Ocean's Eleven

Now this is how you should remake a movie.  Taking the basic idea of an eleven-man Vegas heist from the 1960 Rat Pack original, Ocean’s Eleven discards most of the other story elements in favor of presenting an overwhelming sense of coolness.

Danny Ocean (George Clooney) has a plan to do the impossible.  He wants to rob not one, not two, but three Las Vegas casinos at the same time; no one has ever successfully robbed a single casino, much less three.  Of course, it helps that he doesn’t like the owner of those three casinos, Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia), or that Terry is now dating Danny’s ex-wife, Tess (Julia Roberts).  Yes, Danny has the master plan, but he needs help.  A lot of help, all of it talented, and each person playing parts in multiple cons that will all factor together to achieve the big prize of stealing $160+ million from Terry Benedict’s ridiculously theft-proof vault.  Can Danny rob the vault and win back Tess?  Do you really care?  This is a heist movie, and it’s all about the con.

When you're risking arrest and jail time, a tuxedo is always the right choice.

The cast in this film is ridiculously large and recognizable.  Aside from George Clooney at his wittiest and most charming, you have Brad Pitt as Rusty, the number two man on the job.  Like Clooney, Pitt exudes coolness here, and their scenes together are the best in the movie.  Julia Roberts is okay as Tess, although I wish her character had anything appealing about her to make her worth Danny’s risk.  The rest of the cast is less famous, but still pretty good.  Andy Garcia does a very good job as the uptight villain, Don Cheadle plays a surprisingly good British criminal with a surprisingly Mary Poppins-ish accent, and Matt Damon turns in a quality performance as the relative rookie on the job.  The rest of the cast was pretty decent, although many of their roles were little more than one-dimensional.  Elliott Gould was nearly insufferable as the comically stereotypical showbiz Jewish guy, Casey Affleck and Scott Caan were solid comedy relief as bickering brothers, Carl Reiner was surprisingly serious, Bernie Mac got to make a joke about racism, Eddie Jemison played a nerd, and professional acrobat Qin Shaobo played the part of a “little Chinese guy” like he was born into the role.   

"Say hello to the human Nuprin: he's little, yellow, and different!"  Brad Pitt is racist.

There are also a handful of cameos, including Wayne Newton (it is in Vegas, after all) and a cast of young actors, playing idiotic versions of themselves (Topher Grace, Barry Watson, Joshua Jackson, Shane West, and Holly Marie Combs).

The film’s pace is quick, the dialogue is clever, and the editing is very impressive.  There are a lot of things going on in this movie, many of them at the same time, and none of them are explained beforehand.  Despite all that, the movie is never confusing.  This isn’t the best work Steven Soderbergh has done, but it is probably the most fun, entertaining, and polished of all his films.

What truly makes this movie great is just how much fun it is.  Everybody clearly had a blast working together, and that shows in their chemistry.  Sure, some of the credit can be given to screenwriter Ted Griffin, because there are a lot of gems in this script, but the timing is impeccable on all the jokes and even the ones that are winking at the camera  ---like anything Elliott Gould says, or when George Clooney and Brad Pitt leave a club with Topher Grace and some other young actors, and Clooney and Pitt are the only ones not mobbed by fans --- still work because the actors play up the jokes with the utmost confidence.

If these two can play brothers,how about James Caan and Ben Affleck?

I could go on and on about all the cool little cons they perform in this movie, but that takes away from the fun of watching them in action.  There are an awful lot of details that are often overlooked in this movie because of its pace, though.  I really liked that each character had their own identifiable style, for starters.  Some of the details in those looks would have held deeper importance in other films, but not this one.  In most movies, a character that has a tattoo that reaches out onto the back of his hand, like Rusty’s does, has a story for that tattoo, or it gives insight into his character.  Here, the tattoo is never fully revealed, or even referenced once.  Similarly, you would think that someone would have pointed out that Casey Affleck looks like a pedophile when he has a mustache, but that’s not the point of this film.  This is about style over substance, people.

And that is actually the only problem with Ocean’s Eleven.   It is so stylish and cool and fun that it never bothers to slow down and make the audience care about its characters.  Of course, the filmmakers never try to do this, so it’s not like they did it poorly.  Let’s face it, this is a ridiculous movie.  How much of this was planned in advance?  How many people are friends with Danny Ocean?  Whatever, it doesn’t matter. This is just meant to be fun fluff, and it succeeds at that.  There are other heist movies out there that I think are better movies, but it is hard to argue that there are any that are more fun to watch.

On a personal note, I would like to call out one of my favorite film moments.  When George Clooney meets up with Julia Roberts for the first time in Ocean's Eleven, he sits down and orders "A whiskey [holds his thumb and index finger about three inches apart] and a whiskey [holds his thumb and index finger about an inch apart]."  That makes me smile every time.  And yes, if you go to a decent bar and give them that exact order, they will know what you mean.  And that is awesomely cool.

Colors

"In the heart of the city, people die for wearing the wrong colors."  Well, so do nighttime joggers who don't wear reflective gear, but nobody makes a movie about them.  The year was 1988 and inner-city gang warfare was in the news.  In the 2000s, thanks to Michael Jordan's retirement, shoe-related murder has gone down significantly gang violence is not the epidemic it once was, especially in California, but it was a huge issue in the late 80s and early 90s, one that cried out for a voice to speak about it in popular culture.  Who can speak to both the adults trying to deal with the issue and the teens tangled in the problem?  Dennis Hopper?  Really?  Interesting choice.  Hot on the heels of a career revival, helped by his performances in Blue Velvet and Hoosiers (and not at all helped by Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2), Hopper jumped back in the director's chair for the first time in eight years for Colors.  Let's see...a movie about the police and gang members in Los Angeles, around 1990...I wonder if racism will play a part...?

Danny McGavin (Sean Penn), a member of the LAPD's elite C.R.A.S.H. (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums) unit, has a smart mouth and an attitude that requires him to lash out at the slightest sign of disrespect.  After he makes a joke about tampons during a C.R.A.S.H. meeting, McGavin is assigned to a new partner, the about-ready-to-retire Bob Hodges (Robert Duvall).  Hodges knows that you cannot police an area without the aid of its citizens.  Well, not easily, anyway.  His methods include politeness and courtesy to suspected gang members, and he usually doesn't arrest for minor infractions; he wants to build up enough trust that the people on the streets will alert him if something big or dangerous is going to happen.  McGavin doesn't do things like that.  If he's not in a car chase, he's in a foot race.  If he's he sees a suspect, he rushes in head down.  McGavin earns the nickname Pac-Man on the streets because he drives a bright yellow car and is known to eat scumbags for breakfast.  Probably not literally.  So, this is a good (easy-going) cop, bad (-ass) cop story, with Hodges at his wits end and McGavin completely baffled as to why he irritates his partner.

Meanwhile, a gang war is heating up between the local Crips, Bloods, and a few other gangs.  Lead by the deadly serious Roccet (Don Cheadle) and accompanied by the perpetually high (and possibly mentally retarded) T-Bone (Damon Wayans), the Crips have some big plans to shoot up some Bloods.  However, their plan will take them through the turf of a few other gangs, including a small but tough gang of mostly Hispanics (including a young and thankfully dialogue-free Mario Lopez).  This is the sort of big, dangerous thing that Hodges needs gang members to alert him to.  Will his methods carry the day, or will Pac-Man's?  Or maybe neither?

Robert Duvall is a very talented actor, and he plays his part of the wise veteran pretty well.  He might spend a suspicious amount of time fixing up his hair for someone who has been bald since 1960, and he might actually say "I'm too old for this shit" at one point in this film, but he plays his part and does it well.  Sean Penn also turns in a good performance, even if his acting during a mourning scene is reminiscent of I am Sam.  The rest of the cast is just bit players.  Maria Conchita Alonso has the thankless task of playing both McGavin's love interest and reality check, but she did a decent job with what she was given.  I was surprised to see Don Cheadle playing a street thug, but I'm not going to criticize the role choices for a struggling young black actor; in retrospect, it's impressive just how many complex and non-stereotypical roles Cheadle has played in his career.  It was nice to see Tony Todd pop up as an angry citizen, but it was only a cameo.  Dennis Hopper does a pretty good job directing.  I liked that there was a lot of overlapping dialogue with both the police and the gang members.  I don't know how good Hopper's instincts for storytelling were, but he was definitely able to capture realism in most scenes.

The dialogue is one of the age markers for this film.  If I had a dollar for every time someone used the word "homes" or "hommie," I would have enough to have Hopper's corpse stuffed and mounted in my apartment, probably posed with a Pabst Blue Ribbon in his hand.  Trust me, I've done the research, and there are very reasonable taxidermists in the area.  It's not that the dialogue feels strained or awkward, but a lot of it was probably going out of style when the film was released.  The music stands up pretty well, despite being clearly from 1988, with a Herbie Hancock score and Ice-T rapping the title track.  Neither are particularly memorable or relevant today, but they're pretty good for the late 80s.

I'm still not sure how much I like this movie.  It's not a lot, mind you, but I'm not quite sure what side of decently mediocre it falls on.  On the one hand, I'm glad that this movie doesn't wrap everything up with a nice bow and say, "And THAT is how to end gang violence --- introduce free ice cream Wednesdays!"  I understand that "issue" movies aren't trying to solve a problem as much as they are bringing attention to it.  I just feel like Dennis Hopper was a little too pleased with himself at the end.  The goal of this film is to follow McGavin's progression as a member of C.R.A.S.H., from a hot-head to something else.  His is the only character that has a dramatic arc, so his must be the key story, right?  Well, changing his attitude in the very last scene isn't enough.  And if McGavin is the key to the narrative, then the film should have placed more importance on his work and how Hodges influenced him, for better or for worse.  In other words, I think this would have been more effective if, instead of being about "the gang problem," it was a movie about a young police officer and his work with and against gang members.  And while I think Penn and Duvall were fine actors in this movie, they did not share much chemistry; in a surprising choice, the script doesn't require them to.  As it is, though, gangs take center stage here and the police are simply reacting to them.  If the focus is on an issue, then I feel that the audience deserves a solution to that issue, naive or stupid as that solution may be.  Without that, the film ends with no real sense of accomplishment.

Hotel Rwanda

I borrowed this DVD from a friend when the movie first came out, intent on watching Don Cheadle's acclaimed performance.  I never got around to it.  I always looked at the film as inevitably depressing, and I didn't know much about the Rwandan genocide of 1994, and I always feel sketchy if I let a movie educate me on world events.  In the intervening years, I've educated myself to a point where, when I saw the movie available On Demand through my cable, I finally felt I was ready to watch it.

The movie takes place during the genocide, but thankfully is not a document of the killings.  Instead, it tells the tale of Paul (Don Cheadle), a manager for the finest hotel around.  Paul is very talented at using words to get what he wants; when that fails, bribery usually does the trick.  This serves him well as manager, allowing him to get his hands on high end cigars, liquor, and more.  These treats are not for him, but to gain favor with local politicians, international military leaders, and anyone else.  It's a good thing he is good at his job, because ethnic tensions in Rwanda reach their boiling point, with paramilitary groups of the Hutu ethnic majority gathering and executing any of the Tutsi minority they can find.  Paul is Hutu, but his wife (Sophie Okonedo) is Tutsi.  Seeing his neighborhood quickly becoming a war zone, Paul manages to sneak and bribe his family's way into the hotel.  There, he tries to keep things business-as-usual.  It doesn't really work.  First of all, a war was going on, just outside the hotel.  Secondly, it's the old any-port-in-a-storm rule.  The hotel quickly acts as a shelter for overflow from the United Nations camps, the Red Cross, and for war orphans.  Why don't the Hutu militias just attack the hotel?  Good question.  The answer seems to be because Paul maintains the image of a professional European hotel; it feels like another country, or at least an embassy.  That means that, if the locals attack, there could possibly be some retaliation from the Western world.  Seeing the importance of maintaining this image, Paul must keep the hotel running for appearances' sake, care for the refugees, and act as the support for his own family.  For a while, Paul has his hopes set on the United Nations sending in a peacekeeping force to stop the massacre, but that never happens.  The burden for saving the 1200+ refugees in his hotel ultimately falls on Paul's shoulders.

This is an important movie to watch.  Hearing the abstract numbers (about 800,000 dead in an area about the size of a New England state) doesn't really sink in.  Seeing people being shot in the streets is more effective.  Showing trucks drive over miles of road, clogged with dead bodies is better still.  This movie doesn't set out to over-horrify you, which is good.  This is an exhausting viewing experience, and I say that in the best way possible; at the time of this genocide, Americans were either upset over Kurt Cobain's suicide, or fascinated by OJ Simpson's car chase in a white Ford Bronco.  Sure, those are obviously important things, but I have no recollection of Rwanda from school or news at that time, and that embarrasses me.  Still, this could have easily become a testament to the horrific things humans do to each other, but director and co-writer Terry George wisely chose to avoid making this movie an unwatchable guilt trip.  Instead, we have these terrible things framing a true story of heroic humanitarianism.

I was surprised that this movie did not show off the director or cinematographer's skills more.  Usually, when directors make an "important" movie, they make sure to show their skills or make things a little artsy.  This movie is shot in a straightforward fashion, with no artistic embellishments.

The film clearly focuses on Cheadle's character, but there are several recognizable actors with supporting roles.  Nick Nolte plays a Canadian UN military forces member, and he delivers the best white-versus-black speech I have heard in a long while.  Joaquin Phoenix is a news cameraman that asks many questions about the Hutu and the Tutsi for the benefits of the viewers; since his character is essentially there for exposition, his role is less impressive.  Jean Reno makes a brief, uncredited cameo just for recognition purposes.  Cara Seymour is the Red Cross worker that helps Paul save refugees; she's not in the movie much, but I thought she did a pretty good job.  Sophie Okonedo plays Paul's wife, and it is a demanding performance; she basically spends the whole movie terrified.

As I mentioned earlier, though, the real acting burden belongs to Don Cheadle.  It's rare to see a movie about death and destruction where the hero is not a man of action.  There are several points where Cheadle's character reaches a breaking point, and you watch him crumble in private, only to put himself back together in front of others.  It's fairly common for a low-key drama to have a nuanced grieving performance given by the lead actor or actress; this movie is not low-key, but Cheadle is still able to channel that same sort of private, subtle performance here.  There are two great scenes in particular that show this off.  The first is when he tells his wife to kill herself and their kids if the hotel is invaded; this could have easily been overacted, but his control here made his loss of control later all the more effective.  The second scene is just Cheadle cleaning himself up after unwittingly stumbling upon thousands of fresh corpses.  Cheadle has always been pretty good, but this role really showed what he is capable of.

Despite Cheadle's performance, this isn't a movie I will ever watch over and over again.  That's probably not the point of this movie, I get that, but it should be a little better.  Joaquin Phoenix's character is a little too guilt-ridden and a little too clueless to not be offensive.  I understand that Americans don't know what Hutus and Tutsis are; I think a short prologue would have worked better than having a stupid American make obvious comments about how he can't tell the difference between the two groups (there's a racist joke there, but I'm passing it by).  I think it's funny that Nick Nolte's character expressed his guilt more creatively and accurately (basically, the West sees Africa as a crap pile) as a Canadian than Phoenix's American could.  I also would have enjoyed a little more time spent adding symbolism and the like to make this a little more technically interesting.  I'm not saying the movie needed a Schindler's List red jacket, but a few little touches would have been nice.  Other than that, though, this is an interesting subject with one excellent performance.

Iron Man 2

Making a good sequel is a tricky business.  Of course, you want to stay true to what made the first film good, but you also need to change it up a little to keep the audience interested.  The tricky part is that you don't want to change it too little, or the sequel feels too similar to the previous movie (see the Saw series).  One cure for this is to spend the entire film budget on the stars and special effects, leaving you with enough cash to buy eleven bananas, so you just hire a half-witted chimp to write your script (which is the true story behind the making of Bad Boys II).  Every so often, though, filmmakers get it right, giving depth to the characters, while including more action because the origin story has already been told.

Iron Man 2 is one of those sequels that gets it right.  A big part of this is the fact that the principal cast remains from the original film, with one exception.  The role of James "Rhodey" Rhodes is played by Don Cheadle instead of Terrence Howard this time around.  While both have been nominated for an Oscar, I think of this as a casting upgrade because Cheadle is charismatic enough to hold his own in the Ocean's movies, and Howard was pretty wooden in Iron Man.  Other than that, Robert Downey, Jr. returns as Tony Stark, the man that wears the Iron Man armor.  Gwyneth Paltrow also returns as his devoted not-quite-romantically-involved life partner/assistant, Pepper Potts.  Downey is once again fantastic as the egotistical and sarcastic lead character.  Paltrow's character has more to do in this movie, and she's fine, but the plot requires her to be annoyed with Downey most of the time, so their chemistry isn't as strong this time.  Cheadle, however, comes through with a pretty solid performance as Tony Stark's straight-laced best friend.  Jon Favreau apparently did another good job directing, because the actors all performed well and the action was awesome.

The supporting cast is good, too.  The role of the malicious Russian physicist/tinkerer, Ivan Vanko, is played with relish by Mickey Rourke.  It's always better when his character has a reason for looking as haggard as Rourke does naturally; here, he plays a heavily tattooed veteran of the Russian prison system with some very...um...attractive gold teeth and greasy hair.  Aside from his first scene, Rourke is very good; in that first scene, though, he gives a howl of mourning comparable to Hayden Christensen in Star Wars: Episode III.  Rourke's best moments are when he chuckles to himself.  That creepy laugh with that ugly face makes Rourke a pretty scary guy.  The other villain here is Stark's business (but not intellectual) rival, Justin Hammer, played by the always amusing Sam Rockwell.  Rockwell approaches his character as a first-class salesman that doesn't necessarily care to know the details of what he is selling, as long as it makes him money.  As such, he's perfectly annoying.  To be honest, he doesn't come across as a legitimate threat to Stark (because he's not), but the scene where he is talking weapons to Rhodey shows how effective he can be.  Sam Jackson expands his role as super-secret agent Nick Fury from the last film, and he is appropriately Sam Jackson-esque (read: bad-ass).  Scarlett Johannson stretches her acting range in a small supporting role as a sexy redhead/secretary/martial artist that wears really tight clothes.  Garry Shandling was amusing as an antagonistic senator.  They even had Leslie Bibb reprise her slutty journalist role from the last movie and threw in cameos by Olivia Munn and the late Adam "DJ AM" Goldstein.

You might notice that I've given a lot of attention to the actors so far.  While this is an action movie, Iron Man 2 spends a lot of time developing characters and plot.  The first movie was like that, too, but part of that was because they were telling an origin story.  Here, they use that down time to give Stark two separate types of problems.  The first is the fact that Stark is slowly killing himself with the Iron Man suit.  It's not his fault, really, but his chest battery thingie that saved his life in the first film has a metal component that is poisoning him in the long term.  Oops.  It turns out that no known element can replace the one he's using, either.  That means that, when Stark isn't being his arrogant public persona, he is planning for his eventual death.  These scenes go over well, with Downey doing another great job showing Stark at his most vulnerable.

The other problem is, like in the last film, one of assuming responsibility for his technology.  In Iron Man, it was about keeping Stark weapons out of the hands of terrorists.  This time around, Stark has decided to give the Iron Man technology to no one.  Obviously, the US government is not happy with this.  Justin Hammer wants to fill the hole Stark has left in military contracts, but he cannot figure out the Iron Man technology on his own.  That is where Ivan Vanko comes in; his father worked on a previous generation of the Iron Man battery with Tony Stark's father.  Vanko built an imperfect, but effective version of the battery to power his own suit, but this one has weird electric whips instead of armor.  Obviously, the bad guys team up to take down Stark as a business, as well as a hero.

Since this is a sequel, they have made the action scenes even bigger.  Vanko's first scene using his whips is surprisingly cool and the sheer amount of car wreckage is impressive.  Personally, my favorite action had Stark fighting Rhodey, with each in their own Iron Man suit.  It was just cool to watch.  I would like to point out that only billionaires can afford to fight like that in their own homes.  Scarlett Johannson looked convincing in her fight scene, too, although some of her poses seemed like a little too obviously T & A.  Not that there's anything wrong with that, but some of it just looked uncomfortable.  The big ending fight scene was great, once Iron Man and Rhodey/War Machine finally teamed up.  The action leading up to their team-up was a little underwhelming, given how long it took and I was a little disappointed by the durability of the evil robot drones in the climax, but the fight with Vanko made up for those concerns.  Until this movie, I never considered whips as even remotely cool or threatening; I'm sure they're an acquired taste (as a weapon), but Vanko looked like a legitimate threat in this movie.

Now, for the bad news.  There are a few moments where this movie failed for me.  The first involved Vanko's first battle scene.  As awesome as it was, it had a ridiculous plot hole.  It looked like his plan was always to sneak on the racetrack and attack Stark's race car...but Stark decided to drive the car himself only minutes before the race began.  Was Vanko planning on sneaking into the fancy restaurant where Stark was going to watch the race, dressed as a car mechanic?  It's not a big deal, I admit, but it was a stupid writing mistake.

The other moment was when Stark is watching an old video of his late father, Howard.  It's pretty boring stuff, showing how focused he was on business and not his family, until Howard addresses Tony through the video.  It's the typical emotionally distant father finally admitting how much he cares for his children speech.  If you liked it here, you'll love it in The Incredibles.  It's not that the scene was terrible, but it just...too predictable.  This scene is meant to show Tony at his most vulnerable, finding inspiration and love for an unexpected place, but it just feels flat.  This is probably because the father-son relationship is barely mentioned until the video is played, but Stark's vulnerable moments in this movie are just not as effective in this movie because they are not spent with other characters.


These flaws are pretty well balanced out by a lot of clever little things throughout the movie, though.  Justin Hammer is such a wanna-be, of course he uses bronzing lotion; it is just as obvious that his palms should be orange from using the bronzer, too.   Rourke's tattoos looked like legitimate Russian prison tattoos, too; I recognized some of them from Eastern Promises.  Pepper Potts was upset at Stark giving away his modern art collection because he worked hard to build it; this is a nice bit of work, making subtle reference to the modern art knowledge she showed briefly in the first film.  There's more stuff, but it's more fun to see it yourself.  Honestly, this movie has a lot going for it.  It is a nearly pitch-perfect sequel that introduced new problems to established characters and developed the returning characters even further.  The action is a little bigger and provides a very powerful character with a more even fight.