The Brothers Bloom
begins when Stephen, 13, and Bloom, 10, went through a succession of foster families, getting chucked out one after
another for a number of reasons such as "inappropriate behaviour", "sold our furniture", "caused flooding" and
"molesting a cat".
Eventually, they learned a trade of sorts - hitting upon the art of the con, originally to get Bloom to talk a girl at
his latest school, with Stephen putting together the con as a flow chart in 15 steps, helping themselves ingratiate
with people with whatever tale they could spin that was believable. After the initial sequence with their original
con, we fast-forward to the present day.
At this point, they've spent 25 years leading a string of elaborate cons and Bloom wants his life back - he wants to
be himself and to stop pretending to be someone he isn't. He only manages a temporary escape, to Montenegro, but gets
dragged back for one final con, posing as antiquities dealers and conning Penelope (Rachel Weisz), a young woman
who lives in a mansion which her late parents owned.
There's a lot of very clever moments, such as when they arrange for Bloom to meet Penelope by having him ride his push
bike into her sports car, except that she's so ditzy, after she screeches to a halt, she zooms off and ends up crashing
down an embankment. While he's fine, she ends up unconscious in a hospital bed, but when she's out and they start chatting,
she tells him she fills her time by collecting hobbies. She sees someone else doing something, learns how to do it from
books and gets cracking. These include the piano, accordian, karate, skateboarding, juggling with chainsaws... yes, I
didn't make that up.
It's difficult to pinpoint the era of this movie, as Penelope's car is clearly a present day vehicle, but when the
brothers go to Europe by steamer ship... just who travels that way these days?
The film has a great cast, with Adrien Brody as Bloom, living in his older brother's shadow and also trying to
escape from under it; Rachel Weisz plays ditzy well - and this is probably the first time I've watched a
film with her in and NOT found her annoying; Mark Ruffalo, as Bloom's brother, Stephen, is always worth a watch
and there's an intriguing performance from Rinko Kikuchi as Bang Bang, their rather mental assistant and a rare
speaker. Support comes from Robbie Coltrane as a Belgian curator and legend Maximilian Schell as an arch
enemy of theirs, Diamond Dog. In a film that's mostly very well written, his is the least fulfilling part as it just all
seems rather tacked on.
Overall, It doesn't take a genius to work out that singletons Bloom and Penelope get the hots for each other and that that will
knacker making her an effective mark, but that doesn't matter too much as it starts getting a bit too complex for its
own good and loses its way, although it does come up with a decent ending.
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Blu-ray: 
Presented in the original 2.35:1 anamorphic theatrical ratio, the picture is sharp and detailed with no problems
whatsoever. It's sharply filmed and edited and has a brilliant visual style throughout, in terms of how Rian Johnson
frames each shot and also when each new location is introduced.
For the record, I'm watching on a Panasonic 37" Plasma screen via a Samsung BD-P1500 Blu-ray player.
