DASHIELL HAMMETT IN PICTURES

"Hammett was the ace performer... He is said to have lacked heart; yet the story he himself thought the most of [The Glass Key] is the record of a man's devotion to a friend. He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before." ---Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder

Dashiell Hammett was born 117 years ago today. Completely aside from setting the bar impossibly high in the "write what you know" stakes (seriously, dude was a fucking Pinkerton agent before retiring to write crime novels drawn largely from his real-life experiences, that's just unfair for the rest of us), and being married to Lillian Hellman (herself a chronicler of her own massively badass feats), Dashiell Hammett gave much to the cinema. First, the obvious:




John Huston's The Maltese Falcon, one of the greatest movies ever made and one of the most important progenitors of film noir, was the third version made of Hammett's third novel (numerology hippies are advised to shut the fuck up, but quelle coincidence, non?). The other two, the Ricardo Cortez one and the Bette Davis one, are pretty good, but the Humphrey Bogart/Mary Astor/Peter Lorre/Sydney Greenstreet one sings. It captures the feel of Hammett's book perfectly, and that feel is fucking awesome.

Hammett's fourth novel, The Glass Key, has an equally impressive cinematic legacy. There were a couple direct adaptations made that were okay, but Akira Kurosawa really got shit crackin' with his unofficial adaptation, Yojimbo (often incorrectly called an adaptation of Hammett's first novel, Red Harvest):




One of the great classics of world cinema, Yojimbo makes the very intelligent decision to feature Toshiro Mifune owning the crap out of people with samurai swords, and while most of that is Kurosawa, he himself always attributed the Hammett influence.

Then, legendarily, Yojimbo begat A Fistful of Dollars, wherein Sergio Leone made the incredibly wise decision to make Clint the star:




Clint is Clint, and this was the first picture where it was made clear that Clint is Clint, and is thus historically very important, and while the reflected glory on Hammett is small by percentage, its albedo was fucking blinding, so take another bow, Mr. Hammett.

The Glass Key inspired another cinematic classic, this one based far more closely on the source material. I speak of course of Miller's Crossing.




While still more inspired by than a direct adaptation of The Glass Key, Miller's Crossing nonetheless captures the period atmosphere perfectly, and features original dialogue every bit Hammett's equal (and Hammett was one of the gods).

Hammett's last novel would inspire one of the most deliriously fun movies ever made (and several almost-as-enjoyable sequels), The Thin Man.




Nick and Nora Charles are fucking rad. The degree to which they're based on Hammett and Hellman is debatable, but the degree to which they rule is not. Sure they dress beautifully and can drink any mammal discovered by science under the table, but the greatest thing about them as a couple was that they were both massively in love (emotionally and physically, though the degree to which the latter was permitted to be shown was limited by censors) AND, most impressively, actually liked each other. It's a vividly portrayed relationship, beautifully written by Hammett, perfectly adapted by the filmmakers, and wonderfully played by William Powell and Myrna Loy.

Hammett spent most of the last three decades of his life involved in politics rather than writing. As a real-life character, he was interesting enough to inspire a not-bad fanfic novel called Hammett by Joe Gores that was turned into a not-as-not-bad Wim Wenders picture (like with most Wim Wenders pictures, the degree to which it doesn't suck depends on how much you like Wim Wenders). And then, in Julia, the 1977 movie adaptation of part of Lillian Hellman's Pentimento, Dashiell Hammett was played by the one, the only, Jason Robards.




Here's to Dashiell Hammett. Writer, activist, mensch. One of a kind.

"DO I LOOK FIFTY TO YOU?" "ONLY FROM THE NECK....UP....?"

Happy 50th birthday to George Clooney: actor, writer, director, producer, activist, lover of many women, envy of many men. A lot of people will tell you I'm nuts/retarded for claiming his two best pictures are Ocean's Twelve and The American, and they'll be right too, since his best picture (so far) is Out of Sight. Whatever the truth may be, let's raise a glass. It's sure been a long time since he woke up from that hangover in the ER pilot and every [straight] woman [and a lot of the gay men] in America went "Hello . . . what's this, then?" And damn near all of it's been great. Except for fucking Batman. But hey, can ya really blame the guy?

Peace, George.

YOU'RE ASKING ME FOR INCEPTION

A while back, I posed the question: Can Christopher Nolan direct? It was semi-rhetorical; he's made a handful of fairly interesting pictures, which have a distinct tone (dark and brooding with moments of pretty sharp humor), the specifics of which mark a picture as his. The open-ended nature of that post, though was attributable both to sleeplessness—I passed out for about a day and a half right after clicking “Publish Post” and fixed the typos later—and to the fact that Chris' latest joint hadn't dropped yet. But now it has, so pull up a computer and let's shoot the breeze.

This afternoon I saw Inception in a packed house at BAM, with friend of the blog YarnGuy and his brother and sister-in-law. It's been a long time since I got as stoked about a new picture as this one. I'd heard it was great. I'd heard it was awesome (there's a difference). I'd heard it was disappointing. I'd heard it was a masterpiece that would save us all. One of my pet theories about pop culture is that if people are arguing, it's worth seeing. Another one is, if people aren't giving away whatever secrets a movie may have, it's really worth seeing. Brief digression: 'member when The Crying Game came out back in '92, and you sorta kinda knew what the twist was, but cats wouldn't tell you about Jaye Davidson's dick at first and told you “Ya gotta see it for yourself?” The Crying Game was fucking awesome. Now, recall The Sixth Sense. People didn't start openly talking about Bruce Willis being dead the whole time for about six months. Now, sticking with M. Night, check the flipside of that shit: everyone walked out of The Village loudly moaning their fucking balls off about how it all took place in the present day and saying “what were those assholes supposed to do when a plane flew overhead?” The less willing people are to blab a picture's surprises, the better it probably is, and the more people are like “GAH RUN FOR YOUR LIVES! THE ALIENS MELT WHEN YOU THROW WATER ON THEM! DO NOT WANT!” you can infer that the movie sucks.

The thing that's been funny to me about Inception is that in this modern age, with leaks and spoilers lurking around every tree in the forest that is the Interwebs, no one has been talking about what actually happens in Inception. We saw the trailers (not to put too fine a point on it, but I haven't needed porn for weeks), we read little teases like “Leo DiCaprio plays a guy who can break into people's minds while they're dreaming,” we saw the cast and went “Holy fucking shit, is everybody in this?” But very little actual “this happens and then this happens and then it ends like this” type of stuff came out. Since it opened, sure, the plot synopsis has been posted. The above mentioned obligatory swipe at M. Night isn't really applicable, as Inception doesn't really have his lame-o type of twist. But it still is the sort of picture that spoilers would fuck up, so if you haven't seen the picture yet, bookmark this post until you have, then scroll down past this picture of Marion Cotillard and continue.

Inception opens with an arresting visual image (woo hoo! Chris is learning!) and some intriguing non sequiturs, like a Japanese guy with a machine gun poking an ocean-bedraggled (and armed) Leo DiCaprio in the back and hollering at him. He drags Leo in to talk to Ken Watanabe, who's under about eighty-five layers of age makeup that make him look like Andy Garcia in Dead Again. Ken Watanabe asks Leo, “Are you here to kill me?”

Then we flash back to how Leo and Ken Watanabe met. There's Joseph Gordon-Levitt with slicked-down hair and some fucking bangin' threads. There's Leo lookin sharp. Hmm, there's Marion Cotillard. Oh, Marion Cotillard, you know how to make oblique, ambiguous dialogue sing, baby. (In what might be a funny deliberate touch, “Non, je ne regrette rien” repeats over and over in the movie.) Leo and Joe pull some James Bond shit, and Leo gains entry to Ken Watanabe's safe . . . but they're all dreaming. Joe wakes up in an apartment somewhere in the Middle East with an angry mob fucking shit up outside and tells Lukas Haas they might have a problem.

Leo is vexed by Ken Watanabe and Marion Cotillard before he can get the document he needs. Bullets fly, shit starts exploding because they're in the Middle East, and eventually they have to wake Leo up, so they toss him in a bathtub (in a fucking hot slow-mo shot), which causes water to come in all over the place in the dream.

Once everyone wakes up in the Middle East, Ken Watanabe pulls some heat, but Leo pins him to the ground, whereupon Ken Watanabe's face is mashed into the carpet, and he calls out Lukas Haas. The carpet is supposed to be wool, which makes Ken Watanabe realize he's in a dream (the whole thing with the safe was a dream within a dream), which means Lukas Haas fucked up. So, Leo and company have to get themselves out of that dream, which they do, and find themselves on a train in Japan with a still-asleep Ken Watanabe. They make their exit.

Leo, in his hotel room, talks to his kids on the phone, revealing his kids as a random pair of kids he saw in the opening scene, and when they ask when mommy's coming home, he has to tell them she's not. Because mommy is Marion Cotillard, the mysterious broad from Leo's dreams. And she's dead.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt shows up looking awesome (this is the biggest surprise in this movie: when in the sweet living fuck did Joseph Gordon-Levitt turn into the coolest motherfucker in the universe? I mean, Brick and The Lookout were both great, but wow this sonofabitch is wearing tailored suits and firing guns and all kinds of crap now . . . they grow up so fast!) and there's a bit of terse dialogue about how the Cobalt (sp?) Corporation is going to want them dead now and about how Leo can't go back to the States for Unspoken Mysterious Reasons. They go up to the roof to find their chopper . . . where Ken Watanabe is sitting there chilling with an ass-kicked Lukas Haas, who has given Leo up to the Cobalt Corporation (who we're left to safely assume are evil white guys in suits), so Ken Watanabe does the whole Kyle Reese-as-a-Japanese-plutocrat “come with me if you want to live” routine, so Leo and Joe say, hey, sure.

On the chopper ride, Ken Watanabe pitches an idea to them. Usually, what Leo and team do is “extraction,” breaking into people's minds to steal information (somewhere William Gibson is watching with his lawyers saying, “Wait, let's watch the rest of the movie . . . if it's good, I won't sue.”) But what Ken Watanabe wants to do is called “inception,” which is to say, breaking into someone's mind to plant an idea. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, being the pragmatic dude who gets Leo's haunted, unstable ass out of trouble, scoffs, says inception is impossible. Ken Watanabe ignores him, turns to Leo, and says, “If you can pull this off, I can make one phone call and all your problems are gone and you can go home to your kids.” Leo replies, “You know, now that you mention it, it is possible but it's going to be really fucking difficult and we might not make it out alive, but what the hell? We're only twenty minutes into the movie and we've got two-plus hours to go, we got some time to kill, let's give it a try.”

Because this is for all practical purposes, all the SF shit about dreams vs. reality and the dangerous power of the subconscious aside, a heist movie (I could seriously hug Chris Nolan) they need to assemble a team. They need a slick-talking English con man/forger/thief, so they get Tom Hardy, who was in Layer Cake and Rocknrolla and a bunch of other stuff (who broke my fucking Geiger counter he's so radioactively fucking cool in this). Lukas Haas flaked on them (Ken Watanabe, when Leo asks what's going to happen to him, says ominously “Nothing”) so they need a new “architect,” someone to physically construct the world of the dream. Leo drops in on his dad (Michael Caine, bow yer 'eads in rev'rence) who's a professor of some non-specified but relevant subject and asks him if he has any promising students. Michael Caine busts Leo's balls a bit and then introduces him to Ellen Page, which by the way, it's really good to see Ellen Page in something watchable again, that two-thirds of Juno that didn't suck was a long time ago now. She gets very excited at the possibilities when Leo tells her about building dreamscapes, and wary when Leo warns her about not changing too much (all the extras in the dream turn and glare at you in this really creepy way when you do; another really fuckin cool visual idea for our Chris . . . again, they grow up so fast). Ellen Page immediately realizes that there's something not all right about Leo, that his fixation on Marion Cotillard and their kids—and the inherent instability of his mind being haunted by guilt—is going to fuck everything up.

But, because what they're trying to do is making Joseph Gordon-Levitt's blood pressure go up and might make him shvitz up one of the fucking jaw-dropping suits he wears in this (and we can not have that) Tom Hardy brings in a chemist he knows, Yusef (Dileep Rao, from Drag Me To Hell and Avatar) who has this tailored sedative that they can use on their mark. So he comes aboard and they start to prep.

Part of the prep involves a bit of exposition involving the dream-reality. Joseph Gordon-Levitt explains to Ellen Page that if you keep one small item that only you ever touch on you (so you're the only one who knows its weight and feel) you can figure out whether you're in your own dream or someone else's. Suddenly that spinning top Leo's been nervously fucking with for the whole movie makes (a little) sense . . .

Now, the mark. Ken Watanabe tells them that the mind they're all going to be breaking into belongs to evil white guy manque Cillian Murphy, son of dying evil white guy Pete Postlethwaite, who with the help of hench-evil white guy Tom Berenger (who's all of a sudden really fucking old . . . man, next time I watch Major League when I'm drunk I'm going to cry) is essentially going to have a monopoly on energy. Not just oil. Energy. The stakes are that high. Ken Watanabe wants them to make Cillian Murphy wake up one morning and decide to sell off Pete Postlethwaite's empire piece by piece, thus obviating the sinister hegemony that would otherwise follow.

Leo determines that the way they need to make sure the idea sticks when they plant it in Cillian Murphy's mind is for it to have a positive association, so having Cillian Murphy decide to do this to fuck over his old man who he hates won't work. They need to have him come to peace with the old fucker, “realize” that pops told him he's a disappointment (which he did; what a dick) because he doesn't want lil' Cillian to follow in his evil white guy footsteps, that he wants him to take that fuckin' suit off and be good.

For reasons I don't quite understand but make the movie infinitely cooler, it is decided that the way to pull The Inception Job is to create a dream within a dream within a dream. So Ken Watanabe flexes his nuts and buys the airline that Cillian Murphy is flying from Sydney to LA for his dad's funeral (the same route as Oceanic Flight 815, except in Inception all this hideously complicated shit actually makes sense) so they can have the first-class cabin to themselves. With the team all comfortably in place, the stewardess they paid off to help puts them all into a nice dream coma for the trip to LA, and we're off to the mindfuck races!

Action movie gourmands like moi will tell you, there are many ways you can go for your climactic action sequence. Car chases in the rain are always a good one (see King of New York—several times, please, God it's good—or the pleasant surprise that was the rain car chase in We Own The Night, otherwise not an action movie at all), or there's also the hotel shootout, good because there's elevators and stairs to fuck around on (most notable variant, John Woo going off his meds and doing it in a hospital in Hard-Boiled), and then there's the snowy mountain fortress angle (YarnGuy mentioned On Her Majesty's Secret Service and was polite when I meatheadedly brought up True Lies and xXx). In short, there are many options. Most directors pick one. Chris says “Fuck it, let's do ALL THREE!” At ONCE.

So yeah, layer one of the dream is Cillian Murphy tied up in the back of a van with Tom Berenger while our heroes are all asleep except for Yusef, who's driving the van while a locomotive (????) and several SUVs and motorcycles full of machine gun-toting henchmen types pursue. Level two, where all the sleepyheads are, is a super-modernist earth-tone hallway hotel, where after Leo tells Cillian Murphy he's dreaming (if ever a movie needed more meta, it's this one, God . . .) everybody goes to sleep in a hotel room while Joseph Gordon-Levitt takes his coat off so he can strut around in his vest. Level three is a snowy fortress where Cillian Murphy has to bust into a vault to find out his Big Secret.

A wrinkle that's introduced by Leo after everyone signs on (to the point where they're already in level one of the dream) is that if any of them get killed, they don't just wake up like they usually do. They go to Limbo, where you risk being trapped for years, even decades, even forever. When Ken Watanabe (who turns out to be a cool guy; remember, evil white guys in suits) gets shot in level one and they can't get him to a hospital, they realize they're up against the clock to keep him from getting trapped in Limbo forever. Leo is especially motivated to get him to wake up safely, since if Ken Watanabe doesn't wake up, Leo gets arrested and sent straight to prison the second they touch down at LAX.

Action ensues. When Ken Watanabe dies and Leo takes Ellen Page to level four of the dream—Limbo—there's a big-ass confrontation where it finally comes out that the reason Leo was so convinced inception worked was that he pulled it on Marion Cotillard to get her to want to leave Limbo. Leo tells Ellen Page the whole story about Marion Cotillard, how she died, and why her death meant Leo had to leave sweet home Estados Unidos. Leo fesses up that he and Marion Cotillard had been experimenting, and that they actually spent about 50 years subjective time in Limbo, where Marion Cotillard had invented a top that never stopped spinning if they were in a dream (just like the one Leo carries IRL, which tips over if he's IRL but keeps spinning if he's dreaming, giving Leo, who's a little addled, a much needed leg up on the universe) flipped out and lost touch with “reality,” so Leo pulled a murder/suicide to bring them back to the “real” world, where Marion Cotillard was still convinced that if she iced herself one more time, she'd be back in real reality. Only problem is, she died. And left a whole bunch of false evidence that he'd been threatening to kill her, meaning if he stayed around instead of killing himself to be with her, he'd end up in prison. So that's why Leo had to leave the country and become a globe-trotting dream thief who made enough money to keep his right-hand man outfitted in Savile Row's finest (sorry, I know we're not even talking about him but goddamn Joseph Gordon-Levitt dresses well in this movie).

All the action comes to a head and eventually Leo manages to triumph over the vagaries of dream-reality to find Ken Watanabe and wake him up, just in time to make the phone call to keep Leo from getting tossed in the shithouse. So instead of cops, Leo is greeted by Michael Caine, who takes him home to meet his kids. Leo sets his top spinning to figure out whether he's dreaming or not. And his kids turn to greet him, Leo gets to see their faces for the first time. Then we pan to his spinning top. And god fucking dammit, Chris Nolan cuts to black before we see if it tips over or not! BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!

Oh the glorious troll that is the ending of Inception. Dude, the BAM Rose almost fucking rioted; seeing the kind of people who go to BAM get that pissed was almost as entertaining as the movie. Now me, I'm a little different. I'm with Chris, who was probably tittering like a shithead in the editing room imagining how pissed people were going to get and deciding to do it anyway. But I was also raised on Total Recall, which has the same ending, which I always loved. And seriously, a little ambiguity once in a while never killed anyone. I'm damn proud of Chris walking into the office at Warner Bros with his dick in one hand and the Dark Knight box office receipts in the other and announcing to them “I'm going to spend $160 million of your money on a picture where the audience has to decide whether any of it actually happened or not.” Because what are you going to say to a guy who—as one critic pointed out—made a three-hour allegory about terrorism with a straight-up, unvarnished anarchist for a villain and grossed almost a billion dollars? No? Child please.

Ending aside, let's get down to brass tacks. Yes, Inception has enormous balls. Yes, it pulls off the alchemy of being cerebral and intelligible, but does it win the treble by also being entertaining? And, apart from being entertaining, is it actually good?

“...I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

Motherfucker, if I have to quote James Joyce to tell you how good a movie is, it's fucking good. It was like they did market research to find out what kind of movie I personally wanted to see, edited out the lesbian sex so they could have a PG-13, and released it. I'll have none of this silly debate about whether people only like Inception because we grade Chris Nolan on a curve, or some wiseass looking at the part of that quote where Molly's like “as well him as another” and start lit-critting at me that I'm still being ambiguous about whether Chris is a good director or not. At this point, the only thing wrong with the guy is that the tops of people's heads are still getting chopped off unnecessarily. That's the last frontier he has to cross on his next picture. Everything I broke his balls about back in February has been replaced by sheer joy.

The glimpses we got in The Dark Knight that Chris finally learned how to direct action bloomed (all right, I'll stop with the Joyce) into all-time classic sequences (and one beautiful bit where, when Leo's machine-gunning guys, Ellen Page goes, “Are you really killing them?” and Leo says “No, they're just projections.” Best. Meta-cinematic joke. Ever.) One of the rules to the three-layered dream sequence at the climax is that whatever happens one layer up from you has an effect on your layer (i.e., IRL affects layer one, layer one affects layer two, layer two affects layer three), so when Yusef is trying to keep the van from getting shot to shittereens by all the machine guns and subsequently drives it off a bridge and creates a freefall, Joseph Gordon-Levitt gets thrown around all over the place in the fancy hotel. While fighting with bad guys.

The first fight was motherfucking ridiculous. The van was swerving around and going up on two wheels and shit. So Joseph Gordon-Levitt, while fighting this large black stuntman, was fucking running up walls and throwing him against walls that turned into floors that turned into ceilings and holy fucking shit. WHEN THE FUCK DID JOSEPH GORDON-LEVITT BECOME THE GOD OF ALL THAT IS MALE? Did I miss a Facebook bulletin? Seriously. In a movie with Ken Watanabe and Michael Caine, JGL is the alpha badass? I mean, sure, the English guy is cool, and he cracks a couple jokes about JGL being a tightass. But . . . JGL is the one who gets to kiss Ellen Page. Score one in Joe's column.

The zero-gravity fight, when Joe was floating around trying to figure out how to drop people in zero-gravity (did I mention how much I love cinema, Chris Nolan, and Joseph Gordon-fucking-Levitt?) and the one henchman comes out of nowhere and they fight IN ZERO FUCKING GRAVITY and JGL wins without even breaking a sweat? Yeah, that one was kind of all right. In the sense that cold beer, orgasms, and Low are kind of all right.

But we find ourselves falling into a trap set by critics like Stephanie Zacharek of Movieline, who wrote, “If the career of Christopher Nolan is any indication, we've entered an era in which movies can no longer be great. They can only be 'awesome,' which isn't nearly the same thing.” Her review was negative, mine is kind of orgasmically positive, and yet we come to the same conclusion. I don't think Inception is great, but I do think it is awesome. However, I would argue that Inception succeeds fantastically well in being what it, on one level, is: a summer movie you can nosh popcorn to and whose fight scenes (the first JGL hallway fight, por ejemplo) make the audience (read: me) audibly gasp “Get the FUCK outta here!” I would further argue that, with Inception, Chris Nolan failing to be Jesus Christ and transubstantiate the summer movie into Serious Cinema is not the death knell of Serious Cinema. As long as there are expatriate Iranians and Romanian feminists and hipsters in Williamsburg there will be Serious Cinema. Chris Nolan is a hybrid—he's as smart as all these people making all their serious little art pictures, but his aesthetic influences as a filmmaker are pop directors like Stanley Kubrick, Ridley Scott, Michael Mann, and the Wachowskis (comparisons borrowed from the New York Times) instead of Tarkovsky, Godard, or Maya Deren (and I'm not talking shit about them, especially Maya Deren). It's like pop music. You'd be a dipshit if you walked around comparing Paul McCartney to Beethoven (or, to keep the metaphor closer, Penderecki), but that doesn't mean “Things We Said Today” isn't a staggering fucking pop song.

So yeah. I had a great goddamn time at the movies today, man. I leave you with a sign of how mysterious and strange the world we call home truly is; ladies and gentlemen, our new sartorial overlord:

Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Wonders never cease.

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.