There are two relatively big films opening today in limited release.  They're called Beyond the Sea and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (you can read reviews by clicking on the titles).

There isn’t really a whole lot to say about Ocean’s Twelve.  It features the same cast, the same crew, the same budget, and nearly the same story as the 2001 blockbuster-remake.  If you liked Ocean’s Eleven, you’re going to like this version, as well.

Twelve, featuring just about every actor in Hollywood who wasn’t in Closer (and one who was), is set a few years after Danny Ocean (George Clooney, Intolerable Cruelty) and his pals swiped $160 million dollars from a casino run by the slimy Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia, Twisted).  Ocean, who also managed to steal Benedict’s girlfriend Tess (Julia Roberts, Closer), has been busy trying to resume to a normal, crime-free life in New England.  That plan doesn’t last long, however, as Ocean and his old mates from the Bellagio con all have threatening encounters with Benedict, who was tipped to their roles in the casino heist by a mysterious European with ulterior (and, admittedly, pretty stupid) motives.  The rub: Pay back what was stolen, plus a handsome vig, and you won’t be hunted down and killed like an animal.

Because Ocean’s crew is still too hot to work in the States, they head for Europe and, after a lot of trickery, decide to steal the Fabergé coronation egg from a museum.  But the egg may as well have been a maguffin (mmmmm… Fabergé egg maguffin…).  Some heist films are about, you know, the heist.  This one isn’t.  It’s about the characters, or some might even say the people playing those characters.  This time around, we learn more about Rusty (Brad Pitt, Troy), who apparently had a fling with the very same Europol agent (Catherine Zeta-Jones, The Terminal) who is trying to prevent him and his buddies from making off with the egg maguffin.

The highlights here – aside from Steven Soderbergh (Solaris) and his colored filters, fun jump-cuts and usual directorial flare – are the inside jokes.  Some are casually mentioned (like the Topher Grace cameo – see below), but one is a fairly integral thread to the plot.  It comes from so far past left field, it blindsided me to the point where I’ll need to see Twelve again to enjoy some of the jokes I missed while trying to pick my jaw up off of the floor.  Like Soderbergh’s Full Frontal, he and screenwriter George Nolfi (Timeline) manipulate the “fourth wall” to the point where you’re not sure it even exists any longer.

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In Ocean’s Twelve, Topher Grace has a cameo where he laments his career choices, specifically how he totally phoned in his role in “the Dennis Quaid film.”  The picture he’s referring to, which I saw just 12 hours after Twelve, is In Good Company, the latest from Paul and Chris Weitz (About a Boy).

Don’t let Company’s late-December release date fool you: This isn’t one of those Oscar-quality projects that are dropped into theatres after Christmas just to qualify for this year’s awards season.  It’s a predictable, pedestrian dud – one of those films in which nothing happens that a person with even low-to-moderate brain activity can’t figure out in the first five minutes.  What’s worse, Company’s story preaches the evils that are big corporate behemoths, and shows the havok wreaked by business mergers and takeovers.  You wouldn’t expect a picture with that kind of message to be filled with what might be the year’s most obvious product placement, would you?  Expect it if you see Company, which happens to be financed and distributed by an enormous conglomerate.

Dennis Quaid (The Day After Tomorrow) plays Dan Foreman, the 51-year-old head of advertising sales for a popular sports magazine.  When the magazine’s parent company is taken over by GlobeCom, Dan is demoted and discovers his new boss is Carter Duryea (Grace, p.s.), a 26-year-old corporate ass-kisser, has absolutely no experience with sports magazines or ad sales.  Dan has other troubles, as well.  His wife (Marg Helgenberger, CSI: Topeka) is knocked up, and his daughter (Scarlett Johansson, A Love Song for Bobby Long), is transferring from state school to the less tuition-friendly NYU.  These added financial burdens make Dan increasingly more and more anxious as he wonders if his position will be eliminated by the smarmy, buzzword-spouting Carter.

Carter, meanwhile, lives in an expensive but extremely cold-looking modern home with his wife of seven months (Selma Blair, A Dirty Shame).  But she leaves Carter because he pays more attention to work than her.  This renders Carter, who is already in over his head in his new position, rather helpless and looking for guidance in both his professional and personal life.  Wonder if he’ll find it in…I don’t know…Dan?  Maybe Carter will even strike up a relationship with Dan’s daughter?  Maybe she’ll set him on the straight and narrow?  Maybe everything will end happily?  Check, check and check.

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A Love Song for Bobby Long is the feature film debut from Shainee Gabel, who adapts the story from Ronald Everett Capps’s novel Off Magazine Street.  Like In Good Company (which is being dropped the same day), this picture features both Scarlett Johansson and a 50-year-old guy in what is supposed to be an “awards worthy” performance.  The guy here is John Travolta, and his role would be meaty Oscar stuff in the hands of a number of actors, but Travolta just ain’t one of them.  His turn is valiant, but ultimately transparent.  But, that said, he does dance in it, and all of Travolta’s legendary comebacks revolve around him having a big dance scene.

Johansson is Purceline Will, the epitome of Florida trailer trash who ditches her days of watching television and eating peanut butter and M&Ms with a spoon when she finds out her estranged mother has died in New Orleans.  Because her stupid boyfriend didn’t give her the message about mom’s funeral on time, Purcy shows up a day late and discovers she’s inherited a portion of the family’s dilapidated house, as well as its equally ramshackle inhabitants: Drunk, quote-spouting ex-professor Bobby Long (Travolta, Ladder 49) and his writing protégé, the far-from-sober Lawson Pines (Gabriel Macht, The Recruit).

The drunks plan to make Purcy miserable enough to ditch them and the house so they can mix alcohol and pickle juice in private.  But Purcy’s infectious attitude – which, at some point, has made the giant leap from couch potato to aspiring x-ray technician – wins over as she gets the Ben Sanderson wannabes to give up the sauce and turn their lives around.  Oh, and did I mention that Purcy never knew her dad, and that the curmudgeon we call Bobby never really knew his kids?  Those two will be, literally, the only two people in the theatre who can’t see the end of this film coming from a mile away.

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I caught Takeshi Kitano’s Dolls two years ago at a film festival, and frankly, forgot it existed soon thereafter (it happens with a lot of festival fare).  Kitano made another film since then (2004’s The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi) and turned up in younger form via Most Extreme Elimination Challenge, which did nothing but push Dolls further from my memory.  But now, thanks to Palm Pictures, Dolls is finally receiving a North American release, possibly to capitalize on the hotter-than-hot “puppet film” genre recently blitzkrieged by Team America: World Police (budget: $30 million; gross $32 million).

See, Dolls is, at least in part, a bunraku film, complete with puppeteers manipulating wooden creations through stories of love and redemption.  A really slow story of love and redemption.  One that Kitano directs and edits, but does not appear in and did not write (a first for both).

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Next week: Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, Spanglish, Million Dollar Baby, The Aviator, The Woodsman, The Sea Inside, and possibly, if we can stomach it, The Phantom of the Opera.