Ocean's 8

The Ego Has Landed
or
Why Does There Always Have to be an Asterisk?

So, this whole parity thing is getting complicated and a little obvious now. When men do a heist movie, they get Ocean's 11, but when women get one, they only get Ocean's 8? Really, folks, how fair is that? And they have to work even harder to get the same results, a passably entertaining little light-hearted snatch-and-grab movie, intricately plotted out and stylishly laid out to a fare-thee-well.

There are some ties to the other "Ocean's" movies—there are a couple cameos (surprisingly, current cameo-master Matt Damon isn't one of them*), and the ring-leader is the sister of the purportedly "late" Danny Ocean, Debbie (played by Sandra Bullock), and even though it's produced by the Ocean's director Steve Soderbergh, it is written (with Olivia Milch) and directed by the same guy that Soderbergh did second unit work for on The Hunger Games, Gary Ross.

Debbie, like brother Danny in Ocean's 11, talks her way into a parole from a New jersey prison (women's) and leaves with $45 dollars to her name but with a plan she's been working out for "five years, eight months, and twelve days." She makes her way to New York and, through sheer chutzpah and gall, talks her way into a swanky hotel room for the night and begins to carry out her prison-plan. She hooks up with former partner Lou (Cate Blanchett) who's been running a club and talks her into the score—to conduct a one-of-a-kind robbery at the glitzy Met Gala, and starts the recruiting process: they need a designer down on her luck—that would be Rose Weil (Helena Bonham Carter) who owes the IRS five million dollars; a hacker (who isn't Russian)—that would be "Nine Ball", the coolest hacker ever (Rihanna); a jewelry artist/appraiser (Mindy Kaling); a great pair of of hands (Awkwafina) and a Fixer (Sarah Paulson) and they lay out the plan—to steal the "biggest, spectacularly blingy Liz Taylor jewels", the legendary Toussaint necklace, worth over $150 million in cold, hard 2018 dollars.

They zero in on the host of the gala, Daphne Kluger (Anne Hathaway, clearly enjoying playing a diva with a sharp eye toward satire), manipulating her to be dressed for the gala by Weil, who suggests that she wear the thing for the night, then infiltrate the Met's security company, and embedding a spy at Vogue to get the seating arrangement for the fancy dinner.

The idea is to isolate Kluger and then rip off the necklace in the confusion. It's planned out to the second and by the inch, but even the best-laid plans have their details that complicate—like, for instance, the necklace having a fancy clasp that must be electronically triggered before it can be removed, as well as complications that might stop the gears of the plan that have to be overcome, in the best "Mission: Impossible" style.

This is a well-greased vehicle for its cast and for its intended female audience. Ocean's 11 had men (boys, really) trying to rob casinos with all the testosterone and gamesmanship associated with it. Ocean's 8 is full of opulence and fashion and glitz, the feminine equivalent of passing fancies (and, of course, all the 8 are given expensive frocks to pull off the heist).

There is the underlying satisfaction that the rich are getting soaked, but, as with the males, it's really a left-handed form of wealth distribution—the usual formula of a heist movie.

But, I kept watching Ocean's 8 and seeing how small crimes are pulled off with ease in ways that the more nefarious—or just greedy—members of the audience can take advantage of. Don't be surprised if, in the next few months, the stores you frequent really DO insist that you have the receipt when you bring in "returns" or start getting very protective of their camouflaging logo-sporting bags. Subtle corporate psychological weaknesses of the those employed in customer service are also instructionally exploited, although results may very. But, if the movie does one thing it might actually instruct folks how easy it is to gain information through Facebook. Now, that might actually do some good while doing bad.

* Well, I guess he was but his part was cut.

Into the Woods

Not as Grim (as Grimm Can Be)
or
The Family That Slaps Together Raps Together

Rob Marshall's output as a director has been problematic. He managed to make a fully fleshed-out version of the stage schematics of Chicago, then followed up his multi-Oscar-winner by making a mess of Memoirs of a Geisha, then only managed to sporadically liven up a film version of Nine (but without evoking any ghosts of Fellini, on whose work the whole thing is based). One looked at the plans set photos for Into the Woods and wondered if Marshall was making it or Tim Burton.

However he got there, it was the right path, because Into the Woods, his adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's 1987 Grimm fairy tale mash-up may be his best movie ever after. Marshall's directorial touch post-Chicago has been mostly heavy-handed and cheerless, and only occasionally lightening up in musical moments. Here, the film doesn't flag whenever the music stops.

Blunt and Corden practice their baby-holding techniques

The "real world" of Into the Woods is a fairy tale land where anything is possible...in the confines of one village. There, various stories from the imaginations of The Brothers Grimm intersect to form one story of wishes coming true and going horribly (horribly) wrong and the resulting consequences. In the village is a baker and his wife (James Corden and Emily Blunt) who cannot conceive a child due to the curse of a witch (Meryl Streep) owing to the previous generation's actions. There is also a little girl (Lilla Crawford) in a red cape who is on her way to visit her invalid grandmother, a matriarchal family of women (Christine Baranski, Lucy Punch and Tammy Blanchard) who regularly abuse the runt of the litter (Anna Kendrick), a rather dull-witted farmer's son (Daniel Huttlestone), tasked by his mother (Tracey Ullman) with selling the family cow, and the sister of the baker (Mackenzie Mauzy) (abducted by that same witch) who is locked away in a tower with nothing to do but let her hair grow.

Lilla Crawford as "Red"

The story's machinations and complications take place in a nearby woods which are lovely, dark and Johnny Depp'd (he plays the Big...well, smallish...Bad Wolf), with a crowded thicket of swamps, quick-sand, dangerous cliffs, ghosts and spirited trees, crowding the path to the castle of the King who has two charming, handsome, and extraordinarily dramatic princes (Chris Pine and Billy Magnussen) who must have inherited the trait from their Mother's side.

Anna Kendrick as Cinderella

The music and songs are by Stephen Sondheim (slightly toned down by the Disney studio, which produced) who has a fine time mixing and matching rhyming schemes—but with a difference.  Most movie-goers experiencing musical fare (like...Disney...again) have their "tent-pole" songs (called that because they support the structure of the movie with key-points, like tent-poles, roughly one every 15 minutes) expressing emotions in stasis (or "this is what I'm feeling right now").  

"The woods are lovely, dark and Johnny Depp'd"

Sondheim goes a couple steps better as both song-writer and dramatist—his song's catalogue a character's change of emotion or realization, their thought processes more than their emotions, their motivations, not their feelings. Sondheim's songs travel, propelling the story and characters along, not stopping the show to get a song in, and the lyrics are so dexterous and nimble that, if anything, the pace increases, rather than slows for a musical "time-out."

Mauzy as Rapunzel "lets her hair down"

It is Marshall's best film to date—well cast and performed (everybody can sing...and well), nimbly paced and production-designed somewhere on the border between Burtonville and the Gilliam-verse.  It's fairy-tale land, but things can turn pretty Grimm (despite Disney's efforts to homogenize the material*)—one notices early on that there's a lot of face-slapping going between families. Things do not turn out happily ever after, and the consequences are irrevocable, despite some hocus-pocus, bovine resurrections and after-lives.  But, the through-line is the journey from life to myth, the passing of reality into legend, as it should be. Nothing down-beat about that.

Chris Pine does...some...Shatnering...as the Prince

Performances are uniformly excellent and done with verve, but standouts are Streep, Blunt, Depp and Pine (the "Agony" duet is a comic highlight), working with good material that is consistently entertaining and deep, adding extra dimension to the so-familiar words on pages, breathing life and giving voice to old chestnuts and bringing them to full bloom.

* For instance: the Wolf's song "Hello, Little Girl" has some of its more wicked aspects stripped from it, the princes' reprise of "Agony" (which makes them even more fickle) has been cut, and the ultimate fate of Rapunzel (who is given short shrift, anyway) is not even mentioned.  Sondheim did approve the changes (as he did with Burton's film of Sweeney Todd)