Groderz is normally too sophisticated and not annoying enough to fall into the trap of the activist/political blog, the internet already has way too many we-want-to-change-the-way-you-think blogs, but yesterday this article in Newsweek caught my attention. Basically George Clooney is a moron. Now that he has directed two whole movies and was nominated for an Oscar he considers himself part of the directorial elite. Newsweek had the audacity to include him in a roundtable of directors, openly discussing all-things Oscar and Hollywood. The following two quotes perfectly summarize the difference between him and Steven Spielberg:
SPIELBERG: Audiences are very smart. We never give them enough credit for being able to have a kind of radar that makes them, without a single ad in the newspaper, suddenly say, "I'm interested in seeing 'The Squid and the Whale'." There's just something in the air.
CLOONEY: But on the other hand, I'll wager that every one of our films, when you first tested it with an audience, tested much lower than after it was reviewed. Sometimes people need reviews to explain what a film is, to put it into some sort of perspective.
Thanks go out to Spielberg for recognizing that audiences are very smart. But on the other hand audiences are very stupid and need well-trained film critics to explain films to them, especially films with Clooney's high caliber subject matter. What he should have said was "The type of films we make are too complex and dynamic for the average viewer to understand, they need to have the plot and story explained to them so they don't look stupid."
Spielberg is an artist with vision and refined technical skills. Even if he does let some duds slip by, Minority Report, War of the Worlds, he is still talented and has a deep respect for his craft. Clooney, on the other hand, is a hack and has a certain slime-value that is highly coveted in Hollywood today. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you, this guy is either really pompous or totally clueless, probably both.
Although I guess I should thank Clooney for reaffirming what I already thought about him.
2 comments:
Spielburg is exactly correct. I always thought I had some kind of psychic ability to know how good a movie would be and how well it would do at the box office, based on very little information. A short clip will do. Then I realized that A LOT of people have that psychic ability, because it's just so easy to tell. American culture is naturally intelligent when it comes to analyzing movies.
By the time you've got enough movie to test market it, though, you've already invested so much that you can't quit.
Having now seen War of the Worlds, I know exactly what Spielburg was talking about. That movie had all the boxes checked: A famous sexy star, big budget effects, a recognizable franchise name, and a cameo from a has-been. From a cynical business point of view, it was a sure thing. But the movie was simply terrible. The acting, the direction, the writing, everything. You spend the whole movie scratching your head because it is incomprehensible. The reviews don't matter. The quality is already there in the previews, and then word-of-mouth takes care of the rest.
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