Saturday, April 12, 2008

WE ACCIDENTALLY REPLACED YOUR HEART WITH A BAKED POTATO. YOU HAVE ABOUT THREE SECONDS TO LIVE: George Clooney is probably America's most interesting movie star, so conscious of his playing the role of "celebrity" and using it in a variety of different ways, and Ian Parker's profile of him in the latest New Yorker is certainly worth your time:
Clooney is America’s national flirt, a pitchman on talk shows and red carpets who, against the background hum of the world’s lust and envy, is lightly ironic, clever, and self-deprecating, with furrowed brow and bobbing head, and a gyration in the lower jaw suggesting something being moved around under his tongue. This busy charm — a man on his way out to a party, feeling pretty good about his hair — was profitably packaged in “Ocean’s Eleven” and its two sequels, films that, more than anything, seemed to be oblique views of the A-list esprit de corps, real or imagined, that went into making them; they were fictions yearning to be “making of” documentaries. (Together, they earned more than a billion dollars.) And that charm was largely withheld, to effect, in the downbeat roles that Clooney took in “Syriana” and “Michael Clayton.” There he played hurting, unanchored men. In both cases, he was assigned a romantic partner—played by Greta Scacchi and Jennifer Ehle, in turn — who was edited out of the movie, with Clooney’s blessing. (Referring to his “Clayton” character — a back-room fixer in a New York law firm—Clooney explained to me, “If he’s loved, then he has a buffer, and somehow it isn’t as awful.”)
I know the reviews have been mixed -- is "Leatherheads" worth seeing?

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