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The Blind Side

Of all the horror movies I watch, all the CG and rubber gore I rarely blink at, I felt an inescapable sense of dread at the start of The Blind Side and instinctively moved to cover my eyes. The film opens with Sandra Bullock’s Southern syrup-drenched voice over, but on screen we’re seeing an old NFL film. Look, it’s the Redskins and there’s John Riggins, so it must be from the ‘80s. Yep, there’s Joe Theismann… and it’s a night game… which means a Monday night game… and… oh my god no… they’re playing the Giants… and there's L.T….

Every football fan over 30 remembers what comes next, and as Bullock’s character explains in her narration, it changed professional football and Michael Oher’s life. Thanks to that oh-god-cover-your-eyes moment live on Monday Night Football, when Joe Theismann’s shin suddenly went 90 degrees the wrong way (a moment that in the days before YouTube was still seen over and over again on television), the left tackle’s need to protect the quarterback’s blind side became much more important—hence much more valuable and financially lucrative.

And because of that, the real-life Michael Oher, a hulking, surprisingly quick mountain of a man, went from living on the streets at age 16 to avoid daily life in the projects to becoming a first-round draft pick for the Baltimore Ravens last spring. In fact, in one of those nifty little art-and-life serendipities, this past Monday evening I got home from a screening of The Blind Side—the wonderfully moving dramatization of Oher’s story—just in time to catch Oher himself live on TV, helping the Ravens crush the hapless Browns on Monday Night Football.

The Blind Side tells the true tale of young Michael Oher (Quentin Aaron), a looming giant growing up in a solemn, silent self-protective cocoon. Big Mike, as he’s called by others, goes anywhere in the Memphis night to escape his mother’s broken home, but he’s not getting anywhere.

Then Oher is given a couch to sleep on for a night by Leigh Anne Touhy (Bullock), an interior designer, Taco-Bell-franchise socialite, and a bona fide bull-headed, Ol’ Miss-loving, Southern belle. Michael’s night on the expensive Touhy Family couch turns into two, then a week, then a month, as all the Touhys end up helping the behemoth of a boy find his place first in the classroom and only later on the gridiron. (Football is barely mentioned during the film’s first half.)

Based on the book The Blind Side: The Evolution of a Game by Michael Lewis, the film is written and directed by John Lee Hancock (The Rookie) with a sure hand for negotiating obvious sports-movie clichés past the dopey. The Blind Side may draw its inspiration from how Oher’s quiet, mammoth gentleness hides deep, protective strength, but its tone comes at you like Lawrence Taylor himself, bearing down with every heavy pound of crushing, inescapable power.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon

Last summer I read the four Twilight novels back to back and immediately understood why millions of women around the world went gaga for Stephenie Meyer's fictional Forks, Washington-based universe.  While I don't consider myself a Twihard by any means, I'm also not too proud to admit that I did, in fact, enjoy the books.  And even though New Moon was my least favorite in the series, I still had high hopes for its adaptation. I mean, it just kinda had to be better than Twilight, right? 

If you were reading redblog a year ago then you know that while I had several issues with the first film, I did find some of its cheesiness a bit charming. (What you might not know is that I watched it in the theater again -- twice -- after I wrote that review and actually liked it more each time.)  Therefore, I figured that with a new director (Chris Weitz) and a bigger budget that would surely remedy the embarrassingly bad "special effects situation," there was no way the sequel wouldn't be a superior film.  Alas, fellow Twilight fans, I have bad news for you: I was very, very disappointed by New Moon.

For the most part, the adaptation follows the story arc of the novel. Vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) and mortal high schooler Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) are happy together for like two seconds, but then a few members of Edward's family start lusting after Bella's blood when she gets a paper cut (at her own birthday party, no less), and so Edward's all, "Sorry, babe, but this isn't gonna work."  Bella sinks into a deep depression when the entire Cullen clan skips town, and the only person who is eventually able to cheer her up is her old buddy Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner), who's put on approximately one gazillion pounds of muscle -- and continued to use Crest White Stripes without abandon on his already-blinding choppers -- since we last saw him.  It is then revealed that he simply cannot bear to have his shirt on.  It physically pains him to do so -- he gets a really wicked contact rash and no one on in La Push (where he and his fellow Quileute tribe members hang) can figure out how to help him.  OK, so I made that part up. Jacob's shirtlessness is never actually explicitly explained in the film, but one can infer that it has something to do with him being a werewolf. But forget about the werewolf part for a second because I just need to say that it is seriously Ridiculous (notice the capital r?) how much Jacob's running around half-nekkid in this movie.  Or running around half-nekkid in the pouring rain.  Or in slo-mo.  I just kept thinking, "This is like Baywatch... with guys" during all of his scenes (and some of Edward's -- he also goes shirtless a few times and has a classic/hilarious bad-boy-walking-in-slo-mo scene to boot). I suppose I should be happy that some dudes are getting objectified-to-the-max up on the big screen for a change, but instead I just felt embarrassed for them.

Back to the plot... Just as Bella's life finally regains some normalcy and her friendship with Jacob starts turning into something more (no one can resist all that shirtlessness), the Cullens pop up again. Specifically, Edward's sister Alice (Ashley Greene) decides to drop by, and around that same time the girls learn that Edward thinks Bella is dead (long story). Because she can see glimpses of the future, Alice knows that Edward plans to take a page from Romeo and Juliet and -- since vampires can't off themselves -- will attempt to join Bella in death by putting on a fab-u light show over in Italy.  Meaning, he's going to stand in the sun and reveal his sparkling vampire skin to humans, thus ensuring he'll be killed by the royal vampire clan, the Volturi, 'cause showing your bling-bling face in public is against their rules.  Why would Edward be so distraught over Bella's death?  Wasn't he the one who left her?  Yes, of course, but he was just trying to protect her -- he really does love her -- but vampires shouldn't be with humans -- daaahhhh!!!!!   Don't you see how complicated their relationship is?!?!  Why else do you think they're always fumbling over their words and gasping and sighing and breathing heavy?!?  Because it's hard to be a human and vampire in love, people!

He Said / He Said: In Defense of Pirate Radio

Here’s one for ya: I didn’t actually love Love Actually the first time I saw it in the theater back in fall 2003. I thought it was unbelievably corny and hokey (and it is) and that it jumped around too much to ever get much traction with any of its plot lines or characters. I can’t recall exactly when or how a second viewing turned my head, but these days I love the movie for the corny and hokey, and it’s become one of my favorite rom-coms of all time.

(Another is About a Boy, which I also didn’t think was all that great on a first viewing and now adore. Maybe I’m just too cynical to let sappy romances sink in right away. Or I have a not-so-secret weakness for Hugh Grant.)

Point is, I fully understand why my co-redblogger James Rocchi and many other critics didn’t buy into everything Love Actually director Richard Curtis is selling in his newest film, Pirate Radio. By now, from James’ review and my interviews with director Curtis and star Tom Sturridge, you should know the basic premise of Pirate Radio (aka, The Boat that Rocked, its UK title): It’s Britain, 1966. Rock ‘n’ roll is barely played on the official BBC radio stations, so rock-minded entrepreneurs and true-believer DJs take to the North Sea to broadcast the music 24-7 from old converted freighters; even as the evil, uptight government plots to shut them down.

I’m easily seduced by the effective use of music in films, and the Pirate Radio soundtrack is stuffed full of excellent songs from the era. (All except the Beatles, thanks to licensing costs—but even that works in the film’s favor, allowing less-familiar gems to shine.) And the movie’s cast is a non-stop delight, from Bill Nighy doing his usual perfect lizard-like languor, through Philip Seymour Hoffman reprising his Lester Bangs routine from Almost Famous, to Rhys Ifans’ preening Jagger peacocking. The supporting tier of comic performances are also spot-on, including those of Nick Frost (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz), Chris O’Dowd, and Rhys Darby (Flight of the Conchords' moronic manager Murray).

Having seen it twice now, I’m fully aware of all of Pirate Radio’s obvious flaws: Its choppy, even lazy narrative structure full of contrivances; its reliance on the music to boost its energy and carry it along; its shallow misuse and abuse of its few female characters; its facile Us Vs. The Man politics; and of course Curtis’ deep love for grand, shameless, cornball gestures.

Curtis, who wrote Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, and Bridget Jones’s Diary, is still learning the ropes as a director—and as much as he wanted Pirate Radio to play like MASH or Animal House, you can feel his heart isn’t really in the requisite scenes of silly hijinks and casual sex. (Even in Love Actually, when he tried to write a casual sex gag with Colin flying to Wisconsin to get laid, Curtis couldn’t help turning it back into a love connection.)

And yet, as James pointed out, if you go with all this and let the film’s glaring flaws wash away, Pirate Radio is exuberant, ecstatic fun. I could do that in this case, James couldn’t. I know exactly where he’s coming from: There are many, many supposed “feel-good” or “just-for-fun” movies where I just didn’t “feel” it or have “fun” and could not forgive them their failings. But frankly, I’m much more comfortable giving in, going with it, and letting blatantly manipulative charms smooth over weaknesses when the aimed-for end result is Curtis’s trademark brand of laughter and joy in service of his love for music—rather than, say, Hasbro’s cynical peddling of CGI cartoon violence and faux “honor” and “patriotism” in order to sell more Transformer or G.I. Joe toys.

I admit it, I’m ashamed at the guilty fun I had watching at least the first couple hours of 2012. Getting off on the spectacle of destruction and drawing glee from the death of millions is probably nothing you want to brag about. But I don’t apologize at all for loving Pirate Radio. It probably won’t end up on my Watch Every Year DVD shelf like Love Actually, but I’m already itching to see it again.

It’s cold, gray November in the Midwest, and having come off a month of nihilistic Halloween-y fright flicks, the theaters are now filling with smart-excellent-but-bummer films like Precious, The Road, and A Serious Man. So right about now, it’s nice to have Curtis’s huge-hearted film--with its unrelentingly giddy, chaotic love of rock--to take a bit of the chill off.

2012

There’s a reason they call it “disaster porn.” You don’t want anyone to see you going into the theater, and you certainly don’t want them to know you had yourself some cheap fun while you were in there. Though if we’re going to be specific, Roland Emmerich’s 2012 is more than just disaster porn—it’s a disaster orgy. One held at the End of the Worlds of Fun amusement park.

Emmerich of course has made his career on destroying things, but where your Michael Bay likes to blow up cars and buildings and giant robots, Emmerich aims higher in films like Independence Day, Godzilla, and The Day After Tomorrow: he’s not happy unless he’s bringing the whole world down around your ears and then giving you a lecture about how we aren't going to let ourselves be pushed around by aliens, or giant lizards, or cold weather!

This time the Earth is getting some serious indigestion from solar flares and rogue neutrinos and is set to go all Jenga on us right around the time of some ancient doomsday prediction from the Wayans. Having just written that sentence and you having just read it, can we just agree to stop caring about the why’s and how’s of cinematic global destruction? Emmerich and co-writer Harald Kloser could have said the world was going to end because someone dropped a giant Mentos into the Earth’s core and the film would still work. And if the measure of a disaster movie is how good it gets stuff blowed up, 2012 is a resounding success: like a fat man at a Vegas buffet, the flick grabs a little of this, a little of that. Earthquakes and volcanoes and tidal waves, oh my god yeah.

In the tradition of, oh let’s say every disaster movie ever made, the plot proceeds to introduce various and diverse characters, most of whom will spend the next few hours trying to outrun fiery things. On the government side there’s the earnest scientist (terrific actor Chiwetel Ejiofor), the noble U.S. President (Danny Glover), the President’s smart-and-sexy daughter (Thandie Newton), and then Chief of Staff (or Disasters or Secret Reports or whatever) Oliver Platt doing what he does best: being sneaky and sly, but with such self-aware charming bluster that you almost forgive him when he takes your ice cream cone and kicks you off the bus. Oh and there’s Woody Harrelson, playing a conspiracy minded radio host like Art Bell by way of Gary Busey and a bag of weed. (The Randy Quaid shtick from ID4, only now it appears Quaid has gone nuts for real.)

Warned ahead of time that those rat-bastard neutrinos had turned on us, the world governments have been secretly building giant arks in the Chinese Himalayas. Because when you’re planning to save human civilization, you want your massive ships to be stamped “Made in China.” Just don’t lick the lead-painted walls, kids. My quibble with this whole Chinese Arks of Salvation thing is that the only world figure we see being saved is Queen Elizabeth, alongside her Corgis and Prince Philip. Really? Prince Philip? We have a chance to reboot human civilization and we make an effort to save Prince Philip? I’m surprised we didn’t also see Paris Hilton slinking aboard.

(Actually, there’s an even more cynical reason for this plot angle: Sony/Columbia wants 2012 to do big business in China, hence the Sino-centric plan and a nice, positive spin on the nation’s altruistic participation. Oh and yes, according to the film, Tibet is part of China. Take your little signs and go home, Richard Gere and The Beastie Boys.)

But since few viewers besides me want to see Oliver Platt presiding over the End Times, 2012 needs an Everyman central character. Enter John Cusack, acting out a flawless demonstration of Art for the Heart, Trash for Cash. (Before anyone starts bemoaning Cusack Selling Out, remember this is not the first time Lloyd Dobbler has slathered himself in box-office bait: Con Air? Serendipity? Must Love Dogs? America’s Sweethearts? Runaway Jury? Those are the paydays that keep the little films like Max, Grace is Gone, and War Inc. coming.) Cusack is a struggling novelist living in L.A. (where all struggling writers wind up, since it’s always nicer to struggle in the sun) who suddenly goes all Joie Chitwood thrill driver in order to get his estranged family (including ex-wife Amanda Peet and her new boyfriend, Tom McCarthy) out of town while there’s still a town to get out of.

As you can see, that’s a lot of talented actors dashing around saying things like “You’ve got to see this!” and “We gotta leave right now!” Ejiofor gets to spend most of his time furrowing his brow over scientific computer read outs telling him how dirty the Mentos, er neutrinos are gonna do us, while Cusack gets to have all the fun. 2012’s best section revolves around Cusack and kin using cars, planes, RVs, and Russian cargo jets to flee some of the most gleefully horrifying devastation CGI effects money can buy, while the narratively less fortunate masses go out with one long Wilhelm Scream. (As in The Day After Tomorrow, it turns out even the most destructive natural events can be outrun. If Emmerich ever gets around to making a biopic of Jonas Salk, there'll no doubt be a very exciting scene in which the scientist outruns polio.)

Got 7 Minutes? Hear E's Take on 2012, Pirate Radio, The Ugly Truth and Up

This morning I chatted with the team at KPAM's 'Bob Miller in the Morning' show about two films that hit theaters today -- 2012 and Pirate Radio -- as well as two new DVDs now available at redboxes everywhere -- The Ugly Truth and Up. 

Take a listen!

Where? 

Why, right here.

Pirate Radio

In Pirate Radio, writer-director Richard Curtis (Love Actually, Bridget Jones's Diary) is clearly telling a story that he's passionate about, based on the real-life fact that in 1966, at the height of the British rock revolution, the officially-licensed radio stations of England only played an hour of rock a day -- leaving a void that offshore pirate broadcasters on their own boats were more than willing to fill. It's clear that Curtis is passionate about all of this -- the radical rule-breaking, the rebellion of rock, the struggle to remake Britain in the '60s from a steady nation of uptight upright citizens into 'Cool Brittania.' Watching Pirate Radio, though -- as it meanders through its plotlines and jumps from montage to montage and leeches the energy of rock and roll in order to occasionally give its lifeless form a jolt-of much-needed energy -- you realize that Curtis might not have too much more than passion in his arsenal.

And at first that sugar rush is enough to lull you into thinking that Pirate Radio is going to be, at the very least, fun: It has an amazing cast, from Bill Nighy (Love, Actually) to Nick Frost (Hot Fuzz), Phillip Seymour Hoffman (Almost Famous) to Rhys Darby (Flight of the Conchords), Rhys Ifans (Notting Hill) to Kenneth Branagh (Valkyrie). But Curtis confuses having a great cast with having something for a great cast to do, and Pirate Radio soon turns into a collection of bits and bites and soundbites strung together along the flimsiest pretext of a plot, as the band of radio DJs under Nighy's loose command have a new friend in his godson Tom Sturridge and a new enemy in Kenneth Branagh's slicked-back tight-wound bureaucrat, who's taking on his new task of destroying pirate radio stations as a personal crusade.

A redblog Q&A with Pirate Radio and Love Actually Writer-Director Richard Curtis

Earlier this week, I and others sat down for a short round-table conversion with Richard Curtis, the writer-director of Pirate Radio, opening this weekend. Curtis is the writer of Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary, and the writer-director of my number-one rom-com of all time, 2003's Love Actually. (In the '80s, he also helped create one of my favorite British comedies, the twisted historical Blackadder series starring Rowan Atkinson.)

Originally known as The Boat That Rocked when it was released last spring in Britain, Pirate Radio tells a fictional story based on the real-life outlaw disc jockeys who quasi-legally broadcast rock and roll radio to England in the late 1960s from ships anchored in the North Sea. The rag-tag DJ crew is led by Curtis regular Bill Nighy as the owner and ship’s captain; Phillip Seymour Hoffman as The Count, the station’s sole American voice and most passionate believer in the power of rock; and Rhys Ifans as the preening Jagger-esque hedonist Gavin.

Other familiar comic faces in Pirate Radio include Nick Frost (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) as a “chunky” (and gloriously hairy) ladies man, and Rhys Darby, best known as the Flight of the Conchord’s manager Murray. Kenneth Branagh plays a British government official trying to shut the pirate radio stations down, and Mad Men's January Jones shows up as a dazzling love interest. Introduced into all this floating summer of love madness is Young Carl, played by Tom Sturridge. (A Q&A with Sturridge will be published tomorrow.)

The following are some of the highlights from our chat with Curtis:

On Youth and Music, and the Freedom to Live with People You Hate

Curtis: England was hilarious in the ‘60s. I went to a boarding school and it really was like 1949. All the hair was unbelievably short, you couldn’t run in the corridors, you couldn’t talk after lights out, you sung endless hymns with the word “pilgrim” in them. And that’s why it was so fantastic to listen to rock ‘n’ roll—it was undisciplined.

I had a tiny little radio, and you were like a safe cracker, turning the dial—they were hard to get, these stations because they only had very small frequencies. And it was the thing about volume level as you listened. It was too quiet you couldn’t hear it, but if it was too loud the matron who would stalk along the corridors could hear it, so you had to get that perfect level.

I’ve got very passionate memories of “Reach Out I’ll Be There” by the Four Tops. It was the first single I bought, and you know the way you can remember weird moments from your youth? I remember chapel was compulsory and a guy and I were hiding in the music rehearsal room and remember the DJ saying that "I’ll be There" had gone from 16 to number two, and how unbelievably excited I was. I was locked in a boarding school and sort of sensed this amazing world of freedom.

Also I think Pirate Radio is actually a film partly about being 24. At that age, most people end up in a flat with too many people, one of whom has had sex with everybody, one of whom has never had sex…with dreadful food, bad hygiene, and listening to music all the time. For me that was Camden Town, 1979: The Specials, Madness, Blondie, The Pretenders. And in a way it’s a movie about that nostalgic thing, about the freedom of our 20s when money doesn’t matter, you do the job you want to do, you don’t have any children. The weird thing is you often end up living with people you don’t like, ‘cause it’s a bit random. It’s the one person who can afford to live there, or the guy who owns the place, it’s some girl who’s a friend of his mother’s who has to move in. I hated the four people I lived with, but we were happy.

The Box

In 1992, the late author Thomas M. Disch wrote a controversial essay on science fiction for The Atlantic entitled "Big Ideas and Dead-End Thrills." Among other criticisms of the genre, Disch noted, by way of a quote from T.S. Eliot on Poe, that it often appeals to a sort of arrested development in readers—not just the 12-year-old’s heroic fantasy fulfillment of Star Wars or Star Trek, but also the puzzle-box nature of harder, more intellectual science fiction such as 2001 and Blade Runner.

Himself an SF writer, Disch's implication was that us geeks love clockwork stories full of hidden messages and structural tricks, so much so that the puzzle-solving nature of the narrative is as much a draw as the subject or ideas. For example, we tend to focus more on Blade Runner's hints as to whether or not Decker is a replicant than the film's larger ideas about what it means to be human.

The Eliot quote Disch referenced could just as well have been describing contemporary SF film maker Richard Kelly. Said Eliot of Poe: "The forms which his lively curiosity takes are those in which a pre-adolescent mentality delights: wonders of nature and of mechanics and of the supernatural, cryptograms and cyphers, puzzles and labyrinths, mechanical chess-players and wild flights of speculation. The variety and ardour of his curiosity delight and dazzle; yet in the end the eccentricity and lack of coherence of his interests tire."

Kelly, the writer-director of the beloved mind-flip Donnie Darko, the glorious cluster-mess Southland Tales, and now The Box—seems to embrace Disch and Eliot’s criticism proudly. Kelly’s films are intentionally, intricately, and maddeningly constructed to baffle and even frustrate, to leave more questions raised than answered. As a result, they tend to draw cultish devotion from those who enjoy working their way slowly and laboriously into Kelly’s cinematic puzzles (like Darko’s extra-dimensional poetics), or complete sneering dismissal from those who find his films full of silly, pointless pretension. (Even I, who kind of admires the bat-snot insanity of Southland Tales—you have to read the prequel comic book to even begin to sort out the plot—can’t fully defend it as anything but a weirdly noble, nearly unwatchable misfire.) The Box is already drawing both reactions.

Based on both the Richard Matheson (I Am Legend) short story “Button, Button” and the mid-‘80s “new” Twilight Zone TV adaptation of that story, The Box opens with Matheson’s simple moral premise. A mysterious man delivers a black box to a young, financially struggling married couple with a pre-teen son. Push the device's red button in the next 24 hours, he explains, and you receive $1 millions in cash, tax-free. And someone you do not know will die. So, would you allow a stranger you’ll never see to be killed in order to make a better life for your family?

Kelly sets his version in 1976 in Richmond, Virginia, where the father Arthur (James Marsden), is a scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center. (Like Kelly’s own dad, he helped land the Viking probe on Mars.) His wife Norma (Cameron Diaz) nurses a slight disability—a hidden disfigurement that both adds to the film’s immediate level of oddness and comes to play a major thematic role in the film. Arlington Steward, the mysterious stranger who shows up on their doorstep to explain the offer of the box, is played with terrifyingly elegance by Frank Langella.

From the moment we see Steward's face, we know Kelly has layers upon layers of secrets wrapped within his film, some to slowly reveal, others to keep to himself. As in Donnie Darko, a mood of fatalistic gloom settles over The Box, of seen and unseen things that are not quite right. That sense you are at the mercy of spooky action at a distance.

Redblog On the Radio: Locke's Turn This Week

Take a listen as I discussed G.I. Joe, The Taking of Pelham 123, A Christmas Carol, and The Men Who Stare at Goats on KPAM's Bob Miller Show last Friday.

It's just like reading my reviews, only with a lot more "um"s and a lot less reading.

The Men Who Stare at Goats

I can’t muster the strength to really bag on The Men Who Stare at Goats. Partly because I remain firmly under the spell of my Heterosexual Man Crush on The Last(?) Movie Star, George Clooney (not to mention that of my one-time Hetero Brit Man Crush, Ewan McGregor); partly because I love whenever Long-hair Jeff Bridges shows up in a movie (more on that later); but mostly because this offbeat, breezy, non-committal lark of a film never really asks much of the viewer. Doesn’t give much back, either, but there you go…

The Men Who Stare at Goats is based in part on true stories of how the U.S. Army has been dabbling in New Age psychic warfare for decades, as reported by Jon Ronson in his 2004 non-fiction book. Things like remote viewing, phasing through solid objects, and yes, killing the enemy—or poor stand-in goats—by staring at them.

However, where Ronson’s book is more a collection of oddball tales painting an overview of Army PSYOP efforts since the '50s, the film version, written by Peter Straughan and directed by first-time Clooney writing-producing partner Grant Heslov, tries to herd things into something resembling a plot. “Tries” being the operative word here: The film is jam-packed with humorous gags and easy, likable performances, but it never really finds an overriding point or purpose. Heslov and Straughan have cobbled together a narrative, but they never quite get hold of a thematic or cinematic purpose. There's no "why" here.

What they do have is McGregor’s down-and-out journalist character Bob Wilton stumbling first into the story of the military’s ‘80s-era attempt at building a “New Earth Army” comprised of psychic warrior monks: “Jedi warriors,” as goes the wink-wink joke at Ewan’s expense. Off to Kuwait at the start of the 2003 Iraq War, Wilton then runs smack dab into one of the warrior monks, Clooney’s Lyn Cassady.

Clooney is forever afraid of believing his own Sexiest Movie Star Alive press, so he often flocks to characters like Cassady, where he can let his inner dork roam free. (A la the Coens’ O Brother Where Art Thou, Intolerable Cruelty, and Burn After Reading.) Cassady is classic goofball Clooney: A puffed-up, mustachioed, self-serious goon who believes his own B.S. delusions.