Film: Michael Clayton (2007)
Date: 2/1/07
Place: AMC Media Center, Burbank

Advice from me to a film snob: Every once in a while go see a movie at a mall movie theater. It's a much different experience in LA to see an Oscar nominated flick with the Friday night mall crowd than at some other industry hoopla.

Michael Clayton is one damn fine film. It's a fairytale for this modern age. I chalk it up with the other beautifully bleak Oscar contenders from this year (There Will Be Bloood, No Country For Old Men). Tilda Swinton plays a wonderful villain and Tom Wilkinson is consistently stunning. For the first half of the film George Clooney distracted me. His charisma is sometimes too much to take on one screen and fights the smaller character driven moments a film like this demands. But by the end I was hooked. The end title sequence, by the way, is one of the best I've ever seen. There's a silence and lyricism that you don't usually find in Western filmmaking. In fact, it might be a Wong Kar-Wai or Hou Hsiao Hsien rip-off. If not, then filmmakers take note. That is one effective ending.

Michael Clayton comes out on DVD 2/19 for those not lucky enough to have mall movie theaters bring back movies for Oscar season.

Labels: film journal