Leatherheads
Directed by George Clooney
Starring George Clooney,
Renee Zellweger, John Krasinski, Wayne Duvall, Jonathan Pryce
Universal Pictures
Rated PG-13
Release Date: April 4, 2008

Leatherheads: Early Football Follies

“Oh, oh, the medals. Well, I just wore those to get off the train. I suppose I shouldn’t have.” —Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith from Hail The Conquering Hero

“You’d be surprised about what you can get, if you ask for it the right way.” —Jack Foley from Out Of Sight

“I’m fascinated by that creature. Richer than me? Well, she deserves every penny. And now she’s single again. Excuse me.” —Miles Massey from Intolerable Cruelty

George Clooney has ingratiated himself with audiences since Steven Soderbergh’s Out Of Sight. E.R. made him a household name, but success on the big screen was elusive for the most part. I thought he was good in One Fine Day and he was having fun with everyone else in From Dusk Till Dawn, but it was not until 1998 that Clooney found the perfect role. Soderbergh needed a hit and Clooney needed a hit. They needed each other. Out Of Sight marked the arrival of George Clooney as a movie star. He nailed the part of Jack Foley while having great chemistry with Jennifer Lopez’s Karen Sisco; the film remains one of the best things Jennifer Lopez has ever done. Since Out Of Sight, Clooney has had a large string of great and interesting roles– Three Kings, the Ocean’s Eleven films, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, The Perfect Storm, Intolerable Cruelty, Syriana, and Michael Clayton. He is so likable that he manages to make us sit through the lesser Soderbergh collaborations like Solaris and The Good German — the films may not be that good, but we are transfixed by his performances. He is the closest thing we have to the old Hollywood stars like Clark Gable and Cary Grant. He has a keen sensibility for picking serious and comic roles. He not only acts but he directs as well — Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind and Good Night and Good Luck are not films directed by a pretty boy. George Clooney knows his stuff. He has political ideas like Warren Beatty before him; he manages to put these thoughts into his films and he makes them work without hitting us over the head with them.

Stop-Loss
Directed by Kimberly Peirce
Starring Ryan Phillippe, Abbie Cornish, Channing Tatum, Timothy Olyphant, Ciaran Hinds
Paramount Pictures, MTV Films
Rated R
Release Date: March 28, 2008

Stop-Loss: Doing It Right

“When I go home people’ll ask me, “Hey Hoot, why do you do it man? What, you some kinda war junkie?” You know what I’ll say? I won’t say a goddamn word. Why? They won’t understand. They won’t understand why we do it. They won’t understand that it’s about the men next to you, and that’s it. That’s all it is.” — Hoot from Black Hawk Down

“With the shortage of guys and no draft, they’re shipping back soldiers who’s supposed to be gettin’ out.” — Brandon King from Stop-Loss

On a cold night in December of 1988, the doorbell rang at my parents’ house. I opened the door and an Army recruiter was there. My initial thought was why would the Army want me? This was my senior year of high school. My S.A.T’s were awful and I had just found out that I was wait-listed at the University Of Maryland. It was the middle of the college admissions process which had done a number on me. I listened to what the recruiter had to say; I seriously thought about it because if I did not get into Maryland, it meant Montgomery Community College for me. In hindsight, MC (as we called it) would not have been so bad. In hindsight, I wished I had gone there instead of going straight into the University Of Maryland. Still, the military was an option.

Funny Games (2008)
Directed by Michael Haneke
Starring Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, Michael Pitt
Rated R
Release date: March 14, 2008

The Banality Of Evil Never Dies

“No. I care. This is where I live. This is me. I will not allow violence against this house.”
— David Sumner from Straw Dogs

“It’s funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen.”
— Alex from A Clockwork Orange

“You shouldn’t forget the importance of entertainment.”
— Peter from Funny Games (2008)

Michael Haneke’s shot-for-shot remake of his 1997 German-language film, Funny Games, is a pointless exercise. Film stock is expensive. Making movies is very expensive. I realize that American audiences do not like to read subtitles when they go to the movies; perhaps, they should have dubbed the original film in English as they did with Wolfgang Peterson’s Das Boot. Remember when it was called The Boat and it played at a theater near you.

Having said this, my friend and fellow Geeks of Doom writer, Dr. Royce Clemens, wrote an excellent review of the original Funny Games. Whatever value I thought the original film had has been tarnished by this remake. It is as unimaginative as it is cruel. A shot-by-shot remake of the same film by the same director does no one any good. When George Sluizer remade his 1998 masterpiece, The Vanishing in 1993 for American audiences, it was a disaster. That year also saw an almost exact remake of Luc Besson’s La Femme Nikita called Point Of Return. John Badham directed the remake which could not touch the original film. The great tragedy of this ordeal is that Michael Haneke has made some very interesting films. His masterpiece is the French-language mystery thriller, Cache. It is a truly brilliant film. Many people consider the original Funny Games to be his best, but I will take Cache or Time Of The Wolf over it any day of the week. The Piano Teacher was all about Isabelle Huppert and the continuation of her wonderful, perverted iconography.

In Bruges
Directed by Martin McDonagh
Starring Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Ralph Fiennes, Clemence Poesy
Rated R
Release date: Feb. 8, 2008

“I’ve decided what to do with my life. I wanna be a cleaner.” — Mathilda from Leon (The Professional)

“This is madness, I’ve had enough of this “Crime and Punishment” bollocks. I’m happy here.” — Gary “Gal” Dove from Sexy Beast

“If I’d grown up on a farm and was retarded, Bruges might impress me, but I didn’t, so it doesn’t.” — Ray from In Bruges

In Bruges: The Killing Spirit Goes On Holiday

In 1994, a flurry of films about hit men swarmed the theaters in the United States. Bulletproof Heart, Little Odessa, Romeo Is Bleeding, Pulp Fiction, and The Professional introduced us to main characters that were hit men, hatchet men, cleaners, or guns for hire. These films continued a fascinating examination of the killing spirit that dates back to Frank Tuttle’s This Gun For Hire in 1942. From Alan Ladd’s Philip Raven to Jean Reno’s Leon, we have been captivated by their secret worlds and their codes of honor. The Tarantino-scripted dialogue between Jules Winfield and Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction revealed another whole level as the two talked about everything from pop culture, philosophy, religion, and what they called burgers in France. Tarantino’s film would be imitated throughout the rest of the decade. Guy Ritchie proved to be the most interesting of the directors to come after the Tarantino wave with his British gangster films: Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. Guy Ritchie seemed like the genuine article — a new wave of British Gangster films was on the rise. Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast came along and set the bar very high. Matthew Vaughn’s Layer Cake came in 2004. Vaughn had been a producer on the Guy Ritchie films and by watching Layer Cake, one had to wonder who was the real genius behind the earlier films. Layer Cake raised the quality in the crime genre. Sexy Beast and Layer Cake injected some much needed vitality into the British Gangster film that had not been felt since The Hit, The Long Good Friday, Performance, and Get Carter.

Cassandra’s Dream
Directed by Woody Allen
Starring Ewan McGregor, Colin Farrell
Rated PG-13
Release date: Jan 18, 2008

“You can’t control life. It doesn’t wind up perfectly.” —Sandy Bates from Stardust Memories

“If you want a happy ending, you should go see a Hollywood movie.” —Judah Rosenthal from Crimes And Misdemeanors

“People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It’s scary to think so much is out of one’s control.” —Christopher Wilton from Match Point

Cassandra’s Dream: Getting Away With It Again

Cassandra’s Dream can be seen as the final film in a trilogy of films that began with Crimes and Misdemeanors and continued with Match Point. The three revolve around characters getting away with terrible crimes. While not an official trilogy, the themes that Woody Allen examines in each of these films includes some of his best work. Just as the theme of vengeance linked Chan-wook Park’s Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, and Lady Vengeance, there is a continuous theme that binds all three of Mr. Allen’s films together. Make no mistake about it: Cassandra’s Dream is just as unsettling as the previous films. Match Point must have felt like sweet vindication for Woody Allen — a critical and modest commercial success that reminded many of his long-time fans that he was still very much in the game. As in, Match Point, Woody Allen does not appear in the film, but like all of his films, his surrogate does. I will leave it to you to decide who his alter ego is in this film — more on that later.

Woody Allen makes one film a year; his output is incredible. He has had his share of great highs and mighty lows, but the incredible thing is that he is always able to get financing for his films. He says that financing is the hardest part of making a film; but it seems that it is not much of a problem for him. Many have been envious of his prodigious output and the relative ease he manages it. The volume of his work is too vast to analyze here and the films I have mentioned are very good in their own right. His truly great films hold up very well — Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Hannah and Her Sisters have only gotten better with age. His early comedies, Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex, But Were Afraid Ask, Sleeper, Bananas, Love And Death, and Take The Money And Run, still provide a good amount laughs decades later. Husbands And Wives was timely for its rawness and honesty — art imitating the very real lives of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow. The film was a cinematic confession from Woody Allen — surely it was not the first and by no means the last confession. His films have become more honest. He has let down his guard over the years to show us what is on his mind.