Daily Archives: June 7, 2007

Ocean’s Thirteen

Film Reviews

A world-on-a-string kind of movie that restores a goodwill shine to the all-star series, Ocean’s Thirteen is a slick, pleasurable romp — a populist slice of entertainment that serves as a reminder of just how much fun summer movies can be. It plays like a stone skipping across water, like an old standard belted out effortlessly by a nouveau-style crooner, and it should absolutely slay at the box office, driven by mainstream, cross-demographic appeal and positive word-of-mouth.

The story dumps Danny Ocean (George Clooney) and his crew — including Rusty Ryan (Brad Pitt) and Linus Caldwell (Matt Damon) — back in Las Vegas, where they take a run at amoral hotelier and mogul Willie Bank (Al Pacino), who’s cheated Reuben Tishkoff (Elliott Gould) out of his share of a new development, and induced in him a heart attack that’s left Reuben virtually catatonic. In a Robin Hood-esque plan, the gang conspires — in advance of Banks’ gala opening launch — to rig all the dice games, slots, blackjack tables, etcetera, at his casino, busting Banks’ bank and returning $500 million in winnings to patrons before inducing a cash-out by simulating an earthquake.

Utilizing “up-river” devices and trickery both low-fi and technologically advanced, this scheme requires that they trump an almost laughably advanced artificial intelligence security system and — eventually, when in a pinch — solicit the financial backing of former nemesis Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia), a ploy that comes with its own set of dangers and conditions. It’s not just financial revenge that the guys are concerned with, however. They also set out to undermine Banks’ coveted and highly prestigious “Five Diamond” rating by making sure that the writer (David Paymer) assigned to cover the hotel opening has a miserable experience.

Distended, smug and stricken with a steep rate of depreciation, Ocean’s Twelve was faux-sly, its winking half-assedness substituting for subversiveness. In short, it was the sort of movie you walk out of with an uneasy smile, trying to convince yourself it was enjoyable. Penned by Brian Koppelman and David Levien — who with 1998’s underrated Rounders showed that they know their way around the jargon-filled world of gaming and gambling — this re-up is a return to roots, of sorts. Thankfully jettisoning Julia Roberts and any major angles of romantic intrigue, Ocean’s Thirteen is blithely unconcerned with lasting relationships, except to the degree that its plot is driven by fraternal devotion.

In focusing solely and clearly on the here and now, the film recaptures and in fact fortifies a big part of what made the first movie such a blast of fresh fun — namely, Clooney and Pitt looking dapper, a well-heeled ensemble expressing guy’s-guy exasperation with one another, and a rakish, revenge-fed heist/criminal story set on a 45-degree, downhill slope. Pleasingly paced and powered by a great soundtrack — David Holmes’ original score pulses along courtesy of a nice drum-and-bass line, with chiming chords scattered around it like tiny diamonds on bejeweled wristwear — this snappy, perfectly fizzy summer concoction delivers in smashing fashion on every plane on which it competes. (Warner Bros., PG-13, 122 minutes)

Hostel: Part II Thoughts

Musings

Written and
directed by Eli Roth and executive-produced by Quentin Tarantino, 1996’s Hostel opened to $19.5 million, the eighth
biggest bow in January history, and rang up more than $80 million worldwide, against only a $5 million production budget. It was only natural, then, that distributor Lionsgate would ask for a sequel.

The first film — about three pals backpacking across Europe who, bored with Amsterdam
(!), fall sway to the stories of a fellow partier and head to a hostel in Bratislava, where there are supposedly
drugs, liquor and scorchingly hot women aplenty — was pretty much a willfully depraved exercise in stimulus response. After the neon-lit pleasure trip of its first act, Hostel tilts, in
rather gruesome fashion, toward impressively staged gore-porn, with the guys finding out in firsthand fashion that the hostel is actually a front for a black market
business that provides a homicidal service for disenfranchised thrill junkies.

If it was a xenophobic travelogue gone horribly awry, its sequel follows three young American females down the same rabbit hole, and is an even more starkly realized portrait of amorality. Hostel: Part II isn’t the type of movie you call “good” or leave with any sense of surging, cathartic excitement — rather, you sort of want to find some Purell and scrub your brain clean — but it is accomplished and authentically sketched within its own clearly defined parameters. “Impressively sick,” I guess you’d say. A proper full-length review will follow tomorrow or perhaps later tonight, but for more about Roth’s thoughts on the NC-17, first-pass cut of the movie, click here.

UPDATE 6/10: For the full review, click here.

Naomi Watts to Play Angelina Jolie?

Casting About, Irritations, Musings

So according to Variety, Naomi Watts has inked to star in We Are All the Same, an adaptation of Nightline correspondent Jim Wooten’s 2004 book about Gail Johnson, a white South African woman who adopted a black baby stricken with AIDS, then traveled the world with the child to raise awareness about his plight.

A bit ridiculously on-the-nose, that title, don’t you think? (It also smacks of that’s-a-mouthful similarity to Watts’ We Don’t Live Here Anymore, a poor-grossing, enervated adaptation of Andre Dubus’ short stories, which in turn sounded like a Ryan Adams song.) Geopolitical hot-riser Keir Pearson (a co-writer on Hotel Rwanda, and author of the announced Son of Al Qaeda) is adapting the story, which holds some promise, but a lot about this movie depends on who comes on board as director. Why do I feel like John Curran or John Madden or Sydney Pollack are already fielding calls about this project? Ugh. My left field vote would be someone like Niels Mueller. Or, if I’m being completely unrealistic, D.J. Caruso, who desperately needs to escape the genre ghetto, but won’t do something like this, because the fact that Disturbia was such a big hit means he’s getting hot-shit offers to do the Wolverine movie and other big, summer-type flicks.

Frankie Laine: That Old Lucky Sun

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

Born Francesco Paolo LoVecchio, which I believe is Polish, singer Frankie
Laine went on to score more than 70 chart hits, and rack up sales in excess of
250 million albums worldwide. He wasn’t a teenybopper success, though. Though born
in 1913, it wasn’t until the mid-1950s that Laine really came into his own and enjoyed
his biggest success, which came when he started recording theme tunes for
movies and television shows, most notably Rawhide
and Gunfight at the OK Corral. Work
hosting three separate variety shows followed, and Laine carved out a nice
niche as a hard-working, scruffy-bearded showman. While Frank Sinatra sang
about always doing it his way, Laine rocked the unshaven look before
it was boho-fashionable, and arguably suffered the consequences, allegedly turning
down an invitation to sing at the White House that came with a whispered side-condition
of some special grooming.

Whether singing the blues, torch songs, gospel tunes,
western theme songs or even jazz, “Old Leather Lungs,” as Laine was known,
brought to bear his own sense of style and personality through a sonorous baritone.
This DVD features a full Laine concert from a 1976 tour of the United Kingdom,
and includes the hit songs “That Old Lucky Sun,” “Jezebel” and “Jealousy,” as
well as “Love Story,” the aforementioned “Rawhide,” “Your Cheating Heart,” “Wrap
Your Troubles in Dreams,” “You’re the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me,” “Lord,
You Gave Me a Mountain,” “Dream a Little Dream of Me” and more. Sadly, Laine passed
away in February of this year 2007, leaving behind 21 gold records and plenty
of fans, but also many more people who never got to appreciate Laine and his
place in the rank of crooner’s of his erae. This program serves as a perfect example
of the beautiful music he brought into this world.

Presented on a region-free disc in a regular Amray case, That Old Lucky Sun comes with a 5.1
surround sound audio track, and runs a brisk 45 minutes. The picture is decent,
if understandably not crystal clear, but the audio more than makes up for any
visual shortcomings. There are unfortunately no supplemental extras herein, but
this program is a perfect encapsulation and overview of Laine’s career, and
somehow one doesn’t mind quite as much as one normally might. B (Concert) C
(Disc)