditionally stand for—low taxes, fewer regulations, secure borders, a strong military, strict conservative appointments to the Supreme Court, et al—and significantly a person who has never been accused of being complicit in the deaths of U.S. servicemen, under the ominous investigation of the FBI, or operating an international money-laundering slush fund that compromises the national security of the United States.

Here is the answer: It’s all about the deal!

Underneath the veneer of “service” our elected politicians purport to be driven by, underneath the “ethical standards” our financial centers pretend to operate, and underneath the gauzy illusion of objectivity the media pretend they represent, the so-called culture of the D.C.-Wall St.-media complex is all about cozy arrangements that inevitably line the pockets of those engaged in the following kinds of local, regional, national and international deals, to name but a few:

under-the-table deals

pay-to-play deals

greasy-palm deals

foundation slush-fund deals (sound familiar?)

mutual back-scratching deals

hush-hush deals

access-to-power deals

good-stories-in-the-media deals (sound familiar?)

bad-stories-in-the-media-about-your-political-enemies deals (yep)

sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll deals

immense wealth-producing lobbyist deals

On and on…

You get the picture. In all these “arrangements,” either people with limited power (meaning with limited money, like most politicians when they start out) always get “persuaded” (meaning bought) to do what they know is wrong, but they just can’t resist the irresistible aphrodisiacs of money and power; or people with piles of money engage in schemes that increase their wealth and power exponentially. Some deals are actually legitimate, but too many dealmakers are involved in cynical collusion or corrupt collaborations.

In the political world, with notable—but pitifully few—exceptions, there is little difference between a “strict conservative” like Paul Ryan and a far-left ideologue like Nancy Pelosi. Whether it’s a deal that’s bad for America like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the dumbed down so-called standards of Common Core, or facilitating the building of nuclear bombs by the terrorist state of Iran, both left and right somehow find ways to bathe in the same swamp.

As “Deep Throat” advised The Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein during the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, “follow the money.” It’s always about the money.

Speaking of journalists, who exactly are these seekers of truth, intrepid investigators and earnest news readers who so often seem unable to control the impulses to blurt out their own leftwing two-cents worth (read CBS’s Norah O’Donnell, the entire staff of NBC and MSNBC, Fox’s Chris Wallace and Shepard Smith, the staff of Reuters, et al)? How can they get away with their biases with such total impunity?

It’s because, as Ashley Lutz at Business Insider reports, only six organizations are now responsible for 90 percent of all of the “news” we read, watch and listen to. That’s right—in 1983, there were 50 media companies, today only six! They include:

GE (Comcast, NBC, Universal Pictures, Focus Features).

NewsCorp (Fox, Wall St. Journal, NY Post, et al).

Disney (ABC, ESPN, Pixar, Miramax, Marvel Studios)

Viacom (MTV, Nick Jr., BET, CMT, Paramount Pictures)

Time Warner (CNN, HBO, TIME, Warner Bros.)

CBS (Showtime, Smithsonian Channel, NFL.com, Jeopardy, 60 Minutes)

In other words, the Shepard Smiths and Norah O’Donnells of the media world are simply obedient servants to the tastes, political predilections, and often greed of their bosses, who all happen to be globalists engaged in the massive, multibillion-dollar deals described above. They only reflect the biases of their owners, the people who pay their salaries.

The media, however, seem to be in a downward spiral. Most national news magazines are in their death throes, as is the entire dinosaur newspaper industry, including The NY Times, which still gets mention on the nightly news, but has utterly lost the credibility and cachet it once had.

What about TV’s influence, including cable? If the ratings NBC received for its Olympics coverage is any sign, this medium is being eaten alive by the likes of Netflix and other media alternatives. Gary North writes about the statistical irrelevance of cable news, citing the fact that The Drudge Report gets about one-billion page views a month. In contrast, the approximately 115,000 households in the U.S., which account for roughly 225-million adults, give cable shows like MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show and Fox News’ The Kelly File a paltry 400,000 viewers apiece—a literal drop in the viewership ocean.

“Are we supposed to believe,” Mr. North asks, “that either Ms. Maddow or Ms. Kelly has any significant influence, or even marginal relevance, for the American body politic, or body anything else?” Their audiences offset each other, he says, but “even if they reinforced each other, we could not hear them. They would still be background noise.”

Emmett Tyrell Jr., founder and editor of The American Spectator, sums it up quite neatly: “With the trashing of Donald Trump and the “celebration of a career criminal, the mainstream media have become passé.”

But they keep trying, as we see from the insults, outbursts, lies, character assassination, and general hysteria being hurled in Trump’s direction every day. The entire establishment is running scared. NY Times reporter Jim Rutenberg was all in knots a few weeks ago when he wrote—clearly with the blessing of his editors—journalists were justified in writing openly “oppositional” articles about Trump—objectivity out, bias in. Now why do you suppose those editors approved of this journalistic malpractice?

Because the Times is in on the globalist deals—big time! As are the hedge-fund moguls, the wolves of Wall Street, the political establishment both right and left, the Big Pharma honchos, all those foreign princes and sultans and tin-pot dictators, both friends and enemies of the U.S., as well as all the donors to the Clinton Foundation slush fund, who are all slurping from the same trough.

Shamefully, of the 154 meetings Ms. Hillary had during her tenure in the State Department, 85 were with donors to the Clinton Foundation—to the tune of $156 million dollars! That is how the crooked system worked quite seamlessly until Donald Trump questioned, challenged, and damned it!

A DIRE PREDICTION FOR THE “IN” CROWD

J. Robert Smith explains in AmericanThinker.com that a Trump victory in November “won’t end well for the global elites” who inhabit “New York, DC, Boston, and San Francisco—or wherever else ivory towers, mahogany-paneled offices, pricey secured buildings, and gated communities are found. Trump’s election would have reverberations overseas, too, in London, Paris, Berlin…”

Smith continues: “The worldview among many of our elite is anti-nation—dare we say—anti-American, anti-law and order, anti-tradition, anti-faith (with exceptions carved out for Islam), anti-durable values and enduring truths, like marriage between a man and woman, and family, as defined by a man, woman, and children. The elite, so very cosmopolitan, have evolved past antique beliefs and ways.”

In other words, a Trump victory would utterly destroy the global monopolies these poohbahs have built up over the past several decades—all those cozy deals shot to hell!

Not if Hillary wins, says Smith. “A Hillary victory means…a doubling-down by the elite, as they act with renewed zest to secure their interests—versus the national welfare. Divide to conquer.” [my bullet points below, but Smith’s words):

But if Trump wins, the nightmare for the globalists and the ones they take orders from, particularly billionaire radical leftist George Soros, is that Donald Trump is onto all the tricks and sleights-of-hand and financial hocus-pocus involved in their massive accumulation of wealth and power, and therefore will be highly successful in dismantling them.

They are terrified because TRUMP-OWES-THEM-NOTHING- HE-CANNOT-BE-BOUGHT!

One more thing: Trump—looking 20 years younger than his 70 years and exhibiting tireless energy and passion—is on the campaign trail non-stop and not depending on the self-glorifying media to get his message across.

In stark and rather pathetic contrast is 68-year-old Hillary, who most of the time looks exhausted, her hair matted, her face haggard, her outfits wildly inappropriate—such as the wool winter coat and long black slacks she wore to a fundraiser in 100-degree heat on Martha’s Vineyard—her horrific screech-owl voice producing more cringes than applause.

While numerous websites, including liberal ones, show pictures of her being helped upstairs, losing her balance, and zoning out in the middle of sentences, and articles insist that she has Parkinson’s disease, a neurological malady, or early dementia, I don’t join that chorus. As an R.N. with clinical experience, I believe that people with cancer or Parkinson’s or Type A diabetes or any number of maladies can lead active, productive, responsible lives. But her stubborn refusal to release her medical records fuels the suspicion not only that she’s hiding something but that she is simply not up to the job.

And now, publisher and editor of AmericanThinker.com, Thomas Lifson, writes in his blog that Hillary has no scheduled events until September 26 th !

“Just how frail and exhausted is Hillary Clinton?” Lifson asks. “Surely, she does not need 5 weeks of rest to prepare for her presidential debate. If she did, that would be a terrible indicator of fitness for office. If you look at [her] campaign calendar… there are 15 listed events. However, if you really look at it, what you notice is that Secretary Clinton is not actually attending 14 of these events; they are being attended by surrogates. Go check for yourself.”

ALMOST—BUT NO CIGAR

The craven cabal of the Obama regime—or cartel as Trump calls them—has almost gotten away with opening our borders to anyone who crosses them, including jihadists whose only goal is to murder Americans, but who Democrats plan to register to vote by the millions.

They’ve almost gotten away with socializing our medical and our educational systems, both of which seem to be imploding on their own, thank you.

They’ve almost gotten away with trampling on the Judeo-Christian moral foundation that has elevated our country to among the loftiest in the world; demoralizing the heroic police forces that protect us day and night, 365; undermining our once-vibrant and strong military into a laboratory of preposterous, politically-correct positions and postures; spitting consistently on our magnificent Constitution; and compromising our once-flourishing system of capitalism and free markets. This is the short list.

I say almost because the forces I’m describing are essentially incompetent, as proven by their utter failures for over five decades! They’ve tried. They’ve had the media on their side. They’ve had untold billions backing their anti-American (and did I mention anti-Semitic?) schemes.

And yet, one man comes along, throws their p.c. speech out the window, speaks truth to power, exposes their malevolent plots, and all of them squeal like stuck pigs and double down on their efforts to keep the old corrupt network in place by defeating him in November. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed that every Trump event attracts multi-thousands of enthusiastic supporters, while Ms. Hillary has trouble attracting even 100 probably-paid-for supporters. Does the media report this dramatic disparity? Never.

THE ART OF THE STEAL

But liberals are an obdurate lot, and their goal is not to win but to steal the election. After all, who but Democrats have elevated election fraud to a virtual art form? Every time they’re losing, they magically find several bags of uncounted votes to put their candidate just barely over the top.

Remember ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), the crooked group that received $53 million in federal funds and engaged in massive voter fraud, including registering dead voters or voters with the names of various Disney cartoon characters? The group was finally outed by conservative activists Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe who used hidden cameras to expose ACORN employees advising them how to avoid taxes, et al. The U.S. Congress cut ACORN’s funding and the group eventually disbanded, but continued to operate—to this day—under new names.

Clearly, this is one organization the Trump organization should watch with eagle-eyed vigilance!

In a stunning, must-read, three-part series—here, Part 1 by Katy Grimes, here, Part 2 by Megan Barth and here, Part 3 by Katy Grimes, Grimes begins with a chilling quotation from Joseph Stalin: ”. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.”

Grimes and Barth report the massive election fraud that took place during the California primary in June (2016).

Thousands upon thousands of California voters showed up at their designated polling stations only to discover that their party registration had been changed, or they were dropped entirely from the rolls. And it was evident this was done from within the state’s electronic voting system.

“A group from Princeton needed only seven minutes and simple hacking tools to install a computer program on a voting machine that took votes for one candidate and gave them to another,”

Recent DNC delegate manipulations made it so nearly every primary and caucus magically favored Hillary Clinton, despite the millions of winning votes going to Sanders” [and the probability that he won].

Recently, three liberal federal judges (two appointed by Pres. Clinton, one by Barack Obama) overturned voter-ID laws—in Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Texas—claiming they were racially discriminatory.

Of course, we all know what happened in the fiasco of a 2012 presidential election, largely as a result of liberals’ aversion to voter identification cards. According to writer Rev. Austin Miles:

Voting machines, supplied by George Soros, were rigged to automatically receive an Obama vote, no matter who the voter actually voted for.

In 59 voting districts in the Philadelphia region, Obama received 100% of the votes with not a single vote recorded for Romney. (A mathematical and statistical impossibility).

In St. Lucie County, FL, there were 175,574 registered eligible voters but 247,713 votes were cast.

NOTE: Obama won in every state that did not require a Photo ID and lost in every state that did require a Photo ID in order to vote.

Barth says: “If the DNC was willing and able to rig a primary election, what would prevent them from doing the same in a national election—-especially in the battleground states of Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin”?

She cites a study on Democrat fraud in multiple states, the conclusion of which was that election fraud is occurring and benefitting Hillary Clinton—especially in states that use unaccountable, electronic voting machines.

The Heritage Foundation has published a detailed list of approximately 200 cases of voter fraud from across the country.

Sit down for this one: “What’s more, two of the three companies that control the electronic voting machine market, Dominion Voting and H.I.G. Capital (i.e. hart Intercivic) are on the list of big money donors that donated to the Clinton campaign, as shown by the DNC documents leaked by Guccifer 2.0.”

These stories are nowhere to be found in the mainstream media. Either is this video of a Diebold machine spitting out incorrect votes.

Here’s another stunner. According to Dean Garrison at dcclothesline.com, not only did Reuters rig a major poll to show Hillary winning when Breitbart News was reporting a 17-point swing towards Trump and away from Hillary, but now we learn that Thomas Reuters, owner of the Reuters News Service, is among the top-tier donors ($1.5 million) to the Clinton Foundation!

Reuters is not alone. When was the last time you heard a poll result from ABC-TV that had Trump in the lead? Yet look at this report from the network itself, posted less than two weeks ago, on August 17, 2016.

This is why Donald Trump’s warnings about possible voter fraud in November are right on target.

DESPERATION

So far, in spite of the virtual assault on Donald Trump by the media, nothing has worked to diminish his popularity. So desperate are the powers-that-be to maintain the corrupt status quo, and to defeat the biggest nemesis they’ve ever faced, that they’ve enlisted the top tech companies in the world—Apple, Twitter, Google and Instagram—to defeat the dreaded Donald Trump, writes Liz Crokin in Observer.com.

“Apple isn’t the only corporation doing Clinton’s bidding. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said Clinton made a deal with Google and that the tech giant is `directly engaged’ in her campaign.” She says that Eric Schmidt—chairman of Alphabet, the parent company of Google—is also on board with the Clinton machine. Assange claims this was to ensure Clinton had the “engineering talent to win the election.”

“Twitter is another culprit,” Crokin says, by banning conservatives and Trump supporters and changing “its algorithms to promote Clinton while giving negative exposure to Trump.”

Buzzfeed, too, is in on the biased reporting, and Instagram “has also banned accounts that depict Clinton in a negative light.” Then there is Facebook, which “has a long history of shutting down pages and blocking conservative users while promoting progressive voices…”

CNN, of course is a leader of dishonest reporting. The other day, Crokin reports, “CNN set aside nearly half of its air time…to various recent controversies involving the Trump campaign—1 hour, 24 minutes, and 18 seconds over three hours.” In contrast, the program only devoted 27 seconds to news that the Obama administration secretly airlifted $400 million in cash to Iran, or that “the payment was sent on `an unmarked cargo plane.’ [CNN], therefore, devoted over 187 times more coverage to Trump than to the millions to Iran.”

WHAT TO DO

And Mr. Trump should remember what writer Daniel Greenfield spells out in exquisite detail:

“Hillary Clinton has never won an honest election. And she isn’t about to start trying to win one now. Her favorite kind of race is rigged. Deeply unpopular and deemed untrustworthy by huge numbers of voters, she plans to win by panicking Republicans into abandoning Trump to `save’ themselves. Her weapon of choice is the media.”

Greenfield continues, “Hillary doesn’t want a fair fight. Or even an unfair fight. She wants to cripple the GOP so it can’t fight at all. It’s the ultimate rigged election….

“The game has been rigged in all the familiar ways, from media bias to voter fraud, but only Republican defeatism can hand her the White House.”

The Art of The Steal in Canada

Canadian films had big success at TIFF this month. In addition to two high profile American productions from Quebecois filmmakers (Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners and Jean-Marc Vallee’s Dallas Buyer’s Club ), there were also a number of high profile Canadian films that premiered at the festival; that is, films that were actually produced in Canada. Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy , Michael Dowse’s The F Word , and Jonathan Sobol’s The Art of the Steal all premiered at the festival. All three of these films have a Canadian director, all three were produced with moderately large budgets, and all three are set, to some extent, within our borders. Yet none of these three films have a Canadian actor in a lead role.

The F Word, the most likely of these three to break out internationally, is a romantic comedy that pairs the British Daniel Radcliffe with the American Zoe Kazan (and throws in the American Adam Driver for some extra flare). Enemy stars Jake Gyllenhaal as a pair of doppelgangers, but also makes room for the French Melanie Laurent and the Italian Isabella Rossellini. The Art of the Steal, to be released across the country this week, stars Americans Kurt Russell and Matt Dillon, while making some room for the British Terence Stamp. So yes, these three films are “Canadian” in the technical sense of the word, but they also raise the question of whether or not Canada (specifically, English Canada) is capable of producing popular movies that don’t negate their country of origin.

It’s a tradition of the Canadian film industry to cast “ringers” (internationally recognizable stars) for local productions. Canadian films also have a tradition of denying their own nationality — my favourite example might be the Toronto of David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers. The name of the city is brought up only once, by subtitle, after which the titular twin boys wander around their neighbourhood discussing sex and science in identical British accents. Jump to 30 years later and the twins have grown into identical gynecologists played by Jeremy Irons, who makes no attempt to disguise his British accent. The location of their upbringing, Toronto, is utterly inconsequential. The city is such an insignificant part of the story that it didn’t even motivate a cursory rewrite.

The Art of the Steal is another example of this typically Canadian denial of self, though a much less worthy one. While the word “Canada” is actually used in the film, the country is identified as more of a nuisance than an actual place where people live, breathe, work, and spend their lives. Literally, Canada is a nuisance, an obstacle of the plot that the characters have to overcome. The art smugglers of the film can’t get their stolen goods through the post-9/11 security of an American airport, so they have to drive it to Detroit via a Niagara Falls border crossing. No, the geography doesn’t make any sense, but neither does the rest of this film. Besides, no one wants to see a movie set in Windsor.

Kurt Russell plays Crunch Calhoun, “The Wheelman,” because, like most heist films, each member of the team is only allowed one skill and one personality trait. Crunch can drive a bike; his disposition is ornery. After a botched heist in Warsaw, his brother Nicky (Matt Dillon) gave him up to authorities, effectively sentencing him to five and a half years of Polish prison hijinks. Crunch has to swallow his pride for one big heist, in which the team needs to smuggle an original Guttenberg publication across the border. The team also includes a crotchety Irish mastermind (Kenneth Welsh), a French art forger (Chris Diamantopoulous), and “The Apprentice” (Jay Baruchel). The Apprentice (God knows his name isn’t important) is less of an actual character than a conduit for the audience; an excuse for Sobol to fill his scenes with endless expositional dialogue.

Despite, or maybe because of, the endless attempts at self-effacement (like casting recognizable Canuck actors as Irish, French, and Scottish characters), The Art of the Steal has some unmistakeably Canadian qualities: Sobol’s film has the aspirations of a slick globe-trotting caper flick, but its largest set piece happens at a miserable little border security hut. Of course these characters won’t rob the Louvre, this is a Canadian heist film. Like Toronto pining to be “world class” by comparing itself to New York, The Art of the Steal dooms itself by pining to be the kind of Hollywood production it could never be. Kurt Russell, (former) American movie star though he may be, is no George Clooney, and The Art of the Steal is no Ocean’s Eleven, or even Twelve.

Alan Jones writes about film for Toronto Standard. You can follow him on Twitter at @alanjonesxxxv.

For more, follow us on Twitter @TorontoStandard and subscribe to our newsletter.

The Art of The Steal: Canadian take on art heist caper flick

The Art of the Steal

Crunch has sworn off the game for a quieter life, working the circuit as a motorcycle stunt rider, dressing like Elvis and taking dives off his bike for a few hundred extra from the boss.

Enter running mates from Crunch’s criminal past, each of whom has a job to do in the jammed story.

“We’re not the A Team here, guys. I peg us at a D-minus,” Crush observes.

Stamp’s role isn’t the only odd job. Everybody feels like they’re in their own movie, popping in and out like critters on a whack-a-mole board without any sense of fitting together.

Things get complicated with double and even triple crosses, plus the addition of a piece of representational sculpture played for weak laughs.

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The Art of the Steal (2013/Canada)

Cerita film The Art of the Steal ini dibuka dengan perampokan lukisan terakhir yang gagal dilakukan oleh geng pencuri ulung yang beranggotakan Crunchy (Kurt Russell), Nicky (Matt Dillon), Paddy (Kenneth Welsh) dan Guy (Chris Diamantopoulos). Aksi perampokan mereka berakhir naas dan menyebabkan Crunchy dibui selama kurang lebih 5 tahun. Bebas dari penjara, Crunchy kembali menjalani aktivitas mediokernya sebagai stuntman motorcross yang suka mencelakai diri sendiri, itupun karena desakan sang istri, Lola (Katheryn Winnick) dan rekan baru Crunchy yang masih muda, Francie (Jay Baruchel).

Mengingat aksi stunt motorcrossnya makin berbahaya dan penghasilan yang didapat makin sedikit, tanpa sengaja takdir mempertemukan Crunchy dengan gengnya terdahulu. Mereka pun sepakat untuk melakukan perampokan barang seni terakhir yang nilainya berjumlah jutaan dollar. Maka mau tak mau Crunchy dkk pun kembali beraksi, tapi apakah kali ini motif Crunchy hanya ingin mengisi rekening banknya yang mulai kosong atau ada rencana tersembunyi lain?

Catatan khusus mungkin datang dari Jay Baruchel yang berhasil meningkatkan unsur humor di The Art of the Steal ke level yang lebih absurd dan tolol dengan beragam dialog improvisasinya. Beberapa celetukan aktor muda yang masih satu geng dengan Seth Rogen dkk itu cukup mengocok perut saya selama film ini berjalan apalagi ketika Jay Baruchel entah darimana sempat-sempatnya menggunakan referensi film Predator 2 di film crime heist komedi seperti ini, brilian!

Well, sebagai film yang tidak terlalu terdengar gaungnya, The Art of the Steal wajib menjadi tontonan anda kalau memang anda sedang mencari hiburan instan yang cukup berkualitas di waktu senggang. Aksi dan strategi perampokannya menarik, jajaran cast-nya bermain cukup apik dan alur ceritanya cukup menggelitik. Well, tunggu apalagi? Tonton saja sendiri. Enjoy!

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The Art of the Steal's Jay Baruchel is crazy for Canada

TORONTO—In the recently released comedy This Is the End, codirector and writer Seth Rogen (with Evan Goldberg) and a bunch of his actor friends play exaggerated versions of themselves. Some of the portrayals are ridiculous—like Michael Cera as a cocaine-obsessed womanizer—and some seem truer than others. (We’re not sure that Danny McBride practises cannibalism in his spare time, but we wouldn’t be shocked.) There probably isn’t one, however, that’s as closely in tune with the actor’s real life as Jay Baruchel’s.

Portrayed as “weirdly Canadian” and hostile to everything that Los Angeles stands for, the Montrealer isn’t well received by some of Rogen’s friends in the film. Although that’s surely an inflated representation, in a Toronto hotel room during the Toronto International Film Festival—where he’s promoting the Canadian-shot heist comedy The Art of the Steal, which opens Friday (September 20)—there’s no denying that Baruchel is one of Canadian film’s true advocates.

“Two patriots met each other and it made sense and it seemed like a really fun thing to do,” he says, pointing to Jonathan Sobol, the film’s writer-director, who is also present. “And on a five-hours train ride from my city, I was just, like, ‘Fuck, yeah!’ We need to make more movies here that take place here and where we don’t hide our Canadianness. I’m sick of seeing the Toronto skyline and when it comes time to currency being exchanged, there’s a close-up on American money. Enough, man. Enough is enough.”

Baruchel continues: “So I was happy to meet someone else like that, because, unfortunately, we’re in the minority. If you were in any other country in the world and you wanted to make movies…in your country, people would just be, like, ‘Oh, you’re a filmmaker. How come you’re making them here? You’re a Syrian; you made a movie in Arabic and you shot it for Syria? Where’s the establishing shot of Chicago?’ That would never happen.

“We got so much flak when we made The Trotsky for all the Montreal inside jokes we had in it. I was, like, ‘Inside jokes? What? Because we mentioned a fucking street?’ Jesus Christ, man. Rue Sherbrooke, hilarious! Only a Montrealer would get that fucking joke. It’s just, like, enough is enough.”

Baruchel is that rare example of a Canadian actor with enough star power to generate audience attention wherever he goes. With his mind set on directing, Canadians might take comfort in the fact that we have such a high-profile person fighting for our film industry.

“I got to pop my professional cherry two weeks ago,” he says. “The Trailer Park Boys are back; they just shot a new season, and I got to shoot the finale of it. It was fun, and all I want to do is direct movies. I’m just super busy—it’s a classy problem to have, but it’s paramount amongst my concerns.”

Requiem for a Jumble of Artworks

A scene from Don Argott’s documentary “The Art of the Steal.”

DON ARGOTT was never one of those Philadelphians besotted with the Barnes Foundation, the museum of late-19th- and early-20th-century art tucked away in the suburbs.

A 37-year-old documentary filmmaker, Mr. Argott had previously trained his cameras on disparate subjects like a rock-music school and the experiences of four football players entering the N.F.L. draft. And though Mr. Argott attended the Art Institute of Philadelphia and has lived in the city for 13 years, he didn’t understand the passion that surrounded this highly peculiar Barnes Foundation, the subject of his latest film, “The Art of the Steal.”

“Certain people have deep feelings about the Barnes,” Mr. Argott said the other day over tea at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, his long curly hair and dark glasses noticeable among the suits populating the cafe. “I didn’t understand. I’d never been there.”

That feeling evaporated the moment he set foot in the galleries that housed the Barnes collection, a trove that included 181 Renoirs, 69 Cézannes, 59 Matisses and 46 Picassos, along with countless other items of visual art, ranging from metalwork to Medieval manuscripts to African sculpture.

“I was overwhelmed,” Mr. Argott admitted. “For one thing, I hadn’t had any idea how big the place was. I almost welled up. I’m not sure why. I just suddenly understood how special it was.”

The museum came to Mr. Argott’s attention through a former Barnes student named Lenny Feinberg — “real estate investor, mountaineer and wine drinker” as the film’s program notes describe him. Mr. Feinberg was the driving force and financial angel behind “The Art of the Steal,” a work that traces the decades-long controversy over the museum’s fortunes and its eventual decision to abandon its longtime home for new quarters in downtown Philadelphia. After a few star turns on the festival circuit, the film opens in New York on Friday.

Using archival material, talking heads and graphics to present a case that audience members will find either compelling or strident, depending on their point of view, “The Art of the Steal” brings to life one of the most adored and detested figures in the American art world.

Albert C. Barnes, born in 1872, made his fortune in business but was primarily an educator and collector who presciently snapped up some of the world’s greatest examples of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and early Modernist paintings. (“The Art of the Steal” estimates the collection’s worth at $25 billion.) Starting in 1922 he displayed his acquisitions in what many regarded as a thrillingly idiosyncratic manner in quarters that were open in such restricted fashion that what some Philadelphians remember most about the Barnes is how complicated it was to get inside the place.

When Barnes died in 1951, he left a will that gave control of the foundation to Lincoln University, a small college for African-American students, and stipulated that the art never be sold, loaned or moved. But the collection eventually became the centerpiece of a messy and sometimes vitriolic struggle, one marked by lawsuits and charges of racial discrimination and accompanied by ever worsening financial problems. Government agencies and philanthropic organizations played leading roles in the decision to move the collection from Merion, Pa., to new quarters in Philadelphia, scheduled to open in 2012.

In the film civic leaders, journalists and art historians on both sides of the debate on the wisdom of that decision are heard from. (The Barnes Foundation declined multiple invitations to cooperate, Mr. Argott said.) But no one seeing “The Art of the Steal” will be left wondering where the filmmakers’ sympathies are. For starters there is the title itself, which makes clear what they think transpired behind the scenes.

“We never set out to make an agenda piece,” Mr. Argott said. “But the more we found, the clearer it became that there were dirty dealings behind the scenes.”

He defends a style that some might describe as heavy-handed, including graphics that trace the eroding of clause after clause of Barnes’s will.

“We were trying to tell a compelling story, using all the tools at our disposal,” Mr. Argott said. “We didn’t want to make a boring talking-heads documentary. We wanted to make a work that would resonate with audiences, and these are the kinds of works that do.”

And the emphasis on the will, a leitmotif of the film?

“We’re trying to be storytellers, telling the story through characters,” Mr. Argott said. “Whether or not you agree with the will, it represents Barnes’s point of view, and it’s our script for how he thought.”

Predictably, the film provoked what an arts blog described as “big fireworks” when it was shown last fall at the New York Film Festival.

“Such a lively debate,” Mr. Argott said happily, describing the question-and-answer session that followed the screening. “People were yelling, screaming at each other. These issues bring out these emotions. I’m not sure why. But for some reason the Barnes stirs something up in people.”

“Barnes’s opinions about art were dogmatic, and the acolytes he attracted were equally and possibly more rigid,” said Maggie Lidz, the estate historian at the Winterthur Museum near Wilmington, Del., another institution whose collection was amassed in the early 20th century.

“Anyone trying to understand the history of the Barnes institution is presented with opposing and irreconcilable viewpoints,” Ms. Lidz added. “Everyone seems to insist that their stance is the only moral one. But the problems that beset the Barnes have never been black and white. Polarization is as much a part of Barnes’s legacy as the paintings.”

Some members of the museum world who have seen the film have also taken sharp issue with many of Mr. Argott’s conclusions and with the style in which they are presented.

“The film obviously had a message that didn’t reflect the complexities of the issues,” said Linda Eaton, director of collections at Winterthur. “Even if you agree with their conclusions, that the Barnes should stay where it is, this work is a polemic that’s structured to get people riled up, to get them excited and angry.”

“There are valid arguments to be made for moving the collection to a place where more people can see it,” Ms. Eaton added. “And as for the question of whether Barnes’s will should be broken, is a will necessarily the most sacred document in the world?

“Changing the will is a legal issue. But changing the institution is a very different issue. Institutions can’t become fossils if they want to survive.”

And the reaction of the Barnes?

“The film was full of unsubstantiated allegations and very one-sided,” said Derek Gillman, the foundation’s president and executive director, who saw “The Art of the Steal” in Toronto. “It was made by people who were hostile to the move and very angry about it. That’s why we didn’t cooperate with the filmmakers. It was not in our interests to do so.”

Whatever the final verdict on the film Mr. Argott has clearly savored his immersion in art-world politics. But his taste is nothing if not eclectic. A possible next project, titled “Ride Satan Ride,” is a homage to the horror biker movies of the 1970s.

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The Art of the Steal's Jay Baruchel is crazy for Canada

‘The Art of the Steal’: Navarro Releases Second Volume of Report on Voting Irregularities

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro on Jan. 5 released the second volume of his report that documents what he believes is evidence of the Democratic Party’s extensive efforts to “steal” the election from President Donald Trump.

Navarro’s latest release, titled “Art of the Steal,” follows the Dec. 17 publication of volume one of the report, “The Immaculate Deception,” on alleged irregularities across key battleground states in the 2020 presidential election, which was praised by the president last month.

His sequel attempts to provide a “comprehensive, objective assessment of the fairness and integrity of the 2020 election,” and describes how Democrats took a “two-pronged” approach to effect Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s “narrow and illegitimate ‘victory'” in the Nov. 3 election.

There “may very well have been a coordinated strategy to effectively stack the election deck against the Trump-Pence ticket,” Navarro’s report states.

Navarro argues that “the observed patterns of election irregularities are so consistent across the six battleground states they suggest a coordinated strategy to, if not steal the election outright, strategically game the election process in such a way as to ‘stuff the ballot box’ and unfairly tilt the playing field in favor of the Biden-Harris ticket.”

The report refers to the states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

The Democrats’ “strategy,” Navarro wrote, relied on the expansion of voter access to mail-in and absentee ballots and easing ballot verification protocols and other setbacks to voter registration.

“It is important to point out here that much of what the Democrats did was legal; but some of what they did at times also bent, and arguably sometimes broke, the rules or the law,” Navarro wrote.

“The practical result of the Democrat Party’s two-pronged Grand ‘Stuff the Ballot Box’ Strategy was to flood the six key battleground states with enough illegal absentee and mail-in ballots to turn a decisive Trump victory into a narrow alleged Biden ‘victory.'”

The report’s release came a day before Congress convened on Jan. 6 in a joint session to count electoral votes.

“Volumes 1 and 2 of the Navarro Report—‘The Immaculate Deception’ and ‘The Art of the Steal’—together make the strong case for a full investigation of the election irregularities and strategic gaming of our political process that in all likelihood have led to a stolen presidential election,” Navarro said.

“Any such investigation must begin immediately as this nation simply cannot risk the inauguration of a president who will be perceived by a large segment of the American people as illegitimate.”

So, let's define, what was the most valuable conclusion of this review: The Art of the Steal stars Kurt Russell and Jay Baruchel in a Canadian version of a classic European heist flick. at The Art of The Steal in Canada