August 02, 2007
ocean's 13
Out at the airport Oedipa, feeling invisible, eavesdropped on a poker game whose steady loser entered each loss neat and conscientious in a little balance-book decorated inside and out with scrawled post horns. "I'm averaging a 99.375 percent return, fellas," he heard him say. The others, strangers, looked at him, some blank, some annoyed. That's averaging it out, over 23 years, he went on, trying to smile. Always just that little percent on the wrong side of breaking even. Twenty-three years. I'll never get ahead of it. Why don't I quit?" Nobody answering. — The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon
Nobody needing to answer, it being all too plain.
The house always wins, after all; the games are rigged. Not in the sense that they're cheats, but that the rules of the game say that the player will inevitably put in more than he or she gets paid out. Exactitude of bookkeeping isn't needed to clarify this knowledge; it merely reveals the margins. The only way not to lose is to quit.
But of course you can't quit, under threat of starvation and homelessness We're not talking about gambling, after all; that serves as merely as the most transparent metaphor for the structure of surplus value. For that is, finally, the rigged game you can't quit: labor itself, the only necessary rule of which is that it always returns less than you put in.
This and nothing else explains the development of that subgenre of the caper film which specializes in ripping off the casino, for which the modern locus is Bob le flambeur. It gets most directly at the pleasure of the crime whose victim is work itself; one might say that Oceans 11-13 are closer in spirit to Eisenstein's Strike! than they are to The Sting, much less a standard-issue crime film.
Ocean's 13 is generally flabby; for wit, the best it can do is Hollywood stardom metajokes, as when, caper completed, George Clooney suggests that Brad Pitt take some time off between "jobs" to start a family, have a couple kids — and Brad rejoins that Clooney should try to keep the weight off between gigs so he doesn't have to fight his way back into shape each time. That's one way the film has of knowing itself.
But not the only one. In the most ludicrous of the silly subplots, first Casey Affleck and then Scott Caan fall in with — what's that you say? — striking workers at a Mexican factory. The sharpest of ironies is that it turns out that the strikers' demands for annual salary increase — all of them, in total — can be met by what a Clooney makes in 45 minutes. But the automatic sympathy of the heisters for the strikers is the film's only moment of actual thought, on the verge of knowing what it's about.
24) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
23) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
22) Paris je t'aime (didn't have Hayden Christenson)
21) Waitress (Cheryl Hines' micromonologues, Nathan Fillion's smile)
20) Severance (theatre was quite clean)
19) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
18) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
17) Ocean's 13 (Soderbergh's knack for shooting Vegas so you can't tell if it's a set or not)
16) Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten ("White Riot" a capella)
15) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
14) Hot Fuzz (lighting in British supermarket)
13) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (pleasure of SRO crowd in huge theatre)
12) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
11) Disturbia (strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
10) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
9) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
8) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
7) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
6) Knocked Up (Seth Rogen's delivery, the jokes about Martin's beard, Paul Rudd's three smiles)
5) 28 Weeks Later (Goodbye Dover Beach...)
4) Transformers (has entire theory of American history, plus robot fights)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)