Gratuitous Mid-Afternoon Netflix-Induced Thought

I dunno about anybody else, but I rather enjoyed Ocean's 12. I won't say if I think it's better than Ocean's 11, because I can't remember anything about what I thought of that movie except that the ending left me mildly dissatisfied.

But one question comes up: What is it about Julia Roberts that I'm still not getting?

Just askin'.

YIPS from Steve-O: Talk about the LLama DVD Harmonic Convergance! I rented Ocean's 12 last monday night and it was on my list of things to talk about. My thoughts:

2. Ocean's 11 is one of my all time favorite movies. I have always loved caper/con movies (thanks, I'm sure, to early repeated viewings of the Pink Panther franchise and The Sting), and Ocean's 11 was just so darn cool. I loved everything about it (except for Damon, who was the only bad penny in the bunch). It was quirky and weird in a Napoleon Dynamite sort of way, and the whole creative tension between Rusty and Danny Ocean was just, well, coolness defined. The repeated getting out of prison scenes even top the John Belushi getting out of prison scene in the Blues Brothers. I'm still trying to figure out what exactly "the biggest Ella Fitzgerald, of ALL TIME" was. The clothes, the mood, the soundtrack, it all just clicked for me.

As for the original? George Clooney is cooler than Sinatra.

Sue me.

IV. Ocean's 12 was just, well, flat. I re-watched it to understand the plot, and yes, it did work, but it failed (for me) in the essence of a good con movie---defining who and what the mark is. A good con movie will spin like a drunken gyroscope (think perhaps the greatest con movie of them all: House of Games), but it revolves around that central core. Ocean's 12 was coreless that way: too little quirky banter, not enough Bernie Mac, too much information on Rusty, and way too much Catherine Zeta Jones, who was probably the least convincing cinematic portrayal of a police officer since Al Molinaro's Murray the Cop on the Odd Couple tee-vee show. Maybe it was that the Danny/Tess/Rusty triangle was diluted, I don't know.

House of Games---the greatest con man movie of all time

3.14 One thing I did like was the whole Julia Roberts spoof 3/4 through the movie---it was one of the few laugh out loud parts of the whole thing, although Bruce Willis added a distracting level to the whole thing.

So in the end: too much "hey we're cool celebrities making a movie in Lake Como" and not enough of the core elements of a good con/caper movie.

And no, this doesn't mean I'm ready to join the Church of the Holy Netflix, although I've been pestered with pamphlets offered by its devout adherents in the past five trips to the airport.

Yips! back from Robbo: I'd just say to Steve-O and the commenters who have mentioned it that the whole Roberts-laughing-at-herself thing fell flat with me because it didn't come across as genuine self-mockery, but rather as pretend self-mockery which, in a weirdo Hollywood way, actually translates into more self-promotion. It was all too what my old Texas friends would have called, "praycious".