User talk:Ashharris11

"This town... Is a Losin' Town": Petulance as Cool in Ocean's Thirteen
Steven Soderbergh utilized to remake Rat Pack flicks, now he remakes the Dean Martin superstar roasts. The moment I excused Ocean's Eleven as a gambling metaphor for mainstream filmmaking, even though the flaunted arrogance of its two sequels has made it impossible for them to be seen as nearly anything other than tanning salons where viewers shell out to watch megastars smelling every single other's farts. The Steven & George & Brad I Could Give a Fuck Specific continues in Ocean's Thirteen, in which the plot carefully scrapped in Ocean's Twelve is restored only to be drained of suspense, hazard, character and human curiosity. Now there is just self-fondling fizz -- no, not even that, just a kind of quasi-Zen petulance palmed off as "great." In a summer time packed with unwelcome returns (Spider-Male, Shrek, Jack Sparrow), George Clooney and his gang of Vegas outlaw-hipsters (which includes Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, Bernie Mac, Casey Affleck, Scott Caan, Shaobo Quin and Carl Reiner) nonetheless handle to ring up the season's most corrupt notes. Larceny continues to be a video game, now with a twist of revenge: Elliott Gould, the gang's mentor, lies comatose after possessing been backstabbed by fellow marauding shark Al Pacino, so Clooney and Co. put their constant vacations on hold to teach him a lesson. Pacino's grand casino is their target, wigs, phony mustaches and ostentatious winking are their weapons. The digital camera retains on zipping, but the setups lurch -- Pitt dons hippie whiskers to infiltrate Pacino's office and warn him about a achievable earthquake, which is currently being artificially manufactured by Cheadle even though Affleck is in Mexico kicking off a factory revolt ("Have you forgotten Zapata?"). Meanwhile, Clooney smirks.

Eddie Izzard pinches Kent Jones's great line about John Carpenter ("an analog gentleman in a digital world") to explain the Ocean's Thirteen bunch, and there's a whiff that the quip is meant to apply not just to the aging very boys cavorting on the display, but also to the director supervising the celebration. Clooney and Pitt finding misty over Oprah episodes is about the heaviest acting they've completed in decades, and, shade-coded mise en scÃ¨ne or not, Soderbergh by now shares their laziness -- his filmmaking is not "breezy" and "light-fingered," but slothful and podgy (see Damon's seduction of very poor Ellen Barkin for an encyclopedia of methods to screw up a scene). "You do not operate the very same gag two times," it is explained as the fellas map out their time-devouring charades, a rule definitely seconded by veteran vaudevillian Reiner nevertheless altogether ignored in the ambiance of informal conning, wherever even Gould and Pacino succumb to cuddly mugging. Insouciance is all in this minimum urgent of heist thrillers, even though there's a vast gulf in between the inclusiveness of the transparent meta-rest in, say, Howard Hawks' Hatari!, and the smug sense of privileged entitlement right here offered up as an undemanding palliative, Ocean's Thirteen is in fact a tortuous, permit-them-try to eat-cake doodle. The only identifiable character is unlucky hotel reviewer David Paymer, who suffers indignity following indignity and in the finish grabs his reduce of the loot for his difficulty. No these plunder awaits other critics, who will have to make do with Sinatra serenading our sweetheart-crooks with "This Town" -- yeah yeah, Las Vegas ain't what it applied to be, but Scorsese and Siegfried & Roy by now advised me that.

Cash tends to make Hollywood go close to. In Ocean's Thirteen it quakes the earth, in Hostel: Component II it buys existence. It can not get creativity or talent, alas, and Eli Roth's soiling adhere to-up to his private unaccountably productive gorefest really should have slithered straight to DVD. Chat about operating the similar gag twice: The asshole-jocks from the original have merely been changed with a trio of vacationing gals (art-school child dyke Lauren German, Bijou Phillips in hoochie overdrive, and Wiener Canine Heather Matarazzo), who consider a stupid detour into Slovakia and develop into the meat in the unique abattoir wherever a solution business gives Most Hazardous Video game specials to bloodthirsty millionaires. To be honest, there's a single great image (a Salome package deal mirrored in some Dr. Evil's mirrored shades), one particular flash of wit (new victims currently being auctioned off in global, faux-eBay design), and one particular powerful passage (a mournful Slavic dirge enjoying although Roger Bart and Richard Burgi, Yankee snuff-consumers, get fitted for the slaughter). For the rest, it's poseur callousness all the way. There are hooded prisoners and attack dogs, Burgi evokes Chad and New Orleans and declares "We're the regular ones" -- and Roth somehow nevertheless manages to scrub all resonance out of the content, misreading and degrading the genuine transgression of the horror genre. As for viscera, there's gloating over sawed-off faces and scissored cocks, as well as the cash-shot (Matarazzo hanging upside down naked to present a modern day Countess Bathory with arterial ejaculation). With these two inexcusable sequels, you can both get the extended route with Soderbergh's sweetened roofie or skip forward to Roth's spike-dildo rape: Possibly scenario, you're finding screwed.