Surely there can be few people by now who are unaware that politics is a scummy business. Nevertheless, this is the news that director George Clooney brings us in his carefully paced semi-thriller, ‘The Ides of March.’ As the title indicates, the movie is an examination of betrayal, on several levels. The stars—Clooney, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, Evan Rachel Wood, and especially Ryan Gosling, the film’s central presence—are so good they almost make the picture work. But they’re let down in the end by the movie’s under-powered style—it’s almost too tastefully done—and by the facile implausibilities and familiar political tilt of the script (a collaboration by Clooney, Grant Heslov, and Beau Willimon, who wrote the play on which the film is based).

The story is set in wintry Ohio, during the final week of a Democratic presidential primary. Pennsylvania governor Mike Morris (Clooney) is in the lead, but one of his opponents is catching up. Morris’ campaign is being run by veteran political operative Paul Zara (Hoffman), capably assisted by hotshot up-and-comer Stephen Myers (Gosling).

The opposition mastermind is wily Tom Duffy (Giamatti). Both Duffy and Zara realize that their candidates will need the endorsement of a powerful senator named Thompson (Jeffrey Wright) in order to prevail. But in exchange for the hundreds of delegates he controls, Thompson wants major payback: a promise to be appointed secretary of state in the administration of whichever candidate will meet his demand.

Read the full review at Reason.com

In 2011, Aaron Sorkin won an Academy Award for writing “The Social Network,” in which a young rebel repudiated conventional wisdom and changed how we use the internet and social media. This year, Sorkin is back with “Moneyball”–adapted from the wildly popular book by Michael Lewis (2003)– a new movie he co-wrote with Steven Zaillian and Stan Chervin, about a middle-aged manager who also turned conventional wisdom on its head and changed the game of baseball.  Like “The Social Network,” “Moneyball” tells a great story about a passionate outsider. It is one of the best films of 2011 so far.

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The film tells the true story of Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), the general manager of the Oakland Athletics who faced a dilemma after the 2001 season. His underdog baseball team lost some of its best players and had only a small payroll with which to replace them. Beane had to start over and build a new team without the financial resources of the New York Yankees or the Boston Red Sox, for example.

Pitt plays Beane as an optimistic and underestimated GM who knows how to make the most of a tough situation. Beane also knows how to negotiate good deals with his rival teams. In one well-done scene, Beane manipulates, cajoles, and connives other general managers so he can get the players that he wants at a cost he can afford.

Throughout the story, Beane is assisted by Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a nerdy baseball analyst who looks at the game differently than recruiters and baseball experts. Instead of building a team through players, Brand advocates building a team through wins. That means evaluating undervalued players more carefully and determining whether or not those players have the ability to get on base.

Getting on base is important; being able to demand a multi-million dollar salary is not.

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We’ve all watched well-known, highly regarded actors for the umpteenth time on screen — perhaps even raucously enjoying both their performance and the movie — and thought about how painfully derivative and self-referential they’ve become. Somewhere along the way, over a period of many years, these talented thespians stopped surprising us. They ceased bringing to life fleshed out individuals and  began using and reusing tired sets of predictable quirks and tics.

Mind you, they’re still charismatic and entertaining to watch, but in an almost clownish way. We now go to see them not to be wowed by their acting, but to be entertained by their chewing the scenery and hamming it up. Whereas in the past they lost themselves in a part, now their well-known, theatrically overblown personalities overwhelm everything else on screen.

Who are the worst offenders? My own Top 5 list was compiled with two ground rules: each candidate had to be alive (so James Dean and Marlon Brando each get a reprieve), and they have to have won at least one Academy Award for acting (which spares modern, less-laurelled hams such as Robert Downey Jr., Johnny Depp, Woody Allen, Jeff Goldblum and Mel Gibson.) Again, the following actors are not necessarily unpleasant to watch — raw charisma goes a long way — but they have become predictably one-note parodies of themselves. (more…)

The vocal, sanctimonious Free-Polanski uproar is merely a symptom of an entertainment culture infected with a moral cancer – a culture that regularly practices up on the screen what we’ve heard them preach this last week on behalf of a confessed child rapist.

Last year Miramax released “Doubt,” a high-profile piece of Oscar-bait starring Academy Award winners’ Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Streep plays a puritanical nun on a moral crusade to expose a Priest (Hoffman) who she believes is sexually abusing a 12 year-old boy. Both characters are portrayed as unsympathetic (especially Streep’s) but in just a couple scenes the boy’s working-class mother (Mrs. Miller, played by Viola Davis) is established as the moral center of the film – the only one truly interested in the welfare of her child. When Mrs. Miller’s informed that her son’s being molested, the Moral Center Of The Film responds that her 12 year-old boy is gay, a social outcast, and beaten regularly by his homophobic father … so maybe the best option for him is a sexual relationship with a forty-something child predator.

Starring Aaron Eckhart, Maria Bello, and written and directed by Oscar-winner Alan Ball, last year’s “Towelhead” is a film Roman Polanski might have seen many, many times while wearing a rain coat. The protagonist is 13 year-old Jasira (played by the then barely eighteen Summer Bishil) and the story surrounds her sexual abuse at the hands of a number of men, including Eckhart’s Gulf War Vet. Rather than the repeated abuse damaging the young girl, the filmmaker portrays the rapes and molestations as a healthy and sexually liberating experience. More than once the audience is “treated” to lingering shots of Jasira’s bare legs as she discovers the joys of the orgasm while masturbating to photographs of naked women.

Kate Winslet won last year’s Best Actress Oscar for her role in “The Reader,” in which she plays a “sympathetic” Nazi guilty of mass murder who seduces and then engages in a steamy sexual affair with a 15 year-old boy. The sex scenes between this mature woman and a child lean heavily on the erotic, as opposed to the creepy. (The “sympathetic Nazi” issue we’ll save for another post.) (more…)

Too much information about an actor’s life breaks the ability for the viewer to believe the character the actor is playing. Daniel Sunjata is one of those actors I wish I knew less about. He’s one of the stars of the hit show “Rescue Me,” and after reading of his beliefs that 9/11 was an inside job, I find it difficult to see his character Franco, as real. Good thing for him the producers decided to write his conspiracy theories into the show so now his acting won’t be a stretch. In fact it won’t be an act at all; it’ll be his truth, which leaves me seeing just another vapid Hollywood actor looking to push the envelope of their stupidity instead of minding to their craft.

Two of the greatest actors of our time, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Daniel Day Lewis are the sort of actors that truly let me enjoy their work because I know next to nothing about who they are as people. And I don’t want to know about them, I just want to experience the joy of their craft.

Daniel Sunjata has been quoted as saying “There’s alternative theories about what really happened on 9/11,” he told TV critics in January. “They’re not discussed a lot in the press … I’m really gratified that they allowed that to be focused through my character, because I happen to subscribe to a lot of those theories and beliefs that 9/11 was an inside job.” Daniel, they’re not discussed, because they have no foundation in reality. (more…)