Muddy Oceans

By Aaron 6/9/2007

In the intention of writing a moderately different Ocean’s Thirteen article then the other two great articles below, I thought I’d briefly give my opinions on some issues they touched on.

Ocean’s 12 sucked – a lot. The Julia Roberts thing was really the straw that broke the camel’s back but this movie was so pointless, so annoying, so painful that it made “The Master of Disguise” look good. Maybe that’s a little harsh.

The premise of Ocean’s Thireen was lame – agreed. It doesn’t even pass the laugh test. If Al Pacino had all these casinos all over the place and was so filthy rich, he could cover 500 million in losses. Sure, it’s a lot of money, but he would move some money around to cover his ass.

Al Pacino is the same as Andy Garcia – completely. Like, it would have been better to have Andy Garcia as the guy Rueben teamed with, then we would have known that he was going to get double-crossed and that whole side of the story would have made more sense.  In this sense, I think Pacino was wasted, because if they were so intent on having him in the movie, he could have been something new.

The eleven are underused – that’s an understatement. The eleven were great in the first movie because their specialties actually meant something. For the most part, it seemed like they were kind of just doing whatever they had to do regardless of the area they were supposed to specialize in, crossing over and doing stuff you wouldn’t have thought them capable of in the first installment.

Set up v Con – I choose set up. Sure, the set up was kinda “eh,” but so was the con. You already knew what was going to happen, they were just causing the casino to lose money, they were either going to, or they weren’t, and there was never anything that you thought REALLY challenged them. It was so clear that Livingston’s plan involved installing new machines that when he was apprehended and they alluded to that, it was crystal.

Bribing got out of hand – YES! I thought that one hotel manager (who was pretty hot) was going to have a real part, but instead she was pretty pointless, much like the other hapless employees they tossed money at.

Now I have some things I want to weigh in on that I hope is brand new.

This was a good way to end the series. For the most part, the “main” storylines of Rusty, Danny, and Linus were tied up pretty nicely. More importantly, they were all at a good breaking point. This is random. But was Clooney’s joke about settling down and having kids poking fun at Brad and Angelina’s kids?

But, at the same time the ending sucked. This goes back to an early point that the whole job didn’t make a lot of sense. I’ll spot them that they somehow got the casino back. But how did they recoup all that money? They all supposedly sunk all this money in…was it from selling the diamonds? Did Gould give them that money? Even if there is some explanation for it, one wasn’t given or alluded to, they just assumed the audience would forgive that point because, hey, it was a heist film.

Thank God Julia and Catherine sat this one out, but at the same time, no romantic element made the movie kind of flat. Again, this was another area where there was no real tension. Yes, the conversations between Danny and Rusty about relationships and marriage were good, but they could have piggy backed off of those and had phone calls between the wives or something like that. Or had Linus fall in love with someone. If you think about it, the reason the first movie made so much sense was that the whole job was so Danny could trick Garcia into saying Tess had a price. That got around Garcia’s gobs of money and the impossibility of toppling a casino. The second movie was extremely similar in the sense that Rusty did the job to get Catherine into his lap. But this movie didn’t have any of that, and I think it hurt the movie.

Another question that goes to the heart of the plausibility of the move was, where all the characters that close to Eliot Gould’s character? I thought Eliot knew a few of them but not all of them, and that he was only really close to Rusty and Danny. At the very least, are all of these guys going to give up all of their savings for this guy? And why was that even necessary? Didn’t Gould still have a lot of money? Again, this kind of gets to the issue of why they needed Andy Garcia…

Also, cinematography be damned, the movie looked too smooth. It was too fast sometimes and the split screens were overdone. And when you really lean back and think about it, we’ve seen all these cinematic tricks before, in the first two movies, and Soderburgh isn’t exactly scraping his brain for ingenuity with these movies.

For my sake, who made thirteen? Were we supposed to count Andy Garcia’s alliance as making thirteen? If so, that’s kind of lame. But I guess you have to live with it.

At the end of the day, I’ll look past all those problems, and think about how I enjoyed the movie and laughed a couple times, and I’ll be generous and toss the movie six salty stix.

Could “Avatar” Win Best Picture?

By Brett Hogan

 

Last week, the trailer for James Cameron’s sci-fi experiment “Avatar” debuted. While initially unimpressed with the teaser, I began to wonder: Could this film win best picture? 

 

Buzz has been generating for this movie for years. Years. The technology to make this movie didn’t exist when Cameron conceived it, so he invented it. When is the last time you heard of a director spearheading the invention of anything? The casting started in 2005. Most movies these days, even epics, are done in half that time. I could go on. 

 

The most important thing to take away from all of this is that people are saying this will be the future of movies. Now, I don’t agree with the idea that CGI will become more prevalent than it already is. But I do believe that this will set the bar miles higher for sci-fi. I mean, that is what Titanic did. And that won some awards if memory serves.

 

I’ll bet you’re asking yourself, how can you even suggest that a film like this will win Best Picture when the initial trailer was nothing better than visual stimulation? Well, there are a couple of reasons. First, the Academy has expanded Best Picture to ten films. This doesn’t guarantee anything other than improved chances for most films on the cusp.

 

Second, after last year’s Oscars debacle, which saw the best film of the year, “The Dark Knight,” not only get shafted in awards but nominations as well, the Academy is pulling out all the stops to appease those with the loudest voices in the film industry, the fanboys. Now, the Academy probably didn’t lose anything because of that other than some viewers of the award show. Perhaps if people are again outraged with the winners or nominees, the heads of the Academy would lose their jobs. So this is all about the Academy protecting itself, which is not so outrageous.  

 

 

Third, there is an economic motive here. I’ve heard this film will cost $190 million, not counting the R&D costs associated with Cameron’s inventions or the cost of getting 3-D cameras into every theater in the country. The Academy will do everything in its power to get people into the seats and make this the next “Titanic” or “The Dark Knight.” But the Academy doesn’t have much power, besides nominating and awarding, so they will slap the “Nominated for Best Picture” moniker onto every commercial and print ad to get the people who didn’t believe the critics to relent and see this movie.

 

Of course, all of this is pure conjecture, and no revolutionary film (Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, etc.) has ever won the Best Picture category because it changed the game. Except maybe Titanic. But still, could this movie actually win? My answer is no but a nomination is certain and who knows what could happen from there. We’ll know more come February 2010.