Derrick and the Dominoes

Our theme this week
Films about oil, and what it does to people

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   Giant (1956)
Tuesday         —   The Wages of Fear (1953)
Wednesday    —   The Two Jakes (1990)

Syriana (2005)

Other films about oil this week are personal or local.  This one’s global.  Syriana is a political thriller spanning three continents and multiple storylines.

Oil here is not a diversionary MacGuffin, something just to get the action started, as you might see in a Bond movie.  It’s, as much as anything, the point of the movie:  oil is what makes the world go round.  It’s what everyone’s fighting for—the key to riches, the key to power, the key to control of the political chess board in the game that the master players are playing. 

The action is complicated, not easy to summarize, but what the film lacks in simplicity it makes up for in scope.  Big companies, a Washington law firm, the CIA, and a ruling family in an Arab monarchy are all in on the game.  In the geopolitics of the story, American interests are in jeopardy when a Mideast government grants rights to the Chinese, and the Americans do whatever they can to regain the advantage.  That includes an under-the-table deal to get government approval for a corporate merger and a plot to assassinate an Arab prince who hopes to reform his country’s repressive ways.

The film stars Matt Damon as a globetrotting financial analyst working for an energy company, George Clooney as a CIA officer stationed in the Mideast, Jeffrey Wright as a Washington attorney who makes things happen, Chris Cooper as the head of an oil company, and Alexander Siddig as the would-be reformer in the Gulf emirate.

I’ve seen criticism that Syriana is too far-fetched, the wild imaginings of conspiracy theorists.  The film certainly has a conspiratorial feel, as if pulling back the curtain to show us all how the world really works.  It is fiction, clearly, but is it inconceivable?  I don’t think you’d say so if you’ve been paying attention.

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Six Packs

Our theme this week
Rat Packs, and other “Packs” that made movies

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   Holmby Hills Rat Pack
Tuesday         —   Rat Pack

New Rat Pack

George Clooney said a wise thing in 2001 when the remake of Ocean’s Eleven was coming out.  “We’re never going to be as cool as those guys.”  On that he was right.  But on the other hand, Clooney and his pack of thieves made a better movie.

Clooney was careful to downplay the parallels between the “eleven” in the remake and the Rat Pack of the original.  But when you make a movie called Ocean’s Eleven, you invite people to make comparisons anyway.  In media shorthand they were the ”new” Rat Pack, even if they steered clear of the label themselves.

The remake was another heist movie, also set in Vegas, with a slick cast featuring some of the hottest names in Hollywood, including Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, Bernie Mac and Andy Garcia.  Carl Reiner and Eliott Gould lent the production their veteran touch, and Julia Roberts, as Danny Ocean’s ex, added her million-dollar smile.  Steven Soderbergh, in one of his lighter turns, directed the action with finesse.  In short, the film is about movie stars having fun, and as a piece of juiced-up, pure entertainment, it was one of the decade’s more enjoyable pleasures.

Ocean’s Eleven was a hit with audiences, and Soderbergh, Clooney, and the pack made a couple of sequels, Ocean’s Twelve, in 2004, and Ocean’s Thirteen, in 2007.

Among the core team—Clooney, Pitt, Damon, Roberts, and Soderbergh—none is known for his or her singing prowess.  But like the earlier Rat Pack, they are frequent collaborators in the moviemaking business, both onscreen and behind the scenes.  Their work includes many popular and entertaining films from the past decade or more.  Here, some in which at least two were associated:  Out of Sight (1998), Erin Brockovich (2000), Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002), Syriana (2005), The Good German (2006), The Departed (2006), Michael Clayton (2007),  Burn After Reading (2008), and The Informant! (2009).

“How did you get by the laser fields in the Great Hall?”
A scene that works in any language.

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Deal Me In

Our theme this week
Card games at the movies

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   The Cincinnati Kid (1965)

Rounders (1998)

Rounders has nothing to do with that game from the early days of baseball.  Rounders are people who make a living playing cards.

Matt Damon is a law school student who loses big and walks away from the game—for good, so he tells his girlfriend (Gretchen Mol).  But it’s not easy staying out of the action when his buddy, played by Edward Norton, is released from prison.

Damon and Norton both give impressive performances, and their too-smart-for-the-room dialogue helps make it a memorable film.  John Malkovich, in a performance that can only be called Malkovichian, plays a Russian mobster known as Teddy KGB.

Though it did modest business at the box office, Rounders drew a loyal following and was in part responsible for the recent popularity of Texas hold ‘em and for the glut of televised poker during the past decade.

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Talkin’ ‘Bout “D” Generation

There’s a “My Generation” for every generation.  There’s the rock classic from the Who, the punk cover from Green Day, the remix from Will.i.am.  Different times, different tastes, different musicians.

So it is with actors.  One era has Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd, another Brando, Dean, and Clift, a third Pacino, De Niro, and Hoffman.  Each group of actors reflects their time, and in a way, defines their time.

Who will be remembered as the defining actors of our time?  Time will tell, though we can make a few guesses.

The actors featured this week are all movie stars and contemporaries, born between the mid-1960s and mid-’70s.  Except for one, each grew up in a big city on one of the coasts.  They’re versatile, not easy to typecast, and talented.  Each has at least one Oscar nomination.  Each has appeared in a Best Picture winner or nominee.  They’re guys in demand, with twenty or more film credits apiece.  They’re not new faces but they’re relatively young.  They should have long careers still ahead of them.

There’s one other thing they have in common.  Maybe you could call them the ”D” Generation.

Our theme this week
Actors of the ”D” Generation

Matt Damon

The essentials
Maybe it helps to be a baseball fan.  That scene at the therapist’s office.  Sean Maguire, the doctor, is telling the bright young kid with a chip on his shoulder about the day he first knew his wife was the one for him.  “October 21, 1975.”  Game 6, Fenway Park, Carlton Fisk hits one off the foul pole in the twelfth.  The biggest day in Red Sox history and the doc gave up his ticket to “see about a girl.”  Years later, he doesn’t regret a thing.  Never did.  Even a die-hard Yankees fan (at least this one) could see that was big.

That scene, co-written by today’s featured actor, helped Robin Williams win an Academy Award.  The film, Good Will Hunting, is remembered today for launching the career of a certain twenty-something actor from Boston who also picked up an Oscar for the screenplay he wrote with his buddy Ben Affleck.

Matt Damon had already been in movies—opening two weeks earlier he starred in The Rainmaker, probably the best adaptation of a Grisham novel—but the film that put him (and his friend) on the map was Good Will Hunting.  The film with the punny title was very well crafted, had winning performances, and was a big hit.  It became the inspiration for the dreams of a generation of would-be Hollywood stars.

Damon followed it with his title role in Saving Private Ryan, a character of more symbolism than screen time.  Next was his fine performance as a poker player in Rounders.   The following year, 1999, Damon starred as the cold-blooded killer in The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Damon had excellent success with a couple of film franchises during the ’00s.  Steven Soderbergh remade the Rat Pack’s Ocean’s Eleven, leading to Twelve and Thirteen, with Damon appearing as the heist ensemble rookie.  The Ocean films were loose and fun entertainments, and about as cool as movies got during the decade.  As the amnesiac agent in the Bourne thrillers–Identity, Supremacy, and Ultimatum—Damon was a new model for an action hero.  The fast-paced and popular trilogy raised Damon’s stardom to a new level.

Teaming with friend and frequent co-star George Clooney, Damon starred as an energy analyst in Syriana, a 2005 thriller with intrigue and a political edge.  The Good Shepherd was a spy film set in the early days of the CIA.  Damon was part of the all-star cast, including Leonardo DiCaprio, in Martin Scorsese’s Best Picture winner of 2006, The Departed.  A remake of the Hong Kong film Internal Affairs, now set in the actor’s old stamping grounds of Boston, Damon did first-rate work as an informant for the local crime boss.  The Informant! (with Soderbergh again) was one of two noteworthy Damon films for 2009, a twisted dark comedy about a screwball whistle blower who rats on his corporation and messes up an FBI investigation at the same time.  In Invictus Damon plays South Africa rugby captain François Pienaar, opposite Morgan Freeman’s Nelson Mandela.  The role earned Damon a Best Supporting Actor nomination, his third Oscar nod.  Next month he’s back with Paul Greengrass (director of the Bourne sequels) in the thriller Green Zone.

Beyond the final credits
Partners in crime (frequent collaborators):

• 9 films — Ben Affleck
• 6 films — Casey Affleck
• 5 films — George Clooney, Steven Soderbergh
• 4 films — Brad Pitt, Franka Potente, Carl Reiner, Julia Roberts, Kevin Smith
• 3 films — Don Cheadle, Brian Cox, Andy Garcia, Paul Greengrass*, Eliott Gould, Bernie Mac, Jason Mewes, Brian O’Halloran, Gus Van Sant, Julia Stiles
• 2 films — Joey Lauren Adams, Alec Baldwin, Albert Finney, Brendan Fraser, Martin Landau, John Turturro

        * Includes Green Zone

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