Catch Me If You Can

Immensely Entertaining. Great Performances. -And True Too!
"Catch Me If You Can" is the story of real-life con artist Frank Abagnale, Jr. who, in the late 1960's and early 1970's, when he was between the ages of 16 and 21, wrote $2.5 million dollars in bad checks and became one of the most notorious con men in American history. The film follows Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) from his early high school pranks to his check-printing operation and eventual capture in France five years later. FBI agent Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks) doggedly pursues Frank as he successfully impersonates an air line pilot, a doctor, and a lawyer, living the life of a playboy and cashing ingeniously forged checks all along the way.

"Catch Me If You Can" was directed by Stephen Spielberg and, along with Minority Report, signifies a revival of Spielberg's directing talent after fifteen years of mediocre-at-best filmmaking. This film is fairly light fare, but it is immensely entertaining, funny, touching, and impeccably cast. Frank Abagnale, Jr. is a perfect fit for Leonardo...

Spielberg sends us a message....
and the message is, "Sometimes, I'm gonna do a film where I just try to entertain you". And entertain it did!

Reviewers of the movie are at odds, either giving it high praise, when they recognize that it is just there to entertain the filmgoer, or calling it dreadful, when they expect every Spielberg movie to be a momentous event of special effects and storytelling. "Catch Me If You Can" is based on the life of a con man, who pulled his crimes as a teenager, and then reformed for the rest of a long life. The story engrosses the watcher, and Spielberg gives the film a light touch, a terrific cast, and fits it all into the eerily real culture of the 60's everyday life with costumes (wardrobe is outstanding), period sets, and a general feeling of wonder (Remember "The Wonder Years"?) that was the true 60's feel, devoid of momentous political events and the inevitable strife caused by war.

DiCaprio is featured as an odd duck, an...

A Throwback to an Earlier Time
Steven Spielburg's second 2002 film is a dinosaur. It's an anachronism. It belongs to the time period in which it's set, a more innocent America where Charles Manson had not brought violence to the wealthy and Vietnam was still a winnable (and profitable) war. It's Catch Me If You Can, the story of con man Frank Abagnale, Jr., who may very well be the world's foremost expert on forgery and fraud. If that doesn't sound like a complimentary introduction, fear not; Catch Me a film's film and a throwback to the cinema of yore, when audio and video combined to make an experience rather than an assault on the senses.

Imagine a mixture of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and To Catch a Thief. Catch Me has the slow pacing and careful cinematography of Hitchcock at his finest, and Spielburg has forsaken his recent effects-laden shots for straightforward storytelling. Every individual shot is deliberately framed, with a care for detail not usually seen outside of a Lynch film. There are...

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