Welcome to Collinwood April 24th, 2010
Originally Written 03/28/04
Welcome to Collinwood was an interesting little caper movie. It wasn’t really a gritty drama and though it had a couple of dark-comedy moments that wasn’t what it was going for. It was more just a straight-forward story of a bunch of small-time crooks trying to pull off a job of a lifetime that just happened to fall into their hands.
The film wasn’t perfect, but it was nice in how it was kind of understated. It was also very much a character movie and it was fun watching the ensemble of interesting and imperfect people try and pull things off. It had some good actors in it too, like William H. Macey, who I always like and George Clooney. The whole cast was good.
Another neat thing about the film, which was set in a suburb of Cleveland, was the jargon. The characters kept on using slang terms for various things in the crime business and the way the dialog was written was clever in how you could guess the meaning of the word, without having to have it explained.
For example, one character who was facing a prison sentence asks his girlfriend to find him a Melinski, which turned out to be person who will claim responsibility for a crime and do the time, in exchange for money. One of the features on the disc was a list of the words and where they came from, usually from the person who originally came up with the idea.