HAPPY FEET TWO: ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK to Be Released November 22
Features New Performances by P!nk, Janelle Monáe, Lil P-Nut, Robin Williams and More
BURBANK, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--WaterTower Music will release the HAPPY FEET TWO: ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK on November 22nd. The 23-song album features “Bridge Of Light” – a brand new song from P!nk - along with several new versions of familiar hits performed by Janelle Monáe, Lil P-Nut, Robin Williams, Common, and Hank Azaria, among others. It also includes several tracks by Academy® and Grammy Award Nominee John Powell. The soundtrack, over 70 minutes in length, will be available both digitally and on CD.
An extraordinary, never-before-heard medley opens the soundtrack. Featuring vocals by P!nk, Common, Lil P-Nut and the Happy Feet Two Chorus, it is comprised of unique versions of such songs as “Rhythm Nation,” “(Dance And Shout) Shake Your Body Down To The Ground,” “Mama Said Knock You Out,” “Shake It Fast,” “Ain’t Nobody (Loves Me Better),” and “Do Your Thing.”
HAPPY FEET TWO: ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK will be available November 22nd. The track listing is as follows:
Happy Feet Two Opening Medley - P!nk, Common, Lil P-Nut and Happy Feet Two Chorus
The Mighty Sven - Robin Williams, Hank Azaria and Happy Feet Two Chorus
Bridge Of Light - P!nk and Happy Feet Two Chorus
Papa Oom Mow Mow - Happy Feet Two Chorus
Dragostea Din Tei - Hank Azaria and Happy Feet Two Chorus
Erik’s Opera - Omar Crook and EG Daily
Rawhide - Elephant Seal Chorus
Under Pressure / Rhythm Nation - P!nk and Happy Feet Two Chorus
Tightrope (Ice Cold Mix) - Janelle Monáe featuring Lil P-Nut and Happy Feet Two Chorus
In The Hole - John Powell
Ramon And The Krill - John Powell
Lovelace Preshow - (feat. Judith Hill) John Powell
Searching For The Kids - John Powell
The Doomberg Lands - John Powell
I Don’t Back Up - John Powell
Trapped In Emperor Land - John Powell
Skua Attack/Adelie Rescue - John Powell
Dinner A La Sven John Powell
We Are The Champions - John Powell
Snow Stops Play - (featuring Steven Pence) John Powell
No Fly Zone - John Powell
Krill Joy - John Powell
Tappin’ To Freedom - John Powell
Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Village Roadshow Pictures’ “Happy Feet Two,” the sequel to the Oscar®-winning hit, opens nationwide on November 18, 2011. The film is directed by George Miller and features the voices of Elijah Wood, Robin Williams, Hank Azaria, Alecia Moore (P!nk), Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Sofia Vergara, Common, Hugo Weaving, Richard Carter, Magda Szubanski, Anthony LaPaglia and Benjamin “Lil P-Nut” Flores, Jr.
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Review: "City of God" is a Stunner (Happy B'day, Fernando Meirelles)
Cidade de Deus (2002)
English title: City of God (2003)
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: Brazil; Language: Portuguese
Running time: 130 minutes (2 hours, 10 minutes)
MPAA – R for strong brutal violence, sexuality, drug content and language
DIRECTORS: Fernando Meirelles with Kátia Lund
WRITERS: Bráulio Mantovani (from a novel by Paulo Lins)
PRODUCERS: Andrea Barata Ribeiro and Mauricio Andrade Ramos
CINEMATOGRAPHER: César Charlone
EDITOR: Daniel Rezende
COMPOSERS: Ed Cortês and Antonio Pinto
Academy Award nominee
CRIME with elements of drama and thriller
Starring: Alexandre Rodrigues, Leandro Firmino da Hora, Phellipe Haagensen, Douglas Silva, Jonathan Haagensen, Matheus Nachtergaele, Seu Jorge, Alice Braga, and Luis Otávio
At the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, Miramax picked up the American distribution rights to Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Meirelles’ blistering 2002 film Cidade de Deus. The film went on to earn four Academy Award nominations, including one for Meirelles’ direction although the Academy decided that his co-director Kátia Lund had not contributed anything substantial to the filmmaking narrative and did not also recognize her with a nomination.
Released under the English title City of God, the film covers a period of roughly 15 years from the late 1960 to the early 1980’s in the Cidade de Deus housing projects in Rio de Janeiro. A boy named Rocket (Luis Otávio) watches as his older brother and other neighborhood youths get involved in crime, especially the drug trade. Before long many of them, including Rocket’s brother are dead. Years later, an older Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues) is struggling to become a news photographer, while an old associate, Li’l Ze (Leandro Firmino da Hora), rules the drug trade in most of Cidade de Deus, but he’s running up against an old rival, which leads to a long and bloody street war.
Brutal and unflinching, City of God may draw comparisons to Pulp Fiction, but the former is shot in a raw documentary style that mixes music video style editing and long contemplative shots. When I say brutal and unflinching, I mean it, although this film isn’t as hard to watch as the D-Day landing in Saving Private Ryan. Still, the violence, despair, horror, cynicism, selfishness, betrayal, and poverty are hard to take. The miracle of this darkness is that Meirelles often makes it so alluring, not in that sort of glossy Hollywood way, but in a way that could make you feel that this is real and not some movie fantasy. The thing that most impressed me is how Meirelles is so able to create a sense of impending, sudden, and brutal violence in even the most benign scenes and settings. That goes a long way into creating verisimilitude – in making the film’s setting seem so real, and the drama so visceral and potent.
Based upon a true story, this film is so unlike anything else. Hell, it’s a film where even the “heroes” are sociopath, or at least seem so. For lovers of cinema, this is a film not to be missed. Beyond opinions about the subject matter, director Meirelles’ effort is one of the top directorial feats of the last few years, in particular when one accounts for the fact that he used so many amateur actors and was still able to stay true to the drama.
9 of 10
A+
NOTES:
2004 Academy Awards: 4 nominations: “Best Director” (Fernando Meirelles), “Best Cinematography” (César Charlone), “Best Film Editing” (Daniel Rezende), and “Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay” (Bráulio Mantovani)
2003 BAFTA Awards: 1 win: “Best Editing” (Daniel Rezende); 1 nomination: “Best Film not in the English Language” (Andrea Barata Ribeiro, Mauricio Andrade Ramos, and Fernando Meirelles)
2003 Golden Globes: 1 nomination: “Best Foreign Language Film” (Brazil)
2004 Black Reel Awards: 1 win: “Black Reel Special Achievement - Foreign Film” (Miramax Films)
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Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Review: "Meet the Robinsons" is a Heartfelt Gem
Meet the Robinsons (2007) – computer animated
Running time: 95 minutes (1 hour, 35 minutes)
MPAA – G
DIRECTOR: Stephen J. Anderson
WRITERS: Stephen J. Anderson, Michelle Bochner, Jon Bernstein, Nathan Greno, Don Hall, Joe Mateo, and Aurian Redson; with story material from Robert L. Baird, Daniel Gerson, and Shirley Pierce; (based on A Day with Wilbur Robinson by William Joyce)
PRODUCER: Dorothy McKim
ANIMATION/SCI-FI/COMEDY/ACTION/FAMILY
Starring: (voices) Daniel Hansen, Angela Bassett, Jordan Fry, Tom Selleck, Harland Williams, Laurie Metcalf, Adam West, Ethan Sandler, Tom Kenney, and Matthew Josten
Meet the Robinsons, a Walt Disney Feature Animation digital 3-D animation film, focuses on a boy genius named Lewis. His love of gadgets and gizmos takes him on a trip to the future and reveals to him great secrets about his past and about his own limitless potential.
Lewis (Daniel Hansen and Jordan Fry) is a brilliant preteen inventor, but he’s also an orphan. He’s been living at the 6th Street Orphanage under the guardianship of its sweet and patient caretaker, Mildred (Angela Bassett), ever since she found him on her doorstep as an infant. Rejected by most prospective adoptive parents, Lewis decides to invent the “memory scanner” to retrieve his earliest recollections and hopefully see his birth mother. Lewis presents his invention as his school’s science fair where it is a disaster – mostly because of sabotage on the part of the villainous Bowler Hat Guy (Ethan Sandler), who steals the machine.
Lewis is ready to give up on the quest for his birth mother when he meets a mysterious teenager, Wilbur Robinson (Wesley Singerman), who like the Bowler Hat Guy, is from the future. Wilbur whisks Lewis to the future in his father’s time machine/jet car. Wilbur is desperate to get Lewis to help him retrieve his father’s second time machine, which was stolen by the Bowler Hat Guy. However, when Lewis meets the Robinsons, Wilbur’s large and extended eccentric family, he discovers that, much to his delight, they are ready to adopt him. But if Lewis doesn’t stop Bowler Hat Guy, everyone’s future may turn out to be very dark indeed.
Meet the Robinson’s theme is “keep moving forward,” which is taken from a quote by the late Walt Disney himself, and the filmmakers stay true to “keep moving forward” in terms of the characters. Don’t let the past drag you down, and don’t be bitter about failure because failure is a better teacher than success, the film practically yells out. The writers deal with some pretty serious subject matter in terms of what it means to be a family and also what it means to accept personal blame for failure rather than blaming someone else.
In terms of the film’s visuals and production design, Meet the Robinsons looks way back into the past for inspiration. The futurism of the industrial design movement of the 1930’s and 40’s is present, as well as art deco (which was inspired by futurism). “Streamline Moderne, which was a 1930’s architectural style and Walt Disney’s “Tomorrowland,” join to create a heady, invigorating mix of the retro sci-fi cool and cartoon futuristic. This goes well with what Lewis uses to create his inventions: scrap, spare parts, household items, and odds-and-ends. Think “The Jetsons” meets “Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius.”
The computer (or 3D) animation, however, is highly suspect. There are times when some of it seems to disappear in a glare of white light, or the camera shifts and the entire 3D environment becomes two-dimensional. It’s simply bad lighting and poor environmental building (perhaps because of software and/or hardware issues). It is sometimes embarrassingly shoddy animation work from Disney, a company that has a legacy of delivering exceptional animation, even when the story is mediocre.
However, the truth is that while viewers may come to the film looking for 3D animation, they’ll end up staying for the story. Luckily, Meet the Robinson’s messages of family bonds and of never letting failure be a crippling setback make this visually imaginative film a poignant gem that might bring at least one tear to your eye.
7 of 10
B+
Saturday, December 08, 2007
Review: "Chicken Little" Has Big Action
Chicken Little (2005) – computer animated
Running time: 81 minutes (1 hour, 21 minutes)
MPAA – G
DIRECTOR: Mark Dindal
WRITERS: Steve Bencich and Ron J. Friedman and Ron Anderson; from a story by Mark Kennedy and Mark Dindal (with additional story material by Robert L. Baird and Dan Gerson)
PRODUCER: Randy Fullmer
EDITOR: Dan Molina
ANIMATION/SCI-FI/FANTASY and COMEDY/ACTION/FAMILY
Starring: (voices) Zach Braff, Garry Marshall, Steve Zahn, Joan Cusack, Don Knotts, Patrick Stewart, Amy Sedaris, Harry Shearer, Wallace Shawn, Fred Willard, Catherine O’Hara, Adam West, Patrick Warburton, Mark Dindal, and Dan Molina
One day a piece of the sky falls to earth and hits Chicken Little (Zach Braff) on the head. The sky is falling her warns, but the townsfolk of Oakey Oaks, including his father, Buck Cluck (Garry Marshall), conclude that an acorn hit the boy chick on the head. The incident swiftly turns Chicken Little into the town joke and embarrasses his father. However, the plucky chicken joins the local baseball team with the hopes of reviving his reputation and earning his father’s respect. Chicken Little does indeed lead the team to an upset victory, and he and his pops are on good terms again.
All is well, but another “piece of the sky” hits Chicken Little on the head. Still, he’s reluctant to cause another scene and once again be labeled crazy. Instead, he enlists the help of his friends: Abby Mallard (Joan Cusack), who is also known as the Ugly Duckling because she is so… unpretty; Runt of the Litter (Steve Zahn), a tall, obese pig; and Fish Out of Water (“voice” created by film editor Dan Molina), a fish who wears a water-filled helmet, and the gang embark on an adventure to stop an alien invasion without sending the town into another panic.
Walt Disney’s Chicken Little, of course, spoofs of 17th century, rural English fable, “Chicken Little.” Disney’s new film is also their first fully computer animated film (2000’s Dinosaur combined computer generated characters with live-action background imagery), and also signals the famed movie company’s move away from hand-drawn (2D) animation to computer animated (3D) animation. Clearly aimed at children 12 and under, Chicken Little is filled with clever gags. The script is a hodge podge of sketch comedy, after school special storylines, and the kind of family psychology that would find its way on the “Dr. Phil” and “Oprah.”
The script is Chicken Little’s big problem. The animation is fine, sometimes even outstanding. There are a few moments when it has the quality of the first Shrek, but there are also times when it has the texture and quality of Disney/Pixar’s The Incredibles. However, the film is basically pretty pictures over an ugly story. The script bludgeons the audience with the notion that at this movie’s heart (which it doesn’t have) is the story of a father and son coming together. The father, in this case, Buck Cluck, must learn to accept his son’s physical shortcomings and love him for the plucky fella he is. But unlike Finding Nemo, where the parent/child dynamic seemed so natural, Chicken Little takes that relationship and drapes a cheesy action movie cartoon for children over it.
Chicken Little looks, feels, and sounds like the kind of action movies that have been so popular over the last decade, but tamed for children. Anyone who has seen Independence Day will recognize it in this flick. Chicken Little’s setting, Oakey Oaks, is the same old idealized Midwestern small town that Hollywood has been shoving at audiences for decades. That place is a fairy tale really, but it’s a good setting for War of the Worlds, which is another source reference for this flick. Chicken Little is as noisy and/or as busy as The Rock, Armageddon, Bad Boys II, etc. This is director Mark Dindal’s (The Emperor’s New Groove) Steven Spielberg/Michael Bay movie.
Chicken Little, as voiced by Zach Braff, is actually an endearing character – this movie’s saving grace, in fact. The character itself is a cutey, sort of a riff on “Egghead, Jr.” from those “Foghorn Leghorn” Looney Tunes cartoons. He’s a plucky little fella and the animators lovingly rendered and animated him.
The rest of the cast is mostly trash. The characters aren’t really characters so much as they are stereotypes that get to do stand up routines at different times in the film narrative. I immensely disliked Abby Mallard – nothing more to say about it here – and Runt of the Litter is pathetic. Steve Zahn can play quirky characters whose humor comes through even in crime dramas (Out of Sight), but his comedic gifts are lost because we don’t him here; all we get is his voice in the annoying Runt. Fish Out of Water provides nice slapstick, but the jokes come across as desperation on the writers’ parts. Garry Marshall’s Brooklyn accent is out of place in this film, and as a father, Buck Cluck is like an overbearing mother in his demands on his son, Chicken Little.
I guess the shortest and perhaps best way to describe Disney’s Chicken Little is as Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius with much better computer animation.
4 of 10
C
Saturday, November 5, 2005
Sunday, November 6, 2011
Review: "Tower Heist" Captures Classic Eddie Murphy
Tower Heist (2011)
Running time: 104 minutes (1 hour, 44 minutes)
MPAA – PG-13 for language and sexual content
DIRECTOR: Brett Ratner
WRITERS: Ted Griffin and Jeff Nathanson; from a story by Adam Cooper, Bill Collage, and Ted Griffin
PRODUCERS: Brian Grazer, Eddie Murphy, and Kim Roth
CINEMATOGRAPHER: Dante Spinotti
EDITOR: Mark Helfrich
COMPOSER: Christophe Beck
COMEDY/CRIME with elements of a thriller
Starring: Ben Stiller, Eddie Murphy, Casey Affleck, Alan Alda, Matthew Broderick, Stephen Henderson, Judd Hirsch, Téa Leoni, Michael Peña, Gabourey Sidibe, Nina Arianda, Marcia Jean Kurtz, and Juan Carlos Hernandez
Tower Heist is a 2011 crime comedy from director Brett Ratner (the Rush Hour franchise). The film follows the misadventures of a gang of working stiffs who plot to rob a Wall Street tycoon who stole their pensions. Tower Heist is a comic caper that lives up to the comedy part, and the film’s actors deliver on their characters, especially Eddie Murphy who returns to the kind of character that made him popular in the 1980s.
Tower Heist focuses on Josh Kovacs (Ben Stiller), the building manager of The Tower, a high-rise luxury apartment complex in New York City’s Columbus Circle (Manhattan). The residents are wealthy and are used to being catered to, and the building’s security is no joke. Still, Josh has everything under control until the Tower’s most noteworthy tenant, wealthy businessman, Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda), is arrested by the FBI for running a Ponzi scheme. It was Kovacs who suggested that Shaw invest the Tower employees’ pension fund, and now that money is also apparently gone.
When FBI agent Claire Denham (Téa Leoni) tells him that Shaw may get away with his crimes, Josh decides to get revenge on Shaw by breaking into his apartment to steal from him. He gathers fellow coworkers: his brother-in-law, Charlie Gibbs (Casey Affleck); a bankrupt Wall Street investor, Mr. Fitzhugh (Matthew Broderick); bellhop Enrique Dev’reaux (Michael Peña), and Jamaican-born maid, Odessa Montero (Gabourey Sidibe) as his crew. Josh knows, however, that his crew needs a real criminal, so he recruits his neighbor, a petty crook named Slide (Eddie Murphy), to assist them in the robbery. But as determined as they are, things keep getting in their way.
Tower Heist is not really a heist film like the edgier The Italian Job (either version) or the cool and clever Ocean’s Eleven (2001) and its sequels. Tower Heist is comic fluff – successful comic fluff, but still fluff, and its concepts, ideas, and set pieces are utter fantasy. Things happen in this movie that are so unbelievable that they are often funny; it’s ridiculous stuff, but quite amusing.
The real treasures in Tower Heist are the actors and their characters. The story that is Tower Heist is Josh Kovacs’ story, and Ben Stiller, who has been a successful leading man in big screen comedies for well over a decade, is funny. However, Stiller gives the film a surprising dramatic heft by giving Kovacs a dark and melancholy side that simmers right alongside this movie’s humor – even if many viewers may not see it.
Eddie Murphy, in his role as Slide, has done what many critics (and some fans) have been demanding for over two decades – return to playing the wiseass who makes being rude, confrontational, and streetwise a gold standard. This kind of character, in one form or another, appeared in early Murphy films like 48 Hrs., Trading Places, and Beverly Hills Cop and at various time during Murphy’s tenure on “Saturday Night Live” (1980-84), yet in this film, that kind of character still seems fresh. The reason for this may be that Murphy plays Slide as a genuine criminal, a confrontational person who may appear comical, but who is actually an opportunistic career criminal and felon that is dangerous and untrustworthy. Slide is a real hood rat and is good for the film’s conflict and tension. He makes you believe that this heist has a better than 50% chance of going really bad.
There are other good supporting performances: Téa Leoni (who should have had a larger role), Matthew Broderick, and Alan Alda (who makes Arthur Shaw seem like a really nasty piece of work). I’ll also give credit for Tower Heist’s success as a comedy to both director Brett Ratner and editor Mark Helfrich. Ratner allows the actors room to play their characters for strong (if not maximum) effect. Helfrich composes a film that makes sure the comic moments are really funny and turns the heist sequence into a surprising thriller. I’d like to be a snob about this sometimes shallow and fluffy movie, but I really enjoyed Tower Heist. So why front?
7 of 10
A-
Sunday, November 06, 2011
Review: "Mad Money" Has Mad Funny Trio
Mad Money (2008)
Running time: 103 minutes (1 hour, 43 minutes)
MPAA – PG-13 for sexual material and language, and brief drug references
DIRECTOR: Callie Khouri
WRITERS: Glenn Gers (based upon an earlier screenplay by John Mister and the screenplay for Hot Money by Neil McKay and Terry Winsor)
PRODUCERS: James Acheson, Jay Cohen, and Frank DeMartini
CINEMATOGRAPHER: John Bailey
EDITOR: Wendy Greene Bricmont
CRIME/COMEDY
Starring: Diane Keaton, Queen Latifah, Katie Holmes, Ted Danson, Adam Rothenberg, Roger R. Cross, Meagan Fay, Christopher McDonald, Stephen Root, Sterling Blackmon, Peyton “Alex” Smith, and Matthew Greer
While watching the crime caper Mad Money, anyone who views it with a critical eye will notice that the character writing is thin and that the plot stumbles whenever the narrative jumps back and forth in time, but director Callie Khouri (who won an Oscar for writing Thelma & Louise) keeps things moving – fast and upbeat – so the viewer won’t see the cracks in this lighthearted crime escapade.
The plot is implausible, and even viewers that don’t look hard can see where the criminal conspiracy at the heart of Mad Money would fall apart early in its execution. However, this comic trio of Diane Keaton, Queen Latifah and Katie Holmes are so lovable, and this recessionary crime tale about the struggling working class and downsized middle class is both timely and rings true.
Bridget Cardigan (Diane Keaton) discovers that she is about to lose both her home and comfortable middle class lifestyle because her husband, Don (Ted Danson), has been unemployed for a year (downsized from his job), and the couple is nearly 300,000 dollars in debt. Bridget, a stay-at-home mom, has been out of the job market for decades, and her decades-old comparative literature degree won’t help her in this tight job market. She accepts the only job she can get – as a janitor. Her custodial job is at the Federal Reserve Bank, where every day, employees destroy millions of dollars in worn out paper currency taken out of the system.
Bridget surprisingly learns that she has more in common with her new co-workers than she thought when she forges an unexpected bond with Nina Brewster (Queen Latifah), a hard-working single mother of two young boys, and Jackie Truman (Katie Holmes), a wacky and exuberant free spirit who acts as if she has nothing to lose. Looking to finally just get ahead, Nina and Jackie find themselves buying into Bridget’s scheme - steal all those 1, 5, 10, 20, etc. dollar bills meant for destruction. As their little crime syndicate amasses piles of cash, the girls think they have pulled off the perfect crime – that is until one misstep has them trying to stay one step ahead of the law.
Playing Bridget Cardigan, who must go from supportive wife to bread winner, Diane Keaton doesn’t simply play the character as merely a supportive housewife. Early in the film, Bridget is mostly boosting her husband’s confidence, but Bridget soon has to roar – to assert herself. That’s when Keaton deftly transforms her character into a bossy spitfire, a snappy malcontent not content to watch the comfortable world for which she worked so hard to attain just vanish because society considers her and Don passé. Keaton makes Bridget both sweet and sour and both fragrant and pungent. She’s a senior citizen with zest, spicy and spunky, and Keaton shows that in many scenes, especially when we get to watch Bridget go to Nina Brewster’s inner city hood, in spite of her fears.
As for the supporting characters, Queen Latifah’s Nina Brewster is by far the best of the lot. Latifah makes Nina the island of sanity in a sea full of screwballs – including Keaton’s Bridget, but Latifah also makes the sometimes dour, so-serious Nina so quite likeable. Holmes is no slouch either. Her winning Jackie Truman, always bouncing and shaking to the music of her mp3 player, is the fun chick everyone wants to know. Holmes lights up the screen with Jackie’s screwy bubbly personality.
This is one time in Hollywood fare that a movie’s plot leaves male characters as background filler material, and the girls become the action heroes. Mad Money is, however, more than just a chick flick. It does the caper film as light, but both entertaining and well-timed material, and in these times with so many worried about their finances and livelihoods, it’s darn good to watch these girls beat the system silly. All hail this queenly trio for making stealing money as sweet as honey.
6 of 10
B
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Saturday, November 5, 2011
Review: "Michael Clayton" is a Powerful Social Drama (Happy B'day to Goddess, Tilda Swinton)
Michael Clayton (2007)
Running time: 120 minutes (2 hours)
MPAA – R for language including some sexual dialogue
WRITER/DIRECTOR: Tony Gilroy
PRODUCERS: Jennifer Fox, Kerry Orent, Sydney Pollack, and Steve Samuels
CINEMATOGRAPHER: Robert Elswit
EDITOR: John Gilroy
2008 Academy Award winner
DRAMA/THRILLER
Starring: George Clooney, Tom Wilkinson, Tilda Swinton, Sydney Pollack, Michael O’Keefe, Austin Williams, Ken Howard, Robert Prescott, Terry Serpico, Sean Cullen, and David Lansbury
In screenwriter Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton, his debut as a film director, a burned out corporate lawyer who has built a career on cleaning up his clients’ messes faces his biggest mess when a guilt-ridden colleague threatens the settlement of a multi-million-dollar case. Gilroy is best known for writing the three Jason Bourne films, including most recently, The Bourne Ultimatum.
Michael Clayton (George Clooney) is an in-house “fixer” or “bagman” at Kenner, Bach & Ledeen, one of the largest corporate law firms in New York. A former criminal prosecutor, Clayton is burned out and hardly content with his job as a fixer, but his divorce, a failed business venture, and mounting debt have left Clayton inextricably tied to the firm. The firm is defending U/North (United Northfield) a giant corporation in a multimillion dollar class action lawsuit, but Kenner, Bach & Ledeen’s brilliant litigator, Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson), has a meltdown that threatens to upend a potential settlement entirely in favor of the plaintiffs against U/North.
Clayton faces the biggest challenge of his career and life to reign in Edens. Meanwhile, U/North’s general counsel, Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton), who operates on a hair-trigger, knows that her career rests on the multi-million dollar settlement that once seemed to be heading to a successful conclusion for U/North. Edens’ rogue status means that Crowder may have to take matters into her own ruthless hands.
At one point in Michael Clayton, Sydney Pollack’s Marty Bach says, “People are fucking incomprehensible,” and that seems to be one of the dominant themes of Gilroy’s absolutely gripping legal thriller. Sure, Michael Clayton is an exposé of what evil corporations can do (poison their customers) and the way corporate law firms help them get away with it. The greed, the lies, and the under-the-table murder-for-hire deals are in evidence here, and while we’ve seen this in other muckraking dramas, what sets Michael Clayton apart is that we’re watching a film about people and not just characters.
It is in these people we see both the beauty and ugliness of humanity. We can admire how George Clooney’s Michael Clayton chases his ideals even if no one else believes in them or even if those ideals are the antithesis of others’ beliefs. The manner in which Gilroy tackles such mature themes through his star Clooney makes this an accomplished movie for adults. It’s a crackling delight full of standout performances including Tom Wilkinson’s Oscar-nominated turn as Arthur Edens and Tilda Swinton’s Oscar-winning performance as the neurotic viper Karen Crowder.
And Clooney: what can I say? He’s a movie star in the Old Hollywood tradition and also an exceptional actor that modern American filmmaking would be lost without.
9 of 10
A+
NOTES:
2008 Academy Awards: 1 win for “Best Performance by Actress in a Supporting Role” (Tilda Swinton); 6 nominations: “Best Achievement in Directing,” “Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures, Original Score” (James Newton Howard), “Best Motion Picture of the Year” (Sydney Pollack, Jennifer Fox, and Kerry Orent), “Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role” (George Clooney), “Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role” (Tom Wilkinson), “Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen”
2008 BAFTA Awards: 1 win: “Best Supporting Actress” (Tilda Swinton); 4 nominations: “Best Editing” (John Gilroy), “Best Leading Actor” (George Clooney), “Best Screenplay – Original” (Tony Gilroy), and “Best Supporting Actor” (Tom Wilkinson)
2008 Golden Globes: 4 nominations: “Best Motion Picture – Drama,” “Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama” (George Clooney), “Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture” (Tom Wilkinson), and “Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture” (Tilda Swinton)
Thursday, March 20, 2008
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