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Recently Released In Theaters Reviews
2008 FALL MOVIE PREVIEW Bangkok Dangerous Mister Foe Everybody Wants to be Italian Babylon A.D. College Disaster Movie Traitor Hamlet 2 The House Bunny The Longshots Death Race The Rocker Tropic Thunder Mirrors Recently Added Spotlights Nicolas Cage Anna Faris Katharine McPhee Emma Stone James Franco Seth Rogen Rosie Perez Danny McBride Matthew Goode Will Ferrell John C. Reilly Heath Ledger Christian Bale Aaron Eckhart Maggie Gyllenhaal |
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Spotlight By: Andrea Tuccillo Does George Clooney have a split personality? Or maybe he has a clone? Nope, it’s just good old-fashioned talent that enabled him to be both the director and the lead actor of his new film Leatherheads. For this comedy about the world of 1925 football, Clooney wanted to make something fun; something with spunky dialogue and an old-fashioned sensibility. It was nonetheless a daunting task for this gorgeous A-list Oscar-winner, who tried to balance both acting and directing duties in a graceful way. In the film he plays Dodge Connelly, a 46-year-old football player during a time when the game had no rules. When his team is endanger of being shut down for good, he recruits college football star and war hero Carter Rutherford (John Krasinski) to play and they find instant success. In the process, Dodge finds time to trade barbs with a sassy newspaper reporter named Lexie (Renee Zellweger) out to expose some secrets from Carter’s past. So was it more difficult directing the movie than acting in it? “It’s tricky because there’s an enormous amount of narcissism that comes into play,” he explains. “You’re breaking the trust between 2 actors, in particular when you’re in the lead. If you and I are doing a scene together and we’re talking, I’m not supposed to be judging you as an actor. Now a lot of actors do and they’ll tell you what to do, but in general you’re not supposed to break that trust—the director is. So if we’re doing a scene and I go, ‘Ok cut,’ and I go, ‘You know try it like this,’ you have to go to each of the actors before you start and say listen, this is going to be awkward. You just get it out in the open and lay it out early and say it’s going to be strange all the way around. As an actor it’s easy because I know specifically, precisely what I need in the scene. So I’ve cut out one step which is the director having to explain it.” As a director he was able to find inspiration in old films and borrow some key screwball elements. “I stole from Howard Hawks and Preston Sturges in a big way,” Clooney admits before rethinking his choice of words. “Wait, wait, wait...homage. I ‘homaged’ the shit out of Howard Hawks and Preston Sturges and early George Stevens. There was a film called The More the Merrier that we were trying to rip off a lot—homage off a lot.” The break-neck speed dialogue in particular is something taken straight out of a Cary Grant-Katharine Hepburn film. It was something the actors certainly had to get used to. “The tendency since probably Montgomery Clift came on the scene is to internalize, which is great,” he says. “It’s made for some of the greatest work ever but what gets lost in that is the ability to—you’re almost ... |
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