10 / 40 / 70 (Ocean's Twelve)

An experiment in writing about film: select three different, arbitrary time codes (in this case the 10 minute, 40 minute, and 70 minute mark), freeze the frames, and use that as the guide to writing about the film. No compromise: the film must be stopped at these time codes. What if, instead of freely choosing what parts of the film to address, one let the film determine this? Constraint as a form of freedom. And so, Ocean's Twelve, from 2004. 

Generally considered the weakest in the trilogy (Entertainment Weekly ranked it as one of the 25 worst sequels of all time) it is in fact one of Steven Soderbergh's strongest films, apart from The Limey (1999), which is his best. Julia Roberts playing Julia Roberts, and all the complications that ensue, hearken back to the Jerry Lewis / Dean Martin movies. In fact, the film is so artificial and yet so free of artificialness, with its insanely complicated plots and subplots and red herrings and vernacular and breezy confidence that it seems impossible that it was made post 9-11. It's as if the entire Rip Van Winkle cast had slept through the Terrible Early Aughts.

10:  Here is the first screen grab, from the 10-minute mark:

This is from a slow pan left, from the beginning sequence of the film, which shows, one by one, the lavish lifestyles of the Ocean's gang, as Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia) tracks them down. We are in Miami, at The Amazing Yen's house (Shaobo Qin), as the camera pans across a room flooded with sunshine, liquor, and a beautiful woman. It is Soderbergh's great strength as a visual stylist: the pure compression of information into the frame. 

40: The second one, from the 40-minute mark:

Catherine Zeta-Jones (playing Isabel Lahiri) as she recognizes Brad Pitt (Rusty Ryan), in an eyeline match that is slightly off-kilter, as we don't see her exactly from Pitt's point of view, but from a privileged, closer position. The waiter in the background. Again, the flood of light. Reminiscent of of Anna Karina?

70: The third one, from the 70-minute mark:

Strange, that in a film in which she does not figure too prominently, Zeta-Jones appears again at the 70-minute mark. I would not choose to write about her again, and yet . . . She is aiming the gun at Brad Pitt, in a shot/reverse-shot sequence. Absolute Hollywood glamor, unashamed. And this is the strange dark attraction of the Ocean's films: they are fully aware of their traditions, and manage to quote them without irony. They are, to use the Russian literary critic M. M. Bakhtin's term, carnivalesque: they consume multiple traditions and genres in ways that create something new. Again, the open natural light, flooding the frame from the left quadrant, the entire film bathed in sunlit optimism. The motif of the Ocean's Twelve, revealed in three arbitrary stills.

Critics, conditioned to be on Red Alert against postmodern pastiche, have tended to dismiss the Ocean's films as empty star-vehicles: Soderbergh treading water in between his more serious films (Traffic, Che). But the mystery of Ocean's Twelve is how it manages to be deeply felt, in the way that casual relationships often are.

10 / 40 / 70.

A new method of film criticism, freed of the old tyrannies of continuity. The discontinuity of the digital age, demanding a new way of seeing. A new way of writing.

UPDATES:

The Rumpus was the first to pick it up. 

Whip-smart writing and coverage at Film Studies for Free and Dan North's Spectacular Attractions.

Metafilter even jumped in.

A mention over at if:book, the Institute for the Future of the Book blog.

Comments

[Yardbird]

Very creative, loads of potential.

[Nick]

Thanks Yardbird--the next one is already underway.