FILM: Ocean's Twelve & In Good Company

There are hundreds of directors in Hollywood who could have made a better sequel to Ocean's Eleven than Steven Soderbergh. The original Ocean's Eleven, of course, was a Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr., Rat Pack movie, and Soderbergh's remake of the original was a box office smash starring George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Matt Damon and others. And as night follows day, so Hollywood sequels follow box office smashes.

Clooney, Pitt and the others are back for the sequel. The twelfth in the title is Catherine Zeta-Jones. The cast is good, with lots of charisma and starpower. The movie is less good, with obvious flaws of logic and, for me, a problem of tone.

The Rat Pack movie came at the end of the 1950s, a period in US history of unequalled conformity. A tradition developed of 50s movies about criminals who challenged the status quo with raffish charm. In our morally ambiguous time, the tradition changes significantly. In Soderbergh's Ocean's Twelve, the raffish charm comes across as confusion. Clooney and Pitt certainly have the screen presence, but in this case there's little substance behind the style.

In Good Company, starring Dennis Quaid, is the anti-Ocean's. It's only a good picture, not a great one, but Quaid's performance of an all-American good guy has the moral center lacking in Soderbergh's film. Like About A Boy, by the same writer / directors, In Good Company is about boys growing into men. Ocean's Twelve is about men being boys, and still getting all the good looking girls.

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The cinematographer for Ocean's Twelve was Sven Nykvist. I can't say I've made a study of Nykvist's work, but I associate his name with many beautiful films.

One of the reasons I went to see Ocean's Twelve is that I was in Rome last summer while it was being filmed, in one beautiful place after another. I wanted to see a beautiful film set in Rome, but it's noticable that Ocean's Twelve completely misses the beauty of Rome — not an easy thing to do. So you have to assume that Soderbergh wanted Nykvist to miss the beauty.

The movie is full of underexposed scenes, overexposed scenes, grainy shots, and bumpy shots. What a strange way to make a light entertainment movie full of movie stars and Rome.

Soderbergh has always shown a great discomfort in the world, starting with Sex, Lies and Videotape. He's the wrong director for a movie like Ocean's Twelve, but the explanation for his selection is that he and Clooney are good friends and collaborators. Win an academy award, team up with a box office smash like Clooney, and you get to make terrible, money-losing movies like Solaris that should have gone straight to video.