Ocean's Thirteen + summer movies.

"Is it disheartening for Steven Soderbergh that his best movie in years is his swank Vegas caper comedy Ocean's 13 - and not his searching remake of Tarkovsky's Solaris; his rough-hewn study of the dark side of working-class life, Bubble; or his subversive anti-Casablanca, The Good German?" wonders David Edelstein in New York. Also: "I wonder what it's like to grow up in a world in which so many kid shows and movies are 'meta'.... In short, the kids won't know how terrific Surf's Up is." More from Susan King in the Los Angeles Times.

So another summer movies entry picks up where Pirates, Shrek and Spider-Man, 3's all, left off.

Updated through 6/9.

Dave McDougall on Transformers: "This is the most ideologically dangerous component of the film: the perpetuation of an outmoded strategy - and perhaps more importantly, an outmoded myth of warfare.... If Transformers can be taken as representative of our present response to myth-disillusionment as much as Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Edmund Blunden were of the WWI generation, then the present response is instead one of nostalgia for the definable enemies of past days."

Bashing this year's blockbusters, let's not get carried away, argues Noel Murray at the AV Club:

Not so long ago, the big summer blockbusters were being helmed by the likes of Roland Emmerich, Chuck Russell, Stephen Sommers, Simon West and Dominic Sena - all middling technicians with no clear vision - and Michael Bay, a visionary with no finesse. The movies were frequently sloppy, ugly, and dispiriting. By contrast, [Sam] Raimi and [Gore] Verbinski make movies with personality, crafted with skill. Critics and film buffs may not like that personality, but they should at least appreciate that definite choices were made, by directors with a clear plan in mind. They've given us something intelligible to engage with.

David Poland looks ahead to how the box office numbers may pan out.

Online viewing tips. Pirates stuff at 10 Zen Monkeys.

Earlier: Josh Tyrangiel's rambunctious conversation with George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and Ellen Barkin for Time and "Cannes. Ocean's Thirteen."

Update: Spider-Man 3 gets Kenneth Anger ranting about Hollywood and time.

Update, 6/5: "Where does the animosity for Ocean's Twelve come from?" wonders Matt Singer at IFC News. "Watch the movie again, as I did last week, and reconsider it as an exceedingly stylish, beautifully paced, and sometimes shockingly romantic caper movie." Anyway, as to the number at hand, "[W]hile Ocean's Thirteen is better than Ocean's Twelve, that's not necessarily damning with faint praise. This Thirteen is better than Twelve sentiment is coming from an unabashed fan of Twelve."

Updates, 6/6: Chuck Wilson writes up a summertime guide for the City Pages, where John Behling surveys the Twin Cities area and presents "How to Make Out at the Movies: Summer Cinema in the Rough."

"One could hardly be blamed for getting worked into a cynical corner by Ocean's Thirteen, which is pretty much like its brethren, minus Julia Roberts's microgram of dramatic fuel," writes Michael Atkinson for the Boston Phoenix. "But that doesn't mean, as summer movies go, that it isn't witty, or grown-up, or sly, or diverting. It is, but it's also absolutely disposable."

"The installation of the hand- and footprints of Ocean's Thirteen stars George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and super-producer Jerry Weintraub in the sidewalk outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre on Tuesday morning was one of the biggest promotional events of the year." Deborah Netburn reports for the Los Angeles Times.

"It's a spectacle blatantly predicated on a smug gaggle of mega movie stars in boss threads ostentatiously having fun by pretending to steal the house's money, while actually taking yours," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. That said, "The scene uniting onetime maniacs [Elliott] Gould and [Al] Pacino is not without its autumnal poignancy - California Split on a Dog Day Afternoon."

"It's Pirates of the Careless Being," quips David Poland. "It's a summer movie, damn it!" But there's more, too: "I expect that most people who love great cinematography will look right past it due to its location is this lightweight fare, but Soderbergh makes himself the absolute #1 get for Bond on any other action movie with style with O13."

Update, 6/7: "Soderbergh has made a movie so cool it's practically comatose," writes Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly. "Sputtering along from one half-cocked gag line and self-satisfied in-joke to the next, Ocean's Thirteen is as slapdash and slipshod a three-quel as any in this summer's box-office sweepstakes. It's as if, like Sinatra in the days when he was playing short sets and forgetting lyrics, Soderbergh and company thought they just had to show up and we'd be entertained."

Updates, 6/8: "[I]t's a mistake to separate Mr Soderbergh's personal visions from his professional commitments," argues Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "All the films are strictly personal; it is just that some, like The Good German, have been made more for Mr Soderbergh's pleasure than for ours. Part of what makes the Ocean's films, even the self-indulgent second installment, so enjoyable is that they're not only about Mr Soderbergh's obsessive aesthetic investment in every single shot, but they're also about him trying to make the audience love his images every bit as much as he does."

"It almost begs to be read as a comment on Hollywood," writes Keith Phipps at the AV Club. "A maverick committed to working within the system and reshaping it for his own purposes, Soderbergh has aligned himself with some of the few stars who seem to understand that cashing a paycheck doesn't have to come at the expense of finding quality projects, even when those projects have no higher purpose than two breezy, familiar hours of sophisticated entertainment."

"We're drawn to these films because they make us feel we've been offered a privileged glimpse into the actors' lives," writes Nerve's Bilge Ebiri. "Said actors are the anti-Cruises; their power comes not from their kooky aloofness, but from their seeming availability. That these privileged glimpses only serve (go figure) to make these folks seem even cooler and more appealing is all the better. It insures that we'll line up the next time another Ocean's rolls out. Meta never seemed so sexy."

"All of the Ocean's movies, including the long-ago Sinatra version (1960), are remade or inspired by a great French caper movie, Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob le Flambeur (Bob the Gambler, 1956), in which Bob actually laid down chalk lines in an open field to walk his accomplices through a raid on a casino," writes Roger Ebert. "The movie is available on DVD in the Criterion Collection; see what you're missing now that the formula has been adapted for ADD sufferers."

Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat: Here's "what to do in LA when you've had it with threequels."

"Of all the guilty summer pleasures Ocean's Thirteen is the easiest to forgive," writes James Christopher for the London Times.

"Another week, another big fat threequel," sighs the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "Now it is the turn of this fantastically smug, empty picture, which comes complete with a nasty-tasting dab of misogyny. As this and all the other franchises continue their triumphant march through the nation's cinemas, I now feel like one of those patriotic French civilians in newsreel footage of the Nazi occupation in 1940: blubbering with futile rage on the pavement while the goosestepping victors crash unstoppably down the Champs-Elysées."

The Independent's Anthony Quinn also gives it merely one star.

"[T]he veneer is wearing irreparably thin," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "Once again, there are a zillion guys running around... and most of them just don't have enough to do. That's particularly true of Don Cheadle's Cockney explosives expert and Bernie Mac's - wait a minute, what, exactly, does Bernie Mac's character do? In the previous pictures he was a safecracker. This time around, his big scene involves trying to sell a gaming table to Pacino's Willy Bank. If that's the best you can come up with for a marvelous comic actor like Mac - the script is by Brian Koppelman and David Levien - then it really is time to pass the dice."

But the San Francisco Chronicle's Mick LaSalle to be "the rare case of a movie franchise following The Three Bears pattern: The third one is just right."

"Post-Limey, Soderbergh's visual sense has been in steady decline," argues Keith Uhlich at Slant. "It's now clear that the decision to act as his own DP on each film since was a colossal miscalculation, revelatory of an intellectual and emotional bankruptcy that stems from both a misguided cinephilic nostalgia and an arrogant courting of current fashion."

"While there's no real narrative tension in the new installment, it's delightful in almost every frame and each particular," writes Ray Pride.

"It's fun, it's campy and it's worth the gamble - that's if you don't mind shoddy character development, regurgitated gags and an unrealistic story," writes Cinematical's Erik Davis.

"From USA Today: If you adjust for inflation, the record-breaking blockbusters of Summer 2007 are under-achievers compared to summer hits of yesteryear," notes Joe Leydon.

"Ocean's Thirteen is grimmer, more dutiful and plot-driven, as functional as its purely place-holding title," writes Vadim Rizov for the Reeler. "Regardless, it's also one of the weirdest movies of Steven Soderbergh's already bewildering career."

Updates, 6/9: Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times on Thirteen: "One of the film's characters sums it up best: 'It's not a great idea, but it's an idea.'"

"[T]he art of all-star piffle reaches Parnassian heights," writes Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times. "There are no human beings here, just zodiacal luminaries doing glittering things."

Jeffrey Overstreet's just seen Ratatouille: "Finally... a summer movie that delivers. That enchants. That makes you glad to be a moviegoer."

Posted by dwhudson at June 4, 2007 6:37 AM