Ocean's 13: Big Money, Star-studded and Empty

It must be said...again: Hollywood is not about art at all anymore. It is, to state the obvious, about money. Now I am not naive enough to think that it ever was about art--spend a couple of days in Hollywood or with the people who reside there and you will quickly come to see what is at its heart--but it is just so obvious now. Ocean's 13 is a perfect example of a movie that was just made to make money. It is not smart, it is not subtle, it is not quirky, it is not entertaining and it is not interesting. It does not advance the story or develop characters. It does not do anything. It just makes money--that's it--that is its one role in the world: just to sit up on the screen and make money. It is in a word: forgettable.

Now, of course, like anything its role is to make money-- it's the same with all the sequels: Shrek, Pirates of the Caribbean, Die Hard, Fantastic Four-- they exist to make money, which is fine, but in a world that pretends to be about at least partly about art it is rather shallow. Art has always had an interplay between itself and simply making money. I am sure that many of the wonderful paintings we see from the great artists in history were done for money--which is fine, in fact we should not romantically envision art as something people just do for free; as the saying goes "There is no free lunch." And that is fine--to make money from what God has gifted you to do. But when the art--if we are calling these films art anymore--becomes so contrived that its ploys to make money are as obvious as Ocean's 13 we have to at least recognize it--if not only to be aware if it. The following is what scares me the most about all of this: this movie does not even try to be good. And I could say the same for many of the films I have seen over the last years.

But at the end of the day I wonder if the fact that these kinds of films continue to be made is more of a commentary on us--the consumer--than anyone else. I wonder if we are the ones everyone in Hollywood is laughing at: "Hahaha--I got fourteen scripts for Ocean's 13 on my desk--I threw a dart at one and that's the film we made--it was horrific and it made 40 million dollars the first weekend! Hahaha"...I hope this changes and that better films start being made. I hope we as consumers come to expect more from the art we enjoy.