Entries in the Category "ving rhames"
Movie Review: Out of Sight
I just wrote the final paper for my film class. I was allowed to choose the movie I wanted to write about, and I chose Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight.
Even my film prof gave me a lot of guff about it. Clooney! J.Lo! Really? This is a movie that sometimes plays on Oxygen (Lifetime Lite!) and gets heavily promoted as That Movie Where Clooney Takes His Shirt Off and Looks at Himself in the Mirror! (I swear, if you saw the commercial, you would think that four seconds of screentime was the entire film.)
Well, I love it. I remember the first time I saw it (playing on USA that time, I believe), probably watching it out of weekend laziness (“Eh, this could be OK, I guess—better than going outside anyway”) and not very long into it thinking, “This is really good.” It really is! It’s witty and edgy and romantic and sad and funny and the music’s awesome and the aforementioned J.Lo kicks ass. Even if you have dismissed every single other film in the J.Lo oeuvre, Out of Sight is a special case. Karen Sisco—her character—is in charge. Clooney is great, too; a little dumb, and a little rough, as befitting a career criminal, but in the first two minutes of the film he literally charms a bank teller into tossing a bunch of money across the counter at him. That’s not a strategy that a lot of criminals can employ, but he sells it.
While writing the paper, I watched the movie five or six times—three of those were last Monday night during an all-night writing session. I certainly overdosed on the movie—I won’t watch it again for awhile—but I can say this. There are several moments, mostly good lines, which were enjoyable every single time I saw them, even if it was for the third time in six hours.
Jack: “Thirty years—can you imagine looking at that?”
Karen: “I don’t have to, I don’t rob banks.”Burdon: [hands business card] “Daniel Burdon, FBI.”
Mr. Sisco: [also hands business card] “Marshall Sisco, Karen’s dad.”Buddy: “Nice outfit.”
Jack: “I’m a tourist.”Jack: “The sign says ‘Shut the f*** up’, or can’t you read?”
[cut to sign which reads ‘Quiet please’]
Clooney made this movie at the tail-end of his work on ER when he was trying to prove he could do Hollywood; J.Lo was an up-and-comer, and director Steven Soderbergh had just directed like four flops in a row. Regardless of how much money the movie didn’t make, all of them were given a nice boost by the great work they did here. If nothing else, this movie paved the way for the next one Clooney and Soderbergh decided to do together, which was the super-successful Ocean’s 11.
Bottom line: Out of Sight is cool, it’s clever, it’s got Steve Zahn and Ving Rhames and Catherine Keener and Albert Brooks in a toupee, it’s set partially in Detroit (really, Detroit), and it changed the ending of the book so that both characters could end on a high note. It probably makes my top five favorite movies ever. Highly recommended.