I will now anticipate the new film The American, starring George Clooney, dir. by Anton Corbijn

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Synopsis: Anton Corbijn’s (Control) The American stars George Clooney as ”an artful assassin with a lengthy track record, constantly on the move and always watching his back. When an assignment goes wrong and a lover ends up dead, he vows that the next job will be his last. This final obligation takes him to a picturesque town nestled amongst lush Italian hills, its historical piazzas bursting with life. But to Jack, every location is a trap and every person a potential threat. Still, he surprises himself, enjoying confessional conversations over Armagnac with an insightful priest and slipping into an affair with a local beauty. But by letting his guard down, Jack may be tempting fate. A dangerous shadow-dweller shows every sign of closing in, and the mysterious woman who has hired him may not be all that she seems. As an increasingly wary Jack contemplates life, love and death in Italy, the film escalates into a climactic showdown through the cobbled maze of age-old alleyways. This sexy, suspenseful and intricate story blends intrigue and passionate romance within a searing morality tale to finally reveal the heart of this deeply private man.

http://mail.google.com/mail/e/32B

so bored with Clooney

good riddance

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01130/arts-graphics-2008_1130989a.jpg

I wd bone Clooney in a second but so bored with Corbijn/assassins cracking up.

never bored with clooney http://mail.google.com/mail/e/32B

real talk, basically

i've liked clooney in most everything (not always the films themselves) since 'out of sight'

btw i've never seen an anton corbjin film, i just saw a photo of clooney holding a sniper rifle and my vision started getting blurry (no homo)

It would be better with Alain Delon or Chow Yun-Fat.

wth is Chow Yun doing these days anyway

I've never watched Control either but I'm pretty sure it's shite (whine whine black and white whine whine Samantha "Bobby" Robson" whine whine Joy Dive whine whine 80s whine whine we mean it man whine whine
)

xpost -- Last I saw him was the third Pirates of the Carribean movie.

Let's hope the Killers don't cover Simple Minds for the theme.

LOL. At least it's going to look amazing, because this woman is the costume designer.

The American stars George Clooney. When an assignment goes wrong, he vows that the next job will be his last. This final obligation takes him to a picturesque town nestled amongst lush Italian hills, its historical piazzas bursting with life. He surprises himself, enjoying confessional conversations over Armagnac with an insightful priest. Jack contemplates life, love and death in Italy. This intricate story is a searing morality tale to finally reveal the heart of this deeply private man.

With a cock shot in the 83rd minute.

The American stars George Clooney as an artful assassin with a lengthy track record, constantly on the move and always watching his back. When an assignment goes wrong, a lover ends up dead. To Jack, every location is a trap and every person a potential threat. Still, he surprises himself, slipping into an affair with a local beauty. But by letting his guard down, Jack may be tempting fate. A dangerous shadow-dweller shows every sign of closing in, and the mysterious woman who has hired him may not be all that she seems. The film escalates into a climactic showdown through the cobbled maze of age-old alleyways. This sexy, suspenseful and intricate story blends intrigue and passionate romance.

That was the Boondock Saints sequel premise, yes?

less racism

this will likely be at the very least "competent"

should star dave gahan

CONTROL was horrid.

this is a weird project for corbijn

Can't imagine why I've never wanted to see a movie about a dead pop star's wife bitching about him getting mad laid by a dude who shoots reverent black and white snaps of Bono.

Control was decent and it looked nice. Really tired of assassin/hitman bullshit though. Don't know where that puts me with this film.

control was embarrassingly bad. it started out in this arty mode, which was obnoxious enough, but then settled into the most routine and unconvincing TV biopic crap. like really awkwardly staged "greatest moments of joy division's career" crap. omehow corbijn seemed oblivious to all this, like the high-contrast B&W was supposed to redeem every VH1 cliché. it just gave the whole thing an unearned patina of self-seriousness. my girlfriend and i could barely restrain ourselves from walking out.

i will grant that it was marginally better than "away we go," however.

Maybe my bar's low, but compared to the load of awful biopics we've gotten these past few years, for musicians or otherwise, Control looks pretty damn good.

clooney and sniper rifles and espionage and sex and Italy is like catnip over here

btw i've never seen an anton corbjin film, i just saw a photo of clooney holding a sniper rifle and my vision started getting blurry (no homo)
--house of flying jaggers (J0rdan S.)

this basically

yes

i actually prefer most of the big hollywood biopics over control, honestly. at least they were sort of kinetic and unabashedly emotional. control was just...bleh. like the world's most boring animated AMG review.

but yeah clooney has worn his age about as well as anyone. hot stuff.

star w/ a crappy recent track record + fotog whose first film was pointless = not encouraging

"pointless" is a good way to describe that movie.

this movie = bourne+munich+don't look now?

star w/ a crappy recent track record + fotog whose first film was pointless = not encouraging
--Your Favorite Saturday Night Thing (Dr Morbius)

cheer up guy

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I would like a moratorium on lead characters named "Jack". I don't think I have ever met a person named Jack. It's not a good fake name for blending in if you're an assassin, because it's unusual outside of screenplays for a dude to be named Jack.

There was a run on kids being called Jack about ten years ago in England. Film about a jaded 10 year-old assassin would be good.

I can't remember if the guy in Day of the Jackal was "Jacques"

his name was jack al

The screenwriter, Rowan (son of Roland) Joffe, is also writer-director of the new version of Brighton Rock.

jay ackal

"rowan joffe" is "roland joffe" with a speech impediment, no?

jacka l

jaquille

My grandfather was called Jack, so THERE YOU GO.

control was embarrassingly bad. it started out in this arty mode, which was obnoxious enough, but then settled into the most routine and unconvincing TV biopic crap. like really awkwardly staged "greatest moments of joy division's career" crap. omehow corbijn seemed oblivious to all this, like the high-contrast B&W was supposed to redeem every VH1 cliché. it just gave the whole thing an unearned patina of self-seriousness. my girlfriend and i could barely restrain ourselves from walking out.

― figuratively, but in a very real way (amateurist), Friday, November 13, 2009 7:05 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

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Amateurist OTM, it's like a b/w afterschool special for adults...

Is this the movie that was filmed in that (16th century?) Italian town that was nearly demolished by an earthquake a couple years ago? I remember noise back then about a Clooney movie shooting there and how it would help the town recover. Or something like that.

I could be totally off my meds.

seeing tonight. apparently in the book he just made and fixed guns.

an ass slowly crumbling morelike xpost

i dug his denim jacket. that was denim, right? nice stitching at any rate.

Actually I thought the first hour was relatively cliche-free. That and the lovely cinematography / sound design got me through.

i liked the quiet

but i needed more than that

I liked this movie.

I think it did a good job of portraying a person who is ill-at-ease in his settings/surroundings, wants that discomfort to end, but also has made the connection (probably correctly) that lack of discomfort = being open to getting killed.

The car/vespa chase scene was solid, the music was very good, and the photography was gorgeous. As was Clara. Woo.

Armond otm (in this graf, at least):

Clooney revisits his 1970s movies fetish, imitating the mysterious, nefarious protagonist of Coppola’s The Conversation and the doomed assassin of The Parallax View but without the authenticity of those overrated films. Corbijn imitates their studied calm but this is not the penetrating quiet of a real locale or genuine paranoia or suspense but of portentousness.

http://www.nypress.com/article-21601-the-anti-american-american.html

lol @ that "overrated" in there... he couldn't just say it isn't as good as those movies, he has to let us know that they weren't even that good either

^^^ why i love him

Did he praise as an alternative the unmitigated brilliance of Lost Horizon?

Clooney is a poor man's Olyphant, whose measured, disillusioned performance more honestly portrayed the embittered plight of the masculine professional in a feminized, post 9-11 world.

This was a good, but not great movie that felt a bit incomplete. It took the rogue assassin trope, played with the element of their solitude, using everything from extended scenes of Clooney performing tasks in silence by his lonesome, or zoom lenses on his empty face.

But ultimately it didn't really do much to expand on any of the cliches of the genre. It felt incomplete, like there was supposed to be more to the movie. The pacing was off at times, and the ending was predictable.

The audience I was seated around hated it, but most of em were old dumb rednecks. B-.

this movie is totally empty and full of the worst cliches

― real s1ock (s1ocki), Wednesday, September 1, 2010 3:21 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark

mostly OTM

without the authenticity of those overrated films

<3

him calling those films overrated really breaks up the flow of that sentence though and undermines the point he is trying to make.

^^why it is classic armond

parallax view is a dope film but not very 'authentic'

I liked Control, and not because its pretty, but I guess you had to quite like Joy Division/know and have heard the story of the band repeated: just liked how it turned the whole post-punk thing into an episode of Corrie or what have you.

I saw this in the same movie theater where I saw Ronin some 10-12 years ago. Was pretty bored by both, but maybe it's because this theater is run down and doesn't have the best sound or projection.

Fellas, this is pretty much Ronin II, so if you liked that, I think you'll like this.

Otherwise, if you bring a date, have a drink or two beforehand and I bet that she/he will enjoy it. It's like a coffee-table book. Would make a manic double feature with I Am Love.

TS: Paris chase v Vespa chase

i see 50-60% $ nosedive 2nd weekend

only cost $20 million. they're not too troubled.

easy to have a small budget when people go 20 minutes without speaking and spend another half hour doing things like assembling guns at a table.

$20 M, no way, not w/ pub + ad budget included.

well no, but even if it ends its domestic run at $25 million, factor in international and they'll have made their money back even before ancillary.

so, not a big hit

actually it's on $19.8 right now.

Well no, but I really doubt they expected it to be. If they did, they wouldn't have opened it on Labor Day Weekend. They'll probably hope to garner an acting nomination, but even if they don't, it's not a bomb or anything.

full frontal female helps

Didn't help the other recent hitman-through-Europe box office bomb, The Limits of Control.

ronin was one billion times better than this movie

can we at least all agree this is about 1000x better than Limits of Control?

about the same imo

no, Limits of Control was the worst thing I've ever seen from Jarmusch

they're both pretty bad!

didn't even bother with that, broken flowers was so terrible

i mean--how can you even break a flower?? am i right?!

liquid nitrogen, hammer. saw it in science class.

changed my life.

I thought it was just my audience, but I happened upon a news release saying that CinemaScore, the market research firm, reported the average grade "The American" received from ticket buyers was a D-, which turns out to be some kind of record. This made me laugh, because I had made a point of listening to what people were saying as they left the theater, and jotted down a few of the things I overheard -- most of which were fairly predictable:
"Well, that wasn't very good. Why is it getting such good reviews?"

"It doesn't answer your questions, does it?"

"Nah, too slow."

"I know! I'll never trust him again!" (I don't know who that remark was referring to -- a critic or a personal acquaintance of the patrons?)

from Emerson

i heard similar comments coming out of the theatre but imo they seemed to be more opinions of braindead people who need constant stimulation. ie this was a flawed film but not for the reasons the idiots in my theatre said.

Yeah, I get the feeling if a family member who is a casual film watcher asks "is it any good? I heard it was bad" I'd have to respond, "well, it's not great, but probably not for the reasons you've heard."

i mean this was the same theatre where when the credits came up during No Country for Old Men some redneck shouted "Piece of sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeit" and got applause for it.

the theatre I saw Machete at was far better -- younger, and they actually booed when the Devil trailer came on, as well as the Saw trailer.

This was very slow and speculative and had a very attractive naked woman. I liked it.

Not completely sold on long intro sequence with credits rolling while car goes through a tunnel. It was one of a few shots that were pretty obviously "artistic."

that's kinda the only part that stayed with me (besides nekkid woman)

I liked this quite a lot. The score by Herbert Grönemeyer was beautiful at times... he really recreated the sound of (maybe) a Giorgio Moroder soundtrack, maybe? I don't know if that is what he was shooting for specifically.

i liked this as a mood piece, even if it got silly near the end (admittedly i will watch any movie about a sad assassin killing time in the scenic countryside, or wherever). apparently corbijn is directing an adaptation of one of the recent le carre books, which seems like a good fit?

also enjoyed how the score was portentous during the quiet parts and quiet during the action scenes.

This movie pulls off being understated and beautiful, imo.

I thought it was a good contrast to The International, which came out the preceding year, and is somehow both more action-filled yet less engaging as a film. The cinematography is great.

Not completely sold on long intro sequence with credits rolling while car goes through a tunnel. It was one of a few shots that were pretty obviously "artistic."

― mh, Monday, September 27, 2010 2:19 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yea i liked this. after the title card came up i asked "so hes american?" & my gfs sister said "i think its too soon to tell"; we did not watch the rest of the movie

This is now on the 'flix and helped cure a mild bout of insomnia.