MY MOVIE SHELF: Ocean’s Thirteen

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 178  Days to go: 181

Movie #199:  Ocean’s Thirteen

It drives my husband crazy that I own Ocean’s Eleven and Ocean’s Thirteen but not Ocean’s Twelve, but the only reason I own Ocean’s Thirteen is to get the horrible taste of Ocean’s Twelve out of my mouth and do the best I can to forget it ever existed. That’s the God’s honest truth.

In this one, the crew is once again scattered to the four winds, but they return to Vegas when Reuben (Elliott Gould) is double-crossed out of ownership of a brand new, hot casino on the strip by hotel mogul Willy Bank (Al Pacino, only slightly less a mockery of himself than he was in Godfather III). Bank is a ruthless businessman and an egomaniac. He prides himself on having the hottest, best hotels in all the land, on getting the 5-Diamond award for each one, and for buying an exquisite diamond necklace — which are all in a tower display in his suite — each time he gets that praise. And of course, he’s obsessed with money and power. In order to avenge Reuben, Danny (George Clooney) and his crew — Rusty (Brad Pitt), Basher (Don Cheadle), Virgil (Casey Affleck), Turk (Scott Caan), Yen (Shaobo Qin), Frank (Bernie Mac), Livingston (Eddie Jemison), Saul (Carl Reiner) and Linus (Matt Damon) — work out a way to strip Bank of all of that.

This movie is structured differently than the first, in that it’s more upfront about the cons. It doesn’t try to hide the plan from the audience, as much as reveal step by step how they’re going to dismantle Bank’s casino on opening night by having it pay out millions to everyone on the floor. In addition, since status and reputation are so important to Bank, they have Saul act as the hotel’s reviewer so Bank and his assistant Abigail Sponder (Ellen Barkin) are inclined to give him special treatment, while Danny’s crew secretly sabotage the real reviewer’s stay. (Poor David Paymer, who plays the real reviewer, gets no love his entire stay, but he does win big at the airport on his way home, so that’s something.)

Unfortunately, the team hits a financial snag and have to go through their old nemesis Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia, much more put together and less gross than he was in Godfather III) — a plot line that has a lot to do with what happened in Ocean’s Twelve, but let’s forget that ever happened — in order to bankroll this elaborate con. Terry has a condition: he wants Banks’s diamonds as well. Too bad they’re impossible to get.

There are still a few things Ocean’s Thirteen holds off on revealing, the con is pretty satisfying, and Matt Damon wears a ridiculous nose as part of his role in seducing Ms. Ponder (She’s a “cougar.” He read about the term in Maxim magazine.), so overall the film works for me. At least, it works a hell of a lot better than Ocean’s Twelve did.

MY MOVIE SHELF: Ocean’s Eleven

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 179  Days to go: 181

Movie #198:  Ocean’s Eleven

Do you remember how fantastic and surprising Ocean’s Eleven was when it came out? I do. It was charming and slick and utterly unexpected. It took an old Rat Pack movie so boring and dull nobody even remembered it anymore and made it a bright, memorable, amazing heist film that is still as great today as it was then.

George Clooney is Danny Ocean, a thief getting paroled from prison and, despite his claims to the parole board, immediately on the lookout for his next big score. He contacts a former cohort and current blackjack dealer — Frank Catton, posing as Ramon since his real identity won’t get him past the gaming commission, played by the late great Bernie Mac — and finds out his partner in crime Rusty (Brad Pitt) is out in L.A. So off he goes.

Rusty is teaching poker to young celebrities (Topher Grace, Joshua Jackson, Shane West, Holly Marie Combs, and Barry Watson), which looks like its boring him to tears. When Danny shows up, the two have a little fun with the group, fleece them of several thousand dollars, and set out to learn the job, which is this: Danny has a plan to rob the Las Vegas casinos, The Bellagio, the Mirage and the MGM Grand. The score is upwards of $150million, but that’s not all. Danny’s ex-wife Tess (Julia Roberts) is dating Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia) now, the owner of these three particular casinos, and Danny hopes to get her back while hitting him where it hurts. To do it, he needs a crew.

Reuben (Elliott Gould) is the money. He has a history of owning Las Vegas casinos himself and knows the risk, however he has a grudge against Benedict himself, so he’s in. The first time I saw his gaudy shorts and robe outfit the first time he’s on screen, I laughed so hard I completely missed their entire conversation.

Frank comes out from Atlantic City and gets a job inside the casino. He’s the inside man. “You might as well call it White Jack!” He also has a serious interest in moisturizing techniques.

Casey Affleck and Scott Caan are the Malloy brothers, Virgil and Turk. I forget the cool heist nickname they have, but their competitive chemistry together is spectacular. They bicker and bait each other, both for fun and for profit, but Turk’s laugh when he runs over Virgil’s remote control monster truck (with Turk’s life-sized monster truck), is the best thing in the film.

Eddie Jemison is Livingston Dell, the technology guy. He’s nervous and he sweats a lot. This proves dangerous later.

Shaobo Qin is Yen, a Cirque de Soleil performer who is crazy flexible and acrobatic to an almost frightening degree. He’s the grease man. I’m not sure why they call him that.

The fabulous Carl Reiner is Saul Bloom. He got out of the game a year earlier because of ulcers, but came back in because of the score. He is maybe not in the best of health. Will it harm the team?

Matt Damon is expert lifter Linus Caldwell, who mostly gets treated like a kid and pretty much resents the hell out of it. After all, these guys have rap sheets longer than his … they’re very long.

Finally, my boyfriend Don Cheadle is Basher, the munitions guy. He has a cockney accent and crawls around in the sewers on occasion, but he’s really good in (and with) a pinch.

Ocean’s Eleven is set up as the perfect heist movie, giving away part of the plan, letting more of it play out as it happens, and leaving some hidden even then, only revealing their secrets after the boost is successfully completed. It works flawlessly this way, offering obstacles and red herrings and misdirections to the audience to keep them not entirely sure of how this is going to play out or if it’ll even be successful. And in the end, the con is extremely satisfying.

Be careful what you say, though, because in Terry Benedict’s hotels, “someone is always watching.”

MY MOVIE SHELF: The Godfather Part III

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 250 Days to go: 254

Movie #127: The Godfather Part III

The Godfather Part III is completely off the rails. Literally everyone has given up at this point. It might as well be a TV movie followup to the first two films, for all the awkward, bizarre laughable melodrama.

Al Pacino has completely lost all the layered nuance of his previous performances of Michael Corleone, instead going full Hoo-ah (two years before Scent of a Woman, when it would apparently merit an Oscar — go figure) and sporting uber-’90s hair.

Nothing, in fact, is even remotely reminiscent of 1979, when the film is supposed to be taking place, save the cars. The fashion and hair of virtually everyone, in fact, is pure 1989 (around when it was filmed). There are no bellbottoms, no wide-legged pants of any kind, and an overabundance of ’80s power shoulder pads. Where are the wide lapels? The thick, striped ties? The shawl collars? Where are the feathered bangs and the bowl cuts and the ill-advised man-perms? (Okay, Diane Keaton is sporting an ill-advised man-perm. Points for that.) Where are the plaid pants? The short shorts? The bold colors? The bare shoulders and tube tops? There’s none of that here. Michael’s daughter Mary (Sofia Coppola) wears almost nothing but little black mini-dresses with black tights and flats — an outfit I’m pretty sure I wore to a junior high dance. And the military button jacket with Blossom hat she wears to visit Vincent’s (Andy Garcia) club is pure Rhythm Nation 1814.

Someone also needs to explain to me why so many people are apparently okay with Vincent screwing his barely legal first cousin, because it strikes me as incredibly creepy that everyone’s so okay and open about it. Mary doesn’t even try to hide it, but I’m pretty sure having a sexual relationship with your uncle’s son is frowned upon, even in close Italian families. Especially in close Italian families.

The whole movie is just weird, and the denouement that mirrors similar final scenes in the two previous films, is far more silly than tense — particularly the deaths of Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee the Murder Twins. The fate of Mary is also poorly handled, as the puppet show in Sicily foreshadows it with no more subtlety than Coppola’s awkward “seduction” acting. Add in fake Pope plot details and it just adds up to a mess. How this thing got nominated for seven Oscars is beyond me. Thank God it didn’t win any.

I wouldn’t say the Godfather trilogy is my cup of tea, necessarily, but I can clearly see the artistry and sophistication of the first two films. They are great pieces of cinema, undeniably. The Godfather Part III, however, is a useless piece of crap. They should’ve quit while they were ahead.

MY MOVIE SHELF: Confidence

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 300  Days to go: 289

Movie #73: Confidence

To make a successful movie about con artists — or especially about a particular con — the audience has to be duped. This is not an easy task, obviously, since the audience knows it’s a con (it’s often right there in the title, see: The Sting) and is looking for ways to reveal the trick before the movie does. However, if a movie can lay bare certain aspects of the con, while holding back on others and smudging the timeline or order of events enough to blur the narrative, the audience gets the reveal just as the mark in the film does, and it’s immensely satisfying. Confidence is just such a movie, and it is immensely satisfying.

The key to Confidence is the framing. The movie starts with our narrator, Jake Vig (the dead sexy-and-he-knows-it Edward Burns), lying dead in an alley. From the point of view of the audience, Jake’s ghost or whatever is telling how he got in this, shall we say, predicament. He points the finger at Rachel Weisz (who we find out later is Lily, a woman he meets when she picks his pocket, as all con artist meet-cutes go), who is somehow the cause for him being held at gunpoint in the aforementioned alley by (the equally fine) Morris Chestnut (as Travis). Travis wants to know how it all started too, so we enter our second narrative layer (Jake narrating to the audience and Jake talking to Travis) as we go into a flashback within a flashback to three weeks earlier.

From this point on, the audience goes ahead aware of these two layers, and maybe a third a little later on, but the movie itself is actually working on an entirely different level. Some things are authentic, others are not, while sometimes there’s crossover of the two and maybe things don’t mean what they seem. (The opening titles do a great job of illustrating this impermanence with letters that turn and move and switch into other letters, forming different words in the credits. Title work doesn’t get enough credit, so it’s important to point out when it’s really done well and with intention.) It’s really seamlessly executed, to the point where even if you think you’ve guessed the trick, it’s still not disappointing whether or not it turns out you were right.

The other way the framing works to the movie’s advantage is that it provides necessary exposition about how a confidence game works, who the players are, and what roles they play. It makes the film easy to follow without losing any of its intricacy. The complexities of the relationships and motivations of each of the characters remain undiminished by the seeming transparency of explaining how the cons work. This is thanks to deft plotting and direction, plus excellent character work by the actors.

Jake’s crew is rounded out by Paul Giamatti as Gordo and Cougar Town‘s Brian Van Holt as Miles. When they lose their fourth to retribution by crime boss “The King” (Dustin Hoffman), Jake brings in rogue grifter Lily. There are also a couple of dirty cops (Donal Logue and Luis Guzman) and a federal agent named Gunther Butan (Andy Garcia) in the mix, wreaking their own kind of havoc. Everyone brings their A game to this one, playing at least three or four different roles throughout, layer upon layer, seemingly open yet distant — cards close to the vest. Motivations may be straightforward or misleading, and none of the puzzle pieces really come together to form a clear picture until the end. It’s really spectacular work all around, though I think Rachel Weisz deserves the most praise. Burns is stoic throughout — a no-nonsense leader of the group, a straight-talker, determined, always with a clear intention and plan even if you don’t know what it is — but Weisz gets to play the enigma. She’s the wild card, and you never know who she might be playing or what she might be after. It’s a great role for a woman — strong, confident, aloof, underestimated and pivotal — and I think that’s the kind of thing Weisz is great at and doesn’t get enough credit for. Special props also go to Dustin Hoffman. He’s an odd choice for a crime boss, to be sure, but he brings so much depth to the role. He’s hypersexual, manic, somewhat prissy and yet still menacing. It’s fascinating to watch his interactions with both Burns and Weisz, as he really plays up those encounters, but even with his own staff he’s quite intriguing.

The con artist movie is a popular, well-worn one. The Sting is no doubt considered the best, and The Grifters was also highly acclaimed. In the 21st century, Ocean’s 11 gets the most praise — and it’s great. It’s funny and inventive and I love it. But in my opinion, Confidence is the better of the two films. The stakes are higher, the structure is stronger, and the performances are better. Check it out sometime.