Word: clooney
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This week's hot Hollywood couple, Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal, danced briefly but divinely last night at a beyond-posh Toronto Film Festival party co-sponsored by TIME magazine. Across the way in the huge Design Exchange room, once home to the Toronto Stock Exchange, George Clooney stood in a corner, pinned by the admiration of other, less famous swells. If the three eminences had come there to schmooze with a TIME movie critic, they missed their big chance. Even so, they seemed as happy as celebrities ought to be, given their privileged status in our bi-national movie...
...There are particular demands to a star's job - basically, to be photographed looking great while pretending to be other people - but it's not exactly coal-mining in West Virginia. So some of them give back to the world that gave them so much; Clooney, whom I'd call the exemplary Hollywood star, has been especially generous in lending his aura to well-chosen issues and charities. The top actors also appear in films that are, in their subject matter and their underdog status in the commercial movie universe, their own worthy causes. That's what brought Reese...
...that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke's famous phrase could serve as the text for both Clooney's Michael Clayton and the Witherspoon-Gyllenhaal Rendition. Both are fictionalized expos?s: the first of corporate malfeasance, the second of Bush Administration policy in its war on Muslim extremists. At the center of each is a man trapped in a dilemma between doing what is damn well expected of him and risking his livelihood, and maybe his life, by doing the right thing...
...Clooney did that by not taking a salary on Michael Clayton. The entire film was made for about $20 million, or a top star's salary on a typical movie; but it has the sheen of a picture four times its budget. It also carries the deep distrust of U.S. corporations ? except for the movie conglomerates ? that has become the badge of Hollywood liberalism. (At the Venice Film Festival, where Michael Clayton played, Clooney got annoyed when he was asked to square the sentiments of this movie with his appearing in commercials sponsored by giant companies. He replied...
...Among the hot-ticket films that played Venice before Toronto: Ang Lee's steamy Lust, Caution, the Iraq war dramas Redacted and In the Valley of Elah, Woody Allen's Cassandra's Dream, the Bob Dylan fantasia I'm Not There. Clooney and Pitt stood on the red-carpeted podium outside the Sala Grande to promote their product. All the big Hollywood films were shown in Venice's first few days, so the stars and directors could return to North America and catch a breath before coming to Toronto...