Showing posts with label Hard Rock Hotel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hard Rock Hotel. Show all posts

Monday, March 11, 2024

The Thieves - Kim Yoon-seok (2012) - City of Dreams, Macau

The opening scenes of the film were shot on the casino floor at what was the Hard Rock Hotel (now the Countdown Hotel). Much of the heist is based around the same area, all under the banner of the "City of Dreams", which I believe is the ground floor mall/casino area that connects several hotels including the Crown Towers, Grand Hyatt and Countdown (please feel free to correct me).

There has been quite a lot of digital manipulation of several of the backgrounds in this film (the most obvious one I will include as a post later), so it's hard to know what's real and what isn't. But there are a few - what appears to be genuine - shots of the heist being set up at the the top of the Countdown Hotel (images 2 thru 4) as well as some general views of that cluster of hotels. 

An example of digital manipulation can be seen in the lower image which shows us looking across the City of Dreams towards the Venetian and Four Seasons hotels, but in the distant background you can see the Galaxy, which is located elsewhere! This film is full of subtle little changes here and there and some locations have had me scratching my head as to where they could be, only to realise that the distant background, from which I am taking my bearings, has been added in post-production.


The whole night sequence, of which these two lower shots are part, is just one big massive digital composite showing the location of City of Dreams to be somewhere completely different to its real one. It's very reminiscent of the extreme digital tomfoolery witnessed in 6 Underground.

Saturday, March 2, 2024

The Thieves - Kim Yoon-seok (2012) - Hard Rock Casino, Macau

The next film to fall under the spotlight is a 2012 Korean heist caper called The Thieves (or 도둑들Dodookdeul for the phonetic Korean). It stars Kim Yoon-seok as, Macao Park, a master criminal and seeming double-crosser who recruits his old gang, along with a local Chinese one, to engineer the heist of a valuable diamond from a ruthless Chinese Triad gang boss. The film co-stars Lee Jung-jae (most famous recently for his lead role in Squid Games), Jun Ji-hyun (star of Blood: The Last Vampire) and Simon Yam as the leader of the Chinese gang, Chen.

It's a great film and well worth getting hold of if you can. It was shot in Korea, Hong Kong and Macau in 2011 and released the following year and has been on my to-get list for quite sometime. I just so happened across it at a favourite 2nd hand DVD store in Mongkok a few weeks ago.

The film starts in Korea as the gang carry out an audacious and complicated heist of a piece of artwork from the vaults of a rich but dumb collector. As the police move in they decide to up sticks and move to Hong Kong to link up with their old cohort, Macao Park, who has an offer for them.

The Hong Kong and Macau part of the film/story starts with an introduction to Macao Park as he is ejected from the tables at the Hard Rock Hotel casino in Macau.