Snatch

After the first time I saw the opening scene of Snatch., I knew that this was going to be one of my favorite movies. Very rarely do I find myself getting so wrapped up in a movie that I find myself talking back to the movie, cheering on the characters and grimacing when bullets are shot. But there I was.

Snatch. is one of those great movies where the main character thinks "How did I end up here? I don't belong here. This is not my scene." A guy involved in illegal boxing some how gets mixed up in a very bloody chase for a giant diamond? And yet, the transition between Tommy and Turkish to Sol and Vinny is seamless that you begin to believe that everyone really is connected and there really is something to Kevin Bacon's game.

Brad Pitt's character, Mickey, stands out to me. He is such an emotional character, one that everyone rags on (almost everyone in this movie hates the "pikeys" except the actual pikeys themselves) and yet by the end of the movie he is basically the one that saves the protagonists from some of the most terrifying bad guys. I mean, Brick Top has a speech impediment and he still scares the daylights out of me.

Even though I don't have to use the closed captioning to watch this movie anymore (and props to Pablo for not even asking for it the first time he saw it), Snatch. still finds a way to seem new to me each time we watch it.

Snatch

There is the story, and then there is the way the story is told. Sometimes the two...the story and the telling...work together so that the two complement each other. Such is the case with Snatch.

For the first 20 minutes of the film I still wondered exactly what was happening, but then so were the characters in the half dozen plot lines. But then as the varied lines begin to converge, so did my understanding.

Same can be said for the language of the film. The various British dialects were nearly unintelligible because of the accents and the slang which punctuated every phrase, but as I listened I gradually understood more and more just as I understood the story more and more. Except with the Gypsy language. That I had to rely on a sense of what was happening. My co-watcher offered, early in the film, to select the subtitle option, but I choose not to rely on that tool because I like to watch and hear films...not read them. (Note: Since I do not speak only English, I realize that limits my film watching tremendously...but that’s how it..and I..is).

As the film progressed and the story threads tightened, so did my understanding so by the end I could sigh, a little exhausted, and say “good story.” But man, it sure was a lot of work. That might not be bad. Good things are worth working for.