Title: Ocean’s
Eleven (or Ocean’s 11) |
Release Date: 2001 |
Nationality and Language: |
Running time: about 120 Minutes |
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Distributor and Production Company: Warner Brothers ( |
Director; Writer: Steven Soderbergh (had directed Traffic) |
Producer: Jerry Weintraub |
Cast: George Clooney, Matt Damon, Andy Garcia, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Casey Affleck, Scott Caan, Elliott Gould, Bernie Mac, Carl Reiner |
Technical: Panavision, digital |
Relevance to doaskdotell site: that’s entertainment (??_ |
Review: Oh, really, this all-star “rat pack” cast, all
interviewed by Barbara Walters on It’s
tongue-in-check, as when a boyish Linus (Matt
Damon, normally one of the most intellectually engaging younger characters in
Sometimes it is a bit more serious, as when Linus impersonates a Nevada Gaming Commission official (in classes, like the Talented Mr. Ripley) and gets a casino employee fired and escorted off the premises. The title, in fact, refers to the “rat pack,” the team of 11 (including himself) assembled by Daniel Ocean (George Clooney) as he gets out of jail. Well, he will go back to jail some day. This movie makes me want to get on a chart (even if no Sun Country) and head back to the Las Vega Strip. On a more serious note: of course, nobody could possibly stage a heist on the Bellagio. Nobody will copycat the antics in this movie. It’s an extended comedy, right? Well, there is
this matter of the flux compression generator, e-bomb (electronic pulse
generator) that they use in the heist. It knocks out all of the power in
Vegas (including the fight) for a few seconds. The weapon looks real enough,
but that would not happen. Instead,
there would be permanent destruction of all electronic equipment over a small
area (a couple of city blocks) and it would not come back on, but the city as
a whole would not be affected. The screenplay at one point mentions that this
kind of weapon can throw a geographical area back into the “17th
Century” although then the lights could not come back on! Now, Popular
Science came out with its scary story on this por
man’s weapon around Labor Day, about a week before the Sept. 11 attacks (and
this article uses a 19th Century metaphor). Was this story prompted by knowing that the
e-bomb would figure into the plot of an upcoming high profile movie? Technically, the photography lacked clarity in some scenes, as the backgrounds behind the close-ups blurred too much and lost depth, making the wide-screen format almost a distraction. You want Vegas to look as real and have that “you are there” quality. One more thing, why
did Warner Brothers bypass its wonderful This was the last
movie I would see ( Ocean's
Twelve (Ocean's
12) is a spectacular ( Ocean's Thirteen (Ocean's 13) comes back to Vegas, where one of the rat pack Reuben Tishkoff (Elliot Gould, who was once a young man) has a coronary thrombosis, and needs a heist by his buddies to feel better. He says that the Inuits used to ship away their elderly on ice floes when they became too infirm to hunt, and he doesn’t want eldercare to catch up with him. Part of the plan comprises simulating an earthquake. There is a lot of metaphoric comedy and chic dialogue, somewhat random in nature. Linus Caldwell (Matt Damon) becomes Lenny Pepperidge with a Pinocchio nose. There’s a great line where a dealer is fired for having too high a body mass index, where the supervisor keeps taunting the fat on the employee’s forearm. There’s great on location photography of the strip, although the shots look hot and overhued with orange (as in “Traffic”). Warner Bros. and Village Roadshow
let ratpack music play during their opening trademarks,
instead of the Hollywood Homicide (2003), from Columbia Pictures and Revolution Studios,
directed by Ron Shelton, in which Harrison Ford (playing experienced cop Joe Gavilan) and Josh Hartnett (playing rookie K. C. Calden) run through some rather comic situations and
chases as a tag team. The car chase through Good to see that Columbia Pictures brought back its wonderful musical trademark at the opening.
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