Film Friday: Ocean’s Thirteen (2007)

I should hate this film on so... many... levels. Half the actors are jerks. The writing is nonsense. The whole film is nothing but a product placement. Wow. I should be railing against this sucker. Yet, I really enjoy this film. This is one of those rare films where style trumps everything else. This isn’t a film, it’s an experience, and if you’re using your brain, then you’re doing it wrong.

Plot

Willy Bank (Al Pacino) is an evil man. He dominates the Vegas casino industry and he just cheated his partner, Reuben, who just happens to be good friends with Danny Ocean (George Clooney). This was wrong. See, Bank shook Sinatra’s hand, as did Reuben, and that means Bank broke the code by cheating Reuben. So Danny and his crew set out to bankrupt Bank’s new casino to set things right. From there, the film becomes a Rube Goldberg heist plan in which Ocean and the boys need to break Bank’s security, rig the games to cheat in favor of the guests at a specific time, and then get all the guests out of the casino before they lose the money back.

Why This Film Works

To understand why this film works, let me explain why the original Ocean’s 11 worked... not the Soderbergh remake, but the original 1960’s film staring Frank Sinatra. Ocean’s 11 worked because of a form of nostalgia. Ocean’s 11 is like an invite to spend time with the hippest cats America has ever produced... the Rat Pack. When you watch Ocean’s 11, you aren’t watching to see if they pull off the heist, nor are you watching for plot or to see the acting. No. You are watching to get a glimpse of Frank Sinatra playing around with Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. You are watching to get a sense of what it was like to go to Vegas in 1960 and sit in the audience as all these guys showed up and clowned around for a couple hours right in front of you... these singers and comedians who advised presidents and ran with the mob, married the most eligible women of the era, stormed Hollywood on their own terms, and dominated the music world. These guys represent an entire era in American culture.

What does this have to do with Ocean’s Thirteen? Well, Ocean’s Thirteen is the second sequel to Ocean’s Eleven, which is a sort of remake of Ocean’s 11. Only, whereas Ocean’s Eleven really was never more than just a heist film that borrowed characters from Ocean’s 11, Ocean’s Thirteen captures the spirit of Ocean’s 11.

Like Ocean’s 11, Ocean’s Thirteen is entirely about the experience, not the story. It is about accessing a world you will never access on your own, no matter what you achieve in life. It is a world of casino whales and high rollers at a fantasy casino that is so ornate and stylized that it is the very essence of the image we have of “the casino experience,” an image that wasn’t true in the 1960’s when it was created and certainly isn’t true today. Indeed, nowhere in this film will you see slovenly tourists in Bermuda shorts placing one dollar bets in this casino. There are no rooms the size of closets and no employees who don’t speak English. The hotel staff here look like models or Hollywood butlers, not fat, lazy SEUI members. The guests are models dressed to the nines. The rooms are like mansions decorated by the best designers. Everywhere you look there are designer brands, premium alcohol, luxury cars, beautiful people.

Within this world you find yourself among a huge group of friends: Danny and Rusty and Linus and Reuben and Terry and the rest. And these aren’t like any friends you know. No, these people are all highly educated, clever, funny, beautiful, athletic... celebrities. They have amazing skills you can only dream of – gymnastics, computer hacking, super scheming, card sharping, etc. They are classy too, and they live by a code... a code of infinite loyalty, the kind of loyalty that makes you spend every penny of your millions of dollars to set right an insult made against one member of your crew. Even beyond that, they have amazing chemistry. In fact, they finish each other’s thoughts all the time and any one of them can completely screw up the entire plan without a hint of reproach from the others, because loyalty comes first and they never give up and never lose hope.

They have a good time too. In fact, despite the film being about a heist, it really isn’t. To the contrary, this film is about a chess match played against the ultimate fantasy casino for amazing stakes with no prospect that you will lose and played in a consequence free environment.

To put it simply, this is a fantasy world as much as if it had dragons... it is the American consumer vision of Heaven, and it lets you in completely. That’s why this film is so great. It offers you more and better friends than you’ve ever had, a playground you can never experience, and a game you can never really play in real life. It’s a hell of a ride.

What’s interesting to me is how the film builds this, because there are some fascinating little tricks that other writers should examine closely. First, to create the environment, the director essentially made a study of what works in the luxury advertisement world, and then he brought it to life. If you drive a Rolls, then hot chicks will get out of the car with you. If you drink Gray Goose, you will be rich and respected. If you wear the right clothes, you will be hip. This film takes all of American high-end consumerism and distills it to the images that appeal to us and injects them directly into your brain.

The friendships are interesting too because of how they’re built. First, no one has friends like this. Name one friend of yours who would throw away ten million dollars, everything they own, just to avenge an insult made to another of your friends. Moreover, no one has this many close friends. In fact, management studies have found that humans aren’t capable of monitoring more than about eight relationships with any level of attention, which is why companies don’t put people directly in charge of hundreds of people. Yet, here you are literally surrounded by dozens of loyal-to-the-death friends who are closer to you than any real life friend... these are people you’ve adventured with.

Even more interestingly, to give you the feeling that they are in fact close friends, the writer uses a dialog trick to make you believe there’s a long-time relationship there. Specifically, the writer has the characters speak “in their own language,” by having them reference things you don’t know, and has them constantly finishing each other’s sentences and thoughts, as people who are long-time friends often do. Just as interestingly, the writer starts each scene with one character telling the end of a story involving people the two characters know. Not enough information is given to tell you the story, but enough information is given for you to guess what they are talking about. For example, a character might say, “So I jumped out the window as her husband chased me,” which is enough to let you understand what happened even if you don’t know any of the actual details. What this does is it gives you the feeling that you are in on their relationship because you can understand what they are talking about even as you think other people couldn’t understand because it’s an insider story. In effect, they trick you into thinking that you share their special language, which makes you part of the relationship. This is actually pretty brilliant writing.

Finally, the film rushes all of this past you in a bombarding montage of sound, colors and stylized images, sometimes even being shown in split-screen images. Essentially, the film runs at such a quick pace that you never get a chance to focus on anything you are watching. Adding to this intentional confusion, the film shows a good deal in quick flashbacks, which keep you disoriented, and it often requires you to keep track of the dialog between cuts, as the last line in one scene becomes the first line in the next scene. The result is a film that keeps you from focusing on the plot itself and makes you just “live in the moment.”

Ultimately, this film works not because it’s a good film, but because it immerses you into an idealized, stylized world of intense friendship and camaraderie, unimagined wealth, and an impossibly-high party atmosphere, all wrapped up in a thick sense of adventure. That’s why this film works and that’s why the original Ocean’s 11 worked: because it sells you a trip into a fantasy world with friends you could never have in real life. And for a brief moment, you can be buddies with the coolest people on earth.

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Guest Review: Side Effects (2013)

A Film Review by Tennessee Jed

Since his arrival in 1989 with Sex, Lies, and Videotape, celebrated director Steven Soderbergh has been nothing if not prolific in his output. Critics argue with some justification that his work is best described as uneven or inconsistent. Though hardly an expert on his career, as a fan of independent, low budget films, I owe him at least a debt of appreciation for his notable contributions in that regard. To be sure, this director has made many complete stinkers, but he’s also made several films I have truly enjoyed. Side Effects, fortunately, falls into that latter category.

Soderbergh films seem to fall into several loosely defined buckets, often spilling over into more than just one. It turns out this film is a suspense thriller in the manner of the great Alfred Hitchcock. Although admittedly a fan of that genre, I think one reason it seems to work so well is its ability to hide that fact by sending up false signals that it would be primarily an “agenda” film exposing the evils of “Big Pharma.” The fact this director has made that type of film helps in the set-up. Let’s consider both its highs and lows.

** spoiler alert **

Plot Synopsis - Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara) visits her husband Martin (Channing Tatum) who is finishing up a four year prison sentence for insider trading. Although outwardly supportive, she apparently had lost more than her incredibly exalted financial status; she seems to be suffering from significant depression.

After Martin’s release Emily purposely crashes her car into a parking garage wall. In the ER, she’s interviewed by psychiatrist Dr. Jonathan Banks (Jude Law). He reluctantly agrees to discharge her if she comes back for further treatment, and he prescribes one of the SSRI anti-depressant drugs. Emily tells him she was previously treated for depression by Dr.Victoria Siebert (Catherine Zeta-Jones). Banks consults Siebert who suggests he consider one of the brand new drugs, the fictional Ablixa. When Emily suffers a melt down while attending a business function with Martin, Banks agrees to prescribe Ablixa. It appears to significantly help, but carries its own unique set of side effects.

Martin awakes to see Emily setting the table for three in the middle of the night while the stereo blasts music. It seems one of Ablixa’s side effects is sleepwalking. They both meet with Dr. Banks, but Emily refuses to go off Ablixa, and he agrees to let her continue with the drug, using other treatments for the sleepwalking. One night, as Martin returns to the apartment for dinner, he finds the table again set for three. Confronting Emily, she turns and stabs him to death. Dr. Banks is recruited as an expert consultant by both prosecution and defense. A plea bargain is reached in which Emily is not guilty of murder, but must be institutionalized. Future release is subject to a doctor’s sign-off.

Dr. Banks finds that he has received tremendously unfavorable publicity as a result of the trial. As the A.D.A. points out, Emily is either a murderer or a victim of her medical treatment, and either way, someone has to pay. He begins to lose patients, is forced to resign from a lucrative consulting gig, and ultimately is forced out by his partners. Even Banks’ wife begins to doubt him. As his career and marriage rapidly disintegrate, he finds evidence that perhaps a murder was committed after all. Banks becomes obsessed with proving the wrong person has been “made to pay.” When he presents his concerns to the A.D.A., he is reminded double jeopardy applies, and he should just walk away. To reveal exactly what happens, who was involved, and how it resolves would seem a dis-service to potential viewers.

Why Does The Film Work So Well?

First and foremost, it is an excellent tight script. This film is only an hour and forty-five minutes, and the writers keep the story moving despite a lack of real action. Every scene is lean and purposeful with key information being disseminated just by visuals and mood creation. More importantly, it is a suspense movie that manages to disguise where it is heading for a long, long time. One reviewer even labeled that disguise as the “twist” itself. The story actually touches on some interesting issues regarding “big pharma” and the reliance of modern medicine in this country to depend so heavily on prescription drugs. That is not the true focus of the film, however, and that issue functions, in a way, almost as a kind of MacGuffin. Secondly, the soundtrack by Thomas Newman is extremely compelling and well matched to the scenes in which it is used.

The acting is uniformly excellent. To be sure Law, Mara, and Zeta-Jones do the heavy lifting, and all do it well. Mara has the biggest challenge being alternately sympathetic and a bit creepy. But I couldn’t help noticing just how good some of the actors were in minor roles. Most notable to me were Ann Dowd (Compliance) as Martin’s mother, Polly Draper (Thirtysomething) as Emily’s boss, Michael Nathanson as the A.D.A., and veteran character actor Peter Friedman as the senior partner in Banks’ practice.

Are There Any Negatives Or Is It Really All That?

For this plot to work, the viewer is asked to stretch the bounds of credibility, particularly regarding certain key relationships, and motivations of characters to act in a particular way. Specifically, questions of how Emily develops her relationships with Martin and Dr. Siebert may leave viewers scratching their heads. But, if one looks at most films of this genre in retrospect, almost all present certain facts that just don’t seem to quite make sense realistically. Even if we look at a classic such as North By Northwest, we can easily question the plausibility of some of the events required by that plot. And, what Side Effects does quite well is present its own inconsistencies in a manner that still permits you to enjoy the ride.

So Is This A Must See?

Well, yes, at least in my book. In an era of Man of Steel and Promised Land, damn right it’s worth it to see this one now, and not wait until it comes to MGM Classics. This is particularly true if you like the film noir suspense genre.

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Film Friday: Contagion (2011)

Contagion begins with one person passing a disease to another. They spread it to others. All these people die within the first couple minutes of the film. The next few minutes involve CDC members trying to track down where the disease began. From there, the film becomes the disjointed story of several individuals who really don’t do anything, nor are they interesting. Indeed, nothing about this film is interesting.

** spoiler alert **

Though critics fawn over him, Steven Soderbergh is hit or miss as a director. For every Sex, Lies and Videotape and Ocean’s Eleven there’s a Solaris and The Informant!. When he hits, he’s provocative and stylistic. When he misses, he’s predictable and boooring. Contagion is a “realistic” portrayal of a highly contagious and lethal virus spreading through the modern world. “Realistic” is in quotes because the film takes itself very seriously, but there’s no substance behind the air of realism. In this regard, Contagion is like Soderbergh’s Traffic: polished, serious, and intensely shallow.

Contagion acts like it’s presenting a scientific and non-fictiony view of virus-events, only it really isn’t. There’s almost no science presented and the serious tone masks the fact that the story is nothing more than a couple characters making uninteresting personal decisions. We do see the virus pass from person to person, but only for a minute or two -- Outbreak did this with much greater tension, as have most zombie films. They also try to track down the first person to get the disease, which could be interesting, except it gets resolved almost instantly and they don’t even tell us why it matters. At one point, they seal off Chicago, which could be interesting, except you don’t get to see it happen.

So what do we get instead? Instead, the film is about bureaucrats harassing Kate Winslet for no reason, Laurence Fishburne agonizing over bringing home one CDC employee when two million have already died and calling his fiancé to tell her to leave Chicago, which briefly becomes a scandal that goes nowhere. We also see Matt Damon agonize that he can’t open the door to his house to let his daughter’s boyfriend in for a quickie, and Marion Cotillard makes an appearance as a doctor, though I honestly can’t tell you why. Elliot Gould appears too for some reason. Yawn.

The only thing this film really offers that’s somewhat original is Jude Law as Alan Krumwiede, an anti-government, conspiracy-theory blogger who sells his soul to a hedge fund and tells people they can cure this disease with snake oil. This is about as close as the film gets to an interesting storyline. Yet, while the film spends a lot of time on his character, you are never once shown any effect his actions have on anything. He just talks about getting a lot of page hits and the CDC people are upset at him. But it’s never even clear if he’s lying or what motivates him, nor do you ever see a single person get hurt following his advice.

So how could this film have been improved?

Well, for one thing, it needs focus. The Andromeda Strain created a compelling plot by focusing on whether or not the disease would escape the lab. Quarantine focused on a small group of people trapped with the infected as the government tried to bury the problem. The Crazies showed a group of uninfected trying to escape a town the government sealed off. Zombie movies, like Pontypool and Day of the Dead, thrive in portraying the early moments before the public is aware what is happening, and in showing the exponential math of infection. The Stand took another approach and built around the survivors, even as the virus was only starting. Twelve Monkeys showed mankind trying to rebuild afterwards. In each of these instances, the film followed characters whose survival was important. Their stories became the story of how the disease either spread or was stopped. As they learned information, you learned information, as they lost friends, you felt the loss. This pulled you in to the story.

Contagion isn’t like that. None of the characters in Contagion actually matter. If they all died in an industrial blender the moment the film began, not a single thing would change in the virus portion of the story. Even worse, these characters never learn anything they can pass on to the audience. Instead, the information is presented over radio broadcasts or it appears on the screen like an update. Thus, there’s no mystery and you have little actual connection to the virus story, it just seems to be going on in the background, even though these characters are presented as the most relevant characters to watch. That makes the film feel somewhat fraudulent bereft of drama.

Compare this film to Outbreak. Outbreak fell apart when it did the “crazed soldier” thing toward the end, but until that point the film was quite strong. Outbreak followed one character who had the ability to discover, diagnose and treat the virus, and it became the story of his race against the clock and the seemingly real hurdles he faced. Throughout the film, we knew little more than he did, and when we did it was used for dramatic effect. By comparison, in Contagion information gets handed out regularly and with little drama. For example, you will suddenly see the words, “2.3 million dead” written on the screen, which should be horrific except it’s just a number the way it gets presented. Moreover, in Outbreak, people close to the hero died, people we got to know. In Contagion, you almost never see anyone die and when you do, they are typically introduced as they are dying. So they’re all strangers.

This is why Contagion went wrong: it pretended it was a realistic portrayal of the spread of a deadly virus, but it gave us no realism, no science, no mystery, and no characters who mattered to the virus story. And the personal stories of the characters we were given just weren’t interesting, nor did they ultimately feel particularly relevant to anything. This was how Traffic felt. That was a film that seemed on the surface to be a serious exploration of the drug trade from Mexico to the United States, but there was no depth and nothing we hadn’t seen before. And the characters you did follow weren’t relevant to the larger point of the film, except that they were all anecdotally touched by the drug trade. It’s the same thing here. These characters don’t drive the story, they are passengers, people who kind-of-sort-of relate to the spreading of the virus.

Ultimately, a genuine story about the spread of a disease could be a fascinating film, but it needs to offer more than a glossy version of every other virus story. It needs to connect to the real people who make decisions so the audience can see how the important people would respond and the challenges they face, and it needs to connect us to the scale of death in a very personal way. Simply reading numbers of dead is not enough. Contagion does none of this.

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Film Friday: Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989)

Ladies, did sexual liberation work for you? Steven Sonderbergh doesn’t think so, and he has some advice for you. That advice can be found in Sex, Lies, and Videotape, a $1.8 million movie that was added to the United States Library of Congress’s National Film Registry in 2006 after being deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” That’s got to mean something, right?

** spoiler alert **

Sex, Lies, and Videotape ostensibly tells the story of four unhappy people. Ann (Andie MacDowell) is the repressed housewife of John (Peter Gallagher), a lecherous attorney who is having an affair with Ann’s sister Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo). As the story begins, John has invited old college friend Graham (James Spader) to stay with them. Graham, who is impotent, videotapes people talking about sex. After Graham tapes Cynthia, each of their lives begins to change. Before everything is said and done, Cynthia dumps John, Ann demands a divorce from John, and Cynthia and Ann reconcile.

What This Movie Is Not About

So what is Sonderbergh’s point? Well, before we can delve into Sonderbergh’s meaning, there is something you must realize: this movie is entirely about the evolution of Ann and Cynthia, they are the only characters who matter. Everybody wants to focus on Graham because he’s the most unique character in the film, but this movie is not about Graham. Indeed, many critics spent their entire reviews speculating about Graham, only to ultimately express their confused disappointment that the film never answered their questions. What they miss is that he’s a red herring. Graham tells us as much when he volunteers right away that he's impotent. That is an admission that he may only watch, he can take no action. And true to form, he never once drives the plot, he merely acts as a sounding board against which Ann and Cynthia reassess their lives. In fact, you could replace him with a priest, a therapist or even another female friend, and nothing would change about this movie.

John too is not relevant to this film. John doesn't grow, he doesn't learn. At no point are we given access to his thoughts. And at the very end of the movie, rather than giving us some revelation of insight, John just walks away -- because he never mattered. His purpose in this film is to show us how Ann and Cynthia both fall for his manipulations even though one is “liberated” and the other is "repressed."

What This Movie Is About

So what is this film about? Sex, Lies, and Videotape criticizes the attitudes many women developed as a result of the sexual revolution. According to Sonderbergh, happiness cannot be found either in remaining repressed or in adopting casual sex lifestyle.

The key to this movie is the changes that occur in the two sister. Ann is repressed. She represents women who are ill at ease with sexual liberation (the archetype “prude”). She is so repressed that she finds even the mention of sex upsetting, and she will obsess about problems she cannot fix (like the amount of garbage in the world) to avoid any hint of sex creeping into her life. She no longer even lets her husband touch her. Cynthia, on the other hand, is the polar opposite (the archetype “slut”). She has adopted a casual sex lifestyle. She has no moral concerns at all about sex, as evidenced by the fact she's sleeping with her sister’s husband.

The introduction of Graham, provides the process by which Sonderbergh exposes these two women. Both will eventually make videos for Graham, and in both instances, the experience changes them for the better. Ann comes to realize that sex is not wrong and finds release from her fears and pressures by shaking off her repressed attitude. Cynthia, on the other hand, learns that there is a level of intimacy in sex that she is missing with her casual attitude. Sonderbergh’s message: fearing sex will only make you unhappy, but so will treating sex like just another pastime.

Moreover, Sonderbergh repeatedly stresses that it is within our own selves that the blame for our unhappiness lies, and that women must stop casting blame upon each other for their own problems. Before their awakening, while both women are still deeply unhappy, each blames the other’s “wrong” views on sex for their own unhappiness. Indeed, at one point, Ann admits:

“I hate it when I have feelings [Cynthia] has. It bothers me when I think about men because I know that’s how she thinks.”

Cynthia, on the other hand, essentially blames Ann for making it possible for her to sleep with John, and she admits to enjoying the idea of having sex with John on Ann’s own bed as a sort of revenge. It is only when the two women stop casting blame on each other and realize the power to control their own lives within themselves that they become happy.

Graham’s True Role

Though I said earlier that Graham is irrelevant to the movie, that is not entirely true. Sonderbergh has one more point, and he makes it through Graham.

We see Graham as some sort of strange voyeur, and he makes us uneasy. Indeed, Roger Ebert described his videotaping as “a form of sexual assault; [through which] he has power not over their bodies but over their minds, over their secrets.” But Graham represents us, the viewers: we are doing exactly what Graham is doing -- watching video of two women discuss their sexuality. And we are doing this for the same reason that Ann and Cynthia blamed each other for their own problems -- because we believe that seeing other people with more messed up lives means that ours are somehow less bad. You can hear this charge when Ann confronts Graham at the end of the film and he, speaking for us, tries to justify his voyeurism: “I see John and Cynthia and you and I feel comparatively healthy.” But Ann, i.e. Sonderbergh, responds simply, “You’ve got a problem.”

When Graham then replies, on our behalf, that his problems are his own, and thus, none of her business, Ann shoots that down as well: “You think they’re yours, but they’re not. Everybody who comes through that door becomes part of your problem.” And thus, we are told to examine our own lives to see if we are not repeating these destructive behaviors.

The Critics, Wrong Again

Finally, a quick word on the critics. Drawing deeply from the well of subtlety, many critics patted themselves on the back for recognizing that as Ann’s life was changing, Graham offered her water instead of ice tea when she came to visit. This was apparently deeply symbolic of the change in her life. But these same masters of the subtle arts missed the overall message. Indeed, most critics viewed this movie as simply a meaningless tale about sex with no particular message. They also loved to express their shock at Graham’s voyeurism (no irony there folks).

Ebert, who described the movie as being about four people with “confused sex lives,” declared the film “more clever than enlightening.” And strangely, after condemning Graham’s voyeurism as “a form of sexual assault” Ebert later concludes that the movie “reminds us of how sexy the movies used to be, back in the days when speech was an erogenous zone.” Ah yes. . . the days of sexual assault. . . the good old days.

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