The Pineville Heist

Was lucky enough to attend a screening of Lee Chambers' "The Pineville Heist" last night. It's the story of a high school kid who stumbles onto bank robbers burying their stolen cash in the woods, and then his life is turned upside down when he decides to find the money and take it. You should check it out. It's extremely well-shot and obvious that Lee Chambers has serious directing chops. What I also find impressive about it is that Chambers produced it on his own with minimal funding. I've always been impressed by indie filmmakers who against all odds manage to shoot, edit and release a feature film. It's a herculean effort and Chambers deserves applause for that alone. You'd never know from the look of The Pineville Heist that it was made on an indie-sized budget. It looks great. It's a fun movie and it makes me wonder how cool a movie Chambers could make if someone were wise enough to give this guy a few million bucks!

Terrible acting, the script is horrible. I was literally laughing at the two bank robbers burying the money because of the poor writing. Only reason I gave it two stars was for the nice cinematography.

The Pineville heist Cineplex Silver City April 25,2016

Wake up Thunder Bay! You have a legitimate Hollywood film maker in your midst. The Pineville heist (www. Pinevilleheist.com) is a film by Lee Chambers, a teacher at your very own Confederation College. I first heard about the movie because my niece Leah Rantala, has a small part in it. I must admit at first I thought "oh cute a college film she's got a little part". When I found out there was a screening in Hollywood I thought it odd. I was married for 10 years to a "film producer", so I do understand a little bit how this process works. I managed to get passes and I brought my two kids to the screening. We were blown away. After 20 plus years living in the lush green foliage of WA state, I love living in Southern California. The dry climate of fruits,nuts and flakes....and sunshine.

Yet, I AM from Thunder Bay, Ontario. I regularly enjoy dissing on the good old Lakehead and making fun of it, especially the cold weather, and it's location so far from everything "important".... but always with a light heart.

Truthfully it was a great place to grow up and I have been proud of many things from my home town, like more NHL players per capita than any other city, ski jumpers, skiing mogul champs, even the band leader of a ultra famous nighttime talk show.

I NEVER imagined it would include FILM MAKING! Until now. This movie is as good as, if not better than anything I have seen made or funded by Hollywood and these Califophony-ia studios!

This is the REAL DEAL!!! Lee Chambers truly is a big league hitter yet gone unnoticed whose time has come! The Pineville Heist is a great movie and when you get the chance, see it! Butts in seats and dollars, how you spend them, speak volumes to these studios and their distributors!! Go see this movie in Thunder Bay.

Sincerely Dr Gordon J Grobelny DC Calabasas California

I review film submissions for many film festivals, so it was a welcome surprise when I had seen this as a submission to the 2017 FILMCHELLA film festival on February 27th, I am only one of a couple dozen reviewers for that festival, but I strongly recommend it as an official selection, This is an epic film, from the opening shot, a beautiful aerial view of the forest, to the eerie shots accentuated by the low key lighting and use of hard shadows in the school, the cinematography looks fantastic, like it was shot with the same cameras used in big budget films, it is a very well written story, the principal, the sheriff and the school teacher were it's strongest actors, overall the school teacher is the best actor in the film, she is perfect, the principle is obviously a Hollywood character actor, and he's good at it' the sheriff was portrayed perfectly, the actor playing that role could easily be a real sheriff or football and baseball coach as he is the perfect role model type personality, this is definitely a coming of age film as well as a thriller, it has moments that captivated the audience and kept them at the edge of their seats, for a relatively low budget film, on Hollywood terms anything produced for under a million dollars is low budget, it looks and sounds like a bigger budget film, it has a few small errors in the audio, slight ADR discrepancies, and a few slight Visual Effects errors, not enough for the general public to criticize, but prevalent enough for distributors to take notice, the score is good, the acting is good, the characters work well together, it's believable, overall I loved this film, it kept me excited and intrigued, and engaged in the story, at the end it didn't feel like 80 minutes, which is great, the pace kept going, I would watch it again..

Pineville Heist is surely a movie to watch. Like many productions, there are issues here and there. Some ADR doesn't match up, some sound effects needed more altering to fit the environment, and there are some VFX issues. But that doesn't make this a bad film. It has a logical plot that takes the audience from point A to B and it does it effectively with good acting, good camera work, and overall good production value. Is it a movie that I can watch and make fun of with my friends? Yeah, but it's a movie I can also watch seriously. But everything I have listed are all present in Hollywood level films, and that's what makes me take this film serious.

The part that I would be very critical as an audience member is one part where the bad guy and someone hiding are in the same room together. It's builds tension, but it needed to learn when not to play music. It was a tense scene, and what would have made the hair stand on the back of your neck would be silence... Just the sounds of the guy walking, sounds of the person hiding trying not to breath, and just hearing the room. That would put us there, make us feel how they feel. But instead that experience is taken away with music.

But despite all of that, I think it's a great film. The part that makes me laugh is throughout the film a poster on the wall pops up at almost ironic times... a simple poster that says "Make Healthy Choices".