Ocean’s Thirteen
dir. Steven Soderbergh
George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, et al may garner the majority of ink, but the Ocean’s films are really about director Steven Soderbergh, who’s used the lucrative franchise—much like he did with his micro-budget clusterfuck Schizopolis—to recharge his creative batteries. Ocean’s Eleven was a bricolage of cool modern and archaic cheesy wipes; Twelve found Soderbergh fully immersed, and having a hell of a lot of fun, in his Richard Lester obsession. And now Thirteen, which returns the gang back to Las Vegas, combines the styles of its siblings, making for an entertaining visual spectacle mired by an empty, and often preposterous, script.
The mark this go around is Willie Bank (Al Pacino, keeping his bombast in check), who screws over Oceans alum Reuben (Elliott Gould), spurring Danny Ocean (George Clooney) and company to try to ruin the all-important opening of Bank’s brand new monstrosity on the Vegas strip. Absurd schemes (creating a natural disaster), double-crosses (courtesy of original Eleven mark Terry Benedict), and ridiculous disguises (dig Matt Damon’s ridiculous honker) follow.
Breezy as all get out, no doubt a hell of a lot of fun to be a part of, Thirteen sports solid performances from the entire gang. The lone casualty is Ellen Barkin, as Bank’s assistant, who’s reduced to little more than a boy-band groupie in the third act—which would be fine if the scheme didn’t depend so much on her blatant, and ludicrous, stupidity. Maybe they’ll make it up to her in the inevitable Ocean’s Fourteen. BRADLEY STEINBACHER
Paprika
dir. Satoshi Kon
As anime extravaganzas go, Satoshi Kon's fourth feature—not counting the cult series Paranoia Agent—couldn't be more visually compelling. Sure, the hand-drawn human characters look rather two-dimensional compared to the computer-generated backgrounds and brightly colored fantasy sequences, but that's par for the course. Those looking for more detail in their protagonists can always turn to the plasticine figures cranked out by animators at DreamWorks and Disney's Pixar. At least the people in Kon's films look like sentient beings rather than perfectly coiffed dolls.
As in Perfect Blue and Millennium Actress, the main character is a woman of strength and intelligence (hence Kon's popularity among female viewers). Aided by the minuscule Shima Tora-taroh (voiced by Katsunosuke Hori) and gargantuan Tokita Kohsaku (Tôru Furuya), the tightly wound Dr. Atsuko Chiba (Megumi Hayashibara) is a research scientist engaged in dream analysis. With the help of a gizmo called the DC Mini (a headset with tiny tentacles), she can enter the consciousness of her troubled patients to determine the cause of their restless nights. When a thief takes off with one of the four Cronenberg-looking contraptions (think eXistenZ), the group's dreams bleed into reality. Soon, no one can tell the difference between the two.
Enter auburn-haired dream girl Paprika (Hayashibara), who only appears when Dr. Chiba is around, and lantern-jawed detective Kogawa Toshimi (Akio Ôtsuka), whose Dick Tracy–like presence adds a dose of comic-book noir to the sci-fi scenario (the story is based on Yasutaka Tsutsui's serialized novel). With their assistance, this PG-13 version of Hanna-Barbera's Scooby Gang tries to track down the perpetrator before Tokyo turns into a nightmare state—begging the question whether it isn't one already.
Though some observers have trotted out highfalutin names such as Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel, French novelist Michel Houellebecq (currently preparing his own feature film debut), and Alfred Hitchcock (specifically Spellbound's Salvador Dalí's dream sequence), Paprika is rarely as deep or as clever as those references suggest. No matter. It's fun while it lasts. Dig the buoyant J-Pop, musical frogs, and dancing appliances that march through these twisted Japanese dreams. Animation fans craving something with more substance, however, might want to save their pennies for the next intricately rendered mind-benders from Spirited Away's Hayao Miyazaki or Ghost in the Shell's Mamoru Oshii. KATHLEEN C. FENNESSY
Hostel: Part II
dir. Eli Roth
There was no press screening for Hostel: Part II. You probably already know that when studios don't screen movies for reviewers, it's because the movie sucks—and I don't mean sucks-the-way-that-Dukes-of-Hazzard-sucks sucks. There was a press screening for Dukes of Hazzard. No, I'm talking about sucking like The Country Bears, the 2002 movie (based on the Country Bears Jamboree ride at Disney World) starring Haley Joel Osment as Beary Barrington. It's safe to say that Hostel: Part II will suck as much, or greater than, The Country Bears.
This isn't surprising: The original Hostel was a terrible movie. I can't recall another film so openly xenophobic, misogynistic, homophobic, and artlessly made. The score was uninteresting, the cinematography and characterization were for shit, and the only inspiration was in the torture special-effects department. It opened with a date-rape joke, meandered into a whorehouse ("That bitch had the best fuckin' tits in Amsterdam!" someone exclaims), puttered around with some faggot wisecracks, and wound up with a woman who'd rather commit suicide than be ugly.
And so instead of telling us the story of three male backpackers who get tortured by wealthy businessmen, Hostel: Part II is about three female backpackers (including Bijou Phillips, notable for appearing both naked and headless in a promotional poster) who get tortured by wealthy businessmen. I don't know why Eli Roth bothered making a chick torture flick—as a sadist announced in Hostel: "Pussy's pussy, but [torturing innocents] is something you're never gonna forget." But frat-headed Roth, after all, shoved a butcher knife into a topless cheerleader's vagina in Grindhouse's much-acclaimed Thanksgiving trailer; he's probably got at least a full-length-feature's worth of woman-hating to work through. Creeps who like tits with their torture will no doubt be lining up outside theaters on opening night; everyone else is advised to stay away. PAUL CONSTANT
