Homewrecker

nospam@example.com (Gilles Deacur) — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 11:23:00 -0500

Gilles Deacur

One of the movies at the Sundance Film Festival 2010 is the low-budget "Homewrecker".

Homewrecker is a fun, light romantic comedy about Mike, an ex-con locksmith trying to straighten his life out as a prisoner on work release laboring as a locksmith. He is approached by a free-spirited woman convinced that Mike can help her prove her boyfriend is cheating.

This is Brooklyn brothers Brad and Todd Barnes first feature film. They are excited about their premiere and want to make a career in the film industry.

Sundance has a new category called Next, which categorizes films made for under $500,000. There are 8 films in this category this year.

The film Homewrecker is based on a real person that the Barnes brothers interviewed who was working as a locksmith, on work release. We was locked up at 9 every night and would be released every morning and would help people back into their homes.

One other interesting thing about this film is what YouTube is doing. YouTube has set aside five films from last years' and this years' Sundance Film Festival that they will be renting, in it's first step towards becoming a full service online video outlet. The five films they will be renting are The Cove, One Too Many Mornings, Homewrecker, Children of Invention, and Bass Ackwards, which YouTube will price at $3.99 each.

Here's a trailer of Homewrecker. (This preview does contain language that will be offensive to some.)

The story sounds entertaining enough for me. I don't think I'll be paying to watch this, but who knows.

More on Homewrecker

YouTube blog about renting movies

No Country For Old Men

nospam@example.com (Gilles Deacur) — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 18:02:00 -0500

Gilles Deacur

I finally got around to watching "No Country For Old Men". We have a TiVo at home, so this was one I didn't mind watching.

One thing that really annoys me is when the movies or television shows have a lock that needs to be bypassed and they do it in such an unrealistic way that it just wouldn't work in real life. Hollywood is a large contributor to my distress at work.

Yes... here's an example:

I will get called out to open a lock on somebody's door and I'm about 2 or 3 minutes into trying to pick it open and the customer will say, "It's a lot quicker on TV". Or, "MacGyver (or James Bond... insert the character's name here) can open it in 5 seconds".

Well, yeah, they can open it in 5 seconds because the locks are rigged with 1 pin or none instead of the standard 5 or 6 usually found in the lock.

One of the many blown-out locks from No Country For Old Men

So, here's my beef with "No Country For Old Men". I can't believe they are trying to pass this air-powered contraption as a viable method to bypass a lock. Sure, it looks fancy, and one would like to think that it could work, but it's physically impossible the way Hollywood portrays it in the movie. For added sensationalism, this tool was punching the lock so fast that it was flying across the room on the other side of the door, leaving the outer ring still on the door in the case of a deadbolt, or the knob still standing in the case of a key-in-knob lock.

Well, here's the mechanics of a lock and the door it is on.

Schlage deadbolt lock.

First of all, here is a picture of a similar and common deadbolt. This one has a free-spinning outer collar, such as the deadbolt presented in the movie. This ring sits around the lock body and is designed to spin if somebody takes a pair of pliers to it and forces it off of the door. The lock actually sits recessed inside the ring, and the ring stops the lock from pushing into the door. The ring is designed to absorb as much impact as possible so the lock body can't get shoved into the door.

Deadbolt cutaway diagram.

Notice this cutaway diagram of a deadbolt. Do you see how much of the outer ring is overlapping the lock body? That's just way too much metal to have to force past the outer ring. That outer ring would stop that lock body from moving into the door with more than as much pressure as you could physically exert on the lock. In fact, if you were to exert enough pressure on the lock body to get it to shear off and pass the outer ring, you probably would have broken the door so badly. However, in the movie after the lock is punched out, the lock mounting hole is in good condition and the door isn't damaged beyond a point that it's not usable.

Look at the Schlage deadbolt a few pictures above. Notice the bolt in the way. If the lock was punched out, the lock bolt mechanism would be punched out as well. The door wouldn't instantly unlock. The bolt work would have to be retracted. If the lock went flying through the door and took the bolt mechanism with it, it would take a minute or two with a tool such as a screwdriver to find the bolt and retract it unlocked.

Here is another explanation as presented on The Internet Movie Data Base.

If the lock was punched through, the outer ring would fall off onto the ground outside (unless there was paint holding the ring affixed to the door, or the ring fit so tightly into the cross-bore hole that force was actually needed to install it in the first place).

The other locks in the movie present the same problem. The cylinders don't just fly though the door. And if they did, you'd still need to find a way to retract the mechanism to unlock the door.

It is things like these that turn a fairly good movie into something implausible. Am I too judgmental? Maybe. My wife gets annoyed when we're watching a movie and a scene with a lock makes me utter a "pffft" as the hero (or villain) bypasses it in seconds. Whatever.

C'mon Hollywood! Let's see something realistic in the lock department next time.

I did enjoy the locksmith in "Crash" very much so, but that's the subject of another blog.

Blog of Sunshine Locksmith Team - Locks & Locksmiths in the Movies

Homewrecker

No Country For Old Men