This week, it’s my favorite caper movie ever, How to Steal a Million!

I know that, from this poster, it looks like a movie where Audrey Hepburn stabs the half-man, half-car Peter O’Toole in the back with a hand drill. It’s not. (That would be a much better movie.)

Nutshell: Audrey Hepburn is the daughter of a skilled forger who sells his work to unsuspecting millionaires. In a questionable move, Daddy donates his own father’s forgery of the Cellini Venus to the MumbleMumble Museum, which is awesome until they found out that authenticity tests are going to be conducted on it, and if they don’t get it back he will be busted like a ripe melon.

Good thing Audrey knows this hot guy who tried to break into their house, convinced her to let him go, made out with her, and then charmed away. You can never know enough charming burglars, you know?

Which reminds me: if any of you guys are burglars and/or charming, email me! I’ll buy you coffee.

“I want you to take a long look at the trees, the blue sky, and the river, all of which I personally loathe, which is why a juicy stretch in a French prison doesn’t bother me at all.”

First things first! There is absolutely no attempt at realism made whatsoever. If that bothers you, you will hate this movie. It’s the sort of movie where the heroine tells her father, “I caught a burglar!” and he swans past and says, “Of course you did!” and then someone gets in a sports car and pretends to drive around. Forewarned, you guys.

Secondly, I’m not the world’s biggest fan of Audrey Hepburn, so I don’t have much to say about her. She always seems so forcibly whimsical that it’s really hard for me to enjoy her acting. This is the only movie of hers I can watch all the way through. (I can watch parts of Funny Face – mostly the scenes she’s not in.)

That said, the two of them are pretty damn cute in this movie.

Here, she checks to see if he’s loaded. Since he’s Peter O’Toole, signs point to yes.

This is her incognito while she’s trying to employ his services as a burglar to steal the statue back from the MumbleMumble. Peter O’Toole is happy to help, mostly because he’s trying to put the moves on her, his game seemingly unhampered by that polka-dot tie.

The crime itself is so quietly set up that I won’t spoil the specifics of the caper. Besides, it’s not like it matters – this entire movie is a big Macguffin to trap Peter O’Toole and Audrey Hepburn in a tiny closet for forty minutes.

It’s sort of awesome how they have to negotiate that tiny space as the camera just sort of sits back and stares at them. Pervy, pervy camera.

The two of them manage to get a flirtatious vibe going without ever becoming overpowering, so that even questionable moments pass by in a gleeful cotton-candy haze, like when he orders her to change into dowdy cleaning-lady gear in the museum and she gives him this totally skeptical, withering look and says, “Are we planning the same sort of crime?” (Since he’s Peter O’Toole, signs point to yes.)

Simon: Yes, that’s fine. That does it.
Nicole: Does what?
Simon: Well, for one thing, it gives Givenchy a night off.

FRUMPSNAP. However, to be fair, I don’t think it’s that bad; in fact, it looks pretty much like everything else she wears in this movie. (I could not be less interested in fashions of the Sixties, since it was largely a pile of sacks, some of which had buttons. How this is different than the Twenties is a huge, neeping essay I won’t even pretend people want to read. Just know it’s true!)

Even Audrey knows her clothes are sort of boring, and it really bums her out.

Also? Hands off, Dad, seriously.

It’s weird that there’s a caper movie that’s 90% dialogue, and the action is 90% in a closet (OH HAAAY), but it really works, largely because of Peter O’Toole. Peter O’Toole leaves a slimy, sparkly trail of charm in his wake wherever he goes – he can’t help it, it’s genetic – and makes this movie.

I mean, he wore that tie TWICE. You HAVE to be Peter O’Toole to wear this tie twice.

Here, have a small links list!

* I am on Dreamwidth. (Same name.) I have no plans to move, but maybe to mirror, but who knows since my name on that header’s so freaking big I might as well just leave it empty and call it performance art.

* Eventually I have to stop pretending I’m fumbling around and just admit I Twitter. I’m sure my mom is proud of me.

* And she should be proud, because the Sybil’s Garage TOC that includes me has a lineup of awesome names, the most awesome of which is Enkidu, history’s most unintentionally hilarious name.

Dork Yearbook. This computer wishlist and this first-day of school portrait made me laugh, then cringe and thank heavens no one in my family knows how to use a scanner.

And I talk about it over at Tor.com. It’s the equivalent of me walking up to 30 Rockefeller and slapping an outside pillar with a cotton glove, but at least this way no one can put it on YouTube and get me arrested for assault with a deadly custom.

I am disappointed about the cancellation, since a world populated with slightly-speculative dramas filled with awesome character actors is pretty much my dreamscape. I am also, always, a little surprised when a show with promise gets canceled, because the first time in my youth that happened, with the X-Files, they actually got the big salvage and kept going until they sucked, and then had four more seasons after that. Curse you, formative years, and your beautiful lies about the longevity of offbeat TV series!

However, when I went to saveoneshow.com to put my vote in for Kings, I saw that about a dozen shows were on the block, including ones I thought were pretty popular, like Chuck. Are networks just ousting everybody and putting reality shows in their places?

(For those who want to catch up on Kings but don’t like Hulu, the SciFi Channel is airing them all in a row starting at 11pm tonight – the only time slot worse than its current Saturday slot! *sigh*)

It has begun.

Everywhere you turn in Manhattan, a charter bus is spitting out four dozen slackjawed senior-year Civics students. Uniformed in skinny jeans and multiple scarves, armed with iPhones, they stand in clumps on the sidewalk, lost in a haze of their own youthful hormones, trying desperately to look unimpressed.

These teens, somehow, are infinitely worse series of businesslike pro tourists with their precision unloads and the speedy point-and-walk tour guides. Something about three hundred adolescents before coffee in the morning just beats you down, you know?

(This morning, one of them whispered under her breath to a boy, “Everything’s so TALL!” When he laughed, she shrugged and laughed, too, and said, “Whatever, it’s lame,” and it was more fraught than a Merchant Ivory movie. I could hardly walk through the unspoken feelings.)