Here's one measure, for me, of what makes a movie great: If I stumble across it while channel-surfing and I'm instantly suckered in -- I can't not watch it, no matter at what point in the film it's at, no matter how many times I've seen it before -- that's a great film.

Ocean's 11 is a great film. The 2001 version, of course, not that other one.

As a Vegas movie, my god, I'm not sure there's another movie set in that city that more perfectly captures everything that is everything we've made that city out to be: a rude, lewd fantasyland; a grownup Disneyworld; a wonderfully sordid expression of American audacity and honest greed. In Frank Capra's Meet John Doe (one of the most pragmatically all-American films ever made), Gary Cooper's baseball player deems the average American "inherently honest but [with] a streak of larceny in his heart." That's George Clooney's Danny Ocean and his pals. They're good guys: certainly better than Andy Garcia's casino-owning cad Terry Benedict. They're modern Robin Hoods without the giving-to-the-poor nonsense. They're everything all of us would be if only we were clever and daring enough.

Oh, and I love how it plays on the mystique of the casinos, and the hyperbole of them. Danny's description of the vault they're gonna heist: "This place houses a security system that rivals most nuclear missile silos"? Brilliant.

That's the Vegas angle. But there's a whole other angle that makes Ocean's 11 genius. It's a Movie. I mean, it never, ever lets you forget that it's Just a Movie. There's all the tricky Sting-ish stuff, how it fools you with who's up to what and who's lying to whom and what it all means: even upon multiple re-viewings, you still continue to find moments where you suddenly realize: "Hey, that character is faking that, not only for some of his fellow characters but for us, too, to make it all more fun for us."

Like many other movies that are as much about our experience of watching movies as they are about whatever stories they're telling, O11 subverts our expectations of what narrative can and should do. Clooney and Brad Pitt get caught in the planning office ... and the security guard turns out to be on their side, and is totally fine with their borrowing the casino plans to make copies. The thing with the batteries outside the vault? Pure comic anticlimax of exactly the kind we never expect. It's always funny, even on the 50th viewing.

But then there's the whole other layer, the meta layer, in which we see how much this movie is merely about a bunch of Hollywood stars -- not just Clooney and the huge-name cast but director Steven Soderbergh, too -- simply having a ball. The joke of Clooney and Pitt wandering past the screaming fans outside the club, fans who are all over Topher Grace and Shane West and ignoring two of the best-known faces on the planet? That only works if you know what huge stars Clooney and Pitt are, if you bring into the movie with you a knowledge of who these guys are outside the movie. O11 does not want -- as most movies do -- for us to forget that we're watching movie stars putting on a show. The scene in which Clooney justifies his decision to take on Terry Benedict to Pitt, then worries that he "rushed it," that he's trying too hard? That's Clooney, not Danny, talking to Pitt, not Rusty, a moment of falling out of character that also works in character, a moment that gives us a little taste of the fun they must have been having on the set.

Some viewers find that too insider-ish, too meta, too much of a distraction to getting lost in the story. I say that the joys of Ocean's 11 are that it knows exactly what we really want out of a movie -- to get lost, but not too lost, to never forget that we are willingly complicit in having a movie pull the wool over our eyes. We know that movies are a giant put-on ... and this movie knows it, too.

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MaryAnn Johanson (email me)
film reviews and TV blogging at FlickFilosopher.com

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