Movie Review - 'Michael Clayton' (2007)

'A good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad act the good. Each should have
its own reward.' ~ George R.R. Martin

Michael Clayton is the name that belongs to a character played by George Clooney,
a man who is so handsome it's almost boring and then he talks and whoa where did
the time go. At his best, Clooney is fun to just watch talk and he does that a lot
in 'Michael Clayton'. But it's not the smarmy, cool, confident talking you've seen
him do in 'Ocean's Eleven'. No, Clooney in 'Michael Clayton' is beleaguered, tired,
and questioning everything he's done. And it is magnetic.

'Michael Clayton' (2007) is a riveting, suspenseful, slick corporate thriller and
was a superb directorial debut for writer, turned director, Tony Gilroy, an attestation
to his skill as a storyteller. Best known for his contributions to the Jason Bourne
trilogy. Twenty years ago, he penned 'The Devil's Advocate', which imagined Satan as
the head of a top law firm. In researching for that film, he stumbled upon an internal
memo, by a large corporation, explaining their decision not to recall a certain car,
because of a fatal, defective part. Their legal counsel and financial advisers concluded
they were better off litigating, if and when, a case would reach the courts, than go
through the expensive process of a recall. From the look of things, Gilroy's opinion
of the legal profession has not improved.
Michael Clayton (George Clooney) is an in-house 'fixer' at one of the largest corporate
law firms in New York. A former criminal prosecutor, Clayton takes care of Kenner, Bach
& Ledeen's dirtiest work at the behest of the firm's co-founder Marty Bach (Sydney
Pollack in his second to last film role). The firm has two big deals going. One is
a merger that would fold them into a bigger operation, reaping rich rewards for Bach.
The other is a huge class-action lawsuit against their biggest client, major conglomerate
U/North (think Monsanto), which after years of skirmishing is about to settle pre-trial.
But then Kenner's point man on the case, Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson 'This Beautiful
Fantastic '2016), as a public meltdown in the middle of a deposition. U/North's own
counsel Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton 'War Machine '2017) becomes infuriated and lashes
out at their representation. So Bach dispatches Clayton to fix the damage. Edens certainly
seems unbalanced, but he and Clayton are old friends. As hardened as Clayton might be
in his job, there is a certain amount of empathy. Edens may have mental issues, but the
divorced Clayton, father of a young son, has family problems. Add to that, a barely
controlled gambling addiction, and a debt he and his brother owe to some very bad men
over a failed restaurant. When Edens talks about U/North, Clayton listens and realizes
that he is not hearing crazy talk, which leads to his central dilemma: If Clayton does
the rightb thing for once, will he endanger his own position with the firm? And if Edens
is right about this corporate evil, will he risk his life?
Swinton and Pollack offer wonderful supporting turns, but Clooney is terrific, his
world-weary charm perfect for the tarnished Clayton. Early in the movie (though late in
the story, as the film's time-shifting scheme of things) when Clayton, having just cleaned
up a client's mess and driving toward home, at dawn, stops his car and gets out, climbs
up a hill to commune with a trio of horses. At this point in the tale, the behavior does
not track, but it is a testament to Clooney's talent, as an actor, that he is able to sell
the scene. This movie belongs to Wilkinson, who is simply breathtaking. Michael Clayton
may be the movie's hero, but Arthur Edens is its moral center. Wilkinson's sublime
performance elevates 'Michael Clayton' from an above-average thriller into the realm
of greatness.
This is not an action movie in the manner of the Bourne movies, but instead it is quietly
paranoid, a throwback to the '70s style storytelling of something like 'The Parallax View'
(1974). Gilroy does not create white-knuckle suspense so much as a simmering tension that
will surely burn Clayton if it ever comes to a boil. Editor John Gilroy, the director's
brother, deserves a lot of credit for maintaining an unhurried pace that nevertheless
telegraphs the threat that Clayton faces.
'Michael Clayton' is a wonderfully understated thriller. It doesn't have fight scenes or
a dramatic score or the kinetic feel of a Bourne movie. Instead, it's the most mesmerizing
of slow burns, about a man who witnesses a house collapsing around him in slow motion,
and wondering whether or not he should even bother hatching a scheme to get out.
In this reviewer's opinion, this was one of the great films to emerge out of Hollywood,
in a very, very long time. Shame on them for not created more and shame on you if you
don't experience it.

© Frank Borsellino™
© From Where I Sit™
November 15, 2017

* George Clooney & Sydney Pollack 'Michael Clayton' (2007)

Jeanne Moreau R.I.P.

This week we lost Sam Shepard, a tragedy no doubt... but another departure on the same day may have been overshadowed, Jeanne Moreau. A woman I have followed for a long time...goes back to my relationship early on in my youth with an intellectual French woman. Her gravelly voice… made her the original 'Femme Fatale'. Sometimes I find a story or an article that completely encompasses what I feel and so the words are so eloquently expressed. This piece in 'The New Yorker' Magazine (July 31, 2017) by Richard Brody is such a piece. I edited it to suit me.

The idea of Jeanne Moreau is as great as the onscreen presence of Jeanne Moreau because, in her performances, she embodied ideas in motion, and, for that matter, one big idea: Moreau. Moreau passed away on Monday, July 31st, at the age of eighty-nine, she was a Grande dame without haughtiness or prejudice. Her grandeur didn't erect walls around her; it widened her vistas, increased her curiosity, enabled her adventures, and overcame narrow boundaries. She was a queen of intellect—but an intellect that was no cloistered bookishness but an idea and an ideal of culture that enriched experience, envisioned progress, and looked ardently at the times. Someone once wrote that Cary Grant looks like a person who's thinking; I'd say he's rather lost in thought, whereas Moreau seems at home in thought, standing on a solid foundation of knowledge that makes her searching focused, precise, intention-sharp. If Alfred Hitchcock had known how to film heroic women, Moreau would have been the most Hitchcockian of active and intrepid women—and François Truffaut, who was among the most faithful and profound of Hitchcockians, recognized that trait when he cast her in 'The Bride Wore Black' (1968), one of his most conspicuously Hitchcockian films.

Moreau spanned generations, not merely in her life and in her career but in her ideas and in the art of her times. A celebrated theatre actress in the conservative Comédie Française, she made her name in films with a director from the new generation, Louis Malle, who was in his mid-twenties and found in Moreau a new kind of heroine, whose glamour had no gloss, whose elegance had no airs, who seemed to burst fussy constraints with every word she spoke, every glance she shot, every step she took. Born in 1928, she was an artist raised and trained in traditions that she expanded without destroying; she embodied not the narrowly intellectual artist but the person of culture, and she also embodied the paradoxes of culture in an age when its own presumptions were being challenged.

That's why Moreau was an ideal actress for such analytical directors as Michelangelo Antonioni and Joseph Losey, whose dramatic schemes and visual compositions embodied the lure and failure of intellect, the delusions of reason. Her performance in Antonioni's 'La Notte' (1961) as the fiercely intelligent and sensitive wife of a famous and egotistical novelist (Marcello Mastroianni), a woman who is struggling to rescue her identity in her marriage and in the architectural and intellectual tangle of modernity itself—is among the most essential in all of Antonioni's films. As Moreau walks alone through the lonely and architecturally oppressive streets of Milan, she seems not just to be thinking but to be thinking about thinking. That's also why some of Moreau's most famous performances came in filmed adaptations of works by Marguerite Duras, such as Peter Brook's version of 'Moderato Cantabile' (1960) and Tony Richardson's 'The Sailor from Gibraltar' (1967), as well as his 'Mademoiselle' (1966), for which Duras wrote the script. Moreau even played the role of Duras in Josée Dayans 'Cet amour-là' (2001). But no one filmed the Duras cinematic universe as did Duras herself. In the film 'Nathalie Granger' (1972), Moreau appears along with Antonioni's first screen heroine, Lucia Bosè, in a movie that Duras made in her own house, in a small town not far from Paris. There, Moreau embodies the severe yet dryly whimsical brilliance that Duras herself applies to the stuff of women's domestic lives and her own. The scene in which Moreau and Bosè terrify the young Gérard Depardieu with their skeptical gazes is exquisite comedy.

That's also why Moreau quickly came to embody an idea that was crucial to the French New Wave—she came to embody history itself. It's noteworthy that the film that enshrined Moreau as an icon of the French New Wave, Truffaut's 'Jules and Jim' (1962), is a period piece set around the First World War. The French New Wave brought a new generation of intellectuals and their concerns into the cinema, and proved that the cinema itself was among that generation's crucial concerns. But when Truffaut, the youngest of the New Wave directors, sought to reconsider French history and culture in the light of his own experience, Moreau was his heroine of free-spirited inventiveness, of freedom tout court, and of the tragically destructive (and self-destructive) passions that came with it.
In the following decades, Moreau was cast over and over by directors who sought to unite modernity with tradition. There was Jean Renoir's 'The Little Theatre of Jean Renoir' (1970), Luis Buñuel's adaptation of Octave Mirbeau's 1900 novel 'The Diary of a Chambermaid', which Renoir had adapted in the mid-nineteen-forties. When Jacques Demy, in his second feature, 'Bay of Angels' (1963), pulled the stifling and louche bourgeois world and the cinematic crime-drama clichés of Riviera casinos into the blazing New Wave sunlight, Moreau—platinum-blond—was the star. With her intensely concentrated analytical focus as she pursues the goal of a doomed and reckless passion, is one of her greatest performances. When André Téchiné reclaimed French history through French melodrama in his film 'French Provincial' (1975), Moreau was the star. When Rainer Werner Fassbinder, adapted a novel by Jean Genet for the film 'Querelle’ (1982), it would be his last film, made in a daring new style—a French period piece in the vague past, Moreau was one of its stars. She sang in it, too—indelibly. And in 'Gebo and the Shadow' (2012), the last feature by Manoel de Oliveira, which he made at the age of a hundred and five, the prophetic voice from the distant past was performed by Moreau. Her death marks not just the end of an era but of the idea of an era.

* On behalf of myself and the ladies of © From Where I Sit™ Bon voyage éternelle!

© Frank Borsellino™
© From Where I Sit™
writer/blogger/bon vivant

* photo by Giancarlo Botti

Sam Shepard R.I.P.

'I didn't go out of my way to get into this movie stuff. I think of myself as a writer.' ~ Sam Shepard

* A playwright extraordinaire whose work carried a poetic voice full of passion, soul, sometimes desperation and heartbreak that could rip right through you. He was also a director and a fine actor. In all, he wrote forty-four plays, along with short stories, essays, and memoirs. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for 'Buried Child' (1979)... nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of pilot Chuck Yeager in 'The Right Stuff' (1983). He seemed to disappear for a while…as it turns out, he had ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) - that most cruel disease that leaves the mind intact while shutting down the ability to move and then, at the end, to breathe. May your final act be a peaceful one for all eternity.

* From all of us at © From Where I Sit™ we extend our deepest condolences for the passing of such an immense talent.

* 'Bloodline' (2015–2017)

© Sperry Top-Sider™

'The moment will arrive when you are comfortable with who you are, and what you are– bald or old or fat or poor, successful or struggling- when you don't feel the need to apologize for anything or to deny anything. To be comfortable in your own skin is the beginning of strength.' ~ Charles B. Handy

* As Paul Sperry watched his cocker spaniel, Prince, run across the ice on a winter's day in Connecticut, he noticed his dog's amazing ability to maintain traction on the slippery surface. Turning over Prince's paw, he observed hundreds of tiny cracks and cuts going in all directions. These wave-like grooves became the inspiration for Sperry's latest patent, 'Razor-Siping™', and were instrumental in maximizing the traction and performance of the Authentic Original Sperry Top-Sider™ (or Top-syder™) first introduced in 1935. Since inventing the first boat shoe, the brand continues to share their 'Passion for the Sea' with those who enjoy the good life in, on and around the ocean. From its introduction of the world's first siped rubber outsole for non-marking traction, to advanced technical fabrication to combat the elements, © Sperry Top-Sider™ remains the vanguard of high-performance amphibious footwear.

© Frank Borsellino™
© From Where I Sit™
www.fromwhereisit.co
writer/blogger/bon vivant

* © Sperry Top-Sider™

Life Can Be Fleeting !

'Life is short and it can be as fleeting as cotton candy on the tip of your tongue, fleeting and gone like that. It can be as still as a plane soaring rapidly through the skies, as we barrel on to our destination but do not sense the urgency of seizing the moment.' ~ © Frank Borsellino™

* Jeremy Irons by Mikael Jansson @ Donna Karan New York '2001

Niagara Mohawk Power Corp Building

'Building becomes architecture only when the mind of man consciously takes it and tries with all his resources to make it beautiful, to put concordance, sympathy with nature, and all that into it. Then you have architecture.' ~ Frank Lloyd Wright - - - ± Frank Borsellino © From Where I Sit™

* The Niagara Mohawk Building is an Art Deco classic building in Syracuse, New York. It is a building of the Niagara Mohawk Power Utility Company, now owned by National Grid plc. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as 'Niagara Hudson Building' in 2010. It is an outstanding example of Art Deco architecture and a symbol of the Age of Electricity. Completed in 1932, the building became the headquarters for the United States' largest electric utility company and expressed the technology of electricity through its modernistic design, material, and extraordinary program of exterior lighting. The design elements applied by architects Melvin L. King and Bley & Lyman transformed a corporate office tower into a widely admired beacon of light and belief in the future. With its central tower and figurative winged sculpture personifying electric lighting, the powerfully sculpted and decorated building offered a symbol of optimism and progress in the context of the Great Depression.

* Niagara Mohawk Power Corp Building in Syracuse, New York

White Christmas @ Sofia

Ladies & Gentlemen,

'A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play;
his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He
hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever
he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself,
he always appears to be doing both.' ~ Lawrence Pearsall Jacks

Before I begin let me mention that Mother Nature was not cooperative with our shindig.
It was not a 'White Christmas @ Sofia' soiree... but rather a 'September in New York'
kind of night. I am back, after such a prolonged absence, to extol the virtues of our latest
gastronomic regale. The evening was a fabulous chef-d'oeuvre with delicious sprinkles...
we were able to amass quite a montage of bon-vivants. N'est-ce-pas? I say 'We', because
the success of these shindigs is the collective effort of the whole and not of its parts.
What began quietly enough, and with very little fanfare, turned out to be quite interesting,
engaging and very entertaining. The evolutionary cycle, always moving forward, has cast
its attrition.

First and foremost, let us welcome the nubile Chef Doriana... who took my breath away!
And for the longest time... a male newcomer making an appearance, Luigi, who also dabbles
in writing with a degree in drama. I like people who are creative... in any field. Very cool!
I hope they continue to grace our table.
A special mention goes out to the bombacious Ms Marilyn, va va voom! Not bad for a woman
who recently gave birth! She wore white as she had done on her first outing back in 2012.
I believe Antonella & Wendy are added stimuli, intellectually and emotionally. One of the
patrons @ Sofia confided in me her surprise by the level of camaraderie by everyone.

The word for the evening is 'Umami', whispered into my ear by lovely Chef Doriana.
A loanword from the Japanese, 'Umami' can be translated as 'pleasant savory taste'
and is one of the five basic tastes (together with sweetness, sourness, bitterness,
and saltiness). People taste 'Umami' through receptors included in the foods that
indulge you in an orgasmic experience of the palette. Kudos to the chef, I'm glad Frank
is back where he belongs. The food was remarkable and sublime, as it is always.
They say the measure of a great restaurant is the consistency of its dishes. Bravo
to the personnel as well... who showed true professionalism in the face of our constant
barrage of requests.

Watching Vince & Loredana in the throws of verbal exchanges with Fil & the Attorney,
who had mentioned earlier that she was 'As happy as a little girl' because of all the
male eye-candy in the form of the wait staff. And in the other corner, Antonella with
Wendy, and Domenic with Monsieur Bombardier, each being raconteurs, is the fuel
that propels these evenings.

'Life's euphoria consists of little moments; you steal away from the mundane.' ~ © Frank Borsellino™

The new decor is white-wash brick with vintage trattoria mementos and artworks...
along with a wall of colourful bottles. The bar is a long, expansive wood and steel
structure and the floors are a wooden parquet Herringbone pattern. Beautiful, sturdy
wooden tables, again very trattoria-style decor. There's a whole wall of windows
overseeing the kitchen in full swing.

Gianni and Danny are the epitome of 'Gentlemen service' down to the minutest detail,
and here we were not disappointed. We enjoyed another staple, the dessert platter
and our espressos & cappuccinos.

I'm a big proponent of evolution… as is the case with each soiree the dynamics and
the landscape changes, and this eclectic ensemble has definitely evolved, having passed
a year of ups and downs, while maintaining a certain level of familiarity. As Ms. Marilyn
pointed out to me in hush voice, 'These are my people! This is where I feel most at ease
and free to speak my mind.'
I like to equate it to an ever-changing, living organism that grows as it absorbs particles
it picks up along its journey. I have been told that such a group, as we have, is a rarity
and I hope I am living up to that task.


© Your Cruise Director
Food is my compass
December 18, 2015

* Sofia Trattoria ¤ Vineria
2042 Peel St.
Montreal (514) 843-5100
www.sofiavineria.com