Contradicting Popular Opinion
A.K.A.
An Enquiry Concerning Why Your Favorite Movie Sucks:Ocean’s Eleven
What else to watch!
Normally, I end with this part. Today I start with it. Why? Cuz f*ck it. That’s why.
Anyway, The Score is from about the same time, and is a much better flick. It has a couple of problems, i.e. a laughable performance by Brando, and a little implausibility with water pressure. Otherwise it is a tight flick. It is also much better than that other heist film with Ed Norton as a double-crossing accomplice.
Clooney and Soderbergh teamed up prior to Ocean’s Eleven to make a superior heist film in Out of Sight. Even a starring role by J-Lo doesn’t wreck this movie!
Out of Sight shares a character with Jackie Brown. Jackie Brown is also better than Ocean’s Eleven.
And I’m also going to recommend The Wild Bunch. If I have to, I’ll recommend it every week.
Ocean’s Eleven
Ocean’s Eleven is a remake of an old Rat-pack movie. Sadly, it has nothing to do with the fella that sang “Get outta my dreams (and into my car)” or “Carribean Queen (No More Love on the Run). I think that we should demand Billy Ocean’s Eleven.
Now, we’re sharing the same dream.
Anyway, the 2001 Ocean’s Eleven is one of those heist movies that feels like it was made by people who have appreciated some heist movies in the past. The whole thing is kinda cribbed together from different pieces of movie worlds, then homogenized through the Hollywood bland filter.
The premise of the flick seems to be that a bunch of pretty people stand around looking slightly bored, hang out, and occasionally do something implausible.
I don’t really understand the appeal of that thing. Maybe some people are into watching Brad Pitt eat through half the movie. Doesn’t really do it for me.
Maybe others are into all the half-assed movie in-jokes. You know,
Person A says, “Ooh that code was 1138! like in the George Lucas movie!”
Sensible person says, “So f*cking what? What does that have to do with anything?”
“Whoosh. I guess that it went over your head!”
“No it didn’t! It isn’t a joke. It is a pointless reference.”
“And right there was a reference to The Great Escape!”
“So f*cking what?! What does that have to do with anything?”
“And see he said Mr. Levin get’s HBO! You see, Levin runs Time-warner which owns HBO! It’s funny!”
And then Person A gets stabbed in the junk. True story!
Of course the appeal here is two-fold. Chicks like looking at pretty people. As “Coupling” once noted, they buy magazines with pictures of celebrities with their clothes on!
The alleged appeal to the male crowd is in the heist aspect, which is apparently something on which Dane Cook has several minutes of routine.
The problem in Ocean’s Eleven is that the heist is way too complicated and “non-sensicle,”i.e. too many people are involved, too many things need to go right for it to work, and some aspects seem superfluous. Ocean’s plan is goofier than a pet coon and has about a one in a billion chance of working.
There are also four things about the heist that destroy my suspension of disbelief. A movie is generally only allotted two ludicrous thing when properly spaced out over the course of the running time. This movie piles them on top of each other.
Thing 1: the Pinch. EMPs are cool. An electromagnetic pulse is set off, and subsequently disrupts everything electrical around it. As depicted in the movie, we have some problems. First, their “pinch” is powerful enough to knock out power in the whole city. A good sized nuclear bomb could do that thing. Not what they have though.
You see, a real pinch is really f*cking big. It doesn’t fit into a van. It’s energy source wouldn’t fit in a van. And even at that size, it still isn’t powerful enough to cause a black out across the street let alone several blocks.
Plus, well, EMPs, they tend to do irrevokable damage to micro-processors. That is to say, anything containing a microprocessor is pretty much f*cked for good, and pretty much everything electronic these days has a microprocessor.
In short, they would destroy Vegas.
Thing 2: A short one. The fliers. Where the f*ck do they come from, and how did hey get there? A movie doesn’t need to explain everything to me; it shouldn’t. But I can’t think of a possible explanation for those fliers aside from Nightcrawler or Scotty from the USS Enterprise secretly being the twelfth member of Ocean’s eleven.
Thing 3: The money. The money looks to be all in hundreds. They carry all of it on their persons.
So what, you say?
Well they steal 160 million dollars in hundreds. That is 1.6 million bills. Estimating each bill at 1 gram, that is 1.6 million grams, meaning 1,600 kg worth of bills. That is 1.6 metric tons of money that has to be moved. If it were Oceans 100 I might believe that they could move it.
As it stands, no f*cking way.
Thing 4: Knockout gas. I know we have the shit in comic books, but it ain’t real. Otherwise, general anesthesia would be a lot easier.
Don’t take my word for it; listen to Dr. Karl.
It’s a very fine line between being conscious, being in a state of general anaesthesia, and being dead….
[I]t is very difficult to make somebody unconscious without damaging or killing them. Doctors have to study medicine for 5-or-so years, and then spend several years in general hospital training. If they want to become an anaesthetist, they have to spend an extra 4+ years of study.
Granted, this thing is only a movie. Movies are fake. But I’m offered little to distract me from the ridiculous moments in the movie. Consider Pulp Fiction, particularly the adrenaline shot scene. Now Mia has a toxic level of heroin in her body. The adrenaline shot ain’t gonna change that thing in real life, but it does in the movie. We can forgive it it’s sin, because the scene is effective, the dialogue is beautiful, and the characters are interesting. Pulp Fiction is the vision of a writer/director.
Ocean’s Eleven on the other hand, feels more like a widget. It is a piece of merchandise. It’s a remake that bumped around a couple of screenwriters. The actors seem like they are just waiting to hang out in Clooney’s trailer and drink Guinness.
Fuck it.
Pimping, surprisingly easy.
Scott remains insane. The nicest thing I can say about Underworld is that is doesn’t suck quite so much as Kate’s other werewolf-vampire crapfest Van Helsing.
Mikey misses the good of Hostel. He set his expectations one way, and was bound for disappointment. He wanted the goriest gory that ever goried. In today’s climate, you can’t get that movie into American theaters.
Hostel‘s a good flick, a solid 3 star drive-in movie. It follows the most important rule of the drive-in, “anyone can die, at any time.” The premise is plausible, it includes about 4 dozen breasts, a motor vehicle chase, decapitation, fingers rolling, and I’ll stop here lest I give more spoilers.
The flick also draws an interesting dichotomy between two worlds of flesh fantasies. I like Roth; I have a script I should try to sell him.
Robtrain is still waiting on line to suck off Spielberg.
Whitcomb doesn’t know what “begs the question” means either.
Brad takes a look at Videodrome, which is, as the fella says, often imitated, but never duplicated.
No Lucard still. Eric S. is missing. No movie week in review from Ryan either. Check out the Culture section, most of whom refuse to be called the Culture Club. When coming up with a name for the Culture section, nobody listened to my suggestion of calling it the Freely section. IP Movies, IP Games, etc.
