Ocean’s Eleven was the first soundtrack I bought with my own money. In my memory, the case is cracked from overuse. “You think we need one more? You think we need one more. Alright, we’ll get one more,” precedes “A Little Less Conversation.” It began my love of David Holmes, whose work should be appreciated on its own terms. (Listen to Let’s Get Killed for the same introduction to his solo work I had at 11).
The Ocean’s film series is one of the greatest usages of cinematic language in existence, and time will be kind to its playful, effortless charms. I want a 400-page book detailing every decision that went into making it. Have you seen the original? It is utter garbage. That means that Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven came like Athena out of Zeus’ own head.
It is divine, like wild arugula: remarkably whole, straight from the dirt. In an age of recycling junk into junk, it is a velveteen timpani drum answering Lear’s “nothing will come of nothing”; the rarest occurrence when, with no pressure whatsoever, diamonds simply blossom from the coarsest materials – movie stars, movie music, cinematic intention. Rather than making a film like another film (the most exhausting and commonplace practice today – “this is my take on the neo-Western/Bicycle Thieves/We Bought a Zoo”), Soderbergh has captured the feeling of being in one.
These productions flow with their stars, their unique powers coalesce like a gathering flood, relentlessly watchable. Soderbergh’s easy brilliance is understated to such an extent that the immense authorship behind these movies is almost always overshadowed by the question of whether we needed an Ocean’s Twelve. Did we deserve it? Clearly not. Gray’s Anatomy gets the Criterion treatment before Rusty and Linus? Gimme a break.
Though I’m aware it’s coming back into vogue, what naysayers miss is that Ocean’s Twelve is – also – a masterpiece. Its freeze frames, mix of low- and high-fi filmmaking and raw nerve cutting do a more luscious and emotional homage to the French New Wave than any of the heavy-handed lifts from more respectable thieves, whose efforts earn Oscar nominations instead of scorn.
Say what you like about these other top picks. They’re as great as the sum of their memes. Believe it if you’d like that Ocean’s Eleven and Twelve don’t belong on this list, let alone atop my ballot. You’d be wrong.
The same blood that pumped through the hearts of story producers and directors in 1915 runs, alive as ever, through the veins of Soderbergh’s twin masterpieces, as silly as others may be utterly serious.
