Down With the Sickness

I spent last year working for a magazine in Florida, and I can pinpoint the exact date when I started thinking seriously about coming back home to Canada. It was the day that a pair of insurance company representatives came to the office to brief us on the health plan our employer had selected for us. The two of them were so unctuously smooth in their delivery, their responses to our questions so condescending and so well-rehearsed—and the booklets they handed us were so confusingly worded and organized—that it was impossible not to feel we were all being bamboozled. Still, we signed on—we really didn’t have any other choice—and the premiums were so expensive that one of my fellow editors had to take on a second job just to be able to afford the health plan the first one came with.

How did things get this way? In his new documentary Sicko, grandstanding lefty muckraker Michael Moore traces the problem back to Nixon—he plays a sinister 1971 tape recording of John Ehrlichman recommending the HMO system to the president, explaining with a weird sort of weaselly frankness that “all the incentives are toward less medical care because the less care they give them, the more money they make.” Some 35 years later, things have deteriorated to the point where 50 million Americans don’t have health insurance, and even the ones who do are at the mercy of a system that actively tries to deny as many payouts as possible. It may be the only industry in America that actively tries to give its customers absolutely nothing for their money.

Sicko shares many of the faults of Michael Moore’s previous films: the adolescent jokiness, the tiresomely “ironic” use of old rock songs and black-and-white stock footage, Moore’s lack of interest in his interviewees as anything other than tools for making rhetorical points, Moore’s increasing desire to play up his own saintliness, the reduction of complex issues to simplified—often literally cartoonish—comedy routines. Moore isn’t interested at all in the human side of politics—he portrays the 1994 defeat of Hillary Clinton’s healthcare plan, for instance, as the result of a conspiracy among the insurance companies to pay off key senators, whereas Carl Bernstein’s new biography of the former First Lady offers a more nuanced explanation, blaming the debacle in part on Clinton’s inept organizational skills, her lack of diplomatic skills and her staff’s inability to sell her needlessly labyrinthine plan to Congress.

But here’s the thing: Moore’s still right. The American healthcare system is so fucked up that it probably needs to be scrapped and rebuilt from scratch. Sure, his depictions of healthcare in Canada, England and France so ridiculously adoring that they’re practically propaganda—but he still convinces you that anyone living there who’d rather have the American system needs to spend some time in a mental institution. (If they can find one covered by their HMO.) Sure, the long segment that concludes the film (in which Moore takes a bunch of sick 9/11 rescue workers who’ve been denied care at home and delivers them to a hospital in Cuba) is a bit of a stunt, but that doesn’t make Moore’s point any less valid. Forget about the rescue workers; here’s one of the poorest countries in Central America, and they can afford to provide their citizens with basic healthcare—what’s the problem with the United States?

Moore is refreshingly unembarrassed to use the phrase “socialized medicine” throughout Sicko, but what he’s really calling for is civilized medicine—a system that recognizes that everyone deserves medical care, and that it’s worth sacrificing a few million dollars in profits to achieve that goal.

One of Moore’s underrated skills is his ability to show the specific ways in which governmental policy trickles down and make life harder for ordinary people just trying to raise their kids and keep their heads above water. In Sicko, he makes a convincing case that a change in policy could make life much easier and more civilized for a whole lot of Americans.

Journey to the Centre of Guy Maddin's Brain!

Guy Maddin has repeatedly told interviewers that his new film, Brand Upon the Brain!, is “96 per cent literally true.” He must have had quite a childhood.

According to the film—like most of Maddin’s work, a deliriously plotted, blazingly edited silent melodrama designed to look like a lost cinematic artifact from 1929—Maddin grew up in a lighthouse on remote Black Notch Island in the Pacific Northwest, where his parents ran an orphanage. It was a hardscrabble but happy life, until brother-and-sister teen detectives Chance and Wendy Gale arrived on the scene to investigate the strange puncture wounds on the backs of all the orphans’ heads—it turns out that Guy’s mad scientist father has been extracting “orphan nectar” from them as part of an experiment to rejuvenate Guy’s puritanical mother back to infancy. Meanwhile, Guy’s sister, Sis, has fallen in love with Chance Gale, not realizing he’s actually Wendy in disguise. The whole experience is very hard on young Guy’s constitution—time and again, with each new shocking revelation, he faints dead away. “Too much for Guy!” reads the intertitle.

That’s the part I have trouble believing. “Too much for Guy”? Don’t be ridiculous! As a director, Maddin’s imagination has always been drawn to notions that are “too much”—too wild, too strange, too perverse, too loony, too embarrassing, too weird, too overheated, too stylized, too emotionally extravagant. The Winnipeg auteur’s films (eight features, and more than a dozen shorts) are like fever-dreams bubbling up from early cinema’s long-suppressed subconscious—fast-moving tales of love, lust, guilt, jealousy, repression and bizarre outbreaks of surreal violence, all told with a breathless eagerness to entertain. (Probably three-quarters of the intertitles in Brand Upon the Brain! end in exclamation points! And a significant number of those end in two or three!!!)

Maddin’s creativity has always seemed too much for the screen to contain, and with Brand Upon the Brain! it’s finally burst out onto the stage. Special screenings of the film in Toronto, New York and Los Angeles have included music by a live orchestra (featuring a castrato singer), live sound effects by a team of Foley artists, and narration by such notable guest artists as Laurie Anderson, Eli Wallach, Lou Reed and Isabella Rossellini.

Sadly, Metro Cinema audiences won’t get the full Brand! multimedia experience when the film arrives at Zeidler Hall this week. But even in this bare-bones format, it’s a very potent brew—I’m ready to call it the funniest, saddest, most emotionally resonant film in Maddin’s entire oeuvre. (Although the short Sissy-Boy Slap-Party runs a close second!)

I talked with Guy Maddin last week about Brand Upon the Brain!, the chronic unreliability of Lou Reed and the universal evilness of children—and in the process he more than lived up to his reputation as one of the most entertaining interviewees in cinema today.

Q: This will sound like I’m just sucking up, but I think Brand Upon the Brain! is my favourite movie of yours.

Guy Maddin: I think it’s mine too.

Q: Why do you say that? Is it that it’s the most personal? Or the one where you best realized your intentions?

GM: Yeah, all of that. I made it so quickly, first of all. I drew so much on my own autobiography that the script just came out in one big lump, and no matter how many characters or complications or odd digressions I threw in, it all added up sideways and upside-down and top to bottom. It still felt psychologically true. And also, I made it with a lot of enthusiasm and fearlessness. Now, that kind of thing doesn’t always work. David Lynch was saying pretty much the same thing about Inland Empire, how he made it without a script, and... well, it’s the kind of thing you have to be careful bragging about. Sometimes the lack of a script kind of shows!

I also always loved literature about childhood recollections. It’s seems almost like the birth of magical realism to me—we’re all poets when we’re reminiscing about our earliest childhoods, because we all have such lyrical, mysteriously incorrect models of the universe when we’re that young. All our reasons for why things happen are incorrect half the time and everything seems possible. I’ve also always loved Jean Vigo’s films—Zéro de Conduite and L’Atalante, which are so full of that sense of childlike myth and wonder, and I guess I felt kind of emboldened by those accomplishments and felt that I could try to point myself in that same direction. I set off in a windsprint to make the movie and I couldn’t be more thrilled that it came out pretty much the way I hoped.

Q: You keep saying how the film is autobiographical, but since the plot is so obviously unrealistic, can you explain what you mean when you say it’s “96 per cent true”?

GM: Well, does it matter if it’s true or not? I find myself sneering, sometimes loudly, during trailers that claim a movie is “based on a true story.” What do I care if it’s true or not? It just has to be entertaining. And let’s fact it: the facts have been nipple-twisted into agonized dishonesty by the time any movie that claims to be based on a true story is finished. So I sort of try to backtrack when I claim this movie is based on fact. But it is! And in fact, it’s probably more honest than most Hollywood “true stories” that manage to get the surface right. I don’t worry about the surface so much as I try to get at an emotional truth. I didn’t grow up in a lighthouse, but it did feel as though my mom was perched atop one with a searchlight and a telescope. And she’ll be up there long after she’s dead, you know?

Q: Tell me about presenting the live version of the film, with this rotating cast of celebrity narrators. Did it change the flavour of the film depending on who was narrating it?

GM: Oh, absolutely. It was a really interesting experiment, because the film never changed, and the orchestra and the Foley artists stayed basically the same as well, so it was up to the narrator to assert himself or herself and make a connection with the audience. Some of them were a little bit ashamed of the film’s melodramatic aspects, and if they were, if they backed off, that connection wasn’t made. But if they went for it, the connection was incredible—you could feel the energy in the audience just swelling up. Isabella Rossellini gets better and better every time out. She brings the audience to their feet every night. People like Udo Kier and Crispin Glover and Barbara Steele, the old “scream queen,” really went for it too. Other people were a little more cool—Lou Reed fell asleep at his reading.

Q: Really? You’re kidding me, right?

GM: Seriously—he fell right asleep. He was up in a balcony and couldn’t be awakened. Only this big gong at the end of the movie woke him up. But I knew he was going to be trouble, because he fell asleep six minutes into the rehearsal as well. All that day, I was so tense—I was grinding my teeth together so hard that I shattered a molar and had to spend the next five days in New York with exposed nerves sort of swimming around in my mouth.

Q: Your movies often get described as “demented” and “delirious.” I always wonder—do they feel demented when you’re writing them or making them? Or do you resent those kinds of adjectives?

GM: “Delirious” I like. Because, I find the darnedest and most painful and funniest truths about myself occur to me while I’m dreaming. Truths present themselves to you in the most demented and delirious ways when you’re dreaming! My goal has always been to present cogent, psychologically plausible plots that feel like a dream.

Q: Is it easy to make these movies? I mean, a flippant person might say that at this point there’s now a Guy Maddin formula you can follow—you just do a weird silent movie, through in some non sequitur intertitles and chop it up with these lightning-fast edits, send it out to the theatres...

GM: ...and have no one show up! [Laughs.]

Q: Right, right, but the critics will praise it to the skies. Because you’re a critics’ darling.

GM: Well, obviously it’s not that simple, although I wouldn’t blame people for thinking so. Some movies are easier to make than others, but I’ve read countless interviews with directors who all agree that the ease of making them has nothing to do with how well it turns out. I’m just trying to work on perfecting my own achievements. And I like to think I have something to say—it’s not just wackiness for the sake of wackiness. And even if my movies can be lumped together as being fairly similar to each other, at least they’re not the same as anybody else’s.

Q: Have you ever been approached by a studio to be a director for hire? I mean, I doubt that Hollywood is looking to you to do the next Kate Hudson romantic comedy or anything—

GM: No, but I wish they’d let me. I was approached to do the remake of The Omen, actually, but it didn’t work out. I didn’t want to do it, anyway—I thought the original was terrible and figured the new version was going to be just as bad.

Q: Would you have been able to rein in your style, do you think, and make a mainstream film?

GM: Yeah, I could’ve, but it wouldn’t have been very much fun. Maybe if the story was better. I mean, how many more possessed-children movies can there be? But I thought about it for a long time, believe me. The payday would have been good. I was trying to think of an approach, and I actually arrived at one: all children are possessed! All children are the offspring of Satan! I was thinking of setting it in a daycare or something. Oh well, I think Little Nicky did that whole premise better anyway.

Q: Are there any directors out there right now who seem like your peers or kindred spirits?

GM: Well, I don’t know about kindred spirits, but the directors I admire are people like Jared Hess, the guy who made Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre.

Q: The critics really dogpiled on Nacho Libre.

GM: Well, let ’em do it, because I love that movie! I like P.T. Anderson quite a bit. Lars von Trier is very interesting at times.

Q: You write a regular column about odd and obscure old movies, “My Jolly Corner,” for Film Comment and you’re obviously very interested in early cinema. Do you consider yourself a film scholar at all?

GM: No, no. I’m a total dilettante. I’m just an enthusiast. An enthusiastic amateur.

Q: A teen detective?

GM: Exactly.

Philip Marlowe in Penny Loafers (Review: Nancy Drew)

An innocent woman from a small town—River Heights? Deep River? Something like that—moves into a mysterious old house in the Hollywood Hills. With her prim sweaters and sensible shoes, she looks like she could have stepped straight out of some 1940s small-town soda shoppe. Not long after she walks inside the door, she’s surprised to see a sultry, dark-haired beauty (memorably embodied by Laura Elena Harring, looking as impossibly curvy and glamourous as Ava Gardner) standing before her, imploring her to help her solve a mystery. What can the innocent young woman do? The pull of a mystery is too strong to resist, and she soon finds herself in the middle of a case that takes her to a Hollywood set, a decrepit old movie theatre and a Los Angeles bungalow whose owner seems to have moved out in a hurry—perhaps as a result of threats from an evil Los Angeles power broker?

I’ve just described the setup of Mulholland Drive, but that’s also, weirdly enough, the premise of Nancy Drew, an odd little movie that’s got just enough interesting things going on inside it to make me wish it was good enough for me to recommend it.

It was directed by Andrew Fleming, an underrated director who always brings a sly wit and intelligence to movies about teenaged girls—he also did the guilty-pleasure witches-in-high-school thriller The Craft as well as Dick, the Kirsten Dunst-versus-Richard Nixon satire that’s one of the sunniest, funniest comedies of the last 10 years. Fleming has a lot of sympathy for outsiders, and I suspect he was drawn to Nancy Drew because of the way the main character manages to be an overachiever and a plucky outcast at the same time.

As played by Emma Roberts, Nancy is a lovely throwback—a girl who drives around Hollywood in a vintage Nash roadster, who pores over books with titles like Advanced Sandcastle Building, and who comes to school wearing penny loafers and outfits so meticulously colour-coordinated that her skirt matches her thermos. Actually, her fresh-scrubbed personality recalls David Lynch, that self-proclaimed “Eagle Scout from Missoula, Montana” whose unironic Jimmy Stewart persona is so endearing in interviews.

But Nancy Drew feels like a movie that started out with a simple idea—“Let’s do an old-fashioned kid-friendly mystery”—that got pulled in too many directions at once by meddling notes from the studio. The film’s sincerity is its strong point—Nancy’s unfailingly polite brand of sleuthing is a welcome break from the smugness of Veronica Mars—but there are also these self-consciously silly, “ironic” scenes where Nancy constructs a hyper-detailed model cathedral in shop class, or performs an emergency tracheotomy on a classmate during a party.

Instead of Nancy’s reliable old buddies Bess and George, the movie saddles her with a wisecracking sidekick named Corky (Josh Flitter), a pint-sized cross between John Candy and Chris Penn; and a pair of trendy, would-be celebutantes (Daniella Monet and Kelly Vitz), who are too busy text-messaging each other to be much help unraveling the mystery. There’s also a pointless cameo by Bruce Willis, a car chase (featuring a disappointingly unconvincing stunt driver behind the wheel of Nancy’s roadster) and even a scene where Nancy nearly gets blown up by a bomb. I guess this is the kind of stuff that pleases the focus groups, but Carolyn Keene would be appalled.

On the other hand, she’d also appreciate the effort Fleming puts into telling a simple, coherent story, which is more than most summer blockbusters try to do these days. (She’d probably love to own all the witty costumes Jeffrey Kurland has designed for Emma Roberts to wear as well.)

Too bad the movie doesn’t quite come together. Maybe if there’s a sequel, she could ditch Ned Nickerson and find a new boyfriend worthier of her—how about that nice Jeffrey Beaumont boy from Blue Velvet?

If the Shue Kicks, Play Her (Review: Gracie)

Gracie tells the story of Gracie Bowen, a talented teenage athlete who dreams of playing on the boys’ soccer team. (It’s 1978, and her high school doesn’t have a girls’ soccer team—the coach unhelpfully suggests she play field hockey instead, or maybe try out for gymnastics.) The opposition that Gracie faces as she pursues her dream—the casual sexism of her classmates (both male and female), the discouraging comments from her parents, the idiotic, chauvinistic sniggering of her younger brothers—is so relentless that at times the script seems to be piling it on just for dramatic effect.

But I was nine years old in 1978, and I can remember how easy it was for guys to harass the girls in school in all sorts of horrible ways and get away it. All those scenes where Gracie’s brothers sit there at the dinner table and giggle about her boobs and her period felt absolutely accurate to me. And while Gracie suffers from all the clichés of the “inspirational sports movie” genre—the training montage; the “I believe in you” speech; the gruff, hard-nosed coach who’s eventually won over by the main character’s pluck; the big game that boils down to the big goal; the father rising up from his seat in the stands at the key moment—the story, I think, honours the real experiences of all sorts of girls who came of age in the ’70s.

Supposedly, the character of Gracie is based on the actress Elisabeth Shue, who produced the film and plays Gracie’s emotionally distant mother. Apparently, the script takes tremendous liberties with the details of Shue’s life—she didn’t even play soccer in high school, and her beloved older brother died not in 1978, as he does in the movie, but in 1988, when Shue was 25. Maybe the overall story arc is a crock, but that doesn’t matter when the details feel as emotionally true as they do here.

Director Davis Guggenheim (who, besides being Shue’s husband, also directed An Inconvenient Truth and several episodes of Deadwood) does an excellent job of evoking the frustration Gracie, or any young girl with any spirit, feels at being shunted aside simply because of her sex—I love the way he handles the funeral of Gracie’s brother, with Gracie resting her head on the pew in front of her, watching the men carry the coffin down the aisle.

There are all sorts of quietly startling moments like that in the film, startling because of the way they bring an unaccustomed female perspective to a well-worn, traditionally male-dominated genre. Gracie’s uneasy relationship with a male soccer player—he starts out as her boyfriend, but soon turns into her nastiest rival on the field—is particularly well-observed. Carly Schroeder, who plays Gracie, is a marvelously long-limbed beauty, but even in the scene where Gracie admires her newly muscular physique in her bedroom mirror, you never get the feeling that Guggenheim is ogling her. His admiration of Gracie’s athleticism seems as sincere as Gracie’s own.

At the same time, I’ve got to warn you: this movie indulges in some of the most eye-rolling sports-movie symbolism this side of We Are Marshall. There’s a whole subplot about a wounded bird that Gracie adopts and tries nursing back to health—when someone remarks, “That bird’ll never fly,” she mutters, “Not if you tell it that.” And there’s this one wintertime shot of the abandoned soccer net in the Bowens’ backyard collapsing under the weight of the accumulated snow... oh Mylanta, it’s so awful you can’t believe it survived into the final cut.

But I suppose that it wouldn’t be the worst thing if the young female athletes who’ll be seeing this movie and getting inspired by it were bombarded by a few hardcore Hollywood sports clichés along the way. Hell, we’ve got to toughen these girls up!

The Empress of Lynchland (Interview: Laura Dern)

David Lynch's maddening but fascinating new film Inland Empire makes its debut here in Edmonton, Alberta this weekend, and I was able to snag an advance interview with Lynch's leading lady, Laura Dern. It took some doing to get hold of her, but she couldn't have been more gracious or her answers more thoughtful once we started our conversation. Edmonton is not exactly a major stop on any movie's publicity tour, so it was very generous of Dern to set aside the time to talk.

We only spoke for about 15-20 minutes, so I never got to ask her whether she had any plans to star opposite Loren Dean in a film adaptation of Lorna Doone, but I did get to ask more questions than I thought I would. And since I stole that Lorna Doone joke from an old issue of Film Comment anyway, it's probably all for the best.

Anyway, here's our interview. Enjoy!

***

Would it sound ridiculous if I told you I think Laura Dern gives an extraordinary performance in Inland Empire, even though I couldn’t tell you for sure what character she’s playing?

Dern starts the film as Nikki Grace, a Hollywood actress who lands the coveted lead role in something called On High in Blue Tomorrows, a romantic melodrama set in the Deep South, even though the director (an unctuous Jeremy Irons) says it’s based on an old Polish folktale. But as the film progresses, Dern appears to slip into several alternate realities and alternate identities—the white-trash wife of a Polish carny, a streetwalker working the corner of Hollywood and Vine, a bruise-faced woman telling her life story to a private detective. Every so often, Lynch cuts to a TV sitcom starring a family of giant, anthropomorphic rabbits, and Dern seems to be part of that reality as well.

Lynch created the part (or parts) specifically for Dern, an actress who seems to be a particularly rich source of inspiration for him. (She even has the same name as one of his favourite movies.) He cast her as Sandy, the epitome of virginal teenage innocence, in Blue Velvet, but just four years later he had her playing Lula, the unabashedly carnal, leopardskin-clad, hotter-than-Georgia-asphalt heroine of Wild at Heart. Between those two films, she’s like a living embodiment of the virgin/whore complex.

Her character in Inland Empire, on the other hand, can’t be reduced to mere formulas. The film may not be a complete success for Lynch—its logic is often frustratingly opaque, and the three-hour running time creates more than a few stretches of tedium—but it’s a triumph for Dern. She gives a performance so fearless in circumstances so challenging—working on the fly, without even a finished script—that it seems downright heroic.

Laura Dern spoke with me about acting, the making of Inland Empire, and the most surreal Best Actress campaign in Oscar history.

Q: In interviews, David Lynch always describes the plot of Inland Empire as “a woman in trouble.” But how did he first pitch it to you?

Laura Dern: Well, even that’s more information than I was originally given! [Laughs.] When people tell me that’s not enough information, I always remind them that I started the movie with even less.

Q: Is Lynch the kind of director who you just go along with no matter what, or do you say, you know, “I’m going to need a little more detail than that, David”?

LD: To be honest, both things. Naturally, David is one of the true visionaries of American cinema and someone who I think most actors would leap at the opportunity to work with. But he started out just saying, “Let’s experiment.” There was a monologue that was scripted and which we shot, but we didn’t know what it was going to be or how it would fit into anything. We were just experimenting with a character, and then, after a few get-togethers, we arrived at a turning point where suddenly he saw the movie. And we were so in the thick of it that instead of stopping and writing an entire script, we decided to just keep shooting and go day by day, scene by scene.

Q: Does that change your method of working, when you’re in the middle of an unfinished jigsaw puzzle?

LD: It changes it so much for the better. You work your whole life as an actor to attempt to achieve being “in the moment,” and then David comes along and forces you to. And it works beautifully for a character like this, who’s in such deep conflict that she doesn’t even know where she is. David was as clear as he needed to be in his direction, but it was still terrifying.

Q: Did shooting the film on digital video make a difference on the set? Did it speed things up?

LD: Absolutely. There were no cumbersome lights to move, so David could get a single and then just flip the camera around and get the other actress’ close-up without having to wait for a complete relight. So we were in the moment all the time—in a 10-hour day, we’d get scene after scene after scene, where on an ordinary movie you’d need two days just to finish one big scene.

Q: I have to say, despite all the benefits of digital video, part of me hopes that not every movie Lynch makes from now on is going to look like this one. Maybe that’s just the bourgeois moviegoer in me, but I’d really miss the visual beauty that you get in Blue Velvet or Lost Highway.

LD: But if you look back at someone like Maya Deren, people at the time thought her 8mm footage looked crude and nasty and dirty too. I think the crudity of the digital video adds its own quality—it matches the crudity of that street person on Hollywood and Vine, it takes you more inside her experience. But when David says he wants to stay in the world of digital, I think what he really means is that he wants the freedom it gives him, the freedom from a cumbersome crew. You have to remember, there are never accidents with David. He’s such a revolutionary; at this point in his career, he’s not about to compromise his art just to make people comfortable.

Q: What’s your reaction when you hear people say Inland Empire is too hard to follow? Does it make you think maybe you should have given them a clearer path to follow? Or is it a mistake to watch the movie trying to find the magical key, to figure out the one ultimate, definitive explanation of what it all means?

LD: I do think that’s the wrong approach with this movie. I think David just wants you to enter the film and have your own experience, like you would if you were looking at a painting in a gallery or a museum. But I’m very used to these reactions. I was at a film festival with David the first time Blue Velvet was shown and people were very angry—including some critics who now say it’s one of their favourite films of all time. At Cannes with Wild at Heart, there was a jeering section amidst the standing ovation. So it would feel very weird if this film only got applause. It wouldn’t feel like David.

Q: What did you think of that very unconventional Oscar campaign Lynch mounted on your behalf, camping out on a street corner in L.A. with a live cow and a “For Your Consideration” banner?

LD: I didn’t even know about it until some friends told me it was on YouTube, which I’d never been on before in my life. I thought it was surprising and funny and irreverent and weird and wild and wonderful—all the things that David is. It was so beautiful that he would do that. And I must say, I liked his disdain for the conventional “let’s spend $3,000,000” Oscar campaign. I like that he’s shaking things up. I think it was a very political statement for him about how the film industry needs to find a new way. Inland Empire is self-distributed, self-promoted. It wasn’t just about picking up a different camera; he carried that sentiment through every aspect of this film.

Thieving Las Vegas (Review: Ocean's Thirteen)

They do the heist, we’re told, for completely altruistic reasons.

You see, Reuben Tishkoff (Elliot Gould), the Ocean gang’s old-school-Vegas, cigar-smoking, ruffled-tuxedo-shirt-wearing, outrageously-broad-Jewish-accent-having patriarch, has partnered up with casino tycoon Willie Bank (Al Pacino), who has screwed him over so thoroughly and ruthlessly that Reuben winds up in the hospital with a myocardial infarction, so demoralized and ashamed that he refuses even to talk to his friends.

Ocean and his friends are outraged, not only by the mistreatment of one of their own, but by Bank’s casual violation of the Vegas code (guys who once shook Sinatra’s hand are not supposed to con each other), and so they pool their resources to sabotage the opening night of Bank’s newest and gaudiest Vegas casino. And this is no mere thumbtack-on-the-chair practical joke: the underground drill they plan on using to simulate an earthquake (don’t ask) costs $36 million alone.

However, we in the audience know that, of the many motives that led to the creation of Ocean’s Thirteen, altruism was not among them. I don’t know if this is a particularly beloved franchise among moviegoers, but it’s definitely a lucrative one: the first Ocean’s caper made nearly half a billion dollars worldwide; the second cleared more than $350 million. The hero of the films is George Clooney’s Danny Ocean, who may be a thief and a con man but who only steals from people who deserve it. In Ocean’s Thirteen, it’s unclear whether Ocean will even make a profile on the caper.

In real life, of course, Clooney will make a ton of money on Ocean’s Thirteen and he’s going to keep it. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, of course—I’m just saying that it’s interesting to think that the character Clooney and director Steven Soderbergh identify with the most in this film isn’t Ocean but the venal, villainous Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia), who—SPOILER ALERT!—shows up at the end of the film on The Oprah Winfrey Show to be congratulated for giving a small fortune to a camp for underprivileged kids, a donation that he only made because Ocean blackmailed him into it. Celebrities, Clooney and Soderbergh seem to be saying, are never as selfless as they appear to be.

But who cares as long as they entertain us? And Ocean’s Thirteen, while it’s by far the least sneakily plotted entry in the series, is still pretty decent entertainment. Of course, I’m a sucker for heist movies, and in fact, I could probably watch a two-hour loop of George Clooney walking around a casino in one of his crisp grey suits while David Holmes music plays on the soundtrack and leave the theatre feeling satisfied. At this point in his career, Clooney has practically become a Zen master of effortless cool—the only thing keeping his Danny Ocean character from becoming insufferably smug is Clooney’s bone-dry underplaying, the handsomeness that’s just casual enough not to spill over into narcissism, the glint in his eye that always seems amused by his co-stars and not just pleased with himself, the smile just a safe fraction away from turning into a smirk.

Sadly, Clooney doesn’t have a female lead to play off this time around. The only woman in the film is Ellen Barkin, one of the great ferocious female movie stars of the ’80s; now 53, she still looks great, but she doesn’t get to do much except play a few truly dopey seduction scenes with Matt Damon... who, for some reason, plays them while wearing a huge fake nose.
That’s a distraction—but on the other hand, Don Cheadle has pretty much given up even attempting to do his terrible Cockney accent. So I guess the distractions all even out. And if you can break even on a trip to Vegas, that still counts as a win.

King Captures Bishop

I’m not exactly sure why the DVD rights to the 1964 historical drama Becket, which is clearly a Paramount picture, wound up in the hands of MPI Home Video—apparently it had something to do with complications over the estate of Jean Anouilh, the author of the original play—but it resulted in one of the more notorious and frustrating delays in DVD history.

As I understand the situation, MPI (a small, off-brand home-video company in Illinois whose catalogue is dominated by George Carlin comedy concerts, “special editions” of ’70s gore movies and documentaries about famous serial killers) essentially ransomed the picture, refusing to release it on DVD until the film had been properly restored, but declining to actually shell out for the cost of the restoration themselves. The film’s many fans found MPI’s intractability infuriating—for a while there, online movie columnist Jeffrey Wells was writing about little else. But finally, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences agreed to pony up the dough (after all, the film was nominated for a whopping 12 Oscars the year it came out) and the DVD has just now become available in stores. You can get an idea of how long the film sat on MPI’s shelf by noting that Peter O’Toole’s audio commentary track was recorded back in 2003.

The film has two main points of interest to modern audiences. The obvious one is the chance to see so many great British actors performing at the height of their careers—not just top-billed Peter O’Toole (who plays the willful, at times almost childlike Henry II) and Richard Burton (who plays his lifelong friend Thomas Becket), but also both actors’ longtime mentors, Donald Wolfit and John Gielgud.

O’Toole was fresh off the triumph of Lawrence of Arabia when he made Becket, and he gives a performance bursting with confidence—the scene where Henry demands that the Church of England give him the money he needs for his war against France, and the absolutely withering speech in which Henry denounces his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine are both classics. (O’Toole is such a magnetic actor that he makes even Henry’s petulance seem charismatic.)

Burton’s underplayed, reserved performance is harder to warm up to; you can see where his reputation for “coldness” comes from. Interestingly, he’s much more captivating in the short TV interviews included on the disc as bonus features—he’s amazingly candid about his alcoholism, his addiction to cigarettes and his dislike of playing romantic scenes, going out in public or even being touched.

Becket’s other noteworthy aspect is the boldness with which this 43-year-old film suggests a homosexual attraction between Henry and Thomas. On his lively commentary track, O’Toole says that characterizing the love between the two men as one thing or the other is beside the point, but the film definitely goes out of its way to suggest a sexual component to their relationship—Thomas is always toweling off Henry’s body after his bath, Eleanor’s mother disgustedly calls their friendship “unnatural” at one point, and in one key scene, the two men even share the same bed.

The crux of the film comes when Henry appoints Thomas Archbishop of Canterbury in order to solve a short-term problem with some stubborn bishops—little does he know how seriously Thomas will take his job and his vows, to the point where Henry is forced to have him killed in order to preserve the throne’s primacy over the Church. But Henry behaves more like a spurned lover in the film’s second half—the film is like a romantic triangle between Henry, Thomas, and God. And Thomas really thinks highly of God.

Becket is unfailingly intelligent and literate (although history teachers will grit their teeth at its erroneous claim that Becket, a Norman, was a Saxon). But as a piece of filmmaking, it hasn’t aged particularly well. Director Philip Glenville does very little to give the story visual interest, and his sense of pacing falls somewhere between “leisurely” and “drowsy.” Still, it’s good to have it out of the vault, if only to savour the acting... and to hear O’Toole chortle as he recalls drenching Burton with a firehose during a rain scene.