Lightning Round: Beyond Blockbusters

Girl's night out and rough night sleeping.



Feel free to take my assessment with a grain of salt but I’ve never been a big fan of “Ocean’s Eleven” or any of its sequels.

The whole affair of Danny Ocean assembling his friends for heists while hob knobbing at high society parties has always just reeked of certain smugness suggesting George Clooney’s thinly veiled effort to party with his friends in exotic locations and get paid for it.

There’s certainly some fun to be had in watching charismatic actors play off of one another in a production assembled by mastermind Steven Sodderbergh but the movie’s sense of class doesn’t fully substitute for authentically compelling content even if it’s a harmless way to pass 2 hours.

“Ocean’s 8’s” full swapping of the genders of the roles carried out by its leads does change a few of the dynamics but the end result fall right in line with its male-led predecessors.

Sandra Bulloch portrays Debbie Ocean, Danny Ocean’s professional con woman sister who seeks to reestablish her footing after a stint in prison by robbing the Met Gala with a team assembled of women, taking advantage of high society’s perception of them as arm candy for male escorts to pull off a job that nobody on security would be anticipating.

Despite falling in line with the pitfalls of its predecessor, the biggest sin of “Ocean’s 8” perhaps becomes most transparent upon very quickly realizing that director Gary Ross is no Steven Sodderbergh by any stretch of the imagination.

While the “Ocean’s Eleven” films may have been somewhat meaninglessly self indulgent, there was always at the very least a solid heist storyline running beneath the sense of style.

“Ocean’s 8’s” all star cast comprised of Bulloch, Anne Hathaway, Cate Blanchett, Rhianna, Helena Bonham Carter, Awkwafina, Mindy Kaling, and Sarah Paulson, manage to play slightly richer characters with larger impact on the heist in question but their talent is ultimately handicapped by the material in the script not being bad so much as it is nonexistent.

The story wants to demand more out of them as characters but fails to allow them to build in meaningful character building. All of the focus in the movie is planted squarely on the heist itself which isn’t a feat to be taken lightly but is presented as far more convoluted in planning than what ultimately plays out.

With the actresses starving for better content in an overly simplistic heist that doesn’t meet the pay off of its build up, “Ocean’s 8” falls into a debilitating set of pacing issues that it never manages to overcome, even as the epilogue to the heist manages to better deliver a tighter sense of style to close the movie out on despite boosting the running time by an unnecessary 15 minutes.

Even though “Ocean’s 8” is fairly shallow and mediocre, it isn’t without a fair bit of charm between its leads and watching the heist play out that that may make it a diverting outing with a couple of friends.

Personally, it just made me wish that the current progressions made in modern television happened about 16 years ago, where this franchise’s quirks could have been better suited to a fully developed TV series rather than a hollow gathering of names that seems to believe talent is a substitute for execution.

5 Cubic Zirconium Hauls out of 10

While its billing as a fully fledged horror feature at the expense of its dramatic thriller aspects designed to explore the tragedy of mental health and its ability to tear down families beyond the mere capacity to suffer it, there is no denying that “Hereditary” may be one of the most genuinely terrifying films that I have ever seen in my entire life.

Toni Collette plays Annie, an artist of miniatures trying to shepherd her husband and children through the recent death of her estranged mother. While struggling to come to terms with her conflicted feelings for the toxic and mentally ill woman, loving her for being her mother but frustrated in the pain her issues caused her before they were estranged, while also confronting these feelings in the final years of caring for her and how this may have impact her relationship with her own children, Annie and her family suffer yet another tragic loss that threatens to undo the family.

While a hint of the supernatural worms its way through the main narrative, the true power behind “Hereditary” is its unflinching and uncomfortable look at the ugliness of human nature and subsequently questioning whether the notion of its mental afflictions are familial not simply by way of genetics but perhaps in the imprint that the ordeals leave upon us as individuals.

Similarly to 2017’s “mother!,” the film goes about this by creating a general atmosphere of anxiety that feels off putting to the viewer. However, what sets “Hereditary” apart is how this is done.

Taking advantage of Annie’s vocation, the film often frames its happenings voyeuristically, as though we’re getting snippets of story in the framing of miniature sets with the characters horrifically responding to our very presence.

It’s a clever visual technique that makes the viewer feel gross for watching yet intrigued by what more may be uncovered, specifically after the first act winds down and the gut punch of that second tragedy lands which will have you questioning whether or not what you saw should have even been allowed to be depicted on screen.

And it’s in that boldness and gamble that “Hereditary” truly rises to the occasion and succeeds. Undoubtedly and rightfully so, the movie is not going to be a watch that everybody can sit through and I shudder to wonder what the person capable of sitting through it fully comfortably would be like.

However, it’s daring to cleverly use genre conventions to tackle a topic society never seems to want to address unflinchingly, whether we like the answers we find or not makes for one of the best thrilling genres to use horror conventions since “The Exorcist” and lead to one of the most horrifying final 20 minutes of a movie that I have seen in years.

8 Toxic Family Affairs out of 10