Oct 13 2007
Clooney’s Niche and Qwest CEO’s Battle
Watched the movie “Michael Clayton” tonight. Really enjoyed it: a simple story tightly developed into a brilliant thriller; Excellent casting, scripts and acting.
In terms of acting, we thought Tom Wilkinson’s stands out. I never saw his performance before but a five-minute dialogue between him and Clooney reminded me of Ian Holm in Joe Gould’s Secret. Very typical English stage acting IMHO.
Clooney wasn’t bad either. I liked the movie partly becuase I liked where Clooney is going: he is not afraid of taking on serious topics–topics that demand the “silent majority” to do some collective soul-searching. He is the “righteous guy” from the left and he is happy to throw in his fame and fortune at it too.
Is this Clooney’s new niche? I also liked Syriana. If that movie was a little too dark to be popular, Michael Clayton’s triumphant ending can certainly make a difference here (but I would act differently if I were him. $10 million is enough to buy a life, let alone truth).
One thing I noticed was that the villain in the movie is played by the only female character–is this Clooney’s view on gender equality?
Incredibly, I just read this story on WP: “A former Qwest … executive, appealing a conviction for insider trading, has alleged that the government withdrew opportunities for contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars after Qwest refused to participate in [the evasdropping program].” Nacchio’s case was a high-profile one. It was all over the news when it came out. Now this new twist? Only WP put it on its web front page. No others mentioned it ever. Looks like NSA got everything covered now that Nacchio is allowed to leak the story.