We watched the utterly preposterous and mostly adorable heist movie OCEAN'S TWELVE. The plot is borderline incoherent. Basically it's an excuse to watch big, big stars do their thing.
And they do, adorably. There are scenes between Brad Pitt and George Clooney that you just want to loop over and over because they're so much fun to watch, even when they're barely doing anything -- especially when they're barely doing anything, because any actor can do something and look interesting, but it takes a star to do nothing and make it interesting.
(I did a couple of seasons of Meisner Technique acting training in order to learn to direct and write better, and I got to watch some actors with star quality. There were actors who came in with the right interpretation of the scene. But two actors in particular, Mariska Hargitay and Clare Carey, could come in with completely the wrong interpretation of the scene and yet you couldn't take your eyes off them. They both went on to leads on TV shows)
OCEAN'S TWELVE made $125 million bucks domestic. Not huge, considering the cast, but they made another one, so I doubt they lost any money. I suspect it did bigger numbers overseas. It's a spectacle movie. You're not really watching for a story. The story is there to support set pieces -- dramatic or comic scenes where the stars are on fire, and action sequences that are just huge fun to watch.
I care a lot about story; I'm a writer after all. I have to remind myself from time to time that it's not just story that the audience is paying for. They will also gladly pay for spectacle. In fact, forced to choose between a great story and an amazing spectacle, a big chunk of the audience will choose spectacle. (See TRANSFORMERS and the STAR WARS prequels.)
The spectacle movies will date themselves really fast, as the tech improves. Movies with great stories will last. But if you get a chance to write the next Transformers movie, you can watch the next Martin Scorsese on the 3D screen in your giant Hollywood mansion.
Fortunately, you can write spectacle too. You don't have to wait for the director to add it. You can imagine the action sequences so they're spectacular. And I believe there is a way to write big parts for stars. I think it has something to do with letting the scenes breathe a little bit -- give the characters room to be stars.
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