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Last week's Movie Quiz winners

Filed under: Imported

Casey Siemaszko, Burt Reynolds and Bill Forsyth

If you don't count Deliverance and Boogie Nights, the best Burt Reynolds movie just might be Breaking In, the 1989 film written by John Sayles and directed by Bill Forsyth that was intended to be Burt's debut as a character actor, with emphasis on the actor part. After (too) many years as America's favorite movie star, stinking up theaters with all kinds of wretched shit like Paternity and Stroker Ace, his performance in this picture was a genuine revelation, and even Reynolds haters like me had to admit that the guy was good.

He couldn't have been quite so good, though, if he hadn't chosen the writer and director he did. John Sayles' script about an old crook who takes a young one under his tutelage is filled with good scenes, like the opening where they find each other burgling the same house. (Reynolds' character, Ernie the pro, is there for the wall-safe, while the kid, charmingly played by Casey Siemaszko, broke in just to see what was in the fridge.) Its offbeat tone had a perfect interpreter in director Bill Forsyth, whose best known film was Local Hero and whose subsequent and complete withdrawl from moviemaking has been a mystery.

Congratulations to the handful of astute movie fans who got it this week: Wayne A. Palmer, Corey Anderson, Hank Parmer and Kevin Musolino. Everybody else, try to catch this the next time it shows up on TNT or wherever-- you won't be sorry.

Posted by Steve Monaco at March 21, 2005 10:58 PM

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