Astute cinemagoers will no doubt have noted (as have I) the glaring error in the title Ocean's Thirteen. There is, as any averagely educated cineaste will tell you, just one ocean - a global ocean.
However, to be scrupulously fair to director Steven Soderbergh, an American, the major oceanic divisions are defined in part by the continents, various archipelagos and other criteria.
These divisions are (in descending order of size) the Pacific Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, the Indian Ocean, the Southern Ocean (which is sometimes subsumed as the southern portions of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans), the Arctic Ocean and last - and unfortunately least - Danny Ocean, played by George Clooney, husband of skiffle star Rosemary.
Smaller regions of the oceans are called seas, gulfs or bays and - take note, Steven, there are also some smaller bodies of saltwater that are totally landlocked and not interconnected with the global or World Ocean.
Simple oceanographic blunders are to be expected from film-makers (how I chortled at Alfred Hitchcock's mistaken concept of saline currents in Vertigo - a schoolboy error) but an oversight of this magnitude simple cannot be allowed to pass without comment.
It's not as if Soderbergh is a newcomer to oceanic misconconceptions - Ocean's 11 & 12 were both named on the basis of flawed data. It's about time he took seriously the concept of the hydrosphere.
Anyway, Ocean's Thirteen concerns the strangely landlocked activities of a group of (time out - ed)....
Hahahhahahahahahaha...
Posted by: Mike Taylor | June 11, 2007 at 09:26 AM