K Street

K Street was a short-lived television show created by Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney that aired on HBO for one season in 2003. Looking back at it now, the show has not aged well unless you're a news or politics junkie. Even among Soderbergh fans it is generally regarded as a failed experiment. However, it is a fascinating snapshot of a prolific filmmaker at the height of his mainstream popularity having just come off the one-two punch of the highly acclaimed Erin Brockovich (2000) and Traffic (2000). He used this newfound clout to push through a very unusual T.V. series that examined topical news stories, mixing fictional characters with actual politicians playing “themselves” to comment on American politics.

K Street stars real-life couple James Carville, an ex-Democratic strategist, and his wife Mary Matalin, a former George Bush staffer. They first gained serious mainstream attention when their unlikely romance was chronicled in D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus' documentary The War Room (1993), a behind-the-scenes look at the 1992 Bill Clinton campaign. On the show, they are partners in a start-up lobbying and consulting company called Bergstrom, Lowell. Their assistants are fictional characters played by Mary McCormack and John Slattery.

In the first episode, James and Mary butt heads over his decision to agree to help Governor Howard Dean prepare for an upcoming debate. It's James and his assistant Tommy Flannegan (John Slattery) against Mary and her assistant Maggie Morris (Mary McCormack) as they argue over the notion of bipartisanship. After Tommy and Maggie leave the room, James and Mary discuss Francisco Dupre (Roger Guenveur Smith), a mysterious figure that their shadowy owner, Bergstrom, says they must give a yet undefined job. We get glimpses of Dupre early on and he comes across as a quietly confident man who gets his shoes shined, gets a manicure, gets his haircut, and buys a new suit, all in preparation for meeting with James and Mary. Intertwined throughout the ten episodes are two storylines - the relationship between James and Mary and the murky motivations of Bergstrom.

Veteran character actor Roger Guenveur Smith portrays Dupre as a self-assured enigma who appears to say who he is without giving away much of anything and this leaves James and Mary understandably wary. At times, he's coyly evasive and at other times, warm and reassuring, but even then you wonder if it is an act. As always, John Slattery is good as James' right-hand man. The scene where he argues with Dupre over the difference between Ice-T and Ice Cube is amusing. Over time, we are given tidbits of insight into these characters, like Maggie's fascinating subplot that involves the messy fallout with a girlfriend, which weighs heavily on her mind.

K Street was as inside as it gets when it came to depicting American politics as executive producers Clooney and Soderbergh had incredible access to politicians on Capitol Hill featuring the likes of Orrin Hatch and Rick Santorum. Soderbergh adopts a restless, hand-held camera for a verite look that invokes Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool (1969), which was a docudrama set amidst the chaos of the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention and also combined fiction and non-fictional material. Along with Robert Altman's Tanner '88, which placed a fictional candidate in the middle of the 1988 Democratic primary, both are arguably the most significant influences on K Street. Soderbergh adopts a fly-on-the-wall approach that makes you feel like eavesdropping on these folks. Soderbergh also utilizes his trademark filters throughout with cool, gun-metal blues and sickly, queasy yellows. This was achieved by shooting on digital video utilizing multiple cameras with no special lighting and direct sound.

James Carville and Republican image-maker Michael Deaver came up with the idea for the show, which the former envisioned being “about power: building power, applying power.” As luck would have it, producer Mark Sennet, who was friends with Deaver, called him up one day asking if he had any ideas for a Washington, D.C.-set show. He approached Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney who liked the idea enough that, along with Sennet, pitched it to HBO where it eventually aired. When Soderbergh and his two executive producers began discussing the possibility of doing the show, they watched Tanner '88. Soderbergh said, “All of us felt it was a terrific show and it was time to do something similar. But we wanted to take advantage of the new technology to shoot in run-and-gun fashion,” to create what they called, “real-time fiction.” The three men spent six months with lobbyists and consultants to study their daily routines and learn how they did things.

HBO, which had also backed Tanner '88, continued their habit for courting high profile talent, like Clooney and Soderbergh, and gave them the creative freedom to experiment. K Street had no scripts or written outlines and no one took a writing credit. All the dialogue was improvised, but all the locations and guest appearance were pre-arranged. On Monday mornings, Clooney and Soderbergh, along with their creative team and the actors, would meet and discuss the news that occurred over the weekend, read all the newspapers for the morning, and pick the topical news item that would be the focus for that week's episode. They would shoot for two-and-a-half days, edit for two days and then it would air on Sunday. Soderbergh directed, edited and acted as cinematographer for all ten episodes. Principal photography usually ended on Wednesday, sometimes Thursday, with the director editing right up to the Friday deadline.

K Street received mostly negative reviews from mainstream critics. The New York Times' Alessandra Stanley wrote, “Mr. Soderbergh's original idea was to fuse real people and up-to-the-minute political happenings into a drama about Washington. But in the first episode, at least, the director did the reverse: he built a superstructure of Washington retreads and threaded it with the thinnest filament of fictional intrigue.” In his review for the Washington Post, Tom Shales wrote, “K Street is highly unlikely to become a national sensation, but in big cities of the East it ought to be quite the conversation piece-for a little while anyway. In a sense, the show comes off like a marvelous party, but one to which many of us are bound to feel profoundly uninvited.” USA Today gave it one-and-a-half out four stars and Robert Bianco felt that it was a “pointlessly rambling inside look at Washington's spindocracy - a self-contained, self-satisfied group of political hangers-on who are fascinating to each other and of no interest to anyone else.” However, in her review for the Los Angeles Times, Manohla Dargis wrote, “Brainy, beautifully shot, consistently funny and audacious in its disregard for narrative convention, this HBO show about the power elite in Washington was among the very best and most misunderstood cultural achievements of the year.”

One way to look at K Street is that the topical news storyline is merely window-dressing while the heart of the show is the dynamic between the gregarious James and his no-nonsense wife Mary. The most entertaining parts of the show are when they argue. For non-actors they are very charismatic and act naturally in front of the camera. The problem with K Street, and what dates it, is its ripped-from-the-headlines format so that you wonder who some of these people are that our protagonists interact with. Unless you are politically savvy there is the real possibility of feeling frustrated like you're missing something. The show doesn't spoon-feed its audience and assumes that they follow the daily news, which is probably why it didn't last long. 

That being said, in this day and age of Google and Wikipedia, it wouldn't be too hard to figure out who everyone is and their significance, but most people don't want to do that kind of legwork. At its best, K Street shows what a PR firm does - lobbying politicians, creating ad campaigns and running them through test groups, and so on. Clooney and Soderbergh should be commended for updating what Wexler and Altman did before them, but the immediacy of a lot of the subject matter dates the show, which ultimately prevents it from being something truly great instead of being merely a curious footnote in both of their respective careers.


SOURCES

Frey, Jennifer. “Hollywood Cues the Capitol.” Washington Post. September 13, 2003.

Galupo, Scott. “K Street: Potholes or Road to Fame?” Washington Times. September 12, 2003.

McCollum, Charlie. “K Street is Fresh Fictional Avenue for Real Issues.” San Jose Mercury News. September 11, 2003.

McConnell, Bill. “Hollywood Goes to Washington.” Broadcasting and Cable. September 8, 2003.

Mullins, Brody. “HBO Gets Ready to Take on K Street.” Roll Call. August 4, 2003.

Taubin, Amy. “K Street: Washington Inside-Out.” Film Comment.

Haywire

“I need to break down my process and start over again if I’m going to come back. Because I’m not gonna come back unless I’ve figured out a new way to do this, by my definition. I don’t know if that’s gonna happen or not.” – Steven Soderbergh.

I have this theory that the grueling process of making the unconventional epic biopic Che (2008), coupled with its subsequent commercial failure, broke director Steven Soderbergh’s creative spirit. It didn’t help when was fired from Moneyball (2011) over creative differences. By his own admission, Soderbergh’s interest in making “serious” films had been replaced by a desire to make “fun” ones that included the satirical docudrama The Informant! (2009), the disaster movie Contagion (2011) and the action film Haywire (2012). Built around MMA star Gina Carano, it came out of Soderbergh’s desire to make a 1960s style spy thriller (originally the now-abandoned The Man from U.N.C.L.E. film) but mutated into a photo negative of a typical James Bond film in the sense that Haywire surrounds a ruthless female protagonist with attractive men trying to kill her. While critics generally gave it the thumbs up, audiences were not interested in Soderbergh’s genre experiment and the film disappeared quickly from theaters. Has he lost the plot or were audiences simply tired of seeing ass-kicking female action stars after Salt (2010), Hanna (2011) and Columbiana (2011)?

The first thing one notices in Haywire are how the action sequences differ from most other action films. In the prologue, top-secret operative Mallory Kane (Gina Carano) is confronted by another, her ex-partner Aaron (Channing Tatum) in an upper New York state diner. It quickly erupts into a brutal fight. Instead of the usual Hollywood sound effects and frenetic editing, Soderbergh utilizes actual sounds of flesh hitting flesh in relatively long takes at a distance so that you can see exactly what is happening and where with none of the trendy, disorienting hand-held camerawork and editing that is the norm. He also refuses to accompany this fight with any kind of musical score that would manipulate one’s emotions, which makes the sickening sounds of breaking bone and grunts of exertion and pain all the more jarring.

Mallory is a private contractor hired by the United States government to do dirty jobs for them via her handler and firm director Kenneth (Ewan McGregor). Through a series of flashbacks, we find out that she and Aaron were hired to do a job in Barcelona (scored to a snazzy retro Lalo Schifrin-esque score by David Holmes) and soon afterwards she left the company. But of course it is never that easy and Kenneth ropes her into another assignment, this time in Dublin, Ireland. She’s part of a power couple along with Paul (Michael Fassbender), a freelance operative that Kenneth is trying to woo over to the company. However, Paul tries to kill Mallory (in a brutally efficient fight sequence) and she finds herself on the run.

Some criticism was leveled at the casting of non-actor Gina Carano and her inability to emote or her flat line readings. While she certainly isn’t going to win any acting awards for her work in Haywire, she isn’t any worse than “master thespians” like Jean-Claude Van Damme or Steven Seagal back when they first started out, and they were wildly successful. So, why not Carano? Is it because she’s a woman? Female action stars have historically had a tough time acquiring any kind of mainstream success. Just ask Geena Davis. With the one-two punch of Cutthroat Island (1995) and The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), she effectively destroyed her A-list status. Angelina Jolie is a notable exception and easily the most successful female action star in the world with megahits like the Tomb Raider films, Wanted (2008) and Salt. Carano may not have the acting chops of fellow female actions stars Jolie and Kate Beckinsale but unlike their impossibly thin physiques, she’s built like a believable woman of action with her finely toned body. She has the imposing physical presence that Jolie and Beckinsale lack but without losing her feminity.

Carano does just fine in Haywire, exuding a certain amount of warmth in scenes that warrant it and adopting a determined no-nonsense attitude when called for. Naturally, she’s at her best during the numerous action sequences when she’s bashing heads or leaping from rooftop to rooftop and let’s face it, that’s why we’re watching her in this film. It is pretty obvious why Soderbergh cast her – she’s gorgeous, has a real screen presence and is tough as nails. There’s something quite impressive about the fact that she does all of her own stunts, including the extremely physical fight scenes. I like that her character isn’t some superhuman killing machine. Opponents get the drop on Mallory and she makes mistakes that get her injured. As a result, she is more relatable.

Soderbergh wisely surrounds Carano with an impressive cast of veteran actors that include Ewan McGregor, Michael Douglas and Antonio Banderas as well as up and comers like Michael Fassbender. Their presence elevates what could have easily been a direct-to-video time waster into something a little classier. This is also achieved through Soderbergh’s top-notch direction and super slick camerawork. He’s in fine form with a fast and loose style befitting a stylish spy thriller. He also adopts the same kind of hazy filters he utilized in The Informant! and a variety of them so that each location stands out, much like he did in Traffic (2000).

Haywire saw Soderbergh reunited with screenwriter Lem Dobbs who has worked previously with the director on Kafka (1991) and more infamously on The Limey (1999) (his dissatisfaction over the final product is well documented) and their latest collaboration is a solid genre workout. His screenplay is lean and trimmed of any unnecessary narrative fat. He doesn’t give Carano huge chunks of dialogue, which is wise considering her lack of acting experience. Instead, he leaves that up to the rest of the experienced cast who do all of the heavy lifting in terms of exposition dialogue. Interestingly, Haywire features a father-daughter relationship and a climactic confrontation on an oceanfront beach much like The Limey.

One night, Steven Soderbergh caught a MMA fight on television that involved one of its most well-known female fighters, Gina Carano. He had been thinking about making a ‘60s spy movie but it wasn’t going anywhere. Her fight and subsequent interview afterwards, which impressed him by how charming and sincere she came across, inspired him to build an action film around a woman. In June 2009, Soderbergh was fired from the production of Moneyball due to “creative differences.” Suddenly free to do another film, he tracked Carano down at a time when she had just lost a fight. “It seemed like a good time for the two of us to get into a room, me having been fired and her having been beaten.” Their first meeting consisted of a four-hour lunch in which they talked about her family and upbringing. He wanted to get a sense of who she was and if could he work with her. In addition, he explained how he liked to work and what would be involved. Soderbergh also needed her permission to pitch the premise to a studio, which was her starring in an action film surrounded by A-list actors.

Soderbergh approached two studios, both were interested, and he went with Relativity because they felt that Carano had a big enough of a following that a film could work. The director wasn’t worried about her lack of acting ability: “I just thought if we can get her relaxed and she can stay herself, then we’ll be okay.” He approached Lem Dobbs with the basic idea for the film – a female version of The Limey – and he agreed to write the script. The first draft was written in five weeks. For research, Soderbergh studied films by directors he felt were good at staging action sequences, including Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, John McTiernan, and David Fincher.

While making the film, Soderbergh told the stunt coordinators that he didn’t want to have any large explosions and nobody flying around on wires. It had to be “something a human can do,” he said in an interview. To this end, Channing Tatum, Michael Fassbender and Ewan McGregor did all their own fight scenes, rehearsing extensively with Carano. Soderbergh decided not to put any music over the fight scenes because he felt it would “take away from the realism. It would take you out of it.” The hotel room fight was inspired by a brutal brawl in a hotel room in Darker than Amber (1970) starring Rod Taylor that Dobbs had recommended Soderbergh watch. Haywire’s hotel room fight sequence took two days to film with Carano and Fassbender actually hitting each other – he threw her into a T.V. at one point and she smashed a vase over his head.

For the film’s score, Soderbergh talked to frequent collaborator David Holmes about the soundtrack work of Lalo Schifrin and, in particular, the jazz horn sound he used on Bullitt (1968). According to Soderbergh, the scored needed to “sound more like the character than the genre.” He wanted it to reflect what she felt rather than what the film felt like generally. Holmes’ groovy soundtrack is somewhat reminiscent of the work he did on the Ocean’s films, which had a definite funky retro vibe.

Haywire received mostly positive reviews from critics. For example, Roger Ebert gave it three out of four stars and wrote, “A film like Haywire has no lasting significance, but it's a pleasure to see an A-list director taking the care to make a first-rate genre thriller.” USA Today also gave the film three out of four stars and Claudia Puig felt that, “Carano's charisma, physicality and daring keep the adrenaline high and the clashes captivating.” The Los Angeles Times’ Betsy Sharkey wrote, “The deficits are somewhat offset by the filmmaker's sheer technical wizardry. Even Soderbergh's worst work (and Haywire isn't that) cleans up nicely with such serious attention paid to lighting, framing, casting, costumes, colors, sets; and, per usual, with the director handling the cinematography too.” The Washington Post gave the film three out of four stars and Ann Hornaday wrote, “One of the reasons Haywire is such a pleasure to watch is that its director, Steven Soderbergh, doesn't overplay the film's hear-me-roar subversions. Temperamentally, he's an understater, and he approaches his first foray into pure action with the same evenhanded cool he lends to every genre he has ever tackled.”

However, Entertainment Weekly gave it a “B-" rating and Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote, “Haywire is zippy and visually sophisticated, with tonal palettes color-coded (as in Traffic) to help make sense of time and place. But it zips to nowhere, fun only for those who agree to enjoy watching a woman inflict pain like a man, for the dumb pleasure of watching her fight.” In his review for The New York Times, A.O. Scott said of Carano: “Once the talking stops and the action begins, her professionalism is very much in evidence and exciting to watch. And yet, somehow, it cannot quite relieve the tedium of a movie that is too cool even to pretend that there is anything worth fighting about.” Time magazine’s Richard Corliss wrote, “Carano is her own best stuntwoman, but in the dialogue scenes she’s all kick and no charisma. The MMA battler lacks the conviction she so forcefully displayed in the ring. She is not Haywire‘s heroine but its hostage.

I’m not sure if audiences were expecting Soderbergh to redefine the action film but he’s clearly filtering it through his aesthetic, which is to make it as realistic as possible while still plugging in tried and true genre conventions (fight scenes, chase sequence, shoot-outs, etc.). He may be tired of the filmmaking process (he’s threatened to retire in 2013) but Haywire does not appear to be the product of someone burnt out from the biz. There is an almost playful quality to how he approaches the material as he takes an equally game Carano along for the ride. While the film isn’t groundbreaking in any way this doesn’t detract from the enjoyment of watching a well-made action film. It may not be saying anything profound but so what? It does exactly what it sets out to do: deliver an entertaining and engaging thrill-ride.

SOURCES

Kenigsberg, Ben. “Steven Soderbergh on Haywire.” Time Out Chicago. January 18, 2012.

Osenlund, R. Kurt. “Interview: Steven Soderbergh.” Slant. January 18, 2012

Smith, Nigel M. “Steven Soderbergh on Haywire, Magic Mike and Why He’s Given Up On Serious Movies.” IndieWire. January 16, 2012

Tobias, Scott. “Steven Soderbergh.” A.V. Club. January 18, 2012

Contagion

For over two decades, director Steven Soderbergh has gone back and forth from independent to studio films with personal, experimental efforts like Schizopolis (1996) and big budget crowd pleasers like Erin Brockovich (2000). He’s fashioned himself something of a journeyman director trying his hand at a variety of genres over the years, from period history (King of the Hill) to the heist film (Ocean’s Eleven) to the war movie (Che), adopting a distinctive style for each one. With Contagion (2011), he can now add the disaster movie to the list. This film deals specifically with the deadly virus subgenre as he tracks an infectious disease that affects the entire world with alarming speed. Would Soderbergh go the high road with thought-provoking science fiction a la The Andromeda Strain (1971) and Twelve Monkeys (1995), or would he go the low-budget horror B-movie route like The Crazies (1973) and Warning Sign (1985)? Whereas most of these films rely on horror and science fiction tropes, Soderbergh eschews them for a much more realistic take, albeit with a sly wink to the master of disaster films, Irwin Allen by populating Contagion with a star-studded cast of A-listers (many of whom have either won or been nominated for Academy Awards) only to kill some of them off. However, this is where the similarities begin and end as Soderbergh applies the Traffic (2000) aesthetic, juggling multiple characters and storylines to show how technology not only helps identify the threat quickly but also helps it spread rapidly thanks to globalization and disinformation.


The film starts off on Day 2 of the outbreak with infected people in England, Japan and Hong Kong where we meet Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) on a business trip. She comes home to her husband Mitch (Matt Damon) and family in Minneapolis suffering from what seems like flu-like symptoms. She assumes that it is nothing more than jetlag but within a day she and her son are dead. The doctors can’t tell Mitch why they died and he’s left to take care of his daughter (Anna Jacoby-Heron) on his own. The World Health Organization in Geneva begins to identify all the cities where victims of the MEV-1 virus are appearing and are trying in vain to contain it. They send Dr. Lenora Orantes (Marion Cotillard) to Hong Kong in an attempt to track down the origins of the virus. Meanwhile, muckraking blogger Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law) posts a clip of a man collapsing on a train in Japan and tries to peddle it to a newspaper in San Francisco but they aren’t interested. However, he soon assembles an impressive global readership that hangs on his every opinion and conspiracy theory, which not only spreads disinformation but also draws the attention of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) is leading an investigation into the outbreak in the United States and enlists the help of Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet) who travels to Minneapolis and investigates Beth Emhoff’s death. Their goal is to try and control the spread of the virus.

Soderbergh shows how the CDC interact with local and national governing bodies to identify and deal with the virus while also taking us inside their laboratories where Dr. Ally Hextall (Jennifer Ehle) is working hard to find a vaccine. Soon, Homeland Security steps in and their representative (Bryan Cranston) meets with Cheever to raise concerns that the virus could be weaponized and used by terrorists to attack the United States. However, it soon becomes apparent that the problem is much more serious, affecting a large portion of the world. Soderbergh inserts all kinds of shots of people’s hands interacting with objects and other people. Every time someone coughs you wonder is this person sick and are they spreading the virus to others?

The always-reliable Matt Damon is Contagion’s emotional core, playing the character we get to know the best and therefore care about what happens to the most. He is heartbreaking early on as Mitch watches both his wife and son die and then finds out that his spouse was also cheating on him. He then has to pull it together and take care of his daughter. Damon is given moments to show how the strain of this all is taking its toll on Mitch and the actor really grounds the film in something tangible for the audience to hold onto. Think of him as the equivalent to Benicio del Toro’s soulful border cop in Traffic. Damon is so good as the relatable everyman trying to deal with things as best he can. Without him, Contagion would come across as a little too cold and clinical.

With the help of Cliff Martinez’s brooding, atmospheric electronic score, Soderbergh gradually cranks up the dread as the virus spreads and the situation gets increasingly worse as order breaks down – bureaucratically and then everything else follows in a domino effect with looting and rioting as people think about protecting themselves. Soon, we are hit with sobering apocalyptic imagery that starts off with deserted city streets filled with garbage and abandoned cars to government officials filling mass graves with scores of dead bodies.

Soderbergh is clearly drawing a parallel between the virus and technology, both of which spread great distances and in very little time thanks to cell phones and the Internet. He explores the notion of community breaking down with people becoming isolated, even more so thanks to technology. The film matches this speed by maintaining a brisk pace but does allow for the occasional moment where key characters reflect on what’s happening and how it affects not only them but their loved ones, co-workers, and so on. It is these moments where Scott Z. Burns’ smart, ambitious screenplay shines, allowing archetypes, like Laurence Fishburne’s no-nonsense executive, to show their human frailties.

Burns has clearly done his homework as he presents a scarily plausible viral outbreak based on the rare Nipah virus, which spread from pigs to farmers in Malaysia in the late 1990’s. Contagion is eerily relevant as it evokes real-life outbreaks like SARS, avian flu and the H1N1 swine flu, several of which are mentioned in the film. The script also shows the reaction to an outbreak on a personal level with Mitch and his daughter while also showing its global impact when the fear of transmitting the virus takes hold. This is important because the film throws around a lot of technical jargon and dispenses a lot of facts but Soderbergh has wisely enlisted an all-star cast to make it more palatable. Contagion is not the horror film Soderbergh has suggested it might be, nor is it Hollywood fluff like Outbreak (1995), but rather a slick, sophisticated disaster movie that should provide the director with his first substantial commercial hit in years.

Ocean's Thirteen

Despite its impressive box office returns, Ocean’s Twelve (2004) was considered something of a disappointment by its director Steven Soderbergh who felt that the plot was too complicated. While not quite as fun as Ocean’s Eleven (2001), it was a fine film in its own right – one that had a more satisfying emotional pay-off and doesn’t deserve the lousy reputation that it seems to have. Ocean’s Thirteen (2007) was seen as a return to the fun, breezy vibe of the first film by bringing it back to Las Vegas with style. The result was a very satisfying conclusion to the Ocean’s films.

As the revenge picture cliché goes, this time it’s personal. When Reuben Tishkoff (Elliott Gould) is muscled out of a business deal by slick businessman Willy Bank (Al Pacino), resulting in a heart attack, Danny Ocean (George Clooney) and his crew reunite for one last job: to ruin the opening night of Bank’s casino, The Bank, by making sure he loses a huge amount of money, which involves rigging all the games and slot machines. Bank wants the Five Diamond Award – the top accolade for hotels and will do anything to get it. Danny and the boys use this as a way to get at Bank. To this end, they devise an elaborate plan with the help of their arch-nemesis Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia) who bankrolls the operation. They also bring in Roman Nagel (Eddie Izzard) from Ocean’s Twelve to crack a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence security system.

Soderbergh kicks things off rather stylishly as we get a beautiful shot of Rusty Ryan (Brad Pitt) walking across a runaway tarmac to an awaiting plane at dusk with the sky an impossibly deep dark blue that, accompanied by David Holmes’ groovy score, is absolutely breathtaking. Once again, the director shoots the hell out of the film by employing all sorts of zoom ins and outs, pans and split-screens that, along with a saturated color scheme, keeps things visually interesting.

This time out, Matt Damon gets a juicy subplot where he goes undercover as Lenny Pepperidge, the assistant to a Mr. Weng (Shaobo Qin as The Amazing Yen, also undercover), a very high roller, in order to get close to Bank’s lovely assistant, Abigail Sponder (Ellen Barkin). Part of his disguise involves wearing a ridiculous fake long nose – a sly fuck you to Harvey Weinstein who wouldn’t let Damon wear said nose for his character in Terry Gilliam’s The Brother’s Grimm (2005) because he felt it would obscure the actor’s good looks and hurt the film’s box office potential. Well, it didn’t hurt Ocean’s Thirteen box office as the film went on to gross a very respectable $311 million worldwide.

It is also a lot of fun to see Ellen Barkin reunited with her Sea of Love (1989) co-star Al Pacino. She appears to be having a good time playing a confident businesswoman succumbing to Damon’s “seductive” charms. It is also fun to see Pacino go off autopilot for a change and sink his teeth into a juicy bad guy role. Who else could Soderbergh get to pose as a credible threat to the likes of George Clooney and Brad Pitt but someone of the legendary star caliber like Pacino? He plays Bank like the offspring of his take on Ricky Roma from Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) and Gordon Gekko from Wall Street (1987) – a smooth-talking unscrupulous bastard. In another nice bit of casting, the inventor of the artificial intelligence security system is played by none other than Julian Sands, an actor whose big break through came in A Room with A View (1985) but whose career settled into mostly direct-to-home video fare so it was a pleasant surprise to see him appear in a big mainstream film like Ocean’s Thirteen.

Another amusing subplot involves Virgil Malloy (Casey Affleck, sporting a ridiculous-looking mustache) organizing a revolution/strike among the workers at a dice-making factory in Mexico. He goes from complaining about a lack of air conditioning to tossing Molotov cocktails on the strike lines. At one point, he and his fellow co-workers drown their sorrows at a local bar and Virgil asks them, “Have all of you forgotten Zapata?” He goes on to offer inspirational words that fire them up. How this whole subplot plays out is quite funny. In another nice twist, Terry Benedict is helping Danny out albeit with all kinds of conditions. After all, he resents Bank’s lack of taste and the competition he represents. There can only be on top dog in Vegas and Benedict clearly feels that he is the one. Andy Garcia looks like he relished the opportunity to be in on the joke instead of being the target as he was in the last two films.

While working on Ocean’s Twelve, Steven Soderbergh began thinking about Ocean’s Thirteen. He thought about how fun it would be to set it back in Las Vegas. The motivation to make the film was a desire to work with everyone again but all eleven cast members had to want to do it. Producer Jerry Weintraub contacted them 18 months before hand and told them filming would take place during the summer of 2006 and to clear their schedules. He was able to find a way to juggle all these movie stars’ busy lives and add Al Pacino and Ellen Barkin into the mix.

For the film’s story, Soderbergh felt that Danny and his crew weren’t driven entirely by money and that they would reunite for friendship and revenge. The director came up with the notion of Reuben being betrayed and his friends helping him out. Weintraub hired Brian Koppelman and David Levien to write the screenplay. They had written the script for Rounders (1998) and created the gambling television cable show Tilt, and so they were familiar with the world of con men and gamblers. Soderbergh and Weintraub were both big admirers of Rounders and the director met with the screenwriters in New York City over lunch. They talked about great con movies, the nature of heists, and how the characters had evolved since Ocean’s Eleven. Within minutes, Soderbergh knew they were who he wanted to write the script and were working on it within minutes: “There was not a long list of people that we thought could step into this specific universe and pick up the language and the sense of humor.”

Koppelman and Levien had spent years exploring Vegas culture and the gambling lifestyle. They had every book they could find about con artists and thieves. Early on, Soderbergh told them that he wanted the film’s focus to be on the friendship between Danny and his crew. They understood that getting revenge on Willy Bank was what drove the entire story of Ocean’s Thirteen. They also wanted to “’flip’ the casino so that the patrons would win every time, which would spell disaster for Bank.” Soderbergh also told them that the bad guy should be a casino owner and they imagined Al Pacino and wrote Bank with him in mind. George Clooney also offered some ideas, mostly things to do with the revenge scheme that reunited the crew.

Some exterior scenes were shot in Las Vegas, but the casino interiors were mostly shot on one of the largest soundstages on the Warner Bros. lot in Los Angeles because it would have taken too long to film in actual casinos as they had done with Ocean’s Eleven. Soderbergh said, “In order to get the shots that I wanted, I needed to completely control the environment.” He instructed production designer Philip Messina to build a hotel and casino that would reflect Bank and his huge ego. Messina decided to go with a quasi-Asian theme and make it visually overwhelming. He purposely broke the rules in Vegas by designing a multi-level gaming floor because the production didn’t have a lot of horizontal space to work with.

Much like with Ocean’s Twelve, Ocean’s Thirteen received mixed reviews from critics. In her review for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis praised Soderbergh’s direction: “Playing inside the box and out, he has learned to go against the grain while also going with the flow. In Ocean’s Thirteen he proves that in spades by using color like Kandinsky and hanging a funny mustache on Mr. Clooney’s luscious mug, having become a genius of the system he so often resists.” USA Today gave the film three out of four stars and Claudia Puig wrote, “As escapist entertainments go, Thirteen is far from unlucky: It's breezy, clever fun and ridiculously easy on the eyes.” The Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, “Predictably adolescent and smarmy, with the mix of sentimentality and cynical flippancy that's becoming Steven Soderbergh's specialty (even when he's pretending to make art films), this is chewing gum for the eyes and ears, and not bad as such.” In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turn felt that it was better than Ocean’s Twelve but not as good as Eleven: “Though it's certainly serviceable as the second sequel to a remake, it lacks the brio and élan that made the 2001 film such a treat.”

On the other hand, Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, “Ocean's Thirteen proceeds with insouciant dialogue, studied casualness, and a lotta stuff happening, none of which I cared much about because the movie doesn't pause to develop the characters, who are forced to make do with their movie-star personas.” In his review for The New York Observer, Andrew Sarris wrote, “for long stretches of the proceedings, Mr. Soderbergh seems to be trying to distract us from the suspenseless inevitability of the plot with semi-abstract rainbowish splashes of color.” Finally, the Washington Post’s Stephen Hunter wrote, “It's maybe halfway between okay and not bad. If being about average were a sin, it'd be headed straight to Hell on a bobsled.”

Like Ocean’s Eleven, Ocean’s Thirteen pays tribute to the classic era of Vegas as Danny and co. restore Reuben’s honor. He’s an old school player who still believes in following a code and prides himself in being part of a select group of insiders that got to shake Frank Sinatra’s hand back in the day. Like Benedict, Bank represents the current corporate mentality of making money over the personal touch that the Mob-run casinos used to provide. If the first two films were about Danny and Rusty’s respective relationships with the loves of their lives, then Ocean’s Thirteen is about their friendship with Reuben. He mentored them when they were just starting out and taught them about respecting history as well as those who came before them. Like with the previous films, going after the bad guy is a matter of personal honor and hitting them where it hurts – in Bank’s case it’s his monster ego. Ocean’s Thirteen ends much like Ocean’s Eleven did thus bringing the trilogy full circle and with a truly satisfying conclusion as the bad guy gets what’s coming to him and Reuben’s honor is restored. Likewise, the film did very well at the box office and garnered fairly positive reviews going out on a well-deserved high note. It serves as an example of a star-studded big budget Hollywood film that entertains without insulting your intelligence.

SOURCES

Ocean’s 13 Production Notes. 2007.

Ocean's Twelve

After the commercial failures of Full Frontal and Solaris in 2002, there was pressure on Steven Soderbergh, when he announced that his next film was to be the sequel to the wildly successful Ocean’s Eleven (2001), to not only come up with a box office hit but to also outperform the previous film. With big budget, star-studded casts like the one in Ocean’s Twelve (2004), there is always the danger of having them look too smug and self-indulgent instead of having fun along with the audience. Ocean’s Eleven managed to straddle this line quite well, resulting in an entertaining popcorn movie. Soderbergh kept his cast in check, never letting them go too far over-the-top and shooting it with a style that was always interesting to watch. The big question for the sequel was if he could pull off the same feat without repeating himself too much. Ocean’s Twelve ended making less than its predecessor (but still a lot of money) and cost more while also dividing critics but in some ways I find it a better film.

Danny Ocean (George Clooney) is supposed to be retired and enjoying domestic bliss with Tess (Julia Roberts). However, old habits die-hard and the lure of pulling heists is always calling. She catches him casing a jewelry story on their anniversary. To make matters worse, Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia) is still hot on their trail, tracking down all of the original eleven and letting them know, in his own casually menacing way, that he wants the $160 million, plus interest, that they stole from him in Ocean’s Eleven, and in two weeks time. The montage of him doing this mirrors the one in the first film where Danny and Rusty recruited their crew. If Benedict was an imposing figure in the first film, Andy Garcia makes him even more of a threatening presence in this montage by doing little except exude menace with his eyes and the all-business tone of his voice.

So, Danny gets everybody back together to figure out what to do. Obviously, they need to pull another job but they are too high profile in the United States, so they go to Europe and cross paths with a truly formidable opponent and rival master thief known as the Night Fox (Vincent Cassel), a bored French playboy. He’s jealous of Danny’s status as the world’s greatest thief and is out to prove that he’s the best by having the both of them go after the same thing: the Faberge Imperial Coronation egg. Vincent Cassel plays the Night Fox as an ultra-confident, cocky man in such a way that you want to see Danny and company knock him down a peg.

Ocean’s Twelve ups the difficulty level for our heroes even more by having most of the crew neutralized leaving only Basher (Don Cheadle), Linus (Matt Damon) and Virgil (Scott Caan) left to pull off an impossible heist. So, they bring in Tess to pose as, well, Julia Roberts. Unfortunately, another major movie star is staying at the same hotel, which only adds to the meta aspect. Said movie star gamely plays a fictional version of himself. The scene where he meets Tess as Julia Roberts is very amusing as Damon and Roberts act all star-struck in front of him. It is also interesting in that the meta aspect that was present in Ocean’s Eleven is made even more explicit – something that turned off some critics and audiences but I think works extremely well because Soderbergh isn’t having a cutesy cameo of a movie star for the sake of it but actually incorporating them into the plot and making them an integral part of the scam.

If the first film was about Danny’s redemption by reconciling with Tess, then Ocean’s Twelve is about Rusty’s (Brad Pitt) redemption by reconciling with his past love, Isabel Lahiri (Catherine Zeta-Jones), a determined and quite beautiful Interpol agent. Like Danny’s feelings for Tess potentially compromising his involvement in the heist in Ocean’s Eleven, Rusty’s feelings for Isabel leaves him potentially vulnerable in Ocean’s Twelve. To her credit, Catherine Zeta-Jones fits right in with the European vibe, maintaining just the right mix of determination in nailing Danny and his crew and vulnerability when she’s with Rusty. Their relationship elevates the film ever so slightly above the standard heist story and the conclusion of her subplot is surprisingly emotional and poignant – the highpoint of the trilogy and something you don’t expect from a film like Ocean’s Twelve, which is essentially a feature-length lark.

Matt Damon demonstrates excellent comic timing in this film and is the real stand-out of this strong cast. Early on, Linus asks Rusty if he could have more to do this time out and this moment comes across as quite self-reflexive. It’s as if Damon were almost asking if he could have more screen time in the film itself. In some respects, he is the group’s stammering conscience. There is an amusing scene where Linus, Danny and Rusty meet a contact by the name of Matsui (Robbie Coltrane) for a potential job. Danny, Rusty and Matsui all speak cryptically which leaves poor Linus totally confused. Damon plays the scene so well as he looks desperately to his cohorts for help or some sort of clue as to what he should say. Put on the spot, Linus finally responds by quoting lyrics from “Kashmir” by Led Zeppelin to hilarious effect.

While doing a press conference in Rome during the promotional tour for Ocean’s Eleven, Steven Soderbergh fell in love with the city and over dinner with producer Jerry Weintraub began thinking about the story and structure for a sequel. He got the idea to set it in Europe and was so inspired that he started writing down ideas. After returning to Los Angeles, Weintraub discovered George Nolfi’s screenplay, entitled Honor Among Thieves, about the greatest thief in America going up against his equal in Europe. It was originally developed for John Woo to direct but Weintraub sent the script to George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Soderbergh. The director came up with the basic idea for the film and thought that it “would be more fun if Twelve was the movie in which everything goes wrong from the get-go.” He ended up merging Nolfi’s script with his own ideas. Soderbergh saw this film as more emotional, character-driven and complicated on a narrative level than the first one.

Prior to the start of principal photography, which lasted 77 days, Julia Roberts found out that she was pregnant and Soderbergh incorporated it into the script. He also met with Vincent Cassel at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival and asked the actor if he would be interested in being in Ocean’s Twelve. He agreed without reading the script because he trusted someone with a reputation like Soderbergh’s. Once filming began, the production spent ten weeks globetrotting all over the world with stops in Chicago, Amsterdam, Paris, Monte Carlo, Lake Cuomo, and Rome. Principal photography concluded with four weeks on three Warner Brothers soundstages in L.A.

Not surprisingly, Ocean’s Twelve received mixed reviews. Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and wrote, “The movie is all about behavior, dialogue, star power and wiseass in-jokes. I really sort of liked it.” In her review for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote, “Ocean's Twelve may be slim pickings, but when a film contains a bit as sublime as Rusty putting the moves on a visibly startled Isabel while he's literally hotfooting it from the law it's the kind of movie moment that can tide you over for a week.” The Washington Post’s Desson Thomson wrote, “In this sprawling oglefest, such things as "narrative" and "story" are remote little abstractions indeed. Director Steven Soderbergh uses the same reality-show looseness he brought to his K Street television series.” USA Today gave the film three out of four stars and wrote, “Exuding heaps of postmodern cool — these guys never even break a sweat —Ocean's Twelve also gets comic mileage out of petty bickering among Danny's teammates.”

In his review for the Village Voice, Dennis Lim wrote, “Watching other people's vacation home movies is rarely this fun. Quick, cheap thrills spiked with a jazzy, retro new wave vibe, Ocean's Twelve suggests a double issue of Us Weekly guest-edited by the old Cahiers du Cinema crew.” However, Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “D+” rating and Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote, “What's on screen is lazy, second-rate, phoned-in — a heist in which it's the audience whose pockets have been picked.” The New York Observer’s Andrew Sarris felt that the film “Hits a new low in condescending facetiousness, with no fewer than 15 performers of varying talents, tongues firmly in cheeks, undercutting all the genre's action conventions while camping up a storm on two continents.” Finally, Slate’s David Edelstein wrote, “Ocean's Twelve disintegrates along with its linearity. Two days after seeing it, I can't even remember how it ended. But I do remember Julia Roberts' endearing whoops of panic.”

According to Soderbergh, Ocean’s Twelve tested as well with audiences as the previous film had. He, however, had to deal with expectations from the success of Ocean’s Eleven: “That is what this film confronted and got beaten by, because it’s a completely different movie from the first one. It’s weirder…in terms of the imagery and the music, it is unquestionably the most arresting of the three.” 

Once again Soderbergh keeps the pace brisk and breezy, making the two-hour running time fly by. Like its predecessor, Ocean’s Twelve is beautifully shot with atmospheric lighting and saturated color as evident in the bright yellow that permeates Isabel’s Europol lecture or the green lighting that illuminates the underwater sequence during a heist that Danny and his crew pull off, or the red lighting that dominates the nightclub where Rusty and Isabel meet. Most of the film takes place in Europe and Soderbergh adopts the look of a European film from the 1960’s, which also applies to the eclectically groovy soundtrack from David Holmes that evokes a ‘60s Euro-lounge vibe. The director even described the film’s aesthetic as “the most expensive episode of a ‘60s television show ever.” He and Holmes agreed that the score would be completely different from Ocean’s Eleven in order to complement the different look and feel. Soderbergh is an excellent visual storyteller and this is evident in several scenes that he depicts without any dialogue, instead resorting to music married to visuals that conveys exactly what’s going on. He understands the kind of movie he’s making and doesn’t try to be too cute or wink knowingly at the audience, instead focusing at the task at hand: making a confident, entertaining movie. Granted, Ocean’s Twelve is no Traffic (2000), and it’s not meant to be, but you could do a lot worse with two hours of your time.

Next Week: Ocean's Thirteen

SOURCES

Canfield, Kevin. “David Levien and Brian Koppelman: Ocean’s Two.” MovieMaker. July 31, 2007.

Rosen, Christopher. “Steven Soderbergh Doesn’t Care If You Like Ocean’s 12, But Don’t Hate It For the Wrong Reason.” The Huffington Post. December 10, 2014.