Why this girly-girl loves heist movies

I am a really girly girl. I hate blood (as in can't even watch movies with fake blood without hiding and/or screaming), am a member of a beauty website, watch beauty gurus on YouTube, spend up to an hour doing my hair to get ready for parties, wear dresses all the time and have four different conditioners in my shower.

And yet, I love heist movies. (Bloodless ones.) I watched one a few weeks ago with my boyfriend and his family, Man on a Ledge, and loved it. I can't help it.

It's not the shooting that I love, or even the action scenes, really, but the idea of planning something to such detail, to distracting authorities, and to getting away with something so extraordinary. Man on a Ledge had a really complicated plot and heaps of little details that only got revealed at the end, leaving me sitting on the lounge with my teeth clenched and this silly little smile on my face. The same reaction when I watched Catch that Kid with Kristen Stewart when I was 12.

Producers make their movies for people like me, for people who want to be swept away by an extraordinary scheme. Hints of comedy are thrown in to please the masses and a lack of gore means that this is a widely accessible genre for a wide audience, from young teens to the elderly.

I think what gets me most is that heist films appeal to the imagination. Everyone wants to be as strong and smart and sexy as the robbers, getting back at the criminalised elite and winning one for the underdog. Every girl (secretly) has had at least a tiny desire to squeeze into a catsuit do some extraordinary action scene wearing 4-inch heels and with not a hair out of place. It grows from the spy-play that so many children enjoy (I made secret computers in the middle of my notebooks by drawing screens and keyboards and my Password Journal was one of my favourite possessions) but also from a desire to be a little more impressive that the average. Why this expresses itself in a desire to commit major felonies, I don't know. Real life crime is much less glamorous.