“CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN” IS ALWAYS A GLASS MOSTLY EMPTY: ON “THE IDES OF MARCH”

By Brandon Harris

Note: the following piece contains spoilers.

One time in my fleeting youth, I encountered George Clooney in the Warner Brothers screening room on 53rd Street after a National Board of Review screening of Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German. This is before I had, despite my ongoing poverty and lack of renown, spent ample time around movie stars and the merely sort-of famous at sundry locations, both foreign and domestic, becoming relatively at ease in their strange company. I still often felt not unlike the protagonist of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, as he follows William Holden through a blustery New Orleans afternoon, sensing some protean, dynamic aura from a man he had only seen as light reflected off of (or emanating from) the movie screen. I nervously approached Clooney, as he began to exit the screening room’s staging area after enduring a surely exhausting series of boredom-inducing exchanges with the tired old rich ladies that lunch who make up the NBR’s rank and file. “Cincinnati boy who’s done the town proud,” I said. He stopped and smiled at me. “True enough. I spent most of my time in Northern Kentucky though… Are you from Cincinnati?” he asked, before we briefly talked about high schools (He wished he had played football for Moeller), neighborhoods (“Barry Larkin is from Silverton, right?” he tried to remember) and favorite chili parlors (Ft. Thomas, Kentucky Skyline, he said), his handlers waiting awkwardly on either side to usher him out the door. He parted with a handshake and quickly disappeared into the gray Manhattan day, the whole exchange lasting perhaps two minutes and feeling like an hour.

I can’t help but recall that moment after catching Clooney’s The Ides of March at the 7th annual Zurich Film Festival. A film about the political and moral machinations behind Ohio’s Democratic Presidential Primary in some unnamed year after the beginning of the Iraq War (but with no mention of the financial crisis), when clearly a black man being a potential Vice President let alone #1 isn’t such a big deal, The Ides of March is at once deeply … Read the rest

“FANTASTIC MR. FOX”

By Jason Guerrasio

Not often does a director with an indie pedigree seamlessly segue into subject matter like… children’s literature.

But in many ways Wes Anderson has been training for the moment to use his hyper-stylized, extremely detailed storytelling to make a film like Fantastic Mr. Fox. Based on the Roald Dohl classic, Anderson (and co-writer, Noah Baumbach) use the book’s premise of a sly fox who outwits his farmer neighbors to steal their food to create a film that dazzles children and adults alike with it’s Andersonesque storytelling and stop-motion animation.

When we meet Fox — voiced by George Clooney with motormouth charm (similar to his character Everett in O, Brother Where Art Thou?) — his life is about to change as he learns he’s going to become a father and swears to his wife (Meryl Streep) that he will give up robbing chickens from coops and other dangerous stunts, though it’s obvious he still has a love for it.

Years pass and Fox — dressed in an Anderson staple: a tweed jacket — is going through a mid-life crisis. Unsatisfied as a columnist for the local paper, he’s obsessed to live in the big tree on a hill and his itch to rob the local farmers, Boggis, Bunce and Bean is becoming unbearable.

With his loyal friend/superintendent Kyle (Wallace Wolodarsky), an opossum, by his side, the two head out to rob the farmers. While back home, Fox’s son Ash (Jason Schwartzman) has to deal with being less fantastic as his father, and it things get worse when his much more athletically gifted and better looking cousin Kristofferson (Eric Anderson) moves in with them. As Fox continues to have a blast robbing the farmers, things get serious when Boggis, Bunce and Bean set a trap to kill Fox, but are only able to shoot off his tale. Family squabbles are put aside as the Fox’s home gets destroyed by the farmers over the music of the Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man” and the Fox’s and their friends (including Bill Murry as their attorney Badger) dig to find safety, and plan … Read the rest

ALEXANDER PAYNE’S “THE DESCENDANTS” BEGINS SHOOTING

By Jason Guerrasio

Six years after making the cross-over hit Sideways, Alexander Payne has begun production on his next film, The Descendants.

Announced by Fox Searchlight, the film, based on Kaui Hart Hemmings‘s novel, started principal photography today in Hawaii. The film stars George Clooney as, according to the release, an indifferent husband and father of two girls, who is forced to re-examine his past and embrace his future when his wife suffers a boating accident off of Waikiki.

Also starting are Judy Greer, Beau Bridges, Matthew Lillard, Robert Forster, Shailene Woodley, Mary Birdsong, Nick Krause and Amara Miller.

Surprisingly, Taylor is not co-writing the script with Payne (the two have shared screenwriting credit on all of Payne’s features since 1996′s Citizen Ruth and took home an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for Sideways) but will be on as a producer. This time around Payne has writing credit with actors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash.

Since Sideways, Payne directed one of the shorts in 2006′s Paris, je t’aime (the great finale to the film starring Margo Martindale as a tourist) and directed the pilot to HBO’s Hung, which he also executive produced. He also executive produced Tamara Jenkins‘s The Savages.… Read the rest

IF ON A WINTER’S NIGHT A TRAVELER: JASON REITMAN’S UP IN THE AIR |
By Scott Macaulay

Leading up to the Oscars on March 7, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Scott Macaulay interviewed Up in the Air co-writer-director Jason Reitman for our Fall 2009 issue. Up in the Air is nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Reitman), Best Actor (George Clooney), Best Supporting Actress (Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner).

Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air, which debuted at Telluride and went on to critical acclaim at Toronto, is a perfect film to watch at a film festival. It stars George Clooney as Ryan Bingham, a frequent-flying corporate downsizer whose Zen of life consists of collecting miles, amassing perks at his favorite hotel chains, crashing parties with great hors d’oeuvres spreads, and the serendipities of chance, no-commitment hookups. Indeed, one colleague said to me at Toronto after seeing the film, “I don’t know whether I liked the film because it’s a good film or because I think I’m that guy.”

But if the above makes Up in the Air sound like a light-hearted boomer comedy, a Wedding Crashers of the skies, that’s far from the case. Bingham’s job as he jets from city to city is to fire people. Lots of people. He’s brought in to do mass layoffs, and while his smooth talk applies a psychological salve to the destroyed egos of the suddenly unemployed, neither Bingham nor Reitman are under any pretenses that it’s anything more than a temporary Band-Aid intended to keep them from falling part before they leave the room. One of the astonishing things about Up in the Air is the clear eye it casts on 2009 America and a workforce undergoing the shock treatment of recession, outsourcing and the creative destruction of so many of our traditional industries. Reitman cast real fired workers in his film and what might have become a casting stunt is quite the opposite: Their voices are honest ones that humanize the employment indices that scroll along the bottom of our flat … Read the rest

THE JIGSAW MAN By Howard Feinstein

Leading up to the Oscars on Feb. 24, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Howard Feinstein interviewed I’m Not There co-writer-director Todd Hanyes for the Fall ’07 issue. I’m Not There is nominated for Best Supporting Actress (Cate Blanchett).

Todd Haynes’s first film, a 1985 student short called Assassins: A Film Concerning Rimbaud, focused in a manner both engaging and Brechtian on the anarchistic French poet who scandalized the bourgeoisie in 19th-century Paris and London. Haynes was studying semiotics and art at Brown, and it’s not by chance that he is one of the few directors working today whose gorgeous images are wrapped in real but sometimes indefinable meaning.

Now 22 years later in his magnificent film essay on Bob Dylan, I’m Not There, he casts the English actor Ben Whishaw as a Rimbaudesque incarnation of the chameleon-like composer-singer, a poète maudit whose oblique responses to an unseen interrogator intentionally sidestep direct discourse. Whishaw’s Arthur (the poet’s actual first name) is a rebel living outside the system, much as Dylan, in all his incarnations, has managed to do since the late 1950s. The musician also went through a phase (following his political activism period) of doling out tangential, sometimes nonsensical, responses to queries. You can read some of these in Nat Hentoff’s revealing interview with the usually guarded Dylan in the February 1966 issue of Playboy (http://www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/66-jan.htm), which Haynes kindly lead me to. A sample:

DYLAN: My older songs, to say the least, were about nothing. The newer ones are about the same nothing — only as seen inside a bigger thing, perhaps called the nowhere. But this is all very constipated. I do know what my songs are about.

PLAYBOY: And what’s that?

DYLAN: Oh, some are about four minutes, some are about five, and some, believe it or not, are about 11 or 12.

PLAYBOY: Can’t you be a bit more informative?

DYLAN: Nope.

But then, all of Haynes’s cinematic studies have been about people who fall outside … Read the rest

TONY GILROY, “MICHAEL CLAYTON”

By Nick Dawson

TOM WILKINSON AND GEORGE CLOONEY IN TONY GILROY’S MICHAEL CLAYTON. COURTESY WARNER BROS. PICTURES.

As a Hollywood screenwriter, Tony Gilroy has brought an insistent energy and intelligence to the projects he has worked on, so it was a totally logical step that he should progress to becoming a director. New York native Gilroy grew up with writing and the movies in his veins, as he is the son of Frank D. Gilroy, the Pulitzer prize-winning writer and filmmaker, possibly best known for writing The Only Game in Town (1970), starring Elizabeth Taylor and Warren Beatty. Gilroy Jr. debuted with the superior ice-skating romcom The Cutting Edge (1992) before embarking on a creative collaboration with director Taylor Hackford which produced Dolores Claiborne (1995), The Devil’s Advocate (1997) and Proof of Life (2000). Gilroy is most famous as the architect of the Bourne trilogy, the superlative spy thrillers starring Matt Damon, which are ostensibly based on novels by the late Robert Ludlum, but are in fact almost entirely Gilroy’s own creation.

Compared to the Bourne movies, Gilroy’s debut film as director is a distinct change of pace: Michael Clayton is that most rare of movies, a smart, thoughtful thriller that takes its time. The film revolves around the eponymous main character (George Clooney), a “fixer” at a big New York law firm who is forced to question the path he has taken in life when his company’s most brilliant lawyer (Tom Wilkinson) goes insane while defending a large and unscrupulous multinational peddling fatal pesticides to farmers. Beautifully written and directed with deft confidence, Michael Clayton is compelling not only because of its tight plotting but because Gilroy fully acquaints us with his characters so that, unlike in a conventional thriller, their problems, tribulations and mistakes are utterly affecting.

Filmmaker spoke to Gilroy about working as a writer for hire, the unexpected success of the Bourne movies, and the night he spent choosing machine guns with Russell Crowe.

DIRECTOR TONY GILROY TALKS WITH GEORGE CLOONEY DURING THE SHOOTING OF MICHAEL CLAYTON. COURTESY WARNER BROS. PICTURES.

Filmmaker: The Cutting Edge was … Read the rest

“A MUST-SEE FOR THINKING AUDIENCES”

By Scott Macaulay

I am very excited to see Steve Gaghan’s Syriana, which we tried to nab an early screening of for Matt Ross’s piece on George Clooney in the current issue of Filmmaker. But, they were editing down to the wire so we were simply intrigued and hopeful by the trailer like everyone else. Now, Todd McCarthy promisingly weighs in in the subscription-only Variety:

“Those complaining that Hollywood never turns out films of topical or political substance are likely to embrace Syriana, a weighty and deeply intriguing look at the many-tentacled beast that is the international oil industry. Wide-ranging and restlessly probing, Stephen Gaghan’s second directorial effort uses the same mosaic storytelling technique as in his Oscar-winning screenplay for Traffic to create a revealing portrait of diverse forces contributing to global tension, particularly concerning the Middle East. Terse, understated and sometimes confusing, this is the rare film that could actually benefit from being significantly longer. Warner Bros. release will become a must-see for thinking audiences and make inroads with the wider public thanks to star names and certain critical acclaim.”

Roger Friedman on the Fox News site has also registered his surprisingly positive thoughts. “A thriller for people who read the Financial Times,” he calls it. Put that on the poster, Warner Brothers!

Here’s Friedman: “Syriana is not always easy to follow. Sometimes I felt like I needed a study guide. But Gaghan has made such an engrossing film that you can actually suspend disbelief and just go with it. Once you’re in, you’re in, too. I don’t know if it will make money or be a Best Picture candidate, but Syriana is the most intelligent movie of 2005 so far, and incredibly satisfying.”… Read the rest

THE GRASS IS ALWAYS GREENER

By Scott Macaulay

I know as a blogger I’m supposed to ferret out obscure links from publications you’ve never heard of. But here I go again — two links in a row from the New York Times. Still, if you’re a producer you’ll be interested in this sobering piece about Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney’s Section 8, proving that the producing biz is a tough one even if you’re an Oscar-winning director and matinee-idol movie star.

An excerpt:

“[Says Soderbergh,] ‘I think you could make an argument that it is not important to have too much taste as a producer if you are working for a large company. It’s hard to find commercial stuff that doesn’t make you feel bad in the morning.’

As such, producing quality movies, which means securing financing, overseeing scripts and coddling the insecure actress or director on set when needed, has proved a hard education for the two men. ‘There is the weird paradox of having a company like this if the personalities are like mine and George’s,’ added Mr. Soderbergh. ‘If you are going to do something and do it well, you have to apply yourself. But we both have day jobs. It has become overwhelming. We both talk about how can we sustain it. It’s just such a mountain of work.’”

The piece goes on to talk about the financial risks involved in producing and gives another viewpoint on the much-discussed firing of writer/director Ted Griffin from Warner’s Untitled Ted Griffin project. (“‘It is a scarlet letter for the company,’ Soderbergh said. ‘It shouldn’t have happened…’)… Read the rest