Walter Jon Williams: Reviews Too Late: Money Heist http://www.walterjonwilliams.net/2019/10/reviews-too-late-money-heist/: 'While recovering from surgery I binged, mainly continuing my exploration of Spanish TV with Money Heist (Casa de Papel, “House of Paper”) I do like an intricate caper, as my Maijstral books demonstrate, and this is probably the longest caper ever filmed, something like sixteen hours of television originally split into two seasons. (One crime over two seasons!) The series was one of the most-watched in Europe last summer, which attracted the interest of Netflix. When Netflix acquired the series it was re-edited into 22 episodes, and two more seasons were filmed. (I’m halfway through Season Three, and Season Four has yet to be released.) So, whatta we got here? Master criminal El Professor (Álvaro Morte) recruits a group of criminal specialists to take over the Spanish mint, run off a couple billion euros over a week’s time, and cleverly vanish along with the cash. To preserve anonymity, each of the team adopts the pseudonym of a city, and the tale is narrated by Tokyo, a young woman with a history of robbing banks, and who recently watched her boyfriend gunned down when a heist she planned went terribly wrong. Tokyo isn’t an unreliable narrator, exactly, but she’s an unreliable human being, prone to making an impulsive grand gesture at exactly the wrong moment. And in fact El Professor turns out to have made quite a number of mistakes in casting his crime...
#movies #noted #2019-10-29
