George Clooney is a rare breed, a one-name film star. Mention “George” and everyone knows who you’re talking about.
He’s headlined a handful of films dating all the way back to when there was a Clinton in the White House that raked in north of $100 million. Since leaving the television show ER in 1999, he’s released two movies a year on average, including this weekend’s Money Monster, a thriller about the host of a financial advice show held hostage on live TV by an investor who lost everything.
Some of his films have been successful, others not, but it’s clear Clooney doesn’t aspire to be a blockbuster star. Perhaps it’s because George is, as Time called him, “the last movie star,” that he appears determined to smash what that kind of stardom means. By lending his name to offbeat movies he deconstructs the mechanism of superstardom.
George steers his career toward character driven pieces, often at the expense of giant box office numbers. And while the fabric of his fame may fray around the edges from time to time — he’s as susceptible to box office vagaries as anyone — he stays busy, winning Oscars, producing movies like August: Osage County and acting as pitchman for everyone from Fiat to Martini vermouth.
“I’m very aware of the fact that if not for a Thursday night time slot on ER, I wouldn’t have this career,” he once said, “so I’m going to push the limits as much as I can.”
From kid flicks to period dramas and political satire Clooney has done just that.
Loosely based on a Roald Dahl story, the stop-motion animated Fantastic Mr. Fox sees Clooney as a smooth-talking fox that returns to a life of crime after buying a tree house he can’t afford. Clooney brings charm, wit and warmth to an unpredictable character, smooth one minute, a wild animal the next.
Clooney also starred in The Good German, a tribute to 1940s cinema shot with technology from the golden age of Hollywood — the same lenses, the same atmospheric lighting, the same rat-a-tat-tat style of dialogue, the same everything. It’s a retro-looking film made with twenty-first century creative freedom. Clooney, as an American military journalist covering the Potsdam Conference in post-war Berlin, and co-star Cate Blanchett look like golden age movie stars but behave more like Brat Packers.
Strangest of all is The Men Who Stare at Goats, the best movie with the worst name on Clooney’s resume. He plays a psychic soldier in this screwball satire about the state of modern warfare. Its an absurdist film, filled with memorable images — Clooney staring down a goat, enlisted men doing the Watusi and a montage of Jeff Bridges embarking on a journey of enlightenment — where no joke is too broad or too barbed.
George is so artistically eclectic he even disowns one of his biggest hits. “I always apologize for Batman!” he says of the ludicrous Batman & Robin.
Richard and “Canada AM” host Beverly Thomson kick around the weekend’s big releases, the George Clooney – Julia Roberts thriller “Money Monster,” the lusty and lurid “A Bigger Splash” and the Scottish drama “Sunset Song.”
George Clooney looks like the kind of guy you could trust. Older, experienced, he seems trustworthy, brimming with advice you could take to the bank. I mean, if you’d buy Nespresso coffee because he told you to, why wouldn’t you take financial guidance as well? A new movie, “Money Monster,” uses that quality, Clooney’s charisma, as the cornerstone of a thriller about misplaced trust, mislaid money and attempted murder.
Clooney is Lee Gates, a loudmouth financial advisor who bellows about investing in stocks and saving for retirement on a live television show called “Money Monster.” Think “Mad Money with Jim Cramer” with just enough details changed to avoid lawsuits and you get the idea. Gates is a self-styled Wiz of Wall Street, a financial shock jock who starts each of his shows with a wild dance number.
Just as his Friday night broadcast is getting underway Kyle Budwell (Jack O’Connell), a jilted investor invades the studio and takes Gates, his crew, and producer Patty (Julia Roberts) hostage live on air. “Turn those cameras back on I’m going to shoot him in his head!” He trusted the TV oracle only to lose everything when a high-frequency trading company Gates endorsed called Ibis Clear Capital lost $800 million overnight, tanking the stock market. Kyle is convinced that Wall Street banks are stealing our money and our country and Gates is the emblem of the theft. “I may be the one with the gun,” he says, “but I’m not the criminal here.”
In real time over the next hour Gates learns the human cost of his actions as Kyle as the cameras broadcast every minute to a worldwide audience of millions.
Like the volatile stock market Gates chronicles on his fictional show, “Money Monster’s” story takes many unexpected twist and turns. Unexpected and, as the story unfolds, preposterous. Unable to decide whether it is an exposé of Wall Street’s dirty dealings—much of it breathes the same air as “The Big Short” minus the bubble baths and Anthony Bourdain—a humanist thriller or a comment on the remove we feel watching tragedy through a screen—“If Lee survives we got to get him on the show,” chirps one chat show host watching the action on a monitor—it blends all its ideas into a mushy concoction that is neither one thing or the other. Director Jodie Foster relies on clichés to move the story forward rather than trusting the ideas and rich vein of social commentary that could have been mined from the material. You can’t help but wonder what Sidney Lumet might have done with the same story.
Clooney does the best he can with a script that forces him to behave like a caricature. He’s believable as the cocky on-air host, less so when he has to transform that character into a vulnerable, real human being.
Roberts is trapped in a control room, barking orders through a headset for most of the film, bringing whatever charm there is to be had from a part that is essentially a conduit for information and she tries to unravel the film’s core “where did the money go?” mystery.
The third part of the triumvirate, O’Connell, plays confused/mad quite well, but again is saddled with a role that is dragged down with repetition.
Some of the supporting actors fare a little better, particularly Caitriona Balfe as the CCO who wants to do the right thing, if only she knew what the right thing was and Christopher Denham as a producer who will do anything to please Gates.
“This isn’t good Lee,” Patti says about the action unfolding in the studio. She could have been talking about “Money Monster,” a movie that feels like a missed opportunity to mix intimate life and death drama with an indictment of the wheelers and dealers who play hardball with our money.
Richard talks Cannes and Xavier Dolan with the Canadian Press.
“I think he’s got probably a pretty good shot certainly at being taken seriously as a contender, even thought he’s up against the who’s who of international filmmakers like Ken Loach, Pedro Almodovar, Paul Verhoeven, Sean Penn,” says Toronto-based film reviewer Richard Crouse.
“There are a lot of people here that are working at a very high level, but I’d suggest that Xavier Dolan is working at just as high a level.”
Inside Man is director Spike Lee’s take on a heist film, and predictably he puts his own spin on an old genre and offers up something unpredictable. It’s like an episode of Law and Order minus the order.
Lee forgoes the usual set-up for movies like this and gets us directly into the action. Five minutes into the movie we are inside the bank and the bad guys—led by the charismatic Clive Owen—have already taken control, closing off the building and taking hostages. On the outside a team of detectives led by Spike Lee regular Denzel Washington—they’ve made four movies together—tries to keep the situation under control.
It sounds rather standard, but Lee crafts a story in which the moral compass can’t find true north, and the good guys aren’t always good and maybe the bad guys aren’t as bad as they seem.
Also unexpected for a thriller of this kind is how much humor Washington and Owen bring to their roles. Their conversations crackle with sharp one-liners that diffuse some of the tension of the story.
In one effective scene Owen spends some time with the youngest hostage as the street-wise kid plays with a violent videogame on his PSP. Owen inspects the game that includes drive-by shootings, stabbings and most outrageously, a hand grenade stuffed into the mouth of a pedestrian. As the videogame character’s head explodes Owen says, “I’ll take you back to your Father. I think should have a word with him about that game.” It’s a humorous moment, but one also laden with social comment. In earlier films Lee has employed a heavier hand when trying to get his message across, but it seems he has learned that a spoonful of sugar can sometimes more effectively help the medicine go down.
Inside Man will keep you guessing until the end, and maybe even after you leave the theatre. Lee chooses not to tie up all the loose ends, and the film is more intriguing because of it.
Nim’s Island is a fantasy film aimed at the under ten crowd. Based on the popular Wendy Orr kid-lit novel of the same name, it is a gentle fantasy-adventure story featuring an all-star cast including Jodie Foster, Gerard Butler and Abigail Breslin.
Nim (Breslin) is an 11-year-old who lives with her marine biologist father Jack (Gerard Butler) on an uncharted Pacific island. They are the Swiss Family Robinson for a new generation. When she isn’t dancing or playing soccer with best friend, a sea lion, she passes the time reading adventure novels about a fictional character named Alex Rover written by a phobic San Francisco author also named Alexandra Rover (Jodie Foster). When Jack is lost at sea, abandoning Nim on the lonely island, she turns to the only person she thinks can help—her heroine Alex. Thinking she is e-mailing her hero she actually is in touch with the neurotic author who drops everything to come to the rescue. As they work together to find Jack they overcome their fears and Alex becomes the mom Nim never had.
Nim’s Island will likely entertain young girls born after 1998 but may be a tough sell for anyone over the age of ten. Bogged down by bad dialogue, lame action and blatant product placement—Apple Computers anyone?—the whole thing feels lackluster despite the efforts of the cast.
Abigail Breslin sparkles in the lead role, but doesn’t have the depth of personality she usually shows while Jodie Foster gives her worst performance to date. She’s a great actress but her efforts to inject some life into the proceedings fall flat as she proves once and for all that she has no gift for slapstick. Butler fares best of all in a double role that is both charming and fun.
Nim’s Island is an unremarkable movie that does have good values for kids but suffers from a predictable story and a misguided performance from Foster.
The title sounds ripped from the headlines, but is actually from a 1994 novel by the late Chris Fuhrman, who died of cancer before the book was released. The story centers around a group of teenaged boys who attend Catholic school. Their ringleader Tim (Kieran Culkin) is a prankster who schemes to get revenge on Sister Assumpta (Jody Foster), the joyless, strict nun with a prosthetic leg. They create a “blasphemous” comic book, and plan to kidnap a cougar from the zoo to give her a fright. The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys is a darkly comic, touching coming-of-age story that could have turned into by-the-book teenage drivel, but is rescued by the performances of Kieran Culkin, Emile Hirsch and Jena Malone and some very cool animation by Spawn creator Todd McFarlane.
Stand aside Oprah, Jodie Foster must be the most powerful woman in Hollywood. Possibly in all the world. Not only did she get The Beaver, a difficult script, long thought to be brilliant but unfilmable, to the big screen but then got the movie released in spite of her star, Mel Gibson turning into a public relations nightmare.
Gibson’s recent notoriety threatened to derail the film—three release dates have come and gone—but Foster fostered on, and the movie, about a depressed man who communicates through a beaver puppet hits theatres this weekend.
In a recent sit down in Toronto I asked Foster if Gibson’s baggage would prevent her from working with him again. The two have been friends since meeting on the set of 1994’s Maverick.
“I would work with Mel Gibson every day of my life if I could,” she said without hesitation. “He is the most beloved and easiest guy I have ever worked with. He is the least neurotic actor I’ve ever worked with and incredibly inspiring to work with.”
She goes on to call him “one of our greatest American directors” and says that whenever she sees him she asks, “Don’t you have a part in your Viking movie for a little blonde girl that’s about five foot three?”
Gibson and Foster came to The Beaver after it had languished on the Hollywood Black List, a compendium of great unproduced scripts that has featured titles like Juno and Lars and the Real Girl. The director – actor combo of Steve Carrell and Jay Roach considered making it but passed the script along to Foster instead.
“I can only imagine it would have been a very different film with them,” she says, “maybe a fantastic movie as well. There’s many ways of treating this story. When I read it I was just so moved by the drama of it. I warned everybody up front, ‘I just want you to know, for me, this is a drama. It needs to be moving and we need to work backwards from there.’
“In some ways we had to curtail a lot of the lighter sides and really pull down the comedy.”
She says several scenes were left on the cutting room floor because they were too funny.
“The great professional challenge of this film was trying to figure out the tone. It is a tone that is all over the place. It is light in the beginning and little by little turns darker and you kind of have to embrace that. It’s also a film that is chatty and witty and has a strong intellectual side and yet it is a very raw and primitive film as well.”
The Beaver is a passion project for Foster who says as a director she can’t work on anything she doesn’t feel in her gut.
“Just as you are well cast for certain roles,” she says, “you’re well cast as a director for certain roles. What a director has to do is wake up at three o’clock in the morning and say, ‘I’ve got an idea!’ I don’t know how you do that in a buddy cop movie about Martians. I don’t have any ideas unless I’m inspired. Unless I have an emotional connection to the material I know my limitations. I know that as a director that’s what I bring to the table. I don’t have any interest in doing a big event release CGI movie. The good news is I don’t really have to because I have another identity as an actor.”
“Well,” I say, stating the obvious to the most powerful woman in the room, “you’re Jodie Foster.”
