I’ve been posting music to the site… just been forgetting to tell you all that I’ve been doing it… so these may be old to you:
– Dragon and Toast
– Sonatina in C Minor
and a few others I’ve already forgotten about. oops.

Okay, I realize this is going to be a total blockbuster. If you sit quietly for a moment, you can probably hear the distant ‘ka-ching’ of this film raking in the ticket money. The problem is, I’m not exactly the best person to be reviewing it. I did see Ocean’s 11 (both versions, actually), but that was a long time ago. And I didn’t like either all that much, so I didn’t watch Ocean’s 12. Frankly, 11 was already so crowded, I thought adding one more star would make the movie implode or something. And… I don’t like George Clooney. Yes, I am female. I just don’t think he’s particularly handsome or charming. I read something once where they compared him (favorably!) to Cary Grant, and nearly fainted on the spot. Those of you who don’t understand what I mean need to go watch Notorious.
I’m also kind of indifferent to Brad Pitt. Both he and George Clooney seem like good enough actors, though I’ve only ever seen them playing the same kinds of parts all the time. I guess if you’re good at it, stick with it… However, on the major plus side, this film does have Matt Damon in it. Yummy. If they ever do an Ocean’s 14 (which I have to pray they won’t, because that film really would implode), then they need to give Matt much, much more screen time. Seriously.
Okay, to the plot: One of the original Eleven, Reuben (Elliot Gould, wearing glasses that look like they should make him fall on his nose) has been double-crossed and generally taken to the cleaners by his partner in a new casino, Willy Bank (Al Pacino, and I can hardly believe that they’ve already made two of these movies without him). Danny Ocean and friends, of course, can’t let this slide. But Bank is a high roller — a really, really high roller, so he’s hard to tackle. Not that this stops our heroes, of course. Bank’s weakness? His ego, which is probably true for anyone who’s ever earned more than four or five million dollars in his or her life. I hate to think what a Vegas billionaire’s ego is like.

See, the poster’s already at critical mass, and I only count twelve people.

Now, this is of necessity a huge scheme. The plan they settle on is to sabotage Bank’s casino on opening night by rigging the games — not so the team wins, but just so the house loses — which must be easier than trying to get one person to win, but still a daunting task. They work out ways to rig each game individually, mostly retreating back to old-fashioned methods like weighted roulette balls because the casino is so high-tech. But the real problem is the supercomputer security system, Greco, named for its creator, Greco Montgomery (played by Julian Sands, who I also wish would’ve had more screen time). Greco monitors all the games down to the last detail, and it’s so high-tech, it’s an A.I. It thinks and reasons.
Just a bit of an aside: I don’t think they used nearly so many gadgets in the first film of this trilogy, though I may be misremembering — all I remember for sure is that Matt was a shy pickpocket. (He’s still shy here, but he seems to have forgotten how to pick pockets.) But you should not only suspend your disbelief for this film, you should probably send it over to a different movie. They have gadgets for everything. X-ray machines that look like a piece of cloth, magnetrons that look like cell phones — they even have some sort of super-pheremone-releasing thing that’s applied as a patch to the skin, and apparently can make anyone turn into a raving sex machine. They make Matt use that last one on Ellen Barkin, who plays Bank’s right-hand woman, Abigail Sponder, though I don’t see why. Silly fake nose or no silly fake nose, he’s still Matt Damon.
So they figure out ways to rig all the games, and, since they can’t outwit Greco, they decide to do the next best thing, which is to force it to reboot, thus allowing them somewhere around two minutes to make the house lose big. That doesn’t seem like much time, but in Vegas, it’s enough. This requires more gadgets, of course, including one that has to be maneuvered into place on a semi, and, well, it all gets wilder from there. That’s without even mentioning the contrived side plot where Virgil (Casey Affleck, who has a very bizarre part to play here but still does much better than his brother ever could) starts a labor movement in a Mexican plastics manufacturing company. I told you it was contrived.
You have to remember that there just had to be all kinds of fun references to past movies that I didn’t catch, so people familiar with the first two will probably enjoy this one even more. Still, even for me, it was a fun, energetic sort of film — you know a gadget will save the day, but how can they possibly do it in time? It’s a lot like a Bond movie in that respect, and the superspy himself wouldn’t have been out of place here. There’s a lot going on, lots of faces you recognize, all the glitz you can handle, and more misdirection than any Vegas magic act.
So three and a quarter idols for me, but if you like George Clooney, then you should probably consider it three and a half idols. It’s pretty much all flash and no substance, but the flash is so good you don’t mind much. I do hope, though, that the movie’s way off base in how it portrays the safety standards at Las Vegas hotels, or one of these days, we may lose an entire generation of high rollers and Texas Hold-Em’ champs to just one little earthquake.

Kevin Costner is Mr. Brooks, successful businessman, family man, and the Portland Chamber of Commerce’s Man of the Year. WIlliam Hurt is his sinister, deadly alter ego, Marshall. And Demi Moore is — in another movie altogether, playing homicide detective Tracy Atwood. We’ll get back to her later.
Mr. Brooks (and yes, his name is Earl) and his lovely wife Emma (Marg Helgenberger, and thank god they didn’t cast some ridiculously young woman forced to pretend she’s old enough to be the mother of a college student) live the usual life of the moderately wealthy, with Mrs. Brooks blissfully unaware that her loving husband is actually the notorious Thumbprint Killer. They always are.
Mr. Brooks has sometimes fairly long conversations with his other self, Marshall, but everyone seems blissfully unaware of those also, because this isn’t a comedy. William Hurt does laugh rather a lot, but not at things that would normally be considered funny by a sane person. Marshall is a lot of things to Mr. Brooks — best friend, confidante, fount of useful information — but mainly he’s the little voice you sometimes hear about on the news that tells serial killers to kill.
Mr. Brooks tries to resist, he does. He goes to AA meetings (a breach of protocol, of course, but there isn’t a Serial Killers Anonymous, so he had to make do), recites the Serenity Prayer over and over, and swears to both himself and Marshall that he’ll never kill again. But he gives in. They always do.

Don’t look behind you! William Hurt just might be there…

After being clean, so to speak, for two years, he kills again, with Marshall egging him on. That’s when everything goes wrong. Suddenly the police aren’t too far away from him, he’s got a slightly geeky voyeur blackmailing his way into all Mr. Brooks’ secrets, and William Hurt always there, hurling insults and generally being his evil genius. I might turn into a serial killer myself, if I had William Hurt constantly telling me to be one. Oh, and his teenage daughter shows up, having dropped out of college and gotten herself pregnant. Even serial killers have some normal problems. Sort of.
Meanwhile, over in the other movie, Demi “I wanna be an action star” Moore is getting divorced from her slimy second husband, who wants millions from her very considerable wealth, chasing down escaped serial killer “The Hangman” (mean and scary, but not like any serial killer I’ve ever heard about), and getting run over and shot at a lot, to prove she can handle it. (Actually, given how many serial killers Oregon apparently has, they do need tough cops.) Oh, and sometimes, when she can squeeze it in to her busy schedule, she dreams of catching the elusive Thumbprint Killer. But basically all her scenes could have been edited into a different movie, one with lots of blood and car chases and shooting.
You can tell they tried to integrate them — Mr. Brooks’ movie gets a lot bloodier at the end, and there’s a token scene where he calls Demi — but honestly, they’re two different films stuck together for the most part. One is a psychological thriller, a look at the twisted psyche of a demented killer, and the other is an unfocused sort of drama about your standard homicide cop with too much emotional baggage. She doesn’t even seem to be a good homcide detective — I mean, they talk about how many killers she’s caught, and she gets all the intuitive leaps of logic, but considering her James Bond-ish, threaten-everyone-until-they-break style, I never really believed her as a successful police officer in any kind of real world. She acted the part as written quite well, really, but sadly, it just wasn’t written quite well.
Demi Moore’s movie gets two idols — it’s entertaining in parts, but too thrown together and too predictable overall. Kevin Costner’s (and William Hurt’s) movie gets three and a quarter. (That averages out to two and three-eighths, if you’re curious, but doing that didn’t seem quite fair.) It would have been three and a half for the boys, but they just had to start throwing in lots of blood, which kind of spoiled the mood. But there were some nice little twists and good acting all around, which was a relief. Sometimes Costner seems like a really good actor, and other times it just pains me to watch him, but here he was definitely the former. And someone had a lot of fun on the camera work, playing with reflections of Marshall, one persona in the shadow, the other in the light, that sort of thing. I just hope the DVD release has the option for the Demi-free version.

You can tell I’m not a real movie critic. I missed the extravaganza of Shrek the Third, carefully avoided the craziness that is the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, which I’ve never liked, and ended up reviewing Bug.
Talk about out of the frying pan, into the fire.
I used to like Johnny Depp, really. Then he fell victim to the Christopher Walken curse and became more a parody of himself than himself. I hear Shrek isn’t much good this time out, but Spider-Man 3 was okay. Still, it’s a bit frustrating and annoying to discover that thanks to those three films (all of which are third in a series — maybe there’s something numerological going on), my local 16-screen theatre is actually showing only six movies. Six! So that left me with Bug.
First of all, don’t go see it. I had to get that off my chest. Don’t rent it, don’t buy the DVD. Maybe watch it for free if there’s really nothing else on. Yes, it’s that bad, in spite of all the lovely and talented Ashley Judd could do. I don’t think there is now or has ever been any actress who could say the line “I am the super mother bug!” in any way that won’t provoke giggles, and it isn’t supposed to provoke giggles. I think. There’s lots of nudity, both male and female (yes, even the full monty, as they say), but there’s also a good amount of blood, and after a while, you forget the nudity and can only try to remember why it was you started watching in the first place.
I understand it was quite a successful stage play, but something has apparently gone tragically wrong during the transition to the screen. What that was, I’m not sure. The acting is all good. The plot is very simple, but does involve all sort of wild, paranoia-inducing conspiracy theory stuff, which I usually like. And I’m not against films with lots of talking — far from it. Part of the problem might be that I walked in to the theatre not quite sure what to expect. The trailer I saw made it look like a horror movie, pure and simple. Then I read online that poor Ashley was hiding from a jealous, abusive ex-husband, and started thinking it was a stalker movie. And after about forty-five minutes, I was still kind of expecting a stalker movie, though a low-key, psychological sort of stalker movie.
Then there were suddenly bug strips hanging everywhere, and at least three spray cans of every bug-killer known to man, and Michael Shannon (as quiet, unnerving drifter Peter Evans, reprising his role from the stage) was rattling off every “the government is experimenting on you right now” theory that I’ve ever heard, while completely surrounded by the paranoic’s favorite, aluminum foil. (It scrambles the signals, you know. Really.)

Agnes and Peter search carefully for Ashley Judd’s motivation.

Let me back up a little. Agnes White (our Ashley) is in fact living in fear of her ex-con ex-husband, Jerry Goss (Harry Connick, Jr., who always plays an excellent sleaze, and this is no exception). She works in a honkytonk bar in Oklahoma which apparently caters mostly to gays (I know, I didn’t think Oklahoma would allow such a bar in their state either), and lives in a room in the Rustic Motel. It’s rustic because except for the honkytonk, presumably, there doesn’t seem to be anything within fifty miles of it except for a highway, a river, and lots of scrubby little plants; and there’s also nothing inside it that’s less than thirty years old, including most of the fascinating stains on the walls.
She drinks and does drugs, though I don’t know how she can afford them, and I almost can’t blame her, considering how dismal her life is. The movie’s very claustrophobic, a carryover from its start as a play, but that works here, because you’re supposed to feel trapped and uneasy. Mostly, though, I ended up feeling bored and restless.
But to continue, one of Ashley’s lesbian friends, R.C. (played by Lynn Collins, who wisely escapes from the film before everything starts to look like a set from a cheap sci-fi flick) introduces her to a nice guy she’s met, the aforementioned drifter. R.C. might normally be a good judge of character, but she seriously drops the ball here. Peter is intelligent and observant, but he’s also just as scary as the ex, in his own warped and twisted way. He doesn’t seem to be able to help himself, but that’s not much comfort to poor Ashley, or to anyone watching the movie.
It’s sort of two movies sewn together. First Ashley is a normal, though deeply wounded person, and then, as quickly as turning on a bug zapper, she’s a madwoman, and the audience doesn’t have anyone to connect with. I was left feeling like I must have missed something really important after Ashely’s sudden switch. Maybe that part’s on a cutting room floor somewhere, but if something needed to be taken out, it should have been the part where Peter tries to do his own dentistry. With pliers. Did I mention the blood?
I hate to give this too low a rating, I really do. Let’s go with two idols. There were things I liked — for instance, Peter has a little speech about all the awful things the Bad People of the world can do to you, and somewhere along the way you get the sense that he’s warning Ashley about what he could do to her, though I don’t think the character quite realizes what he’s saying. The film does everything it can to pull you in to the characters’ crazy little world, and I usually like movies that do that, but somehow it just doesn’t work here. My only consolation is that I didn’t pay money for this. I used my free ticket voucher.