Things I Learned Watching "Ocean's Thirteen"

-No Topher Grace cameo!

-No sulky Julia Roberts! No catty Catherine Zeta-Jones! No turkey ala-king!

-What does it mean that Grace’s absence disappointed me more than the absences of Roberts and Zeta-Jones?

-A lot of film critics took a perverse delight in panning this movie outright, panning it up to a point, or breezing through no-stakes reviews with what they probably imagined was the broadsheet equivalent of director Steven Soderbergh’s devil-may-care tone here. The New Yorker’s David Denby – whom I quite like, even when we don’t see eye-to-eye – didn’t even deign to give Ocean’s Thirteen an indepth review, instead tacking a one-paragraph flourish onto the back of a longish standard multi-flick thinkpiece. I sort of disagree with his estimation, but then I sort of don’t, and his closing sentence might be my favorite line of the, like, 30 writeups I read because I’m a loser: “Soderbergh ends the movie with a few jokes, which is casual and neat but leaves you wondering whether the practice of making enormous movies about nothing isn’t a little mad.”

-Baddie to restless/relentless police detective Al Pacino in Heat: “I could get killed for tellin’ you this shit!” Pacino, snapping gum and chewing scenery, to baddie: “You could get killed walkin’ your doggie!” God, Heat’s such an awesome movie, even 11 years later. Even though it totally could’ve lost maybe 50 minutes. Dear rappers: please make movies based around Heat instead of Scarface. Seriously, I saw Scarface maybe once and never want to see it again. It's like paint drying while Pacino tries, desperately, to be hispanic. Lame!

-Pacino’s the bad guy in this case. He’s Willie Bank. His casino’s called The Bank. He’s looking to make mad bank. Bank bank bank! That’s fun to say in place of swear words. “Holy bank!” “Bank you!” “Bank this bankety-bank, man! Bank it!” More seriously, I know this franchise is high-profile and I like Pacino as much as anybody, but why they didn’t get Christopher Walken for this role is beyond me. He’d have brought more to the whole asshole villian thing. Or Sean Bean. No, not Sean Bean. Sean Bean’s such a ubiquitos bad guy actor that he wouldn’t have even registered amidst all the glamour and high-voltage starpower on display here. Plus, I don’t know that he’s a bankable enough quantity. (Ouch.)

-Casey Affleck’s fake-as-all-fuck Mexican moustache steals the movie in an uncredited role. (Or was that Scott Caan’s moustache? I don’t know. Does it matter?) I’m not going to explain why Caan and Affleck go to Mexico, what result they instigate, or what it has to do with the plot because it’s so ridiculous and random that I don’t wanna ruin it for you.

-Yeah, about the plot. Read a couple reviews before you see this movie or nothing that happens will make any sense whatsoever. Rest assured that you will still have a fun time even though it’s a foregone conclusion how all this will end.

-The whiney guy who plays computer whiz Livingston Dell is the same dude from those Budweiser “Why Ask Why” television commericals from back in the day, right? Just asking.

-At this point, you may be getting the impression that I didn’t enjoy this movie; you’re wrong. I just like making dumb jokes.

-Matt Damon gets to pretend to be a vintage Bond villian. The guy who plays Saul gets to pretend to be Q pretending to be a British hotel critic. While driving to work this morning I remembered a scene from one of those early 007 movies where Sean Connery is informed, by M, that one of his fellow agents was killed in the field, and he responds by saying “We shared the same bootmaker.” I have no idea what that means in the context of this ongoing non-review of Ocean’s Thirteen.

-Alecia probably got sick of me making comments about how delicate and gravity-defying and earthquake non-impervious and building-code impossible Bank’s towering, cgi-generated casino/hotel/resort looks. It’s like a crimson and gold glass’n’steel Twisler or something.

-All those random shots of the Night Fox – you’ll remember him as the super-duper burgler extraordinare/nemesis from Ocean’s Twelve – do add up to something eventually.

-Bernie Mac doesn’t get enough screen time to talk about his nails or skin moisturizers.

-Whatever language Shaobo Qin speaks – Chinese? – is now understood by every member of the gang, even though he doesn’t speak any English. It’s a testament to the cast and the director that this linguistic incongruity gag is actually funny the third time around.

-Ocean’s Thirteen was a great deal of fun, though a subsequent sequel is unnecessary. The same could be said, in fact, about Ocean’s Twelve. Why try to top the Ocean’s Eleven’s perfect crime caper? The answer is: because they could. That nothing other than honor/friendship is at stake here is acceptable and besides the point, because these movies exist for their own sakes. The attraction lies in watching cogs in a heist-machine operate and succeed even though we as viewers might not understand exactly how the whole thing works until we’ve seen the movie(s) four or five times. This series could run forever, but should it? I mean, I’ve been trying to imagine what an Ocean’s Fourteen would look like all weekend and I’m just seeing George Clooney laying in a suave coma as the other principles live their lives all over the world for three hours. Ultimately, of course, we’d learn that the gang was surrepticiously bankrupting Halliburton via an elaborate plan Clooney communicated to Brad Pitt via telepathy. And I’d go see it anyway, and so would you. And when it ran on cable week after week we’d tune in everytime we stumbled upon it, without fail, and we wouldn’t consider this a waste of time. That’s what I’d call the mother of all (mod) cons.