Word: capered
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...trouble at work - well-founded suspicions of embezzlement - and he is also the masterless mind behind a plan to rob a suburban jewelry store - which just happens to be owned by his very own parents (Albert Finney and Rosemary Harris). Needless to say, this not exactly capering caper goes murderously awry. We quickly understand that nothing good is going to come out of this mess for Andy. He, of course, does not catch the drift toward disaster. Coolly smiling, eerily calm almost to the end, he keeps manufacturing work-arounds that, naturally, continue to make matters worse...
...George Clooney and Brad Pitt took Ocean's Thirteen to Cannes, but they don't need a film festival to get attention for their caper movies. They do for a dark, corporate-chicanery drama like Michael Clayton. or a murky, elegiac western like The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. So the big boys are here to exchange their star luster for the ego boost, and maybe the Oscar boost, a good showing at Toronto can bring. That's how American Beauty and Crash, both Academy Award winners for Best Picture, got started...
What can you expect of the third in a series of remakes of a not-so-hot 1960 caper (the Rat Pack's Ocean's Eleven)? No matter how slim your hopes, they will probably be deflated by this tired smarmathon. Despite all the star quality--George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, guest villain Al Pacino--director Steven Soderbergh can infuse no energy into the Vegas caper plot. He can't even make these photogenic celebs look fabulous. For them and the audience, this Thirteen is bad luck...
...answer is that the Coens' crime caper is sharp and smart and was certainly worthy of a top slot. Gray's cop drama rarely reached the emotional boiling point, but the Tarantino and Fincher films, if not nearly the best of the directors' work, paraded the filmmaking brio, the narrative twists and drive, that mark solid updates of the classic Hollywood style. That the jurors ignored every member of this quartet, while laying hands on Van Sant's very minor indie effort, could possibly suggest an anti-Hollywood agenda. Major U.S. studios may take the hint, and be more reluctant...
...Pack's idea, such as it was, was to do a movie in a friendly town (Vegas, Chicago) or familiar genre (caper, Western, gangster movie) and apply to it a bit of the ad-lib roguery they brought to their nightclub gigs. The slapdash nature of the script, performances and production was meant to reflect the informal, what-the-hell, let's-pretend-we're-having-a-ball impulse that led to their making. These were movies that loosened the tuxedo tie and the tongue to provide an intoxicated if not intoxicating diversion. They were loosy-goosy for the time...