Thursday, December 29th, 2011
The Descendants
The Descendants is an escape to the ordinary. Alexander Payne’s first feature since Sideways is also his second since leaving Nebraska; it proves afresh that you can take the director out of Omaha, but you can’t take Omaha out of the director. At least that’s the message encoded in the opening monologue—one I was happy [...]
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Thursday, October 13th, 2011
The Ides of March
What if George Clooney really parlayed his star power into the sphere of politics? Would the opposing parties occupying Wall Street both decamp? Or would the dreamboat be swift-boated for sinking the ship in The Perfect Storm faster than Bill O’Reilly can cry “Hollywood élite”? (The star’s already been bested at the box-office by the [...]
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Thursday, September 9th, 2010
The American
With a frosty beard, George Clooney looks like Sean Connery. In sunglasses, he resembles my dad. (Weird, right?) But, in The American—scripted by Rowan Joffe from a Martin Booth novel, and directed by Anton Corbijn—he’s playing Steve McQueen. They may as well have cast McQueen, too—and made the movie while he was alive. It’s a [...]
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Thursday, March 4th, 2010
And the Winner for the Best Picture of 2009 is . . .
Paid, as I am, merely by my satisfaction in writing and yours in reading, I don’t fritter my hours away compiling the best-of lists that the pros—much to us amateurs’ collective pleasure—slave away at, or the sort of star-studded, red-carpet reportage that asks the celebutantes who they’re wearing. (Those queries make me wish that Buffalo [...]
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Thursday, December 31st, 2009
Up in the Air
More than a century has passed since the Wright Brothers first took off from Kitty Hawk, but flying still retains some of its romantic appeal. Nothing represents freedom better than defying gravity, hurtling hundreds of miles per hour across the sky. The vistas turn towns into toys as you drift through those polymorphous clouds. Life [...]