The Conical Glass: Thirteen is an unlucky number

Sunday, August 05, 2007

Thirteen is an unlucky number

It's kind of pointless writing a review of a movie that opened almost 2 months ago, but "Ocean's Thirteen" just hit my neighborhood second run film emporium on Friday. It seemed like the kind of movie that would be goofy, lightweight summer fun. I enjoyed "Ocean's Eleven"; I skipped "Twelve," since it got such poor reviews, but a lot of critics called "Thirteen" a return to form. Personally, I felt it wasn't even worth the $6 ticket price -- in fact, it's the first movie in years where I desperately wanted to walk out. (Had I been alone, I probably would have.) Usually, even if a movie is not very good, I want to keep watching anyway because I am curious about what's going to happen. With "Thirteen," I knew exactly what was going to happen, and I had no interest in watching it.

The lethargic, phoning-it-in performances, the convoluted storyline, the Whatever Technology, the smug in-jokes (George Clooney to Brad Pitt: "Why don't you settle down, have a couple of kids?"), the downright misogynistic plotline involving the attractive but curiously trout-lipped Ellen Barkin -- really, there's not one thing I enjoyed in this entire movie. Well, OK, maybe one thing -- the fabulous CGI addition to the Las Vegas skyline of Al Pacino's new megacasino. It looks completely real. Beautifully done.

If I may quote the great Roger Ebert:

I know full well I'm expected to Suspend My Disbelief. Unfortunately, my disbelief is very heavy, and during "Ocean's Thirteen," the suspension cable snapped. I think that was when they decided to manufacture a fake earthquake to scare all the high-rollers on opening night. How did they plan to do this? Why, by digging under the casino with one of the giant tunnel boring machines used to dig the Chunnel between England and France.
Yes, you can buy your own. There were originally 11. One sold on eBay for around $7 million. A boring machine, I find, weighs about 600 tons. How easy do you think it would be for a handful of Vegas slicksters to buy such a machine, transport it to America, move it cross-country, and use it to drill a tunnel under the Strip (which never sleeps), all the while removing untold tons of earth, rock and sand without being noticed? And without causing earthquakes in all the other casinos they bored under?
I am reminded of that IMAX documentary about climbing Mt. Everest. All I could think of was, if it's hard for the climbers, think about how hard it is for the guys carrying the big IMAX camera up the mountain. I wanted to see a doc about them. Now if you had a movie about smuggling a 600-ton tunnel boring machine under Vegas, that would be a caper.

posted by 125records @ 11:09 PM

4 Comments:

At 9:47 AM, Paula said…

This is precisely how I felt watching O-12: it looks like they were havin' a grand time filming it, but with all the lame writing, in-jokes, and lazy performances, it amounts to watching someone else's home videos.
At 10:37 AM, Janet ID said…

I'm trying to make myself not write this, but hell: our second-run cinemas still charge $1.
At 11:46 AM, 125records said…

I will say that the Cerrito is a beautifully restored art deco theater, whereas most second-run cinemas tend to be shabby old multiplexes, so I don't begrudge them charging $6. They also have two-for-one night every Wednesday, though I'm not sure "Ocean's Thirteen" would have been worth even $3.
At 5:56 PM, 2fs said…

Janet: I'm not sure why you forced yourself to write what you did if you didn't want to: you've got kids, you could have just said, Hey B: type this, and dictated to him, spelling out words when necessary. Voila! You wouldn't have typed it. La-la-la not guilty!

Also: I forget what second-run theaters around here charge - but given the typical clientele I've seen, you could probably get in for free simply by scraping up the old gum and popcorn and selling it to 'em: they look as if it'd be a step up from their usual diet and standards of cleanliness.