(Dir. Steven Soderbergh 2001)
PG-13 Ocean's Eleven is based off the 1960 Frank Sinatra version and is a classic heist movie. I decided to watch this because Ocean's Eight is coming out soon and I wanted some context before I went to see it. Again this is a classic heist movie, it doesn't try to do anything groundbreaking. It is what it is and it excels at that. I enjoyed this movie, but I have to say that it was aggressively 2000s. From the actors to the fashion to the filming style, it all screamed 2000s. Personally I like to pretend that the 2000s never happened so this movie came as a slap in the face in terms of that. Honestly though feelings on that matter is viewer preference, so you have been warned. Ocean's Eleven did an amazing job of balancing showing and telling. This is going to be a hurdle for any heist movie. Most audiences don't have in-depth knowledge of heists or the lingo and terms. So the script faces the conundrum of the characters sounding realistic and confusing the audience. Obviously no one wants to watch a heist movie if half of it is just explaining the role of each of the men in on the con, so a lot of the movie must be devoted to the idea of showing and not telling. At the beginning of the movie, when the men are assembling their crew they mention the role of each of the men. To avoid having to over-explain to the audience what that meant, they instead cut to clips of the men doing their job. The one complaint I have about this movie is that it didn't spend much time developing the characters. I understand why, there wasn't a lot of extra time left over once they got through explaining and planning the heist, but I still would've loved to see some more interaction between George Clooney's and Matt Damon's characters. Though I feel that due to the intended audience for this movie they didn't worry about the lack of development. Which isn't a critique of the intended audience, it just means that this was meant to be a typical heist movie. Nothing more nothing less. The only instance of lack of development that really bothered me is when Ocean's ex-wife goes back to him. I understand why she left the casino owner, but that doesn't give me any explanation as to why she would suddenly decide to go back to Ocean. Other than her deciding to leave the casino owner, nothing had changed between the two of them. That just felt kind of cheap to me. They wanted Ocean to get his girl but they didn't want to devote any more time to their relationship. Thus turning that character essentially into a trophy for Ocean. So that bugged me.
1 Comment
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Aubrey KirchhoffI'm just screaming into the void and somehow getting graded on it. Archives
April 2018
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