george clooney Tagged Articles at Cinematical
The Movieman's Oscar Nomination Predictions: Actor/Actress
Filed under: Awards », Oscar Watch »
The supporting actors and actresses have been broken down. Percentages are pretty high on at least eight of the ten predicted to be announced next Tuesday morning. With ten more available acting slots, there are potentially 17 performances in the running to grab them. Good luck to all of them since it has practically been decided who the winners will be already.
THE LOCKS
Since 1998, every winner of the Screen Actors Guild Awards have been nominated for an Oscar. That makes things pretty easy, don't it? Congratulations to Jeff Bridges (Crazy Heart) and Sandra Bullock (The Blind Side) on their impending nominations. As with all, we will examine their chances to win the Oscar at a later date. Plenty of time for that. Since 2001, there have been 33 leading men and women who have been nominated from the following five groups: The BFCA, the Golden Globes, the Chicago Film Critics Association, the Screen Actors Guild and the BAFTAs. All 33 were nominated for an Oscar. This year there are five that fall into that illustrious category. One of them being Bridges. The other four are George Clooney (Up In The Air), Carey Mulligan (An Education), Gabourey Sidibe (Precious) and Meryl Streep (Julie & Julia)
THE LOCKS
Since 1998, every winner of the Screen Actors Guild Awards have been nominated for an Oscar. That makes things pretty easy, don't it? Congratulations to Jeff Bridges (Crazy Heart) and Sandra Bullock (The Blind Side) on their impending nominations. As with all, we will examine their chances to win the Oscar at a later date. Plenty of time for that. Since 2001, there have been 33 leading men and women who have been nominated from the following five groups: The BFCA, the Golden Globes, the Chicago Film Critics Association, the Screen Actors Guild and the BAFTAs. All 33 were nominated for an Oscar. This year there are five that fall into that illustrious category. One of them being Bridges. The other four are George Clooney (Up In The Air), Carey Mulligan (An Education), Gabourey Sidibe (Precious) and Meryl Streep (Julie & Julia)
Interview: Harrison Ford
Filed under: Fandom », Interviews »
It's not often that we get to interview a bona fide legend, but Harrison Ford qualifies and then some. As the star of two of the biggest movie franchises of all time, as well as the purveyor of some of the silver screen's most thrilling moments, Ford has earned his place among the biggest and best Hollywood has ever offered. These days, however, he seems interested in slightly more modest accomplishments, evidenced by Extraordinary Measures, a quiet little movie in which he plays an abrasive scientist who teams up with a desperate entrepreneur to find a cure for the disease that affects two of the entrepreneur's children.
That of course isn't to say that the film doesn't offer its own sort of spectacle, but that it's largely contained to emotion, rather than action. Cinematical recently sat down with Ford at the film's Los Angeles press day to discuss his participation in Extraordinary Measures. In addition to discussing the emotional dimensions of his cantankerous character, Ford reflected on the style and technique that's made him a household name, and offered a few observations about the state of the industry as we know it -- and the humble way in which he manages to maintain his status as a superstar.
Cinematical: While I was watching Extraordinary Measures, my first thought about your character was "this guy is going to have to melt a little by the end of the movie," but he is pretty consistently cantankerous. What to you was underneath all of that obstinacy?
Just How Often Does the NBR Predict Oscar Winners?
Filed under: Awards », Oscar Watch »
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By: Erik Childress
It's sad that every year the awards season is kicked off with the National Board of Review (see our post from yesterday for the complete list of winners). As unknown as the members of the MPAA or the Hollywood Foreign Press – and about as credible as serious-minded critics of film – we nevertheless entrust their choices to help steer our curiosity towards the eventual Oscar nominees. Christening this flying wasp yesterday with the announcement that Up In The Air has taken their prize for Best Picture of 2009, they can now await their RSVP from George Clooney, amongst others to their annual party. Which is what it's really all about for them. But if the Academy Awards have taught us anything, it's to respect the trends and traditions in place. Plus a few people who have seen only about a quarter of the films released this year could use a tip in the right direction.
Coming up tops is indeed Jason Reitman's Up In The Air, widely considered to be a frontrunner for this year's Best Picture honors at the Oscars. The film certainly has a leg up for a nomination with this win as 9 of the last 10 NBR winners have gone on to a nod. Quills was the lone holdout in 2000. But only three of their choices in that time (American Beauty, No Country for Old Men and Slumdog Millionaire) have jetted on to winning the big prize.
Review: Up in the Air
Filed under: Comedy », Drama », New Releases », Theatrical Reviews »
By: Eugene Novikov, reprinted from the Toronto Film Festival '09
Sometimes it seems like one of Hollywood's main goals is to make people without spouses and children feel really bad about themselves. If that sort of thing bothers you, I would recommend passing on Up in the Air, which is as strident about the notion that a life without a family is worthless as any movie I've ever seen. Fortunately, it is also brisk, funny, and not enslaved to genre conventions. Parts of the film, in fact, approach comic brilliance. The reason that the film's message-mongering doesn't grate, I think, is that we really do feel sorry for the protagonist – an obsessive frequent flier who begins to realize that his life is an empty, lonely shell of rationalizations and self-delusions.
In some respects, Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) approaches caricature: not only is he wifeless, childless and practically homeless – he has a barren studio in Omaha and spends 320 days a year on the road – but he fires people for a living and occasionally gives motivational speeches urging people to "empty their backpacks" and rid themselves of commitment. But there's a kernel of truth to him, in the sense that there is something compelling, almost romantic about transience. His world of luxury hotels and airline perks – and a hot frequent flier girlfriend (Vera Farmiga) with whom he sleeps with when their paths cross but who asks for nothing more – actually seems kind of cool.
Review: Fantastic Mr. Fox
Filed under: Animation », Comedy », Theatrical Reviews », 20th Century Fox », Family Films »
By Todd Gilchrist (reprint from 11/3/09 -- AFI Film Festival)
It's not hard to like any movie that uses the Beach Boys' music, but Wes Anderson makes it especially easy. As Hollywood's foremost purveyor of hipster drama, his pedigree as a reliable selector of appropriately wistful, poignant and all-around unforgettable songs is virtually unrivaled, but Fantastic Mr. Fox exceeds even the work of his earlier films, using "Heroes and Villains," and later, "I Get Around" as populist punctuation that manages to be both specifically relevant and substantively rousing.
As an animated opus, the film is by necessity his most controlled to date, a painstakingly-designed dollhouse where he no longer controls just the music, sets, and costumes, but the performers themselves. Ironically, however, it feels like his loosest as well - a gloriously unwieldy comedy of manners submerged in the minutiae of Anderson's madcap creativity. All of which makes Fantastic Mr. Fox a celebration both of its stop-motion medium and Anderson's aesthetic, while still managing to fully document the spectacular fun in original author Roald Dahl's daffy, distinctive imagination.
Jason Reitman's Interview Pie Chart
Filed under: Comedy », Drama », New Releases », Paramount », Fandom », Movie Marketing », George Clooney », Images »
Jason Reitman, whose next film Up in the Air comes out on December 4th, posted a very funny image on Twitter recently – a pie chart detailing the different things that people have asked him in recent interviews. The top three were about George Clooney (111 people), the economy (96 people), and his next project (78 people). The fourth is a little more confusing, as it just reads "Real People," so apparently 77 people asked him about real people. Maybe they wanted to know if the people being laid off in the movie were real people? Who's to say what goes through the murky depths of the mind of a journalist?
I humbly ask Jason Reitman to make a pie chart of his answers. Here's what I picture it to look like.
111 people: "Clooney is such a prankster! But he's also a great serious actor. He's the Cary Grant of our times. Sometimes we have moustache contests."
96 people: "The economy sucks. Seriously though, I've never been laid off, but if I had to be laid off, I'd hope George Clooney would do it."
78 people: "My next project will be with George Clooney. Actually, it will be catching up on all the sleep I lost talking to you people and answering the same damn questions over and over again."
In one jpeg, Reitman manages to sum up the exhausting paces that filmmakers, actors, musicians, et al are put through to get their names and faces and projects out there, the laziness of some journalists, and the terror that faces every journalist that wants to be good at what they do and engender an interesting discussion that is hopefully pleasant and/or illuminating (but at the very least not boring) for everyone involved, including the reader.
If you could ask Jason Reitman anything, what would it be?
'Up in the Air' Songs Pulled from Oscar Race
Filed under: Comedy », Drama », Awards », Paramount », RumorMonger », Oscar Watch »
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Well, it's November, which means the awards contenders are steadily coming out of the woodwork, and just as we have the Academy Awards to look forward to, we also have their fine print to tolerate. The first of this year's disqualifications naturally come from the music end of things, the same category that didn't see fit to honor the tremendous original scores composed for The Dark Knight last year and There Will Be Blood the year before that.According to Kris Tapley over at In Contention, both "Up in the Air" and "Help Yourself" from Jason Reitman's Up in the Air have been pulled out of the Best Original Song race. The former was written by Kevin Renick before he met Reitman (the song is presented in the film as it was presented to the filmmaker, with homemade introduction and all), not to mention that it comes halfway into the credits when only the first song over them can qualify. (Really, AMPAS?)
And a portion of the latter had existed earlier in Sad Brad Smith's career and thus means the song itself was not created in full for the film. It's an earnest and catchy tune, used prominently in the trailers and well in the film (and now available on iTunes, cough), but it now looks like those are two more slots left to be dominated by Disney's latest...
Review: The Men Who Stare at Goats
Filed under: New Releases », Theatrical Reviews », George Clooney »
We're told at the beginning of The Men Who Stare at Goats that "more of this is true than you would believe." But the story of the U.S. Army's attempts to harness psychic powers to create super-soldiers is so bizarre it almost HAS to be true, in accordance with the "how could anyone make this up?" principle. In fact, I believe more of this admittedly fictionalized story than I do of The Fourth Kind, which claims to be 100 percent true. Surely there's a lesson in there.
Based on Jon Ronson's nonfiction book, The Men Who Stare at Goats stars Ewan McGregor as Bob Wilton, a journalist covering the Iraq War in 2003. Bob meets a man named Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), a private contractor with an unusual past: He claims to have worked for the government as a psychic spy. Bob once met a man, back home in Michigan (played by Stephen Root), who made the same claims, and who named Lyn Cassady as one of his colleagues.
You can see why the military would be interested in psychic spying. Surveillance is a lot less dangerous when you can do it entirely with your mind, rather than having to actually sneak up and eavesdrop on people. And if we could harness things like telekinesis, well, forget about it! We'd beat the Russkies for sure!
A Peek at George Clooney Voicing 'Fantastic Mr. Fox'
Filed under: Action », Animation », Comedy », Fox Searchlight », Family Films », George Clooney », Trailers and Clips »
Yahoo! has posted an incredibly cool video of George Clooney acting out his role as Mr. Fox in the freakin' adorable Fantastic Mr. Fox. The video shows cool side-by-side comparisons of Clooney acting out different scenes on a farm with costar Wallace Wolodarsky, who voices loopy sidekick Kylie, as well as just running around pretending to be Mr. Fox, down to rolling around on the ground and doing his super cool whistle. This behind-the-scenes peek at Mr. Fox also offers mini-interviews with director Wes Anderson, producer Allison Abbate, and Bill Murray (Badger) about working with Clooney on the film. The funniest part shows an argument between Mr. Fox and Badger, which involves growling and swiping, split-screened against the actors themselves doing the voices in an office.
As Abbate notes, "There couldn't be a more perfect Mr. Fox, because he has the Cary Grant suave, debonair sparkle where he can talk his way out of any situation, which is so our Mr. Fox character. He's just got a great voice."
Clooney's got a rather full docket this season, with The Men Who Stare at Goats coming out this week, Fantastic Mr. Fox coming out at the end of November, and Up in the Air out on Christmas day.
Click through to see the video itself, then let us know which Clooney feature you're going to be lining up for at the theaters this season, by cuss!
Discuss: Which Trailers Are You Sick Of?
Filed under: Action », Comedy », Drama », Mystery & Suspense », Paramount », Focus Features », George Clooney », Trailers and Clips »
I'm grateful for this Friday, because that's the day that The Men Who Stare at Goats comes out and I can stop seeing its trailer relentlessly attached to anything and everything I see (and given that I try to see most anything and everything out there, it's really only a 'me' problem, I suppose). One night, I had myself a triple feature and saw the preview not one, not two, but three times; as a pal put it, he had "more than a feeling" that I was getting sick of it.Before that, it was a summer of Taking Woodstock time and time again, and it would already seem that Shutter Island's move to February will insure that I'll be sitting there, trying to piece the thing together for the next three months when not perfecting my New England Leo impersonation.
So, whether currently or in your own formative years, what trailers have you been just absolutely burnt out on? Did you and your friends quote along with them as they played? Were you actually ever turned off from seeing a film because you had it advertised to you too much? Come on, let it all out...
Tom Cruise and J.J. Abrams Reunite for 'Mission Impossible 4'
'Big Top Pee-Wee': The Original Benicio Del Toro Wolfman
Spin-ematical: New on DVD and Blu-ray for 2/9
Watch This: Brilliant Oscar-Nominated Short 'Logorama'
Chris Nolan to Lead 'Superman' Reboot!?
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