☆☆☆
Years and years ago, there were Dollar Tuesdays, when every movie cost just a dollar for admission, any show, any time, all day. Back then, you'd hear people say things like:
"Is it any good?"
"Sure, especially if you go on Tuesday."
Here we are decades later and we've got the 21st century, technologically enhanced version of Dollar Tuesdays called Moviepass*, which looks like it might end up being as much a fleeting phenomenon as Dollar Tuesdays themselves were. (First, they became $2 Tuesdays, and then, as the economy improved and the threat of staying home and watching VHS tapes began to wane, they disappeared forever.)
And the question that comes up regarding Ocean's 8, a sort of reboot of the Ocean's Eleven movies with a predominately female cast of crooks, is: "Is it any good?"
The answer to which is, "Sure, with Moviepass." I, on the other hand, paid full price, out of pocket to see Ocean's 8 and found it a perfectly entertaining, acceptable, frequently funny, often meandering, tremendously overlong movie that kind of moves along in fits and starts, layering in one new plot point onto another like a giant, fluffy dessert that looks like it might fall in on itself at any moment. I was amused.
If I had seen it essentially for free, I'd probably be overjoyed at the outcome, because Ocean's 8 is more than passable entertainment, and when you get it for free, what is there to complain about?
Now, having seen one, two or all three of the previous, male-dominated Ocean's movies, what lingered in my mind was: absolutely nothing. One of them, I think, took place in Las Vegas, and all of them involved a lot of merry criminals who were breezy and funny and looked very, very well dressed.
When I watch the news and see people taken in for big, brazen crimes like this, they generally look angry, confrontational and not at all like the people you'd like to see at a swanky party. But the Ocean's movies are heist movies, and heist movies are usually better if we feel the heist is being done for thrills rather than with criminal intent. I mean, these people are committing major, international crimes; they're not nice people, but we've got to believe they are.
This time around, the heist begins with Sandra Bullock as Debbie Ocean, whose brother was Danny, the "Ocean" in the original title. The criminal inclination runs in the family, it seems, and Debbie has been spending five years in prison thinking about the next job she's going to pull just as soon as she gets out.
And snap-bam, here we are. No parole officer hearings, no worries about where to live or how to survive, just right back into a life of crime, and doing it with a smile on her face the entire time. Bullock remains an engaging and winning film presence, so she can get us past the disbelief. She hooks up with an old friend Lou (Cate Blanchett), whose criminal enterprise has diminished to watering down vodka in a nightclub.
It's not too long before Debbie reveals her master plan: to steal a $150 million necklace during the Met Gala. It'll be around the neck of a glamorous movie star named Daphne Kluger (Anne Hathaway), with the down-on-her-luck celebrity designer Rose Weil (Helena Bonham Carter) in on the job. So are Sarah Paulson, Rihanna, Mindy Kaling and Akwafina in decidedly underwritten roles that exist primarily to have people to take on different positions in the elaborate heist.
The film is divided roughly into four parts, each of which plays to varying success: The setup and building the team is substantially less interesting than it's been in earlier movies; the planning and tech rehearsal are amusing and suspenseful; the heist itself proves a little more complicated than expected (some of the key information on who moves where and does what has been withheld from us, and having the audience fully aware of every detail has long been key to enjoying a heist picture); and the final investigation builds on a needless and extraneous story that involves a fellow criminal Debbie used to love.
For all the talk about female empowerment and women playing strong roles in films, it's curious that Ocean's 8 was written and directed by men, and features a handsome, ultra-masculine man at its core who the women, for a long period of the film, need to talk about. Sociologically speaking, Ocean's 8 leaves you wondering why they couldn't trust the women to be as smart as they are, or they just thought that no one can believe that a woman's ultimate goal can't be to attract the attention of a man. That kind of casual sexism left me with some weird thoughts about what Ocean's 8 wanted to accomplish.
But all that stuff aside, the question is: Does it work? And the answer is, yes. The acting is at times iffy, the story is iffy, the plot requires not mere suspension of disbelief but putting it into your smartphone, turning it all off and ignoring it for a couple of hours. You don't want little nagging thoughts gnawing at your head as the heist gets underway, since some of it requires such astonishing coincidences to pull off, that ... well, wait, see what I mean? Put that disbelief away for a couple of hours. Ocean's 8 won't work any other way.
Let it happen, succumb to the geniality of it all, and it's a fun, diverting little film, cleverly made, totally enjoyable, and often so ludicrously plotted that there's just no way that one person could end up over there at just the right time-- wait, see what I mean? Forget about it.
It's a fun movie. Especially if you see it on a Moviepass. Ocean's 8 may, indeed, be the ultimate Moviepass movie; how can you be too critical about something you didn't even pay to see?
The good news is, it's much better than that. But increasingly, the scariest part is, maybe it didn't even have to be.
--------------------------------
* The popularity of Moviepass, incidentally, leaves me thinking that no matter the financial state of the company behind it, it demonstrates an underlying fear among exhibitors and studios of streaming services -- even while studios double-down their bets on streaming, they've got a problem of simultaneously urging people to stay home to watch digital content while needing people to go to theaters. Moviepass plays an important role in this, and probably sooner rather than later, we'll mostly go to movies with these subscription models, just as most people go to the opera or their local symphonies with season tickets. Moviepass as a brand will likely die off quickly; the company behind it can't sustain its questionable business model, but movie theater owners are looking eager to fill this void. And all of that calls into question whether the era of $70 million comedies like this one will be able to last much longer. It's an interesting quandary the entertainment industry has found itself in, and one entirely of its own making.
Viewed July 10, 2018 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks
1955
"Is it any good?"
"Sure, especially if you go on Tuesday."
Here we are decades later and we've got the 21st century, technologically enhanced version of Dollar Tuesdays called Moviepass*, which looks like it might end up being as much a fleeting phenomenon as Dollar Tuesdays themselves were. (First, they became $2 Tuesdays, and then, as the economy improved and the threat of staying home and watching VHS tapes began to wane, they disappeared forever.)
And the question that comes up regarding Ocean's 8, a sort of reboot of the Ocean's Eleven movies with a predominately female cast of crooks, is: "Is it any good?"
The answer to which is, "Sure, with Moviepass." I, on the other hand, paid full price, out of pocket to see Ocean's 8 and found it a perfectly entertaining, acceptable, frequently funny, often meandering, tremendously overlong movie that kind of moves along in fits and starts, layering in one new plot point onto another like a giant, fluffy dessert that looks like it might fall in on itself at any moment. I was amused.
If I had seen it essentially for free, I'd probably be overjoyed at the outcome, because Ocean's 8 is more than passable entertainment, and when you get it for free, what is there to complain about?
Now, having seen one, two or all three of the previous, male-dominated Ocean's movies, what lingered in my mind was: absolutely nothing. One of them, I think, took place in Las Vegas, and all of them involved a lot of merry criminals who were breezy and funny and looked very, very well dressed.
When I watch the news and see people taken in for big, brazen crimes like this, they generally look angry, confrontational and not at all like the people you'd like to see at a swanky party. But the Ocean's movies are heist movies, and heist movies are usually better if we feel the heist is being done for thrills rather than with criminal intent. I mean, these people are committing major, international crimes; they're not nice people, but we've got to believe they are.
This time around, the heist begins with Sandra Bullock as Debbie Ocean, whose brother was Danny, the "Ocean" in the original title. The criminal inclination runs in the family, it seems, and Debbie has been spending five years in prison thinking about the next job she's going to pull just as soon as she gets out.
And snap-bam, here we are. No parole officer hearings, no worries about where to live or how to survive, just right back into a life of crime, and doing it with a smile on her face the entire time. Bullock remains an engaging and winning film presence, so she can get us past the disbelief. She hooks up with an old friend Lou (Cate Blanchett), whose criminal enterprise has diminished to watering down vodka in a nightclub.
It's not too long before Debbie reveals her master plan: to steal a $150 million necklace during the Met Gala. It'll be around the neck of a glamorous movie star named Daphne Kluger (Anne Hathaway), with the down-on-her-luck celebrity designer Rose Weil (Helena Bonham Carter) in on the job. So are Sarah Paulson, Rihanna, Mindy Kaling and Akwafina in decidedly underwritten roles that exist primarily to have people to take on different positions in the elaborate heist.
The film is divided roughly into four parts, each of which plays to varying success: The setup and building the team is substantially less interesting than it's been in earlier movies; the planning and tech rehearsal are amusing and suspenseful; the heist itself proves a little more complicated than expected (some of the key information on who moves where and does what has been withheld from us, and having the audience fully aware of every detail has long been key to enjoying a heist picture); and the final investigation builds on a needless and extraneous story that involves a fellow criminal Debbie used to love.
For all the talk about female empowerment and women playing strong roles in films, it's curious that Ocean's 8 was written and directed by men, and features a handsome, ultra-masculine man at its core who the women, for a long period of the film, need to talk about. Sociologically speaking, Ocean's 8 leaves you wondering why they couldn't trust the women to be as smart as they are, or they just thought that no one can believe that a woman's ultimate goal can't be to attract the attention of a man. That kind of casual sexism left me with some weird thoughts about what Ocean's 8 wanted to accomplish.
But all that stuff aside, the question is: Does it work? And the answer is, yes. The acting is at times iffy, the story is iffy, the plot requires not mere suspension of disbelief but putting it into your smartphone, turning it all off and ignoring it for a couple of hours. You don't want little nagging thoughts gnawing at your head as the heist gets underway, since some of it requires such astonishing coincidences to pull off, that ... well, wait, see what I mean? Put that disbelief away for a couple of hours. Ocean's 8 won't work any other way.
Let it happen, succumb to the geniality of it all, and it's a fun, diverting little film, cleverly made, totally enjoyable, and often so ludicrously plotted that there's just no way that one person could end up over there at just the right time-- wait, see what I mean? Forget about it.
It's a fun movie. Especially if you see it on a Moviepass. Ocean's 8 may, indeed, be the ultimate Moviepass movie; how can you be too critical about something you didn't even pay to see?
The good news is, it's much better than that. But increasingly, the scariest part is, maybe it didn't even have to be.
--------------------------------
* The popularity of Moviepass, incidentally, leaves me thinking that no matter the financial state of the company behind it, it demonstrates an underlying fear among exhibitors and studios of streaming services -- even while studios double-down their bets on streaming, they've got a problem of simultaneously urging people to stay home to watch digital content while needing people to go to theaters. Moviepass plays an important role in this, and probably sooner rather than later, we'll mostly go to movies with these subscription models, just as most people go to the opera or their local symphonies with season tickets. Moviepass as a brand will likely die off quickly; the company behind it can't sustain its questionable business model, but movie theater owners are looking eager to fill this void. And all of that calls into question whether the era of $70 million comedies like this one will be able to last much longer. It's an interesting quandary the entertainment industry has found itself in, and one entirely of its own making.
Viewed July 10, 2018 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks
1955
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