The Nutty Professor 2: Facing The Fear

Now it’s time to wrap up “The Nutty Professor” movies by talking about the 2008 movie, “The Nutty Professor 2: Facing the Fear.” Never heard of it? Well neither did I until rather recently. First off, I would just like to point out that there seems to be confusion over the title to this movie. The movie is simply titled “The Nutty Professor,” like the original Jerry Lewis movie from 1963. Turns out that “The Nutty Professor 2: Facing the Fear” was simply the working title. It is still listed under that title when you look under the IMDB. Gino Sassani said, “Whatever the title, you should know that this isn’t your father’s Nutty Professor.” This version is a CG animated flick, but don’t expect the movie to be on the same level of quality as Shrek or Pixar. The budget is considerably lower, and you can clearly see that in the final product when you think, “This is looks like something made out of the SIMS game.”

Jerry Lewis returns to his iconic role of Julius Kelp, the intelligent but often clumsy professor who made a formula that could bring out a person’s inner strength. The result was like a spoof on the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde theme. This time the Hyde character was a smooth sophisticated opposite of the ordinarily awkward Professor Kelp. Of course, like Mr. Hyde, the alter-ego caused a whole lot of trouble. It’s many years later, and we are introduced to Harold Kelp, the grandson of Professor Kelp. Harold is just as socially awkward and shares the brilliant mind of his famous grandfather. His inventions, however, have a tendency to fall just short of making the finish, and as the film starts the neighbors, one of them voiced by Jerry Lewis’ daughter, Danielle Lewis, have made an angry mob, complete with a torch, to do something about his dangerous inventions. Just as they are about to attack, Harold gets an acceptance letter from Cerebrum University, where his grandfather is the head of the science department. Glad that he will be moving away, the mob cheers him to his new school…and home, far away from them. At the school, Harold finds it hard to fit in, until he discovers his grandfather’s formula and sets free his own Mr. Hyde, in the form of Jack. Harold must fight with his other half to finally learn the secret to facing his own self-confidence issues, and going up against his own fear…literally.

The film will likely be loved to the younger audiences on one level or another, but it will fall quite flat for anyone expecting to be taken back to 1963 and the original film experience. Sassani admitted, “This film is so loaded with a lot predictable contrivances that it just won’t wear well for the adults. The final confrontation is completely silly and makes little to no sense. It’s a video game kind of battle that might have been better fit for an old Atari 2600.” Drake Bell, who you might remember from that Nickelodeon sitcom “Drake and Josh,” voiced Harold Kelp/Jack. He’s fine, but there isn’t anything energetic in his portrayal to make the character in any way interesting. Jerry Lewis does link the two ideas together by providing the voice of Professor Kelp, but it wasn’t really his voice that made him so successful. Lewis was more of a physical comic. In this CG flick a delivered character just can’t mimic the antics that made Lewis so funny. Sassani said, “Even the distinctive qualities of his voice are gone, covered by decades of age on the actor. On its own this is a fair to mediocre piece of child entertainment.” If you compare it to the original, it is something significantly less.

Here’s the final verdict from Sassani, “It’s been a long while since I saw the original film. I remember it did contain plenty of laughs, however. These laughs are really missing everywhere in this CG creation. Let’s not even talk about the fatty Eddie Murphy films that might have ruined that franchise forever.” Here we return to the original ideas, if only to serve an oversimplified, face your fears, moral. What does it bring to the franchise? Absolutely nothing! I would not recommend this movie at all because it is definitely below average. But I don’t think it’s like an atrocious movie that I wish I didn’t see, just your basic bad sequel.

Thank you for joining in on “The Nutty Professor Month.” I hope you have enjoyed it as much as I have. Stay tuned for what next month will have in store. I’ll see you then.

Ocean's Thirteen

Well, it’s time to wrap up the “Ocean’s Trilogy” with the final installment, “Ocean’s Thirteen,” released in 2007. The basic story is after the team’s member Reuben Tischkoff, played by Jack Geller from "Friends," Elliott Gould, is double-crossed in a business deal and is hospitalized; Danny Ocean joins his old team and heads to Las Vegas to execute revenge on the man who put Reuben in the hospital: shark-like hotel manager, Willy Bank, played by Al Pacino. Their plan is simple: break the Bank by ruining his new multi-billion dollar hotel. However, this isn’t easy.

This is because the experience has to do with watching so many A-list actors having a grand-ole time; the Ocean’s movies have always felt like an enjoyment. Sadly, since “Ocean’s Eleven” was an all-complete affair, “Ocean’s Twelve” felt like we had our faces pressed up against the screen watching Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Matt Damon in the VIP lounge have considerably more fun than we were having. Well, thank goodness, the trilogy (of sorts; it’s more a series of films that apparently has the same characters) is complete with “Ocean’s Thirteen,” and the invites are definitely back in the game.

Empire stated in their review, “In fact, Thirteen occasionally feels like a two-hour apology for the French New Wave noodling of Twelve, with a dialing down of the smugness that alienated so many last time around, a recalibration of focus onto the gang themselves (no love interests here; Catherine Zeta-Jones and Julia Roberts’ absences are explained very early doors), and a return to the Vegas milieu.” Besides the first half, as transvestite English comedian Eddie Izzard’s electronics genius Roman Nagel arrives, with a plan already in the blueprints, to receive a very detailed meeting from Danny and Rusty, who have become seriously stuck in their attempts to break The Bank, Willy Banks’ hotel-casino. This extended segment, twisted in flashbacks within flashbacks, shadowy camerawork in dimly-lit rooms and reams of machine-gun explanation, feels as tentative as anything Soderbergh has done in the series so far. However, besides from an absolutely cracking opening one-liner, it’s worryingly flat and difficult to make sense of.

Empire went on to say, “But by frontloading the spadework, Soderbergh ensures that the second half of the movie is bright, breezy and sumptuously entertaining.” The camerawork is improved (one astounding tracking shot, covering a series of crash zooms and pans across a casino floor, is a technical miracle), the performances get tastier and the movie virtually jumps towards its finale as their complicated plotting come together like clockwork, with twits upon twists, punchline following punchline and pay-off following pay-off. In a summer filled with darkness, this movie’s late lightness of touch is a huge sigh of relief.

It’s also a masterclass on how to film an ensemble work, with each actor of the gang given their moment to shine (Casey Affleck’s inspired diversion down to Mexico in particular) as they exchange ironic one-liners, mean-looking grins and nonsensical con artist mockery about Bellinis, Billy Martins and Susan B. Anthony. Of the real A-listers, Pitt and Damon are once again enjoyable, but this is Clooney’s movie. As he gets older, the former ER cast member just becomes more charming and commanding, quietly dominating with two standout moments – an intelligently-developed joke about Oprah that is the movie’s funniest scene, and a commanding parting shot to Andy Garcia’s Terry Benedict – that remind you why you’re not watching, Empire states, “Rusty’s Thirteen.”

In such memorable company, you’d still expect Pacino to shine but – a few quiet moments aside – Willy Bank is not fully developed into the cold enemy he could have been. His dishonest planning does timely a lovely and vaguely poetic frequent logo about ‘shaking Sinatra’s hand’ (the only direct reference in the franchise to the star of the original “Ocean’s Eleven”), but really, the honor amongst thieves subtext is almost an afterthought. Empire described, “Ocean’s Thirteen is about gloss and glitz; here, the style //is// the substance, and the result is the first genuinely enjoyable movie of the summer.”

Final verdict: I agree with Empire when they say, “You can beat the house and you can break the bank, but sequels always get long odds on defeating the law of diminishing returns – yet Ocean’s Thirteen just about pulls it off.” I personally think this is better than “Ocean’s Twelve,” but “Ocean’s Eleven” just can’t be topped. I don’t think there will be a fourth movie in this series, seeing how much time has passed since the last one and plus Bernie Mac has passed away. Anyways, check the “Ocean” movies out when you get the chance because they are enjoyable. I personally liked them, and I think you will too.

Thanks for joining in on my reviews of the “Ocean Movies.” I hope you enjoyed them as much as I have making them. Stay tuned for Monday on the finale of “The Nutty Professor reviews.”

Nutty Professor II: The Klumps

Today we are going to look at the sequel to the Eddie Murphy remake of “The Nutty Professor,” “The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps,” released in 2000. Roger Ebert started his review with this speculation:

My guess is, most of the reviews of "Nutty Professor II: The Klumps" will deliver perfunctory praise to the makeup and move on quickly to the comedy. But we're not talking garden-variety "makeup" here. We're talking about a rather astonishing creative collaboration between Eddie Murphy and makeup artist Rick Baker, with considerable help from director Peter Segal and cinematographer Dean Semler, to populate the movie with eight different characters, all played by Murphy, all convincing, each with its own personality. This is not just a stunt. It is some kind of brilliance.

That does appear in a comedy of determined vulgarity. Some of the long sessions which last five hours in makeup do put at the service of scenes which has giant hamsters breeding and farts that are flammable. The story wanders, but this movie is frequently very funny and nowhere near less than amazing, as long as you consider the work and imagination that went into Murphy’s creation of the Klump family (Sherman, Granny, Mama, Papa, Papa’s younger self and Ernie) and two other characters, Lance Perkins and the evil alter ego Buddy Love.

Murphy has a mysterious gift for imitation, for creating new characters through the talent of improvisation. We, as an audience, first saw this when he was on “Saturday Night Live,” obviously. Ebert mentioned, “In Steve Martin's underappreciated "Bowfinger" (1999), he plays two characters more or less without help from makeup: the movie superstar Kit Ramsey, who looks a lot like Murphy, and a doofus named Jiff, who looks a lot like Kit and is hired to play his double. This isn't simply a double role. Kit and Jiff are two different people, and Jiff is actually the funnier and more involving one; he was so abashed when he found out they wanted to put him in a movie that we couldn't help liking him.”

The entire Klump family that is played entirely by Murphy in this sequel are much broader characters, and yet Professor Sherman Klump, the family protagonist, also has that pull of sweetness: He is likable, vulnerable and naïve, and we can understand why his research assistant Denise, played by Michael Jackson’s sister, Janet Jackson (another singer), might want to marry him. We understand him even better when he hires a Mexican band to stand under her window while he sings to her, although that romantic scene is interrupted when Buddy Love takes control of him.

Ebert said it best when he stated, “Buddy Love is essentially Tourette's syndrome personified.” Buddy appears without saying again, taking over Sherman’s personality, ejecting insulting comments and embarrassing Sherman in public. Ebert mentioned, “His nuisance value multiplies when Sherman tries a risky genetic split, externalizing Buddy but causing his own intelligence to start shrinking.” One of the funniest twists in this movie is the way the tables get turned on Buddy. A strand of his DNA gets crossed with the genetic code of a dog, forcing Buddy to show instinctual behaviors of a dog at every single inconvenient moment. You could say that this is somewhat wonderful when Sherman can distract his enemy by forcing him to play fetch.

I believe Ebert is right when he said, “Animal jokes have been obligatory in raunchy comedies since "There's Something About Mary," and "Nutty II" builds to some kind of a crescendo as Dean Richmond (Larry Miller), Sherman's superior at the university, is assaulted by a giant hamster. How this happens and why is immaterial; what is important is the way it leads up to the line, "Do you think he'll call?" Eddie Murphy has been a star since 1981, a movie star since "48 Hrs." He started strong but has made more than his share of bad movies ("Vampire In Brooklyn" was perhaps the low point). In "Bowfinger" and "Nutty II," he seems to be in a new flowering of his career.” Murphy seems to be home with his comedy, willing to disappear into his characters, ready to find laughs with behavior and personality instead of forcing them with punch lines. Not only does he play eight different characters here, but he makes them different and (within the broad requirements of the story) believable.

Sherman obviously is the main character, a research professor who is brilliant, innocent and obese. We like him and feel for him. Janet Jackson is warm and supportive as his girlfriend, and they have some touching scenes together (Ebert mentioned, “Borrowed from "Charly")” when his intelligence starts to decline and his genius to fade. In a movie so hoarse, so scatological, so optimistically offensive, it is a little surprising to find yourself actually caring for a character who is made mostly out of Latex makeup, but there you have it.

Overall, I think this is a funny sequel, and I don’t hate it like everyone else. If you liked the first movie, then definitely check out the sequel because it will make you laugh, and most importantly, feel and route for Sherman. Hold on to your seats because Friday I will wrap up the “Ocean’s Trilogy” with the final installment for this month.

Ocean's Twelve

I first want to apologize for posting this late for I was out for about the whole day. Let’s not waste any time and start my review on “Ocean’s Twelve,” released in 2004.

Josh Bell started off his review by saying, “Steven Soderbergh's 2001 remake of the Rat Pack caper flick Ocean's Eleven was a light, fun romp with little substance but plenty of style, an excuse for big-name actors like George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and Julia Roberts to play dress-up and prance around Las Vegas as cool, suave thieves. Coming on the heels of serious, intelligent Soderbergh films like Erin Brockovich and Traffic, Ocean's Eleven was a bit of a trifle, but it was an exceedingly well-made trifle, and a ton of fun to watch.”

“Ocean’s Twelve,” Soderbergh’s 2004 sequel, is not a lot of fun to watch. It may have been fun to direct – the actors spend their time smiling and laughing at one another, and the movie was filmed in several gorgeous European locales – but it’s a difficult movie-going experience, full of pointless in-jokes, with a terrible 130-minute running time and more characters that you can possibly keep up with. There are a few laughs occasionally, but they’re little comfort among the stupid plot and aimless set pieces.

A little over three years after stealing $150 million from Las Vegas casino owner Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia going way overboard with the villain chatter in this sequel), Danny Ocean and his team are having a great life with their loot, when suddenly Benedict locates all 11 members and issues a threat: Pay him back all his money, with interest, in two weeks, or they will be murdered.

So the entire team reunites, led by Danny and his right-hand man Rusty. Too infamous to work in the U.S., they fly to Europe, where they first plan to steal a rare historical document from an outsider. However, they are stopped by two enemies: police detective Isabel Lahiri (the drop dead gorgeous Latina that Nostalgia Critic is crazy over, Catherine Zeta-Jones), who once was in a relationship with Rusty, and a master thief called the Nightfox (Vincent Cassel), who hates Ocean and his team for becoming bigger stars than he is.

Unlike the first movie, which focused on one big plot, the sequel shows several smaller plots that never play out as planned. As a result, a film about thieves has very little stealing, as writer George Nolfi focuses instead on plot twists that come out of nowhere and leave the viewer puzzled rather than open-minded. Bell noted, “Nolfi's script originally had nothing to do with the Ocean's characters, and the retrofitting certainly shows.” The Benedict connection to the first movie comes off as little more than an excuse to get the characters to Europe, and many characters traits feel ill-suited to the people we got to know in the first film.

Matt Damon’s immature Linus Caldwell gets a bigger role this time, and the biggest addition is Zeta-Jones as Isabel. Where the first movie was all about Danny trying to get back Tess from Benedict, this one is all about Rusty trying to get back Isabel from the control of respectability. Brad Pitt and George Clooney, who sold a comfortable, long-standing friendship between their two characters in the first movie, get only one convincing scene together this time around. Or else, it’s like Danny and Rusty are working on two separate ways.

Bell goes on to say, “It's possible that Nolfi's initial treatment had the core of a good thriller, but it's been stretched so far to accommodate the Ocean's characters that whatever might have been exciting about it is no longer recognizable. The filmmakers seem unsure of what kind of movie they're making, and instead of sticking to the stylish thievery antics that gave Eleven its charm, they throw in self-indulgent Hollywood in-jokes, including an awful, interminable sequence in which Roberts' Tess must pose as Julia Roberts to facilitate a theft.” Julia Roberts, as a character imitating herself, runs into a Bruce Willis cameo, who mistakes the character for the real Roberts, and at one moment calls Roberts on the phone, so that Tess can talk to Roberts herself (doing her own voice). It’s enough for you to rip the hairs out of your head.

I think Bell said it best when he said, “Furthermore, it's smugly, annoyingly self-congratulatory, the kind of meta-textual nonsense that critics hated in Soderbergh's experimental Full Frontal (which also featured Roberts in a role skewering her own personality). At least there it was in context, as the whole film was about the self-reflexive nature of storytelling. Here, it's just jarring and narcissistic, an especially wrong note in a movie full of wrong notes.”

It’s difficult to get too furious about, though, since none of the movie pieces together, anyway. Soderbergh directs the film like he’s bored, throwing in freeze frames, wipes, adorable titles and strange camera angles just to keep himself awake. He’s a successful stylist, but the style doesn’t have a purpose here. Like the rest of the film, it looks like fun, but the audience is never in on the joke.

Overall, the beginning is slow, the plot is just a clichéd revenge story that we’ve seen so many times before (and why did he wait three years to locate and threatened the team), and the final twist that really hurts the final action sequence. Soderbergh actually admitted that this was his favorite amongst the trilogy, but I personally think it’s the weakest. But I don’t think that this is one of the worst sequels ever made, because there are good things about it, even though there are more cons than pros. Check it out, but you will not enjoy this one as much as the first one.

Well, look out for Monday when I look at the Murphy “The Nutty Professor” sequel.

The Nutty Professor (1996)

Well, now it’s time to talk about the 1996 remake, “The Nutty Professor.” Roger Ebert started his review out by saying, “Eddie Murphy's talent for comedy has been in eclipse during these lean recent years of flops such as “A Vampire In Brooklyn.” But in “The Nutty Professor” he's back with exuberance and energy, in a movie that's like a thumb to the nose for everyone who said he'd lost it. He's very good. And the movie succeeds in two different ways: It's sweet and good-hearted, and then again it’s raucous slapstick and bathroom humor. I liked both parts.”

The movie is based off of Jerry Lewis’s 1963 comedy, which has been said by some people that it was his best, where Lewis played a mild-mannered chemistry professor whose scientific potion that made him into an obnoxious bar regular named Buddy Love. Some said that Buddy Love was based off of Lewis’s former comedic partner, Dean Martin, allowing him to play both sides in a double act. Others said the Buddy Love character was a creepy foreshadowing of Lewis’s own personality in his future. It might have been a little of both.

The Eddie Murphy remake follows the big picture of the Lewis film, with one added part: The protagonist is morbidly obese, along with making him shy and clumsy, and that doubles the chance for physical comedy. Jerry Lewis’ transformation from the professor into Buddy Love was a personality switch, but Murphy also goes through a complete physical change, from 400 pounds to average weight and back again, sometimes almost instantly.

As the movie starts, Murphy plays Professor Sherman Klump, brilliant chemist and geneticist, and fat man. He immediately falls in love with a new graduate student named Carla Purty, played by Will Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett, and warily bumbles his way into asking her out on a date. Meanwhile, his position at the college depends on raising new research funds, and the sycophantic college dean, played by comedian Larry Miller, puts on the pressure during a sarcastic meeting (“Anything I can get for you? Juice? Coffee? Rack of lamb?”).

Sherman’s habit when he gets worried is to eat, and so he sits down with relief to the Klump family dinner table. Every member of the Klump family (Sherman’s parents, brother, and grandmother) is played by Murphy, who has always been a master of disguises (think back to the SNL sketch of Gumby). But here he outdoes himself, in bringing up the increase of vulgarity that would be disgusting if it weren’t so funny (Ebert admitted, “The audience laughed so hard at Papa Klump's approach to colon cleansing that I missed the next six lines of dialogue”). The dinner table scene is where we also hear the famous "Hercules, Hercules, Hercules" line from the mother. Not only does Murphy play the Klumps, but he also scores huge laughs as a Richard Simmons droid on a TV exercise program.

The character of Sherman himself is a victory of successful disguise combined with good writing and acting. The makeup of Rick Baker (three-time Oscar winner) adds weight to Murphy’s face and neck so flawlessly that Sherman looks completely convincing. As Murphy plays him, Sherman becomes one of the most likable characters, good-hearted, sympathetic and funny. Ebert asked, “When Sherman morphs into Buddy Love, the thin character resembles some of Murphy's own abrasive stage incarnations; does this mean he'll be hosting telethons in 10 years?” The plot, freely inspired by the 1963 film, gets Sherman and the beautiful Carla to a cool nightclub where Sherman is humiliated by a comedian, played by one of the funniest comedians Dave Chappelle, because he’s fat (“I think I found where they hid Jimmy Hoffa.”). Dave Chappelle admitted at that part, he made Eddie Murphy break character by making water shoot out of Murphy's nose, which Chappelle admitted was a great feeling to make Murphy break character. Eddie Murphy admitted that at that part, you get to know Sherman very well and when that happens to him, you sympathize and feel sorry for him. Both Eddie Murphy and Dave Chappelle say that part is their favorite in the entire movie. Later Buddy Love returns to the club and gets revenge, although Carla’s attraction to Buddy is never really accounted for the fast-moving plot.

Sherman’s transformation into Buddy isn’t all makeup. At times animation and visual tricks are used. There are a couple of smooth special effects parts, including a nightmare where Sherman grows to be as big as King Kong and walks through a frightened city. Buddy has a tendency to show up into Buddy without notice, which leads to embarrassment: Fireman have to cut him out of a sports car. Murphy plays both roles at the same time in a scene where the two characters fight for control over the body. (The crazy energy here is a reminder that the director, Tom Shadyac, also directed “Ace Venture: Pet Detective.”) The ending is just as sentimental as the original, with Sherman finally accepting himself (and to be loved by Carla). He gives a heartfelt speech (“Buddy’s who I thought I wanted to be – who I thought the world wanted me to be”). Ebert admitted, “Eddie Murphy looks straight at the camera as he hits the last line, and it occurred to me that maybe he was referring indirectly to some of his recent career miscues.” There is a lot of Buddy Love in Eddie Murphy’s screen persona, and not enough Sherman Klump. Ebert ended his review by saying, “But I’ve never doubted Murphy's comic gift, and “The Nutty Professor” shows him back on track, balancing two sides of a real talent.”

Overall, I think this remake is funnier than the original, although I do not hate the original at all. If it wasn’t for the original, we would not have gotten this version. Both versions are funny in their own respective ways, but this one I just found funnier. Maybe it’s because I grew up around the time when Murphy was still in his popular days and I’m not old enough to say anything about Jerry Lewis. Anyways, check this one out if you have or haven’t seen the original and/or you are an Eddie Murphy fan because it’s definitely worth seeing. The dinner scene with all the farting I found to be funny, but that’s maybe because I’m really immature.

Dave Chappelle admitted that Eddie Murphy is one of the funniest people he has ever met, and when Murphy was in the Sherman outfit and makeup, he came over and told Chappelle that he is very funny. Murphy told Chappelle that he is really smart and funny, which makes him stand out from the other comedians, and Chappelle looked at him like he was surprised someone said that. Chappelle admitted that Murphy would give him good advice by saying when to write jokes, you think in pictures, which was the highlight of the movie for Chappelle.

Look out for this Friday when I look at the second installment in Soderbergh “Ocean’s Trilogy.”

Ocean's Eleven

Alright everyone, today it's time to start more famous "Ocean's Trilogy," directed by the great Steven Soderbergh. Let's get started with the first installment, the 2001 remake, "Ocean's Eleven."

Roger Ebert started out his review by saying, "Serious pianists sometimes pound out a little honky-tonk, just for fun." That's what it looks like Soderbergh was doing with this remake. This is a basic genre movie, a remake of the 1960 Frank Sinatra version, and Soderbergh, who mostly shoots bigger, does it as a kind of fun. It's polished, obviously: directors this good don't normally handle material this process. It has longing above its usual level, as if wishing to redeem itself and change into a very good movie.

The movie stars Hollywood's ladies man George Clooney, who can be amazingly emotionless better than just about anyone, as Danny Ocean, out of prison and dying for a new job. He's a slick operator who, his parole tells him, has a handful of investigations that he was charged with. He calls his old friend Rusty Ryan, played by Brad Pitt, with a plan to steal millions from three Las Vegas casinos. Amazingly, the movie tells and films in real casinos (the Mirage, MGM Grand and the Bellagio) and combines the destruction of the Desert Inn.

Running the job, Rusty sees the casino owner, played by the great Andy Garcia, with a woman he is familiar with: Tess Ocean, played by Julia Roberts, Danny's former wife. "Tell me it isn't about her," Rusty asks Danny. Obviously it is. Danny wants to get Tess away from her new boyfriend and get her back. They form a team, including Matt Damon, the late insult comedian Bernie Mac, Don Cheadle, Casey Affleck, Scott Caan (James Caan's son), the great Carl Reiner, Elliot Gould, Eddie Jemison, and Shaobo Qin. Ebert noted, "I suppose there are 11 in all, although even during a long tracking shot I forgot to count."

The outlines of these types of movies are long and well established: the scary outer shot of the impervious targets, the inside information, the voice-over as we see the guards still attending to their work, and the plan with a limited timing. "Ocean's Eleven" even has a detailed full-scale mockery of the strong room used by the three casinos, leading to legitimate questions like:

1. Why does this need to be this detailed?
2. How much did this cost? and
3. Who contracted them it for them, or did they put it together themselves overnight?

The movie transcends in its delivery of the dialogue. Ebert said, "The screenplay by Ted Griffin is elegantly epigrammatic, with dialogue that sounds like a cross between Noel Coward and a 1940s noir thriller."

Tess: "You're a thief and a liar?
Danny: "I only lied about being a thief?"
Tess: "You don't do that anymore?"
Danny: "Steal?"
Tess: "Lie."

Ebert confessed, "They do this so well I was reminded of the classic exchanges between Bogart and Bacall." Notice the conversation between Danny, Tess and the Terry Benedict, the owner of the casino, when Terry finds Danny at Tess' table in the restaurant. The two men obviously loathe one another, but are so smooth and cool we see it only in the accuracy of their timing and word choices, getting up to a final moment where Danny, leaving the table, says "Terry" in a way that uses the first name with inappropriate freshness, and Terry responds "Danny" on exactly the same note.

Rusty has a nice dialogue passage as well, when he's instructing Linus Caldwell, played by Damon. The jargon is all about strategy and completely in modern words, but listen to the music instead of the words and you realize it's a situation on Hamlet's instructions to the actors.

Ebert ended his review by saying, "As movie capers go, the specifics in "Ocean's Eleven" are not necessarily state of the art. I can think of more ingeniously executed plans, most recently in "The Score," but then this is not a movie about suspense but about suavity. Clooney and Roberts deliberately evoke the elegance of stars like Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, Garcia is as smooth, groomed, polished and tailored as George Raft, and the movie blessedly ends not with a shootout but with a complicated plot finesse. I enjoyed it. It didn't shake me up and I wasn't much involved, but I liked it as a five-finger exercise. Now it's time for Soderbergh to get back to work."

This is a fun movie, and you should check this one out. Look for next Monday for my review on "The Nutty Professor" remake.

The Nutty Professor (1963)

Since I am going to review all the “Ocean” movies every Friday of this month, I thought it would be appropriate to review all “The Nutty Professor” movies every Monday, since I can’t talk about Dean Martin and leave out his comedy partner, Jerry Lewis. With that said, let’s get started today with the 1963 Jerry Lewis classic, “The Nutty Professor.”

An online blogger by the name of “garv” started his review out by saying, “Jerry Lewis must have driven the studio bosses to drink when he announced that he wanted to tamper with his proven formula for The Nutty Professor.” For the first time in his career, Lewis decided to put aside the “nine-year-old” character, creating a completely new character with a different voice, different posture, and different look. The film was different too. “Garv” also noted, “Instead of a loosely connected group of blackout gags, The Nutty Professor featured a storyline that was both more coherent and more adult than anything Lewis had previously directed.”

Lewis plays Julius Kelp, a buck-toothed, near-sighted, accident-prone science professor. Kelp is in love with Stella Purdy, played by Stella Stevens, a shapely undergraduate, but he is too nervous to say anything to her. After being humiliated by a bully, played by Med Flory, in front of Stella and the rest of his class, the professor decides to muscle up, but physical exercise fails to change him physically. His only other choice is science, and before you can think up “Jekyll and Hyde,” Kelp invents a science potion that changes the chemistry professor into Buddy Love, a self-satisfied, bad-mannered narcissus. Despite his bad behavior, Buddy makes Stella fall head over heels and becomes the idol of the naïve set, who love him for his singing, swinging, and swilling. Of course, the make-believe can only last so long.

Over the years, “The Nutty Professor” has become Lewis’ most adored movie, but few critics have noted the major role that alcohol plays in the narrative. Once the professor changes into Buddy Love, he becomes a humongous jerk, leading to two of the best-remembered scenes in the history of covered cinema. The first happens after the professor’s first transformation into Buddy Love. “Garv” mentioned, “Kelp’s newly released alter ego makes a beeline for the local watering hole, The Purple Pit, a popular hangout for Stella and the other college students (most of who appear to be in their mid-forties).” Buddy jumps right into ordering a drink, the “Alaskan Polar Bear Heater,” a drink of near-death power. After saying the drink’s recipe to the Purple Pit’s bartender, played by Buddy Lester, he allows the bartender to taste the dangerous beverage. The bartender finds the creation appetizing, but then freezes in place as if hit by Medusa. “Garv” noted, “Buddy is unfazed and has no qualms about downing the rest of the cocktail.”

“The Nutty Professor” also has the best hangover scene in any movie. “Garv” put it as, “Showing up late for class, wearing tinted glasses, Professor Kelp suffers the aftermath of Buddy’s bacchanalia.” Lewis intensifies every sound in the scene to let the audience to experience what the character is going through. As he closes the classroom door, the coming with slam sounds like a cannon shot. Chalk scratching against the blackboard sounds like the scraping of metal upon metal. Finally, liquid dripping into a test tube sounds like the beating of a kettle drum mixed with the crashing of waves upon the shore. It is an inspired scene – the best in the whole movie.

While “The Nutty Professor” isn’t the funniest film that Jerry Lewis was in, it’s probably his best film ever. Like all the movies directed by Lewis, the jokes are uneven and the story once in a while falls into silly corniness. At the same time, Jerry’s talents as a filmmaker were never shown to greater effect. From the strange transformation scene to the amazing close-ups that show Stella Stevens at her most beautiful, this film is a candy-colored delight.

Thank you for joining in on my first installment on “The Nutty Professor series.” Stay tuned this Friday for my review on the first “Ocean’s Trilogy” directed by Steven Soderbergh.

Ocean's 11

This is a very special month because I will be looking at the entire “Ocean’s” series. Now the best way to start it off is with the 1960 original starring the Rat Pack, “Ocean’s 11.” TV Guide started their review off by saying, “A free-wheeling, uninhibited all-star romp, OCEAN'S ELEVEN set the pace for the "caper" films of the 1960s and 1970s.” Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr, and Dean Martin performed their club acts at night and worked on this Las Vegas setting of the film during the day, and the good time they were having evidently shows and jumps off the screen.

Spyros Acebos, played by Akim Tamiroff, gives the team a plan to rob five of Vegas’s casinos – the Sahara, the Flamingo, the Riviera, the Sands, and the Desert Inn – on New Year’s Eve. His plan calls for the team, all 82^nd Airborne Division veterans, with Danny Ocean, played by Sinatra, as their leader to use their military knowledge and commando timing to barge the casinos in the dark by switching off their electricity. In order to follow through, they have to blow a power tower outside the city. Then the back-up systems at the hotels will be dispensed with so the electrical powered doors to the safes will open up. Next, all of the cash will be taken and thrown into garbage cans outside the casino, where they will be picked up by a disposal truck driven by Josh Howard, played by Sammy Davis Jr.

While the team is planning the crime, the film gives us the chance to learn a bit about each member of this crew. Jimmy Foster (Peter Lawford) is the son of much-married Mrs. Restes (Ilka Chase), who is about to make Duke Santos (Cesar Romero), a local gangster, her fifth husband. Missing his wife, Beatrice Ocean, played by Sergeant Leann “Pepper” Anderson from Police Woman, Angie Dickinson, but knowing that she will just be an obstacle, Danny sends her a telegram saying they can’t get together. This, obviously, has her immediately come to Las Vegas, where she is an obstacle. When Adele Elkstrom, played by Patrice Wymore, an ex-girlfriend of Danny, also arrives, flares erupt. Beatrice wants Danny to go back to New York with her, and when he refuses but can’t explain why, she leaves.

The big night arrives. The robbery goes well, but things start to fall apart – as that always seem to happen in this type of movie. Tony Bergdorf, played by Richard Conte, has a heart attack and dies. Duke finds out about the team and demands half of the amount, making it impossible to the team to get the money out of town. They figure out that running the money in Tony’s coffin, believing that no one will ever look in there. What they don’t know, however, is Tony’s widow, Gracie, played by Jean Willes. She decides to have Tony cremated, and Danny and his team look on in shocked silence as all of the money (and their friend) goes up in smoke.

Peter Lawford started the idea of “Ocean’s 11” when he found the story which this was based on. Then he and Sinatra made a production company, with Martin also pitching in. George Raft and Red Skelton have small cameos, as does Shirley MacLaine, in an unbilled bit as a drunken person. TV Guide noted, “MacLaine was busy making THE APARTMENT and took off a day to fly to Las Vegas and appear in a scene with Martin that reputedly took less than 10 minutes to shoot.”

There are several other interesting small performances in the film, including from Hoot Gibson, Red Barry, and Louis Quinn (from 77 Sunset Strip”). Other Rat Pack members in this film include Joey Bishop, Henry Silva, Buddy Lester, Richard Benedict, Norman Fell, and Clem Harvey.

If you are fans of the Rat Pack, like I am, then you should see this movie. It wasn’t well-received, but it’s very nice to watch just to see the Rat Pack sit around and be themselves, which is what they were good at. Separately and together, the Rat Pack never failed to disappoint their fans. This is a very underrated film, and I highly recommend everyone go out and watch it because it’s worth it.

Look out next week when I start the more famous trilogy directed by Steven Soderbergh.