Palookaville (1997)

Director Alan Taylor's debut feature is the low-key tale of three amiable fuck-ups who dream of improving their dead-end lot in life with the perfect crime, but who're just too good-hearted to pull it off. Scripted by playwright David Epstein, Palookaville adapts the '40s tales of Italian humorist Italo Calvino (who told of his countrymen's ill-fated strategies to make ends meet in the economically devastated post-war years), and plays like a sort of American Ealing comedy or Bill Forsyth droll festival. Applying Calvino's universal human situations to contemporary New Jersey's long-term unemployed, Epstein and Taylor have fashioned a slight yet smart indie comedy, marrying sharply observed Ed Burns-style dialogue to a low-rent vision of the US underworld.

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