AT TRIBECA: EDDIE, THE SLEEPWALKING CANNIBAL

Dylan Smith as the title character

Taste in comedy is one of the most subjective things there is, right up there with music and the way one takes one's eggs (Douglas Adams was right, everybody in the fucking universe takes their eggs differently, it's uncanny). Some people like goofy comedy, some like fart jokes, some repartee, some odd people even find bald men smashing watermelons with hammers funny. Me? I like all the aforementioned except the watermelon business, even though I'll concede it a point or two on pure strangeness. But one particular thing I love is really, really dark deadpan shit deriving from and intertwined with graphic violence. Another particular thing I love is lots and lots of levels and meta out the fuckin wazoo. A third, truly special thing I find hilarious, are titles that are both elaborately on-the-nose and insane. That last is a bit of a stretch intended as a segue into the glorious, sublime fact that there is a movie that exists in the world that people can go see called Eddie, The Sleepwalking Cannibal.

The title was what initially intrigued me. Then I saw this enthusiastic recommendation. And I thought, hey, what the fuck. What's the worst that can happen? Even if it sucks it'll be over in an hour twenty. So I decided to give it a whirl. And oh boy oh boy lemme tell ya. This picture's fucking great. It's funny, it's dark, it's fucking fucked the fuck up (in the best sense of that exalted designation), and it's kind of a brutal “stop frontin, you know this is pretty much the way it is” critique of the “tortured artist” mythos that hits the center of the bulls-eye.

Our protagonist is a Danish painter named Lars Olafssen who, in the midst of a creative dry spell, takes a teaching gig way out in the middle of goddamn nowhere in rural Canada. On the way out there, he hits a deer with his car, a situation he deals with in a way that is . . . well . . . kind of strange. His fellow art school teachers welcome him with varying degrees of warmth, and almost immediately Lars is warned about a student named Eddie, a fairly innocuous looking dude (apart from being a mute) whom they let sit in provided he doesn't disturb anyone. Lars hits it off with Eddie, who comes to live with Lars in his house.

In fairly short order, Lars comes to discover that Eddie has a nocturnal routine you can probably guess from looking at the title of the movie: left unchecked, Eddie walks in his sleep and eats people. Lars is a little nonplussed (I mean, dude, somnambu-cannibalism is some ya-don't-see-that-every-day shit if ever there was such a thing) but he soon finds that Eddie's wanderings and snacking is inspiring him to paint for the first time in ten years. And because he wants to keep painting, Eddie has to keep eating people.

And yeah, all this insanity is really fuckin funny. Thure Lindhart is equally adept at playing Lars as endearingly alien, weirdly creepy, and someone who is his art, in a terrific lead performance. Dylan Smith has an even steeper difficulty curve as Eddie, not overdoing the simpleton aspect of his waking repose or the mania of his tormented, ravenous sleep, and making us care about Eddie even when he's gnawing on someone's neck before they're dead. Stephen McHattie shows up in a smallish role as the craven representation of art as commerce and, as the devil always does, has all the best lines. (Ed. Note: he doesn't play the literal devil, he's just a guy. Gotta clarify with a picture this strange.)

Eddie, The Sleepwalking Cannibal works as a horror comedy even if it isn't exactly that thing, primarily because its setting, atmosphere and tone are so utterly fucking weird. The violence is kind of matter of fact, and only one person seems to really give a shit that Eddie's running around eating people. Everyone else is far more concerned with Lars and his art: no atrocity so great that it cannot be swept under the rug in the interests of A Great Man engaged in the process of making Great Art. The movie makes something of a point of never showing the audience any of Lars' paintings that everyone oohs and ahhs over, nor the sculpture his “love interest” shows him. The concern here is more with the artist and the way people enable artistic turpitude. The picture's conclusion ties that point up nicely, in both form and content; if it's a smidge too neat, that's a minor quibble.

The important point is, holy shit this movie's good. If you've been waiting for a movie about a Danish painter in rural Canada whose roommate eats people—and I know you have—you're going to want to check this one out, and keep an eye on writer-director Boris Rodriguez, because this cat knows how to make movies.

ON THE CABIN IN THE WOODS AND SPOILERS (WHICH THIS CONTAINS)

(Seriously, DO NOT READ THE REST OF THIS until you've seen The Cabin In The Woods, unless you don't mind knowing about what surprises it contains. The subject of this post requires discussing them a bit, but it's really a movie best seen completely blank, because even the trailers don't reveal much of anything really important about it. So, if you haven't seen it, STOP RIGHT HERE and DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER. Check out my review at Tor, which is light on specifics, but long on reasons why to see it. Alles klar? Okay, let's continue. But do not say you weren't warned.)

Yesterday, the long-delayed (for reasons having nothing to do with quality and everything to do with its initial distributor going tits up) Joss Whedon-Drew Goddard collaboration The Cabin In The Woods finally came out. For most of the week leading up to it, there was a furious argument online about a number of reviews and whether or not they were in the right, divulging as much of the picture's plot as they did. Here is, in broad strokes, the situation:

1—The trailers and official plot synopsis focused mainly on a group of five stereotypical-ish horror movie characters: the two hot girls, representing the “virgin/slut” (horror's terms, not my own) dichotomy, and three dudes, the jock, the intellectual, and the stoner. HOWEVA, there are oblique hints that All Is Not What It Seems (the movie's poster, aside from the tagline, featured a cabin floating in a void, unmoored to the earth, the trailer had a shot or two of a control room-type space). But, it must be stressed, those were not explained any further than serving as an indication that there was probably something up and that it was not a paint-by-numbers slasher picture.

2—That last observation could very easily be reinforced by the presence of names like Joss Whedon (and to a lesser extent Richard Jenkins and Brad Whitford) in the cast/crew listing.

3—It screened at South by Southwest to a borderline unseemly amount of critical fapping; between it and The Raid it's amazing hospitals in Austin weren't working around the clock reattaching penises that had accidentally snapped off.

4—Since point 3 was in large part related to point 2, the kind of film critic whose formative years predate the assimilation of fandom and criticism (meaning, very roughly, people who were too old, be it chronologically or otherwise, to have grown up with Star Wars) looked at all those tweets and advance reviews and some of them bristled; “Ah, shit, here we go, another one of those fuckin' nerd movies.”

5—Whether as a reaction to their younger (chronologically and otherwise) counterparts' enthusiasm or simply because it wasn't their kind of picture, people like Rex Reed wrote things like this.

6—Eric Snider, Scott Weinberg, and other members of said younger generation, hit the fucking ceiling. Not only because Reed spoiled plot elements, but because a lot of his scorn, like that absurdly gratuitous “writing on crystal meth” swipe, was so disconnected from the reality of what the movie was. I've never done crystal meth, but I've done old-fashioned speed, and let's just put it this way, speed writing is nothing like The Cabin In The Woods. Not to mention the fact that he indiscreetly yaks about a number of plot points that would be surprising if he hadn't told you about them.

7—But, because neither life nor the Internet is simple, an increasing number of people coming out of Cabin are taking, if not in its bitchily irresponsible totality, a similar side to Reed and other critics' seeming belief that there is nothing in The Cabin In The Woods that really merits caution about spoilers.

It's a big fucking mess. Although I'm more on the Snider/Weinberg side of this particular fence, having thoroughly enjoyed my near-clean-slate viewing of The Cabin In The Woods the other day, the non-Rex Reed contrary opinion is equally valid, and one that I personally find myself on more frequently than not. A lot of plots don't spoil. But The Cabin In The Woods is a bit of a unique case. (Seriously, I'm about to start talking about it, so if the opening spoiler warning paragraph didn't chase you away, going any further is your own damn fault.)

(I'll give you another minute.)

Okay. What makes Cabin a bit of a rara avis in terms of the whole spoiler discussion is the fact that the very first scene is something unexpected, based on what the movie was obliquely hinted to be. A lot of the people making point 7 in the above list do so because, hey, if the first scene gives away the alleged “surprise”, how the fuck's it supposed to be a spoiler? Well, that's the thing: when I saw that opening scene of Richard Jenkins and Brad Whitford being awesomely loose office douchebags, I was like “whoa, holy fuck.” Because that had nothing to do with anything I'd theretofore heard about The Cabin In The Woods. I thought it was a movie where a bunch of kids go to a cabin in the woods. WTF are Richard Jenkins, Brad Whitford, and the foxy WASPacita in the lab coat doin up in this piece, yo?

So, yes, the first scene makes it clear that the subsequent stuff where the girl dancing around in her underwear, her newly-blonde friend, the NBF's jock boyfriend, the dude the NBF and JBF are trying to get the girl dancing around in her underwear to shtup, and the stoner with the bong that collapses into an apparent travel coffee mug is all in some way being controlled by Richard Jenkins and Brad Whitford. Fine. But that opening scene is just an opening scene if someone tells you there are control room guys. How the fuck were we supposed to know there were control room guys? That one tiny insert of a lever with a lit-up button next to it in the trailer?

Since everyone still reading at this point has already seen the movie (RIGHT?) we know that it subsequently transpires that Jenkins and Whitford are manipulating the cabin-bound college kids into a situation where they enact horror movie plots in a ritualistic fashion, only to be killed off one by one in true horror movie fashion, to placate the dormant (for now) “Ancient Ones” with blood. If the kids don't get killed, the Ancient Ones will, presumably, rise and end life on earth as we know it. The Final Girl, or the Virgin as she's called here, is allowed to live only if everyone else dies.

It is thus that The Cabin In The Woods manages to be both horror and meta-horror (even if it succeeds far more decisively as the latter), light and dark, observer and the thing observed, and have any number of either/or dichotomies both ways. Most importantly, with regards to the spoiler question, it's simultaneously completely upfront about what it is and yet consistently surprising. This is why, however Richard Jenkins/Brad Whitford-y that first scene might be, it's kind of shitty to tell people who haven't seen the movie that it's about Richard Jenkins and Brad Whitford manipulating stuff. First off, because spoilers, fuckface. But second, because over the course of the movie you see the extent to which the two of them halfass their jobs, and because they're gradually laid bare as a couple dorks who play God to hide their own impotence, describing The Cabin In The Woods as a movie about Richard Jenkins and Brad Whitford controlling shit is patently inaccurate. They don't control shit. And the movie isn't about them. It really is about horror, and the rules of the horror genre. The movie's (inevitable, really) conclusion serves as a darkly tongue-in-cheek warning against violating those rules (when comrade Final Girl neglects to murder the stoner Fool, the Ancient Ones do indeed rise, in the form of a giant fist rising from the Earth and coming right at the camera, ending the movie and thus the world), a firm reinforcement of the picture's theme, which is, again, genre and the rules thereof.

Now, that might not be everyone's cup of tea. Because I am, however scruffy and foul-mouthed, an intellectual and an academic (especially when it comes to genre), The Cabin In The Woods was basically Joss Whedon gift-wrapping a movie to me. And I'm thankful, not to mention relieved that there aren't any lingering hard feelings about the time Hudak and I set up camp in the TV room at Bard's student center to watch the Knicks and pre-empted that evening's Buffy conclave. But I am not the world, and the world is not me. So I understand people maybe not being so thrilled by the fact that it's more meta-horror than horror-horror. I could even understand the movie losing people when it goes bugfuck at the end of the second act when ALL THE MONSTERS come out. Shit, I could even understand people feeling cheated by the ending when the Giant Fucking Hand eradicates existence. I loved all three, to be clear, but if things like that are gonna bother you, they're gonna bother you.

Where I have a problem is in the unilateral decision that because the genre being deconstructed isn't one's personal cup of tea that said deconstruction is without merit. I'm not, comparatively, really a Joss Whedon fan. I've seen a couple episodes of Firefly and Dr. Horrible, and as above I've gone to extreme measures to not see Buffy and antagonize its fans; the Joss Whedon piece I'm most familiar with is his script for Speed, which he wrote approximately 95% of the dialogue but was ineligible for credit because the WGA requires any writer subsequent to the original to have created a certain percentage of new scenes as opposed to “merely” doing dialogue rewrites. But fan or no fan, I can recognize that the guy's extremely intelligent, a master of genre, and really goddamn fucking good with characters. I'm probably never going to see The Cabin In The Woods again, and will have to check out of the kind of massive fan geek-out conversations that'll result should it become the classic it's being heralded as, but I'd be staggeringly disingenuous if I were to claim that it didn't succeed almost perfectly in being the kind of picture it set out to be, which is the most important metric in determining if a movie is good or bad. “I didn't like it” and “It's bad” are not the same thing.

This is why, however entitled we all are to our particular opinion, criticism is more than simply I liked it or I didn't. It's about looking at what a thing is, rather than what we want it to be. If a picture you're reviewing is outside your frame of reference, do a little research. It's not going to kill you. Google exists. Shitting all over something for the sole reason of it not being within the realm of one's own personal taste is irresponsible criticism. If one doesn't particularly care for horror pictures (for example, since we're talking about Cabin), when reviewing a horror picture one is nonetheless responsible for determining how effective the given picture is within its own context. And if one is unable to properly determine how well a given horror movie is within its own context, one should offer the disclaimer that one is out of one's depth as a critic in the given instance. But hey, who the fuck wants to confess fallibility.

Empirically, this all comes down to one thing: consideration. All spoilers aren't created equal, and there is a point, undefined though it may be, when one can take the cultural temperature and begin to publicly discuss things like “she's got a dick” or “he was dead the whole time,” or “holy shit, Woody Harrelson really does need a stepladder to dunk a basketball.” But before a picture's release, when there is a clearly stated desire within the community for whom (almost exclusively) the picture in question was made, maybe shut the fuck up about its reveals. Even if you personally think those reveals are done really early. Just don't be a dick. Especially if the way in which you're going to unzip is by accusing the writers of a movie of being on crystal meth, when you clearly have no idea what that drug does to cognition.

Oh, by the way, feel free to ram this post straight up my ass if I ever fuck up and spoil something in the future. Even I'll admit I deserve it. Until then, though, I'll just stick a “This Machine Kills Fascists” sticker on the side of my soap box and enjoy the view from up here.

SINCE YOU'VE BEEN GONE

Well it ain't half been a while, huh? Let's catch up: since the last post, I undertook the massive . . . undertaking . . . (coughcough) of reviewing every single Batman movie ever made for Tor. It was interesting, starting with the 1943 and 1949 serials, then moving to the Adam West/Burt Ward “holy kitschy 60s homoerotic silliness, Batman!” incarnation, then to Tim Burton, then to Joel fucking assnuts Schumacher—research revealed that he spent the whole second movie (probably) fucked up out of his head and (verifiably) screaming shit into a megaphone about not taking anything too seriously, verifying my most wild exaggerations—and then to the Extremely Serious And Fraught With Portent version brought to us by Christopher Nolan (who sure is good at casting: Anne Hathaway as Catwoman is going to be straight uncut meeeeeow). Basically, after that whole fuckin' thing was done I needed to get the fuck out of Batman world and into something wholly other.

Enter my buddy Abe, whose contagious Bollywood evangelism has led to me being that dickhead in the front pew who doesn't really know what's going on but fucking FEELS THE SPIRIT OF THE LORD. Starting a few months ago with Endhiran (which wasn't a Bollywood movie but it had Indian people in it and was a good gateway drug for me because it was really fucking expensive and had a whole lot of trippy FX) and continuing with a recent outing to see Tees Maar Khan—the subject of a splendidly popular post—I'm starting to really dig the shit out of Indian movies, because they understand a couple things that we kinda lost here in America:

(1) Movie stars are important. The guy needs to be awesome and the girl needs to be hot and that's not fucking negotiable.
(2) Stylized acting fucking rules
(3) Singing and dancing similarly fucking rules
(4) It's a movie. It's meant to be enjoyed.

Doesn't that sound exactly like what I've been saying all this time in between the cursing and the Schwarzenegger advocacy? It's a match made in geek heaven.

So, less than an hour after finishing up the Batman pieces, I hopped into the shower and on the subway and, with the Tees Maar Khan crew, took in a Bollywood DVD double feature. The first picture we saw was called Om Shanti Om, by TMK director Farah Khan. The best way I can describe Om Shanti Om is that it's about everything, and everyone is in it; neither of those is all that much of an exaggeration.

The hero is Shahrukh Khan, a man who gives you your money's worth (and who's damn near a billionaire in US bux just from acting, which is seriously badass in its own way), playing two roles. Kind of. When the picture starts out, SRK is Om, a “junior artist” (read: bit player) in the 70s who dreams of stardom and romancing Shanti, the staggeringly beautiful movie star of his dreams (Deepika Padukone, making her Hindi debut, which surprised the shit out of me, because girlfriend has movie star written all up and down her). A whole bunch of wonderful, completely non-naturalistic romantic stuff happens and it looks like Shanti likes Om back . . . only to have Om discover that Shanti is secretly married to Mukesh (Arjun Rampal), the jerkoff who's producing the movie! (Which, by the way, is called Om Shanti Om; Farah Khan is basically sitting there at the stove with a big old pot of meta saying “Oh, no, sweetie, you're so thin, you need more, you're just wasting away, have more meta, it's good for you” for this whole picture)

Om is heartbroken, because he overhears Shanti tearfully telling Mukesh she just wants their marriage to be public, forget the damage to her career (different culture, different rules; not being single would seriously fuck things up for her, but that's love for you). Mukesh flips out and, in a scene that raises the bar for villainy to Himalayan heights, totally tells Shanti that he's going to marry her on the set of the movie, and right when she gets all excited, he goes, “Actually, no, I think I'll burn you alive.” And he has his big muscle dudes guard the entrance to make sure she doesn't get out. Om, motivated by true love, makes a damn fine effort to get in and save her, but Mukesh's dudes beat the shit out of him, and with the wasted time, Shanti dies in the fire, and Om dies in the hospital. Right after Om dies, the wife of movie star Rajesh Kapoor (Javed Sheikh; also, as I understand it, “Rajesh Kapoor” is sort of like if the guy was named “Jack Stone” or something in an American movie, like a real generic “movie star” name), who hit Om with his car on the way to the hospital, gives birth. Which leads to them naming the baby Om.

Jump ahead thirty years to the present day. Om Kapoor (also, of course, played by Shahrukh Khan) is a spoiled, shallow, puer aeternus fuckhead nepotistic brat, totally career-minded in his stardom. He's starring in a movie where he's playing a blind, deaf, and dumb guy in a wheelchair, but he insists on all kinds of rewrites, that lead inexorably to this magnificence ending up in the movie:



That bit at the end, where SRK starts freaking out? It's because he's afraid of fire. Why is he afraid of fire? Because . . . HE'S THE REINCARNATION OF THE OM FROM PART ONE! Boo ya motherfucker, welcome to India. If you don't recognize how rad this is, there is no reaching you.

Om Kapoor gradually gets less and less douchey as more of Old Om seeps in, to the point where he's almost completely Old Om, to the point of reuniting with Old Om's Old Mom and Old Childhood Chum. And—this is the best part—launching a jaw-droppingly elaborate revenge scheme against Mukesh, who's spent the last 30 years in Hollywood and now calls himself Mike and speaks almost exclusively English. This gives SRK the chance to do a fucking splendid vacantly Californian airhead accent when busting “Mike”s balls.

The revenge scheme centers around a remake of Om Shanti Om, on the original set, which has been considered “cursed” since the fire. Om takes advantage of his industry cachet to get a big star to play Shanti, only he's planning to find someone who looks exactly like the old Shanti to splice into the dailies to freak “Mike” out and drive him insane (something like that, at any rate), and lo and behold he finds Sandy (also played by Deepika Padukone, conveniently), a gum-chewing, clumsy bubblehead who, wouldn'tcha know, is a dead ringer for Shanti! PerFECtion!

Events converge. Somewhere in all of this there's a party scene where literally almost everyone who's been famous in Bollywood in the last thirty years pops in to say what's up:

All hot girls put your hands up and say
Ommmmmmmmmmmmm Shaaaaaaaanti Om!
All cool boys come on make some noise and say
Ommmmmmmmmmmmm Shaaaaaaaanti Om!

Goddamn that's catchy.

Then there's this big awards show parody thing where everybody else who's famous in India shows up (in which Akshay Kumar literalizes a joke I made a few months ago about Liam Neeson in Taken and actually machine guns a bunch of guys with his dick). And then the actual movie starts back up and there's more singing and dancing and eventually, Om is the instrument of ghost Shanti's revenge on Mukesh. The end. Standing ovation.

Om Shanti Om is feverishly ambitious, and is every movie ever made. A point made in the intro to Filmi Girl's excellent “Bollywood For Beginners” series that made me realize why Bollywood makes perfect sense to me: it's an industry as old as Hollywood, evolving in direct, completely separate, parallel. If you're able to carry the one, so to speak, watching a Bollywood movie shouldn't be that difficult. Cinema vocabulary is universal, and as long as you bear in mind that what appears to be tonal inconsistency to a cinematically monolingual Westerner is actually on purpose because it's the most popular style in India (the masala picture, so called because the mix of styles is like the mixture of spices in Indian cooking). So, given all that, it makes sense that even though I haven't seen most of the specific movies Om Shanti Om might be referencing (whole subplots might have flown over my head) I know movies, so it makes perfect sense on that level. Also, Farah Khan is awesome, so there's that.

Of course, after the mind-blowing intense experience of the totality of cinema that is Om Shanti Om, we were totally gonna watch something else. Abe got out a bunch of DVDs and was like “okay, I've got this, it's a little weird, I've got this, which is something something, and this one has Salman Khan.” No-brainer, we're going with Salman Khan.

Non-initiates might not see the absolute logic of this decision, so I'll explain: Salman Khan rules. If that's still not enough explanation, let's try the opening of Wanted (no relation to the stupid, excessively-pleased-with-itself McAvoy/Jolie thing). We open, eccentrically, at a women's kickboxing match, where a badass gangster type takes a call wherein it's explained that he has to come back to Mumbai at once. Some guy tips someone off that the badass gangster type is on his way back to Mumbai, and the badass gangster type cuts the guy's throat and leaves him to bleed to death in public. We then flash back to Mumbai a couple months before, where due to circumstances that presumably include suicidal impulses, a warehouse full of guys decide to antagonize Salman Khan. He proceeds, in Statham-esque fashion, to fuck each and every one of them up with extreme prejudice. But the capper is that after he owns the living fuck out of every single henchman within a five mile radius, Salman Khan stops the movie to sing a song about how awesome he is.



That's swagger, my friends. (Side note: I love how in every single Bollywood movie I've been watching lately, Anil Kapoor shows up with a shit-eating grin on his face to hang out for a dance number; that guy must be having a lot of fun) The rest of the picture alternates between Salman Khan getting goofy over the lovely Ayesha Takia (though the way he neurotically fucks with her heart after it becomes clear she likes him back is a little weird, but hey, weird is better than boring) and owning the bejesus out of the entire Mumbai criminal underworld, with a few not bad songs, a whole lot of tonal inconsistency (I don't mean that as a critique, it's just the way these pictures are; as Abe, an avowed Bollywood lover, put it: “Tonal inconsisency, thy name is Bollywood”) and, at approximately where the third act break would be in an American movie, one motherfucker of a plot twist.

Turns out Salman Khan, badass criminal, killer of many men, lover of many women . . . is an undercover cop. And though there's been no apparent mention of it the whole picture, his girlfriend's yoga teacher is not only an ex-cop but his dad. This is the point when Wanted stops fucking around and says, “You want ownage? Okay, here you go.” The gangster from the first scene is summoned back to Mumbai to stop Salman Khan from owning everybody (hey, they wouldn't be bad guys if they weren't fucking stupid) and makes the horrible mistake of killing Salman Khan's dad. Before he checks out, though, Papa Khan out-Dennis Hoppers Dennis Hopper and reminds the baddie that he ain't no motherfuckin Christopher Walken by laying shit out for him: My son is going to find you and fuck you up. Which is hardly a surprise at this point, it's like telling someone “Oh yeah the sun's going to rise in the east and set in the west tomorrow,” but the way he lays it out is just badass. I wish I could find the exact quote, but take my word for it, it rules.

Following his father's murder, Salman Khan openly reveals his policeman status and has the corrupt rapist shitbag cop on the bad guy's payroll take him out to the Final Action Sequence Warehouse. To set the tone, Salman Khan decides to jump out of the moving police car, spin in midair, and start walking up a flight of stairs in one motion for no reason whatsoever aside from sheer swagger. About twenty henchmen deaths in a row consecutively win “most stylishly and brutally violent henchman death of all time.” At a crucial point, Salman Khan removes his shirt by basically flexing his pecs. This lead to the following conversation:

Female friend: You know, not to be a girl, but that's why his package is kind of small. All those steroids, doesn't do well for you there.
Me: Yeah, but metaphysically, he's packing serious heat.
Female friend: Yes, metaphysically, that's true.

Because if they had steroid testing in movies, SK would be in some trouble. On the other hand, American action movies were awesome when the heroes were all on steroids and haven't quite been the same since (just like baseball).

By the time he gets to the main baddie and the rapist corrupt cop, Salman Khan is so intense the screen vibrates when the director cuts to his reaction shots. No shit, there's like eight shots in a row where they cut back to Salman Khan and the whole movie goes BWOMWOMWOMWOMWOM for a couple seconds. Final ownage is dealt. Fin.

Sure, Wanted's a little long (about two hours and forty minutes). Sure it'd be almost an hour shorter if it was made in America (or England or Europe or wherever) with Jason Statham. But if you're seriously sitting there whining about that shit you have no soul. Consider that extra hour an extra hour you get watching Salman Khan swagger, watching Ayesha Takia's smile (and, though I'm not a fake tit guy, hers are kind of spectacular), and all those songs. More on my nascent Bollywood fandom as it unfolds.


In other news, playoff football and my Tor duties kept me from doing up a Golden Globes post. The republic will not collapse. I had planned to do some snarky shit about the bribery scandal as a preview, but time didn't permit. Afterwards, the only thing worth writing about was Ricky Gervais' hosting, which has been written to death since then, so I won't pile on too much except to say this: what Ricky did out there was straight up Friars Club style, which has been around forever and is an institution in comedy. People were whining about him being mean, being a dick, so on and so forth, but seriously. If I was nominated for something and Ricky made fun of my weight, substance abuse, frequently gender-indiscriminate crushes, or foul mouth, I wouldn't be thrilled but I wouldn't whine my balls off about it like everyone there. Robert Downey Jr. makes a crack about shit being “mean-spirited” before doing a bit where he pretends to have shtupped all the Best Actress nominees? No. The spirit is one and the same, dude, you just got away with it because all five of them actually would fuck you given the chance (and when applicable, a waiver from her husband/significant other). Both jokes are in-bounds. Lighten up.

So that basically brings us up to today. I'm back on my regular irregular schedule, and have a couple things in store for you this week, including an in-depth look at the Lethal Weapon series in honor of Warner Bros' craven, avaricious announcement that they plan to reboot the series. So stay tuned.

One last note: next weekend, a project in which I had the privilege of being asked to take part is being unveiled: Piper McKenzie's Dainty Cadaver! Everyone in the NYC area is advised to come by and behold its majesty, and everyone not in NYC is advised to get your plane ticket now. Check out this “interview” about the play. Happy Sunday, y'all!

DANNY GOT TROLLED

Careful readers of this blog may have detected, here and there, a sense of humor. From other subtle hints I've dropped you may also have surmised that I get a kick of out of fucking with people. Yes, I once mixed a friend a drink called a Fire Island Iced Tea, so called because it would fuck his mind in the ass. (Ed. Note: it did). It is important, if you're going to behave in this way, that you accept the possibility that people will fuck with you right back. And thus, when this Matt Damon/Randy Travis lookin' ass motherfucker lent me Freddy Got Fingered on DVD, I had the sneaking suspicion that I was being trolled. Yes, Mr. Yustin assured me that it was legitimately hilarious, but I've been down this road before (“sure, that second pill won't make you freak out, you'll be fine”) and, remembering the singularly passionate negative critical response the movie got upon its release, I approached watching it with great trepidation.

Turns out, ya know what? It's a pretty funny movie. Tom Green, who co-wrote, directed, and starred, is the kind of comedian one either gets and thinks is hilarious, or does not get and thinks is the Antichrist. His style of humor is he doesn't give a fuck. Observe this classic bit, a collaboration with the similarly divisive Andy Dick:

Bonus Bob Odenkirk: the pause that refreshes. Anyway, Tom Green's popularity itself was considered an act of trolling at his peak. Most critics had no idea what the fuck to make of him and subsequently wrote him off as a talentless hack who just mugged a lot and trashed shit. I freely confess to total confusion myself. I would, if someone asked me, “Are you a Tom Green fan?” say something like “Dear God, no. Heavens! Thinkst thou me hoi polloi?” without really having more than an out-of-context bit here and there or a trailer, and then see him show up in something like Charlie's Angels or Road Trip and be like “Whoa, that guy with the goatee is funny.” This is what happens when you let critical consensus do your thinking for you, kids.

Freddy Got Fingered, in truth, falls between the two polarities of Roger Ebert's “This movie doesn't scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels . . . The day may come when Freddy Got Fingered is seen as a milestone of neo-surrealism. The day may never come when it is seen as funny” and A.O. Scott calling it “conceptual performance art”and Nathan Rabin declaring it a “borderline Dadaist provocation.” The truth is, Freddy Got Fingered is a movie by a guy trying to be funny, and whether he succeeds or not depends entirely on the audience's sense of decorum or tolerance for non sequiturs and immaturity. A) Just because something doesn't make any sense doesn't mean it's postmodern or Dada or whatever the fuck and B) far as I'm concerned, a chef should have taste, a comedian doesn't have to. That covers that.

The movie has a number of truly inspired and strange sequences. The opening with Tom Green skateboarding through a shopping mall for no apparent reason had me going “What the fuck? There're actually a couple sweet Steadicam shots. Is this . . . a real movie . . .?” The cinematics, the rest of the movie, aren't quite as flashy, but they're still surprisingly solid considering a laundry list of critics called this one of the worst movies ever made.

As for the cast, Tom Green is Tom Green, doing what he does. There's a point with him where you either have to turn the fuckin movie off or surrender to his insanity, because if you don't find him funny, you're not suddenly going to half an hour in. One thing Tom Green the director does that's very wise is make sure that Tom Green the leading man doesn't overwhelm everything; the supporting cast features any number of really solid performances. Harland Williams is pretty funny getting his ass kicked as Tom Green's buddy, and Julie Hagerty is good in the first thing I've seen her in in about 20 years, as Tom Green's mom (who takes Tom Green's advice that she go out and "have sex with basketball players" to heart and ends up shtupping Shaq, in a funny cameo by himself). Anthony Michael Hall is funny as a Hollywood douchebag (it's always fun for actors to play executives and producers, they get out all kinds of long-simmering resentments). Marisa Coughlan plays the love interest who, of course, is a wheelchair-bound amateur rocket scientist with a fetish for being caned on her paralyzed legs who loves giving head; this, of course, is proof that Marisa Coughlan either has a really solid sense of humor or really needed to pay the fuckin rent.

But above all else, Rip Torn is fucking amazeballs off the fucking reservation in this movie. He plays Tom Green's dad, which explains everything. Rip Torn could kick ass in anything, no matter how bad (and has devoted most of his career to proving this point), and when given some snappy text like in Men in Black or The Larry Sanders Show, he makes being awesome seem utterly effortless. Some examples:

Tom Green: Wow . . . it's a LeBaron!
Rip Torn: You bet your boots it's a LeBaron. Fine car. Convertible.

Rip Torn (about Tom Green): Miserable dead beat punk. Paid for his damn college. Sits around all day wacking off. Proud? My ass.

And of course, the scene when he comes in, shitfaced, and starts casually ripping up Tom Green's drawings. Tom Green nuts up and says “Fuck you.” Rip Torn pulls down his pants and starts waving his ass in Tom Green's face and goes, “Fuck me? Sure, go ahead! Fuck me!” This was some of the funniest shit I've seen in years, and if that means I never get to be grown-up pretentious movie critic like the cool kids, so be it.

What makes Rip Torn's performance so great is that he knows exactly what kind of movie he's in. He knows that, enjoyable though it may be in the right mood, you get what you paid for when you watch a picture called Freddy Got Fingered. We are not in hoity-toity land. We're in a movie where you get fucked up on Wild Turkey and wave your ass in Tom Green's face.

As much I enjoyed the movie, and as unapologetic as I am about so doing, there were large chunks I didn't find particularly funny. The notorious scene where Tom Green swings the newborn baby around the room by the umbilical cord? Not all that funny, though it's not offensive either, amazingly. The two women randomly banging tambourines the whole time make it wonderfully bizarre, like a reflection of something that makes sense in a parallel universe.

The role of animals in the movie is a strange one. Tom Green randomly pulls over to the side of the road to jerk off a horse at one point, because, hey, sometimes you have to randomly pull over to jerk off a horse. Then, following Anthony Michael Hall's advice to “get inside the animals” (Tom Green's initial pitch for his cartoon show lacks character depth), Tom Green finds a dead deer in the road and proceeds to gut it and wear its skin while running around Tom Greening. A bunch of other woodland animals serve as the audience surrogate, looking at Tom Green like “What the . . . fuck . . .?”

Overall, Freddy Got Fingered is kind of like a movie a Martian would make if he came to Earth, went to film school somewhere in upstate Ontario, and fell in with heavy acidheads. It follows the basic linear progression of a “normal” movie, except everything in it is as weird as weird gets. Strangely, though, at the end when Tom Green shows up in a helicopter with a bag of jewels and professes his love to Marisa Coughlan on the roof of her building (over the sound of the helicopter; she has to ask him to repeat himself a lot) and she says to him “I don't care about jewels. I just want to suck your cock” it's both pretty funny and oddly endearing. There's a whole bunch of business earlier about how all she ever wants to do is suck his dick, but Tom Green wants to go out on dates and stuff, so that's as close to “I love you” as you're going to get in a picture like this.

In a weird way, even though I rather enjoyed it, I understand why the critics all had to line up and pan the shit out of Freddy Got Fingered. It's indefensible, which is why I haven't been bothering to defend liking it. Real critics, though, have to defend their opinions; “fuck you, I liked it” works here at Movies By Bowes™ but I imagine the Chicago Sun-Times says “okay, lose the 'fuck' and extrapolate a little, wise guy.” I'm not, by any means, getting up in Roger Ebert's shit for not liking this movie; my mom took me to see Breakin' on his advice, for fuck's sake. Roger Ebert's cool. But his sense of humor, like most people's, has lines past which you ain't getting a laugh. The casual violence and the fact that the title is a reference to Tom Green falsely accusing Rip Torn of molesting Tom Green's brother flipped Rog's fuck no switch. I understand that. The evolution of popular culture has created a separation between an act and the idea of that act that's largely dependent on context. Molestation isn't funny. But Tom Green trying to “win” a therapy session by accusing his dad of molesting his brother is. Or, more to the point, it is when Tom Green throws a marble bust out the window for no reason and then jumps out after it.

I do not, the title of this post notwithstanding, feel like I actually got trolled (just as Freddy never actually got fingered). But do I ever want to see Freddy Got Fingered again? Probably not. Unless, of course, the time is right to mix someone else a Fire Island Ice Tea, itself probably the perfect mixological equivalent to this movie: a deeply irresponsible, mind-altering, and entertaining good time that actual mixologists (or cineastes) would find utterly appalling. But, ya know, sometimes you gotta pull over to jerk off a horse. And there's really no resisting inevitability.

WELL, MY NAME IS JIM, BUT MOST PEOPLE CALL ME . . . JIM

I've had Westerns on the brain lately. It should come as no surprise to anyone who frequents this small, bombastic, foul-mouthed corner of the Interwebs that my favorite Westerns are ones that either fuck with the myths or point, giggle, and make fart noises in the direction of those myths. This is partly because one of the cornerstones in the foundation of my theory that evil white guys in suits are going to kill us all comes from the genocide of the Native Americans: evil white guys in suits did kill them all. But it's also partly because anyone who takes him/herself too seriously is gonna get a stern fucking-with from yours truly, and holy shit do people in Westerns take themselves too seriously. This notion that white people needed to own everything from Massachussetts to California because God willed it, bitch please. God's been fucking slipping for a while now; that whole business about coming down to earth in the person of a hippie reform rabbi and trolling the Italians was ill-considered, and it's all been downhill from there.

Speaking of Italians, until Sergio Leone figured out that throwing meticulous wide-screen compositions, Ennio Morricone scores, Clint Eastwood, and Claudia Cardinale into a picture was a recipe for awesome au jus, I wouldn't have really cared about Westerns apart from humming “Deutschland Uber Alles” whenever John Wayne squinted into the camera. Sergio was the reason I started watching John Ford movies and reluctantly admitting they were the tits. But the movie that got me watching retarded run-of-the-mill Westerns was Blazing Saddles.

Blazing Saddles has been one of my favorite movies for just about my entire life. When I was a kid, I liked all the farting and stuff, but I reached a point where I thought watching a whole bunch of Westerns would help me get a few of the subtler jokes. This pretty much led to me wasting a lot of fucking time watching shitty Westerns, and forming the opinion that Blazing Saddles is the single greatest meta-Western of all time.

At his peak, Mel Brooks had the advantage of perfect timing: he was a seasoned comedy-writing veteran, who had the benefit of beginning his career as a movie director at a time when all the old restrictions were disappearing. He also had an impressive knowledge of the history of cinema, and a deft feel for not only written language but cinematic language as well (in this regard, his one equal as a director of movie comedies is Woody Allen).

Before he—ironically, given the inspiration of this post—started taking himself too seriously and making self-indulgent mistakes like casting himself as the lead in High Anxiety, thinking anyone would give a shit about Silent Movie, and getting himself confused with Ernst Lubitsch with the remake of To Be Or Not To Be, Mel Brooks directed three of the finest screen comedies ever: The Producers (the one with Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel, not the awkwardly filmed one with Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane), Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein (which will the subject of its own post sometime).

The Producers certainly Goes There in terms of content (though diluted a bit now, I remember very fondly seeing “Springtime For Hitler” for the first time and going, “Wow, Mel Brooks has fucking balls”) and Young Frankenstein has about a hundred of the funniest one-liners and sight gags ever, but Blazing Saddles is fucking insane. Blazing Saddles is what happens when you take your friend with Asperger's, give him a five-strip of industrial-strength acid, and put him in a Western double-feature with a theater full of Borscht Belt comedians.

Blazing Saddles opens with the evil white guys' field grunts bossing around a bunch of railroad workers (“The way you was lolly-gaggin ya'd think it was a hundred and twenty degrees . . . cain't be much more than a hundred and fourteen! HAHAHAHA!”) before suggesting to the black railroad workers that they could lift morale if they sang a “good ol' nigger work song.”

This is a reminder, if one is required, that this movie was made in 1974, before political correctness. Even by 1974, though, it was a rare picture that came right out and saturation n-bombed as much as Blazing Saddles does, let alone as hilariously.

Anyway, the black railroad workers turn to each other, murmuring “a nigger work song . . .?” before Cleavon Little steps to the front and, hat over heart (and barely keeping a straight face) starts singing “I Get a Kick Out of You” by Cole Porter. The bosses' dudes get pissed, and start teaching the railroad workers a “real” song (“Camptown Races”) before Slim Pickens shows up and empties a couple warning shots of awesome—“What in the wide wide world o' sports is a-goin' on here? I hired you people to try to get a little track laid, not jump around like a bunch of Kansas City faggots!”—before instructing his dudes to check reports that there's some quicksand up ahead of where they're trying to put the railroad, and to not waste horses but rather “send over a coupla niggers.” Cleavon Little and his buddy are selected as the requested advance team, and sure enough there's a big thing of quicksand ahead. Slim Pickens reluctantly saves Cleavon Little and his associate, but not before rescuing the expensive piece of equipment they rode in on. Cleavon Little, not one to take such insults lightly, smacks Slim Pickens over the head with a shovel.

It is thus that villain (Evil? Check. White guy? Check. Suit? Check) Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman) decides that the railroad is going to have to go through idyllic Western everytown Rock Ridge, where everyone's name is Johnson, and where Dmitri Tiomkinesque High Noon-ass music emanates from the very air. The awesome thing about Hedley Lamarr (aside from his name) is that he's too much of a pussy to just declare eminent domain and gank the town. He hatches a scheme, so nefarious, so deliciously wicked, so sensuously evil that he is clearly a movie villain (the real-life evil white guys just said “fuck you” and eminent domained that shit): he will convince the people of Rock Ridge to voluntarily vacate the land so he can buy it cheap. That's not the best part, though. The way he's gonna do this is by appointing Cleavon Little as sheriff.

Cleavon Little, happy to not be hung by the neck until dead for banjaxing Slim Pickens, approaches his new job in style—Gucci saddlebags, Count Basie himself appearing in a cameo to conduct his theme music—only to find that the meek, mild-mannered white townfolk don't like African Americans. OH NOES! He rides into town, in total silence. The fanfare the town had prepared for their new sheriff, abandoned as they gape at Cleavon Little in shock. As he delivers his prepared speech (“Excuse me while I whip this out.” [women scream in terror; he produces a sheet of paper, everyone sighs, kinda disappointed]) they recover and start pointing guns at him, leaving Cleavon Little to improvise some vaudeville minstrel act to distract everyone.

An ally soon presents himself in the form of Gene Wilder (Mel Brooks deserves to be hailed as a god for his selection of a black guy and a Jew as the heroes of his Western, if nothing else; bravo, sir, bra-fucking-vo!), a drunk tank inmate. He turns out to be legendary gunslinger The Waco Kid, and “must have killed more men than Cecil B. DeMille.” (Ed. Note: Cecil B. DeMille is still regarded by purists as the real record holder, as Roland Emmerich's modern-day record was revealed to have been aided by performance enhancing drugs) The Waco Kid turned to drink after being challenged to a gunfight by a little kid. Realizing the folly of his ways, he laid his guns down and walked away. But . . . “Little bastard shot me in the ass!” And from there it was drink.

Cleavon Little tells Gene Wilder about how he came to be out West in a story that manages to make an incredibly profound statement about the history of the American West in the form of a Jewish joke: as his family's wagon train was set upon by Indians, they were spared by Yiddish-speaking Indian chief Mel Brooks (“Shvartzes! Tsayt ist meshuggeh . . .”) who bids them safe passage. Sure it's a funny joke, but like George Bernard Shaw said, when a thing is funny, look for the truth. The Indians kind of were the Jews of North America. The genius here, though, is that rather than getting all somber about it, Mel Brooks goes, “fuck it, what happened to us both was so awful, let's have a laugh.” And that makes the point even better.

After bonding over their pasts, Cleavon Little cleans Gene Wilder up and appoints him to the role of deputy (historical accuracy note: blurry line between law enforcement and criminal in Old West) and soon the two are smoking joints that make Gene Wilder's voice helium squeaky, in what may very well be the best throwaway weed smoking joke in the history of cinema.

Cleavon Little manages to escape being killed by the townspeople, although they still call him the n-word. This leaves Hedley Lamarr to come up with a new, even more nefarious plan: foil Cleavon Little with a white chick. Not just any white chick . . . a German white chick. Madeleine Kahn, as cabaret star Lilli von Shtup.

Yeah, sure that combination of actor and character is fuckup-proof, but holy living shit Madeleine Kahn is hilarious with her Elmer Fudd-in-drag-doing-Dietrich accent. Hedley Lamarr preps her to make sure she's ready to seduce and destroy Cleavon Little, and even though Gene Wilder warns Cleavon Little it could be a trap, he goes backstage into the spider's web anyway. And fucks her brains out. And the next morning, has her wrapped around his finger, helplessly enthralled with his forbidden, exotic sexuality.

At wit's end, Hedley Lamarr demands that Slim Pickens think of something. (This in itself is an indicator of how dire the situation must have been for Hedley . . . asking Slim Pickens to think?) After a round of bean-induced farting—the Odessa steps sequence of fart humor—Slim Pickens' retard right-hand man, the one who tried to teach Cleavon Little how to sing Camptown Races in the beginning, comes up with the idea of sending in monosyllabic strongman Mongo (former football player and future Webster dad Alex Karras). Slim Pickens is in awe of the cruelty of this notion, and sends in Mongo.

Mongo rides into town, scares the fucking shit out of everybody (“Mongo! Santa Maria!”) and, in one of the greatest “Oh shit that is just wrong and I should not be laughing hahahahahahahahahahaha” moments in cinema, knocks a horse unconscious with one punch just because. Cleavon Little has to think quickly, and again resorts to a vaudeville minstrel bit (Mel Brooks knows how to hoist fucked-up traditions on their own petard like nobody's business), blowing Mongo up with a candygram bomb (“The bitch was inventin' the candygram . . . I probably won't even get credit for it . . .”)

Surprisingly, Cleavon Little getting the better of Mongo makes Mongo a fiercely devoted ally, and Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder are able to get some broad strokes of Hedley Lamarr's plan out of Mongo, though details are in short supply, because “Mongo only pawn in game of life.” (historical accuracy note: evil white guys in suits employing and willing to sacrifice physically gifted proletarians to carry out their dastardly will)

After a bit of intelligence gathering by the sheriff's department, it transpires that Hedley Lamarr is raising an army of “rustlers, cutthroats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperadoes, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, half-wits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswagglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass kickers, shit kickers, and Methodists” to tear Rock Ridge a new asshole. The townspeople have by now reluctantly accepted Cleavon Little as a guy who gets things done, but when he comes up with a plan to construct a copy of Rock Ridge to mislead the bad guys—and once all the bad guys are in the fake town, blowing them to hell with dynamite—there's a bit of resistance. Because, part of the plan is that Cleavon Little wants to bring all his old buddies from the railroad to help with the construction. Cleavon Little insists “You'd do it for Randolph Scott.” This point is, of course, uncontestable. Eventually, Olsen Johnson (David “The Big Lebowski” Huddleston) offers a compromise with one of my favorite lines of all time:

“We'll give some land to the niggers and the chinks . . . but we don't want the Irish!”

Cleavon Little refuses to budge, and Huddleston smiles and says “Fuck it, they can stay!” So, having racially harmonized, everyone bands together as one to hornswoggle the baddies. The plan goes pretty well—one anachronistic gag involving a toll booth leads to Slim Pickens' classic “Somebody's gonna have to go back and get a shitload of dimes!”—until the bad guys figure out that the fake Rock Ridge is fake. At this point all hell breaks loose, and a massive fight ensues.

So massive, in fact, that it breaks the fourth wall. This is why Blazing Saddles is holy to me. Mel Brooks takes the trope of the big showdown at the end of the Western and takes it to the most duckfuckingly insane extreme ever. The scruffy Western brawlers accidentally crash through a flimsy wall into the set of a musical being directed by a fabulous (and fabulous) Dom DeLuise. When he gets all up in Slim Pickens' grill about what the fuck he's doing on a closed set, Slim Pickens puts the little poof in his place—“Piss on you, I'm workin' for Mel Brooks!”—and then puts his lights out. The all-male cast is not pleased:

“He hit Buddy! Get him, girls!”

And the fight just gets bigger. It spills into the commissary, right after an actor made up in Hitler says “They lose me right afta the bunka scene” in Noo Yawk-ese. Eventually, Hedley Lamarr runs across the street from the Warner Bros lot and hails a cab, instructing it to “get me off this picture.”

The ultimate showdown between Cleavon Little and Hedley Lamarr takes place at the premiere of Blazing Saddles at Grauman's Chinese (of course), and Cleavon Little shoots Hedley Lamarr in the balls, leaving him time to make one more joke about Hedy Lamarr before expiring.

Back in Rock Ridge (the transition makes perfect sense, somehow), the townspeople are begging Cleavon Little to stay, but he, like all good Western heroes, has to ride off into the sunset. He asks Gene Wilder if he'll ride off into the sunset with him. And so they do. Out to where their limo is waiting for them, and they get off their horses, into the limo, and ride off.

Critics, at the time of Blazing Saddles' release, sniffed that it was vulgar, structurally scattershot, messy, and generally proved themselves to be sticks in the mud. The movie is, indisputably, out of its motherfucking mind, and did inspire a lot of vulgar comedies that weren't as smart or as good, but Blazing Saddles is an unqualified masterpiece, and an essay on the Western every bit as brilliant as Godard's on the gangster picture in Breathless, and Blazing Saddles has a lot more dick and fart jokes than Breathless. That's another thing. For fuck's sake Blazing Saddles invented the fart joke. The best part about fart jokes is that they make uptight film faggots make the “who farted?” face, and you, as a less uptight film faggot, can point out the irony that a fart joke produces, in them, the same result as a fart. And then you can laugh, because farting is funny.

It is a little sad that Mel Brooks later fell off the rails, but before he did he made Young Frankenstein, which holy fucking shit is Young Frankenstein fucking funny. More on that at a later date, but it, Blazing Saddles, and The Producers make up for all the misfires that followed. And then there's Spaceballs, and Spaceballs is special. So that's four of the funniest pictures ever made, and some really funny shit in some of the less perfect ones. Mel Brooks did okay for himself, but Blazing Saddles is the apex. Never before have balls, intellect, a mastery of cinema history and technique, and The Funny met, given each other the finger, rode around on horses, told each other Jewish jokes, and faded into the night quite like they did there.

THE THING WITH THE GUY IN THE PLACE

The first decade of the 21st century will be remembered for a lot of things cinematically—massive budgets, remakes, sequels, filmmaking by casting/marketing calculus; not that any of these things weren't clearly on the horizon or already in place in the 90s, but they became inexorable facts of nature in the 00s—perhaps most notably the discovery that any tentpole series becomes untenable past the third installment. Thus, the trilogy: the Matrix trilogy, the Star Wars prequel trilogy, the Pirates of the Caribbean thing that finally made Johnny Depp Scrooge McDuck rich, Spider-Man, Bourne, et cetera. I've already written about the first two, will never write about the third, probably never the fourth, and definitely will cover the fifth at some point. Today, however, we talk about my (improbable?) favorite of the bunch, the Ocean's series.

All three pictures had really big budgets (mostly actors' salaries), the first one was a remake, they had movie stars out the ying yang, and by those criteria should be the kind of thing I use as a straw man in a glass-of-whiskey-in-hand bellicose soliloquy of doom. And yet.

A big budget isn't inherently a bad thing, as long as you're not wasting money. Assembling a cast of movie stars costs money, as does shooting on location in Vegas. The first one was actually fairly economical, featuring no fewer than four actors with eight-figure rates yet costing “only” $80 mil. Considering that it grossed like $500 mil worldwide, that's not a bad cost-to-profit ratio.

Remakes, too, are not inherently bad things, provided that there's a reason to remake the original picture. I submit that an interesting yet flawed movie is the perfect candidate to be remade, and the original Ocean's Eleven fit that bill perfectly. It was made as a vehicle for the Rat Pack, and its Vegas-themed plot was probably thought up by Frank, Dino, Sammy, and company (or on their behalf) as an excuse to get fucked up in Vegas for a few weeks, since that's what they'd be doing anyway even without a movie. The story was twisty, contained an unfortunate downer when Richard Conte dropped dead (the only time it was okay for Richard Conte to get killed was when he was Barzini, and even then you're more like “holy shit Michael Corleone is cold” rather than “hey, fun”) and ends without them getting away with the money.

When it was announced that Steven Soderbergh was directing a remake, the bunch of Rat Pack purists I was drinking with at the time were all scandalized. “How dare anyone meddle with perfection?” said they. “Uh, Ocean's Eleven sucks,” said I. “Fuck you,” said they. “Fuck you,” said I. And so forth. But from the start I was optimistic. Partly because I've always been a Steven Soderbergh fan, since before I even knew what a director did (and because Out of Sight proved fucking A that man can direct a movie star picture) and partly because, I'll admit, I'm a sucker for the right movie star. George Clooney? No defense. Brad Pitt? Even less. Julia Roberts? She seems so nice. Matt Damon? Hell, I'd let him bust my balls about being a Yankee fan. Andy Garcia? Andy Garcia was in The fucking Untouchables, okay? Bernie Mac, Don Cheadle, Elliott Gould, Carl Reiner . . . okay, now you're cheating with the character actors. I love character actors even more than movie stars, but both at once is like a shot and a beer.

It occurred to me in one of my more solipsistic moments that the Ocean's movies could have been made for me personally (actually, in that—very high—moment while watching Ocean's Twelve, it occurred to me that they were made for me personally, but that's one of the reasons I don't do the weed anymore). And that's the perfect blockbuster, something that makes you and tens of millions of other people all feel like it was made just for you. And that's why I surrender to Hollywood and say “Well played, old chap, you take this round; my artsy-fartsy little crypto-French auteur pictures that I want to make will show you someday,” and Hollywood twirls its moustache at me and ripostes “Foolish Earthling, Steven Soderbergh makes artsy-fartsy little crypto-French auteur pictures and he works for us now . . . mwahahahahahahahahaha!”

So then, the trilogy:


Eleven

Danny Ocean (George Clooney; and yes, I am enough of a dork/homo that George Clooney playing a character named Danny makes me all blushy and “oh, stop”) gets released from prison and paroled, under the condition that he engage in no criminal acts. Clooney keeps quiet and immediately goes to bother blackjack dealer Frank Catton (Bernie Mac) at work to ask him where Brad Pitt is, and Bernie's like, “Uh oh, I know what this means, a job is afoot.” Which indeed it is.

Clooney finds a bored and frustrated Brad teaching a bunch of TV actors (playing themselves) how to play cards. Clooney hustles the actors out of a few hundred in pocket change and pitches Brad on the idea—we're gonna rip off three Vegas casinos. Brad is vaguely nonplussed, and pieces it together that they're Terry Benedict's (Andy Garcia's) places.

Clooney: You think he'll mind?
Brad: More than somewhat.

See, the observant student of history will note (as Elliott Gould later does) that ripping off a Vegas casino has a fairly high difficulty curve. But observant cineastes will note that fucking with Andy Garcia is fucking retarded. However, observant scholars of masculinity will note that fucking retarded acts are both what make us men and furthermore are awesome, which Brad realizes as he assents (the $150 million is but icing on the cake). He does insist that Clooney exercise some caution, and recruit a large crew—

“—running a combination of cons. Off the top of my head, I'd say you're looking at a Boesky, a Jim Brown, a Miss Daisy, two Jethros, and a Leon Spinks, not to mention the biggest Ella Fitzgerald . . . ever.” (Ed. Note: Brad admits on the commentary track “I have no idea what I'm talking about right there.”)

And the first stage of the picture is given over to the assembly of the crew. First, finance. Here we run into what at first appears to be a plot hole, to wit: in order to rip off $150 million from a Vegas casino, you probably need to spend a massive amount of money in order to do the job right. Two important points obliterate this argument: first, that it's not about the money (it's about revenge, partly, but mostly because a very important element of the male psyche is doing something because you can, and when added with the adrenaline rush attendant to doing something totally fucking retarded, you have a win-win-win situation) and second, what do you, not want to watch a movie about a bunch of guys ripping of a Vegas casino? Fuck off back to your documentaries about soybean farming.

Elliott Gould, as rich guy Ruben Tishkoff, who “owes” Clooney and Brad from “the thing with the guy in the place” (a debt that can, of course, never properly be repaid) is awesome, and reminds our intrepid antiheroes that no one ever successfully ripped off a Vegas casino (in a monologue told in three hilarious flashbacks) before assuring them:

You guys are pros. The best. I'm sure you can make it out of the casino. Of course, lest we forget, once you're out the front door, you're still in the middle of the fucking desert!

Clooney and Brad pretend to be chastened and head out, before “accidentally” letting it slip that it's Andy Garcia that they're planning to rip off. Since Andy Garcia muscled Elliott Gould out of Vegas, torpedoed his casinos, and other assorted rudeness, Elliott Gould immediately signs on.

With funding, the most important element, in place, they assemble the rest of the crew. Bernie Mac is already in (to infiltrate as a dealer), so they need to recruit someone who knows how to blow shit up (Don Cheadle, sporting a goofball Mockney accent and a lot of rhyming slang) a con man who's “the best . . . [he's] in Cooperstown” (Carl Reiner, who you better fucking believe is in Cooperstown), two rednecks to cause disturbances (C-Fleck and Scott Caan, who somehow manage to never be annoying in a majestic feat of thespianism), an electronics guy (Eddie Jemison, a movie star due to the fact that he made it through Schizopolis with a straight face), a “grease man” (acrobat Shaobo Qin), and because “you think we need one more? Okay, we'll get one more,” Matt Damon, an ace pickpocket who's the son of an operator Clooney and Brad know and respect.

The team now recruited, we head to Vegas and Clooney lays out the specifics of the plan. Here, another major criticism of the movie, that its central premise is horseshit: Vegas casinos are not required to keep enough cash on hand to cover every bet in play. They keep as little cash around as possible precisely so a bunch of assholes don't show up and rip them off. There's no getting around this fact. However, the kind of person who points such things out probably gets a boner telling kids there's no Santa Claus, which of course means by the transitive property that if you care that the central premise of Ocean's Eleven is bullshit, you're a sadistic pedophile. Glad to help!

Once in Vegas, banter ensues as our merry band of rogues prepares to ram it to Andy Garcia. In the course of preparation, Brad Pitt discovers Clooney's real motivation: Andy Garcia is shtupping Julia Roberts. Julia Roberts is Clooney's ex-wife. Danny Ocean is making it personal, instead of keeping it strictly business. Clooney tries to convince Brad that his primary motivation is the money (and testicular grandeur, naturally) but Brad gets worried and 86s Clooney from his own plan, installing nervous novice Matt Damon in his place. But it turns out that was all just a pretense to get Matt Damon's mind on the job, and he passes the test with flying colors.

The actual heist is incredibly elaborate, really well filmed and edited, total edge-of-your-seat stuff with very few—if any—elements that induce “get the fuck out of here” facepalms. It of course resolves with Ocean's eleven making off with over $150 million, and Andy Garcia accidentally confessing his love of money is greater than his love of Julia Roberts over closed-circuit TV, which means not only does Clooney get the money, he also gets the girl. Which, ultimately, is why one does anything.

Ocean's Eleven, however ambiguous the ending, wherein it's made clear that Andy Garcia's guys are following Clooney and Julia Roberts, is nonetheless about as perfect a Hollywood movie as you can get in this day and age. The one false note is, sadly, Julia Roberts. She's a little clunky with the banter, and the shot where Matt Damon goes “This is just the best part of my day,” where she's walking through the lobby of the hotel isn't as dazzling as it should be. Because the reason Julia Roberts became a movie star in the first place was because she was kind of endearingly awkward, and the part she plays here requires an old-fashioned movie star, not her new-school version. That being said, she's not bad (she certainly doesn't fuck anything up), she's just not perfect like everything else.


Twelve

So. How to follow up a perfect Hollywood movie, one of the five best remakes ever, a massive hit, and a story with a clear resolution; what are they gonna do, rob Andy Garcia again? Initially, Clooney and Soderbergh were like, no way we're doing a sequel. They went off and said, hey, we remade Ocean's Eleven, that worked, let's go remake a Tarkovsky picture! I was one of about three people who liked their Solaris, but we were also about half the people who bought tickets to it. It was also pretty expensive, even for a relatively inexpensive SF picture, so when it flopped, Clooney looked at Soderbergh and said, “Hey, remember that crack I made a couple years ago about making Ocean's Twelve? Well . . . um . . . we kinda need to make some money.”

Soderbergh was cranky. He wanted to do little experimental pictures like Bubble and big experimental pictures like The Good German. So he bought a spec heist script George Nolfi had written with the intent of selling to John Woo and had Nolfi rewrite it for the Ocean's ensemble. A large reason for picking that particular script was so they could shoot in Europe so Clooney could hang out at his place in Italy and so Brad had easy access to Amsterdam to see how much weed he could smoke before they had to CG out the red from his eyes. In this regard—the reluctance, so many symptoms of creative laziness—it was shaping up to be a typical sequel.

Except another facet of Soderbergh's crankiness was “if the fucking studio system won't permit me, fiscally, to direct the experimental pictures I want to, I'm going to shove an experimental picture up their fucking ass on their dime.” Which is why Ocean's Twelve is one of the most underrated Hollywood movies ever made. It takes the theme from Eleven about the heist not necessarily being the whole picture and runs with it, resulting in a “heist” movie where the crew is foiled in their first heist, pulls a minor second one out of pique, and all get thrown in jail while pulling the main one. They never profit from any of the jobs (and most of them, hilariously, already blew most of their profit from the first movie, and Brad's actually about $12 mil in debt).

On one level, Twelve actually is what all the critics accused it of being: an excuse for the cast to get together, hang out in Europe, and get paid a shitload of money for it. But, check this out: the movie itself is the heist. None of them really wanted to do a sequel for any reason other than getting to hang out together—the original Rat Pack 1960 one was made as an excuse for the cast to hang out, you'll recall—so, why not blatantly make that the raison d'etre behind the sequel, and soak Warner Bros for another $110 mil? Soderbergh gets to fuck around with his non-linear structure and kind of-sort of remake Full Frontal for a hundred times the budget, Clooney gets to hang out at his house, Brad gets to smoke the whole cast up all the time, people like Vincent Cassel and Jeroen Krabbe get to make some Hollywood bank, and in spite of all that it's still fun to watch (my one caveat is that it doesn't get good til the second viewing; the first time I saw it I fuckin hated it).

The plot: Andy Garcia has found Ocean's eleven (him going around and dropping in on the crew serves as the intro this time) and is giving them a deadline to pay back what they stole. The crew, now that word is out about the Vegas job, is “too hot” to work anywhere in sweet home Estados Unidos, and so their only option is to go to Amsterdam (yeah, it's contrived, but I don't give a fuck).

In Amsterdam, Robbie Coltrane gives them a job, in a scene where he, Clooney, and Brad speak in non sequiturs, and poor Matt Damon, not knowing what the hell is going on, recites the first verse of “Kashmir” only to have Clooney and Brad pull him outside and tell him that he mortally insulted Robbie Coltrane's 7-year-old niece. Clooney and Brad go back in and “smooth things out” and the job turns out to be for a mere fraction of their debt to Andy Garcia, which leads to a bit of disgruntled banter and speaking in code to troll Matt Damon (trolling Matt Damon is probably the second-most prominent plot thread in the movie) before they get down to work ripping off agoraphobic antiques collector Jeroen Krabbe.

HOWEVA, when they do, they find an mp3 player with a message on it from a trash-talking Frenchman who identifies himself as the “Night Fox” and leaves a small fox figurine as a memento. They find out that this Night Fox is basically the European version of them: ballsy, slick, fucking amazingly talented, with an Old World hint of mysticism about him. And guess who the world's leading expert on the Night Fox is? Brad's old girlfriend, Europol agent Catherine Zeta-Jones!

Yep, just like Clooney in the first picture, Brad arranges the job so he can cherchez his femme. And yes, normally ripping off the same idea as the first movie for the sequel is stupid, but here it's not, for one simple reason: Catherine Zeta-Jones is fucking staggeringly beautiful.

Just LOOK AT HER. Oh my God that scene in Traffic where she goes “Get out of the car, and shoot him in the head!” That scene in Entrapment where she's slinking through the laser field in that vinyl catsuit! (Both of which are relevant here: the Soderbergh connection from Traffic, and the scene in Entrapment is homaged later. No shit.) Catherine. Just like Sean Connery said when he gave her her Oscar for Chicago. “Catherine.” All true penitents, genuflect now.

Anyway. So yeah, the point is, even Brad Pitt is like, “Man, I shouldn'ta let that one get away” and launches his convoluted plan to get her back. Which is “complicated” by the fact that the Night Fox (Vincent Cassel) contacts the crew to inform them that the reason he ripped off Jeroen Krabbe before they could get to it was because some American asshole (played by producer Jerry Weintraub) told the Night Fox's mentor, Lemarcq (the greatest thief in the world) that the Ocean's crew had pulled off the greatest job of all time. Vincent Cassel is not happy with the idea that anyone could be considered better than him, and so he proposes that they prove who's the best by both setting out to steal the same thing, a priceless Faberge egg that Lemarcq once stole but his wife made him give back. Clooney's like “what the fuck is this shit? Not only is this asshole living in my house [Vincent Cassel's Lake Como pad in the movie is Clooney's IRL] but this is the dumbest fucking idea ever.” Only when Vincent Cassel offers to pay off the debt to Andy Garcia if Clooney et al manage to get the egg first does Clooney say, okay.

While they plan the job, they have to assume Vincent Cassel is watching/listening/some combination thereof at all times, so they're a little limited. They contact Eddie Izzard (ah, Eddie Izzard . . . words cannot express how much you rule) to make them a holographic version of the egg, and they fuck around and half of them get arrested by Catherine, leaving Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, and Scott Caan the only ones on the outside. They meet, and Matt Damon tries to call the proceedings to order, prompting a line from Scott Caan that (for personal reasons) I absolutely love:

“Who died and made you Danny?”

Once they sort out the chain of command, Matt Damon comes up with an idea. Danny Ocean's wife Tess has, previously, had it said “Have you ever noticed she looks like . . .?” before someone cuts in and goes “Yeah, but she hates it when you say that” or some such. Matt Damon decides to use the fact that she looks like _____ _______ to their advantage, so they fly Tess to Italy.

Whereupon they call the hotel and tell them that Julia Roberts is arriving. Yes. Julia Roberts, as Tess Ocean, is pretending to be Julia Roberts for the con. You have no idea how fucking happy this makes me. A Hollywood movie that cost $110 million, and they decided to break the Guinness world record for meta. Can I get a hell yes?

Julia/Tess/Julia lands in Rome and has Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, and Scott Caan pelt her with trivia they've heard about “Julia Roberts,” and she has second thoughts.

Julia/Tess/Julia: It's just wrong!
Matt Damon: You mean . . . morally?

(That last, by the way, is the finest moment of Matt Damon's acting career.)

Then, complication arrives in the person of Bruce Willis, playing a decidedly chick-crazy and skeptical version of himself. Julia/Tess/Julia manages to keep the charade going just enough to get everyone to the museum, where it's been arranged for “Julia Roberts” to view the Faberge egg under Catherine's vehement protests. But Catherine's watching over the security camera and sees them swipe the egg, so she swoops in and blows up Julia/Tess/Julia's spot by asking for an autograph that Tess signs with the wrong hand, revealing her to not be Julia. Bruce Willis, thoroughly impressed, tries to pick Catherine up as our heroes are led out in handcuffs, though she's having none of it (despite being determined to lock him up forever, her heart belongs only to Brad).

An American fed (Cherry Jones) turns up to interrogate the crew, starting with Matt Damon. She gets him to “rat” everyone out . . . only to reveal in the cop car on the way out that she's his mom! Leading to the second-finest moment of Matt Damon's acting career:

“You told dad?”

BAHAHAHAHAHAHA! So Cherry Jones hustles everyone off the cops' radar, and Catherine (having been fired for falsifying her paperwork) follows in hot pursuit, only to find Brad waiting by a Learjet. He tells her her father (a thief she's long presumed dead, the reason she became a cop) is still alive and waiting for her. She gets on the plane with him.

Cut to Clooney and Julia dropping in on Vincent Cassel. Clooney asks him, “How'd you do it?” and Vincent Cassel answers, well, I snuck past your surveillance team (C-Fleck and Scott Caan, bickering and not noticing anything) to get into the museum. Clooney's like . . . okay, that makes sense. But how the fuck did you get past the laser field in the great hall (i.e. the reason Clooney and company didn't break in themselves)?

Vincent Cassel's answer: I put on my headphones, bumped some French hip-hop, and did capoeira through the randomly moving lasers. Observe. (Yes, that's Vincent Cassel doing his own dubbing into French. He actually, before he got big, was famous in France for dubbing Hugh Grant, in an irrelevant but mildly amusing aside.)

Now, a lot of people thought that scene was stupid. Those people can eat a dick. That scene is fucking awesome. Not only is it awesome, not only does Vincent Cassel's little Gene Kelly kick at the end of the thing put the perfect capper of “even though I don't have an audience, I nonetheless feel the need to show how effortless that was” on the proceedings . . . it's a fucking homage to Entrapment! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!! Of all the movies you never thought you'd see an homage to. Entrapment. Oh, man. If I ever meet Steven Soderbergh and/or Vincent Cassel, they're getting a big hug for this scene.

So, after all that, Clooney says to him, “So pay me my money.” Vincent Cassel goes, no, you don't get it, fils d'une putain américaine, that's if you won. You lost. Clooney just folds his arms and smiles his “I'm a bigger movie star than you are, junior” smile. And Vincent Cassel realizes, shit, he's a bigger movie star than I am. And we flash back to Clooney and Brad meeting with Lemarcq like five seconds after they found out who the Night Fox was. Lemarcq tells them that Vincent Cassel is going to propose a wager over the egg, so they have to steal it first (and naturally, give it to Lemarcq, who having stolen it first is the rightful owner, of course). And so we see that the whole fucking thing where they move the egg on a truck with a motorcade is a smokescreen and the way the egg really moves is some French hipster with a backpack taking the train. Matt Damon, carrying an identical backpack, gets on the train and sits close by. Clooney and Scott Caan stage a fight (over wearing Yankees and Red Sox hats, a scene that, hilariously, was shot a day or two after the Yankees and Red Sox had a bench-clearing brawl in real life) and Matt Damon swipes the egg, replacing it with a replica, that was the item Vincent Cassel stole. Devastated, Vincent Cassel kicks them out.

Cut back to Brad (who has the egg) and Catherine. They're arriving at a friend of Brad's place.

Catherine: What's his name?
Brad: I don't know, actually. I've only ever known him as [dramatic pause] Lemarcq.

And Catherine's like holy shit. Because Lemarcq is her father. This whole thing was about Brad reuniting Catherine with her father so they could reconcile; the fact that she'd naturally be grateful and fall back in love with Brad as a result is of secondary importance at best. Now, a lot of people felt ripped off when they realized that this was the whole point of the movie, that the whole picture, in fact, was one giant con, on several different metatextual levels. Not me. As a serious intellectual and a committed troll, that kind of thing is a fucking Christmas present for me.

So we all live happily ever after. Long live Ocean's Twelve!


Thirteen

Once again, Clooney and Soderbergh had a flop (The Good German) trying to be all artsy, so once again they said, “Fuck, is this the only thing either of us knows how to make that'll make money?” This time they went about things slightly differently. For one, no one aside from me, my mom, Bryan Enk, and the odd person I meet every couple years or so actually liked Ocean's Twelve, so they decided to make Thirteen as an apology to all those dullards, killjoys, and all manner of other civilians who squinted, bucktoothed, and whined “I don't get it” when they watched Twelve.

Thirteen's good too (though it's not as good as Catherine Hardwicke's Thirteen, a whole different brand of vodka, to paraphrase Clooney in Eleven) but it has more than a few signs of Advanced Sequel Retardation (recycled tropes, a lot of the characters being in the movie just because they were in the first two, a total betrayal of everything awesome about Vincent Cassel in Twelve, etc etc). It's entertaining, but unlike the first two, it has no claim to be anything other than fluff. Not that there's anything wrong with fluff. (See what I did there? I recycled an old joke, from Seinfeld. And it wasn't funny. The prosecution against unnecessary sequels rests.)

The story concerns nouveaux riche fuckface Al Pacino (clearly enjoying himself) screwing over Elliott Gould in a business deal, causing Elliott Gould to have a heart attack, and the crew to drop everything and reunite by his hospital bed. And, of course, plot revenge against Al Pacino by ripping off his brand-new, state-of-the-art casino. That is, of course, impossible to rip off. Unless, of course, you can fake an earthquake and sneak a magnet into the CPU that runs all the security systems in the place, and rig every game in the place so that they can win non-stop for however long it takes until the computer reboots. Which, of course, costs a lot of money. Thus, inevitably, they have to go, hat in hand to Andy Garcia to help.

Everything progresses with a crisp, economical pace, partly because Julia and Catherine were too busy to show up and do annoying cameos as the girl trying to talk the guy out of doing WHAT MEN MUST DO (Ocean's Thirteen was written by the guys who wrote Rounders, saved from being the worst Annoying Girlfriend movie of all time solely by Matt Damon not ending up with Gretchen Mol at the end; allegedly Gretchen Mol's whole character in that was due to Harvey Weinstein telling them “write a part for Gretchen Mol because I'm fucking her” and them reluctantly agreeing and “inadvertently” turning her into the most annoying pointless character of all time . . . this is just what I heard, it might not be true, but if it is, that makes the absence of girlfriends resonate a bit . . .) Al Pacino and Ellen Barkin are both fun, though Ellen Barkin looks like she ended up on the wrong end of a plastic surgery accident at some point (this actually makes the subplot where Matt Damon seduces her to get access to some room where something they have to steal is a little sad).

It ends exactly like it should, with Al Pacino in disgrace, Elliott Gould avenged, and our protagonists very rich. The very last scene is a nice touch—David Paymer, having played a hotel critic whom our heroes tormented so he'd pan Al Pacino's hotel, takes Brad's advice that he play a particular slot machine in the airport that Brad just rigged and wins an eight-figure jackpot. And so, despite a lot of lazy shit and a whole lotta jokey-jokes, Ocean's Thirteen caps off the trilogy with some goodwill.

Despite its flaws, I think the Ocean's trilogy is something Hollywood can (and should) learn from. They're proof that movie star pictures don't have to be fucktarded, don't need all kinds of ginormous special effects, and that you can fuck around and make an art picture that still functions as a movie star picture. The first, at least, is as good a heist picture as you're ever going to see (I mean, it pales in comparison to The Killing or Reservoir Dogs, but so does every other heist picture ever made), the sequel is just fucking beautiful, and the third one is the single best unnecessary sequel ever made (narrowly edging Lethal Weapon 4). And it can all be summed up by the following exchange between Al Pacino and Clooney:

Al Pacino: This town might have changed, but not me. I know people highly invested in my survival, and they are people who really know how to hurt in ways you can't even imagine.
Clooney: Well, I know all the guys that you'd hire to come after me, and they like me better than you.

That's the Ocean's gang in a nutshell. They know everyone, everyone knows them and everyone likes them. You know. Movie stars.