Salvage Operation: Ocean’s Thirteen

2007’s Ocean’s Thirteen got lumped in with that summer’s plague of under-performing threequels but, while it is not as masterful as 2001’s joyous franchise-originator, not only does it atone for Ocean’s Twelve it also contains, amid the stylish shots and great music, one genuinely great sub-plot which should be salvaged for posterity.

Casey Affleck is dispatched to Mexico to infiltrate the factory which makes the die for villain Al Pacino’s casino and introduce a new polymer into the mix so that the elaborate con can be pulled off by flipping the loaded die in the finale. However he’s no sooner there, ‘blending in’ with his hilarious/racist moustache, than he starts complaining about the lack of air-conditioning in the factory. However another worker tells him to stop complaining and put his mask back on before he gets them all fired, the evil factory owners are watching them… Later we see Affleck in el local taverna complaining about el conditiones bestiale; delightfully these sequences barely need to be subtitled, so perfectly chosen are the Spanish words to be half-comprehensible. Affleck ends by gazing at a poster of Zapata on the wall and muttering revolutionary sentiments. Guess what happens next… Back in the main plot George Clooney and Brad Pitt hear that the factory is offline. Why, they ask puzzledly? Cut to Affleck leading the chants of the workers separated from their factory by a wire fence.

Affleck’s screen brother Scott Caan is dispatched to sort this nonsense out and get the factory back online so that the loaded die will arrive in time for the third act. A short while later Clooney and Pitt ring him for an update, which he delivers with his phone in one hand while lighting and then hurling a Molotov cocktail over the wire fence at the guards with the other – “It’ll be fine, we just have to break the bosses”. Finally the demand comes thru and Clooney does a quick mental calculation: 36,000 dollars, by 220 workers, equals 7 million. No, he’s told, 36,000 dollars in total, not per worker… “We’ll send them a cheque” he replies. “He had them out for 3.50 dollars more a week?” another con-man asks indignantly. “Hey, that’s a 5% pay-rise for them” says Bernie Mac. Cue Affleck and Caan leading the charge of triumphant workers back to the factory, and then they drive off in the truck with their loaded die, to rejoin the main plot by harassing an unfortunate hotel inspector and causing earthquakes.

And so Ocean’s Thirteen may be the closest that mainstream Hollywood will ever get to satirically critiquing the progress of globalisation thru zero-sum game outsourcing aka the race to the bottom. Who’d a thunk it?

Any Other Business

What is one to do with thoughts that are far too long for Twitter but not nearly long enough for a proper blog post? Why round them up and turn them into a portmanteau blog post on television of course!

Johnny Whitworth Abu!
I was delighted to see Johnny Whitworth pop up in a supporting role pushing mind-opening drugs to Bradley Cooper’s protagonist in Limitless. Whitworth had a recurring role a while ago on CSI: Miami as Calleigh’s ex-boyfriend, a roguish narcotics officer deep undercover in a criminal gang, who later got back onto regular duty after more than a few questions about which side of the law his blurred loyalties now belonged to. He was always effortlessly charismatic in this part, aided by an awesome Southern burr which enlivened Brandoesque mumbling, so it’s nice to see his profile rising.

Meta-Textual Moira?
Moira Kirland may have necessitated a new technical term with a deranged reference in Castle season 2 episode ‘Tick, Tick, Tick…’ The brilliant unpredictability of Castle’s mysteries is in no small part down to the presence of Kirland and Rene Echevarria as writer/producers, as both of them were very important presences in the equally twisty Medium. In this particular Castle episode Dana Delaney appears as an FBI agent venerated by Castle. She mentions one of her past cases as being the Recapitator in Phoenix, Arizona. Kirland wrote some of the three-part Medium season 3 finale featuring extremely twisted serial killer the Recapitator, who left his first victim’s head on his second victim’s body, and his second victim’s head on his third victim’s body, and so on… But Medium is a CBS show while Castle is on ABC, and Medium’s supernatural premise inhabits a different type of fictional universe than Castle’s comic verisimilitude. The reference would clue-in Medium fans like me that darkness was imminent and indeed Kirland ended the episode with an almighty shock. But self-referential, inter-textual, non-own network promotional, in-jokey, audience-alerting touches like that surely need to have a term all their own. What’s a good one?

A Lenkov Touch
A post is imminent about his writing for CSI: NY but here let me note that the first pure Lenkov touch has been noticed in Hawaii Five-O. Peter M Lenkov left CSI: NY to run Hawaii Five-O for busy writer/producers JR Orci and Alex Kurtzman, and, with the help of fellow CSI scribe Sarah Goldfinger, he’s exceeded expectations with entertaining high-stakes mysteries. But a prolonged conversation between McGarrett and Dano about the respective tourist attractions of Hawaii and New Jersey was so spectacularly irrelevant to the plot that it could only have come from the absurdist Lenkov.

“I’m never leaving! You hear? Never!”
Talking of Hawaii Five-O let’s all loudly cheer Daniel Dae Kim’s awesomeness. The reboot of Hawaii Five-O has been used as a life-raft by Alex O’Loughlin (Moonlight was prematurely cancelled), Grace Park (BSG finally ran its course), and Scott Caan (Ocean’s 14 is never happening), but Daniel Dae Kim’s snagging of the role of Chin is the most impressive of them all. Not only does Kim get to use his actual accent speaking English, which I haven’t heard since his glory days as Agent Baker in Day 3 of 24, but he has contrived after 6 years on LOST to instantly jump straight into another show being shot on the same Hawaiian island of O’ahu. The chances of being able to make such a jump must be somewhere around the chances of being able to see Halley’s Comet pass earth and yet, and this is where things get delicious, if Hawaii Five-O runs for as long as its original incarnation (and it’s solidly entertaining popcorn TV in a beautiful setting so it has a reasonable chance of doing so) Kim will have managed to contrive no fewer than 18 years of filming in Hawaii…