For the 12th chapter in this series, I will cover a legend who isn’t precisely underrated nor overrated but someone who is the absolute definition of properly rated. A man that had a hell of a winning streak throughout the 2000’s, building up a resume that eclipsed his heartthrob sex symbol status which in his case could not have been an easy thing to do. A two-time Oscar winner who has quietly become quite the force both in front and behind the camera.
GEORGE TIMOTHY CLOONEY
He’s been in the news quite a bit this year. He’s a notable political advocate, of course, who wrote a very honest op-ed (which must have been pretty painful for him, honestly) in the New York Times early this year, which caught a lot of the expected toxic political backlash that op-ed pieces like that tend to do. But that is not at all what inspires this introspection.
In a GQ joint cover story last month, Clooney lobbed some bombs at legendary director Quentin Tarantino over some weird s*** that he allegedly said:
“Quentin said some shit about me recently, so I’m a little irritated by him,” Clooney said. “He did some interview where he was naming movie stars, and he was talking about [Pitt], and somebody else, and then this guy goes, ‘Well, what about George?’ and Quentin goes, he’s not a movie star. He literally said something like, ‘Name me a movie since the millennium.’ And I was like, ‘Since the millennium? That’s kind of my whole fucking career.'”
Of course, the millennium was not his “whole career,” given that he was the star of the number-one show on television for half a decade.
From 1998 until 2012, there was at least one major Hollywood studio film from George Clooney. And whether we want to recognize it or not…. He is the most consistent movie star from the decade of the 2000s, excluding nobody. The resume needs to be respected, and that’s precisely what we will do here.
But first, as this series will always do, we must acknowledge the s*** that is not essential to George Clooney’s career legacy. There’s a lot of notable stuff in here that, in my humble opinion, is not essential for self-evident reasons. Let us start with…
*EVERYTHING BEFORE 1996*
George Clooney was a man who worked hard on many small things to pay the bills back in the day. His breakout was ER, and everyone knows it. When it comes to discussing his legacy, he did not have a single notable thing mentioned before ER. You can go ahead and hit Wikipedia for all of those movies. But there’s a lot to name that won’t be named here.
Other notable omissions…
- WAITING FOR WOODY
- THE BOOK THAT WROTE ITSELF
- SOUTH PARK: BIGGER LONGER AND UNCUT
- ALL OF THE SPY KIDS MOVIES
- WELCOME TO COLLINWOOD
- POLITICAL DOCUMENTARIES
- THE FLASH
- IF
- MIDNIGHT SKY
- THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS
- THE AMERICAN
- THE GOOD GERMAN
There are quite a few cameos on that list. Those last three movies were major Hollywood releases, but if I were to start a conversation at length about Clooney’s career, there’s a good chance that y’all would forget that those three movies existed. Respectfully. All of them are okay enough, but we’re talking about legacy and the essential things. And it ain’t those things.
Anywho, without further ado, here is…….
THE GEORGE CLOONEY TIER LIST!!!!
🤩 GREATNESS🤩
OCEANS 11
Let’s get the obvious s*** out of the way to start things off. This is quite possibly the most swagged-out movie of all time. It’s endlessly quotable, with a brilliant second and third act. Every one of the protagonists in this story has at least one highlight reel kind of a moment for the actor playing the character. This is one of Steven Soderbergh’s best films, and not for nothing…quite possibly the best DVD commentary for any movie that has ever come out.
O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU?
Comedies from the Coen Brothers do not get better than this one. This is one of the better screenplays they’ve ever written and a highly entertaining musical as much as it is a comedy. The combination of Tim Blake Nelson, John Turturro, and Clooney have chemistry for days and are as funny as any collection of actors that have gotten together for a Coen Brothers comedy. This is the bronze medal of George Clooney’s performance. He’s never been funnier.
GOOD NIGHT… AND GOOD LUCK
The credit for the greatness of this film goes entirely to the legendary David Stratharin, who gave one of the best performances of the entire decade. He only lost the Oscar because Philip Seymour Hoffman did CAPOTE that year (which is also an all-time performance). I don’t want to jump off the ledge and say this is Clooney’s best directorial effort, but it might be. He’s done more dynamic things as a director than what he does in this movie, but this movie feels like it legitimately is from a different era, and I know that was the goal. Mission accomplished.
3 KINGS
When conversations about the most underappreciated films of all time come up, this is one of the first three I bring up (along with IN BRUGES and WALL*E). This is David O. Russell’s best movie by leaps and bounds. Funny, entertaining, informative in some areas, and compelling drama. Ice Cube, Mark Wahlberg, and Clooney are a dynamic threesome that should have done more movies together. Spike Jonze also deserves a lot of credit for the fantastic performance he puts on here. The movie really should have been called 4 Kings imo.
OUT OF SIGHT
Steven Soderbergh has so many bangers on his resume that to say this is a top-six or seven films speaks to how great everything is on his resume. This cast is unbelievable, and they all have individual moments to shine. This is the best JLo performance (aside from hustlers) that exists. This is the first script I ever read on the internet. And the original script is a little bit better than this movie.
GRAVITY
Easily a top 10 movie of the 2010s. I wish the Oscars would do ties every now and again for categories because both Sandra Bullock and Brie Larson deserved Academy Awards for their works in the movies they did. This movie is visually superior to many films that came out during the 2010s. Seeing this in IMAX is truly a special experience, and I am sorry for anybody who didn’t get a chance to do so. Clooney isn’t around for long, but he certainly makes an impact. His performance is decent enough, but he is the sprinkles on the sundae of this movie.
GREATNESS ADJACENT
OCEANS 12
I really, really don’t understand the flack that this gets. The first act of this movie is absolutely spectacular, and it carries on the spirit of the original. Vincent Cassel’s villain, Nightfox, is just as good of a villain as Terry Benedict if not a little more dynamic. The one drawback to this film is that it’s not as funny as the original, and the third act isn’t as strong. No where close, actually. But everything holds up in just expanding the world and taking things internationally. The swag does not disappear; there’s more Julia Roberts (which is a good thing) and it’s a prettier film. Sometimes cinema goers just want to bash sequels. That is very much the case here.
FROM DUSK TILL DAWN
George Clooney is absolutely great at being a badass. He’s suave enough to do the one-liners in a unique way, he’s always stylish, and though I wouldn’t classify him as an action star, he pulls off the everyman action guy as a Nicholas Cage or Colin Farrell would. His chemistry with Tarantino is pretty good. FROM DUSK TILL DAWN has that excessive 1990s movie violence that I’m so fond of; it’s unpredictable as hell… in that scene.
(Side note: Throughout my adult life, I’ve been down badly for Salma Hayek. In the worst way possible, and I know a couple of you people out there also have. Being a 13-year-old boy sneaking in to see FROM DUSK TILL DAWN and arriving at the scene where Selma does this striptease is one of the greatest happy accidents of my life. Even if this movie was flat-out bad, I could not give it a bad review because of Salma Hayek).
THE DESCENDANTS
Even though I don’t consider this one of the top five George Clooney performances, it should still be said that he low-key was kind of robbed of the Best Actor Oscar in 2011, given how unbelievably weak that category was that year. This is the best performance of Shailene Woodley’s career to date. And she high-key got robbed of an Oscar nomination, which in and of itself is inexplicable. This is a movie that is borderline great on many things. It’s a borderline great Alexander Payne film, a borderline great Clooney performance, and a borderline top 10 film of 2011.
THE IDES OF MARCH
I might be crazy, but this movie was the first time that I realized that Ryan Gosling was truly a leading man of the highest order. This is a criminally underrated film that has aged marvelously and is very sharp without being too preachy. In my humble opinion, the only kinds of political films that can exceed movies like this are biopics, and even saying that not many of them actually do.
😊GOOD😊
OCEANS 13
By the time this came out, the element of surprise was gone, and they maximalized everything they could do with the lavish aesthetics. A third film couldn’t top the climactic heists of the previous two films. We all knew this going in. But I still think we do not appreciate this movie enough. This is still fun popcorn movie-type stuff. When you compare this film to other heist films and from the OCEANS 8 movie, which was released long after this one, you can come to appreciate what this had to bring.
THE PERFECT STORM
I don’t necessarily know why the Clooney / Mark Wahlberg duo stopped making movies together, but for a 3—to 4-year span, it was gold in every way. I want to say that this is a film that everybody should have experienced in the theater. The climactic sequence is really intense and IMAX-worthy. This is also one of the saddest movies ever, so if you haven’t seen it yet, get ready for that.
THE FANTASTIC MISTER FOX
Animation is just as much Wes Anderson’s bag as anything else. He has a very deep creative reservoir, and this, along with ISLE OF DOGS, are both effectively funny and entertaining movies. These movies (like all other Wes Anderson projects) might be a little bit too weird for some, but I’m definitely a fan. George Clooney’s voice is absolutely spot on here for Mr. Fox, and as we know by now, he’s not really a slouch in the comedy department.
CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND
As with GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK, the best directorial efforts from Clooney tend to have dynamite leading performances from people who are not him, and they are about telling the story of an individual character rather than trying to make a period piece with an assortment of characters to focus on. Until THREE BILLBOARDS OUT OF EBBING, MISSOURI existed, I considered this the best Sam Rockwell performance. This is still Rockwell’s silver medal performance, though, and considering how many bangers are in his resume, that is saying quite something about what he does in this film.
WOLFS (See review here).
MONEY MONSTER
Very terrible film title, but it is a good movie. At this point in Cooney’s career, the bar was too high for him. He was on a monster run; this came at the tail end of that, and I think it was criticized too harshly. He’s great at this. He and Roberts have always had chemistry together on screen. The script is a bit hokey, and Clooney’s character is a retread of things that have come before. However, sitting in a movie theater, eating popcorn, and watching this was a very enjoyable experience. A film that is just a fun, easy watch and a good night out is all you need to be considered good. Why must there be many other complicated things to add to that?
MEH…
SYRIANA
I’m not going to go as far as to call it an Oscar robbery or anything like that, but George Clooney winning the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in 2005 over Matt Dillon (for CRASH) and Jake Gyllenhaal (for BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN) is kind of crazy. Clooney is the best part of this movie, but the film is overwritten, and the pacing is sketchy. There are plenty of bathroom breaks that you can take during this 2-hour and 20-minute run time, and you won’t get lost or anything like that, even though the characters keep talking at length. Stephen Gaghan is a man who wrote my favorite screenplay of all time, TRAFFIC, which was released in the year 2000. SYRIANA is very much a Coke Zero version of that film, and it’s hard for a guy like me not to notice.
TOMORROWLAND
This movie is far more grim than it’s selling itself to be. Not to give you guys too much of a spoiler alert, but this is a film based on a Disneyland ride about bringing on the apocalypse. Yes. The apocalypse. In that, it thinks it’s doing something original and fresh. But, after the initial shock of realizing where the film is going, you start seeing the same kind of dystopian kind of s*** in movies that talk about the apocalypse, just with Disney sprinkles on top of it. Yes, it’s a weird combination to digest. But this is all recognizable, and once you realize where it’s going, it gets predictable.
PEACEMAKER
Badass Clooney made his debut in this film, and I have to be honest, it’s the only saving grace. As a person who deeply loved 90s-style action cheesiness, I find that this film did everything to the bare minimum. As a person who deeply loves Nicole Kidman, I see her involvement in action movies a little weird. She never fits with this genre.
LEATHERHEADS and MONUMENTS MEN
These two movies are both good and bad in the same ways. As previously mentioned, director George Clooney knows his way around a period piece. The world surrounding these characters is always done with meticulous detail and is visually impressive. The cast for both movies are stacked with bonafide character actors that all supplement each other very well. Everything looks good on paper, but in the end, story and character matter more than anything else, and in the case of both films, the story and character are just kind of…
🤮WTF IS THIS GARBAGE?!??!?🤮
BATMAN & ROBIN
Ain’t much to say about this film that hasn’t been said 1 trillion times since its release. It’s one of the most universally hated films I’ve ever seen. A film so hated that everybody involved with it still sh*** on it even after Joel Schumacher’s death. The film is so hated that even the people who defend its campiness have parts of the movie that they openly despise. A film so hated it made the entire Batman fan base cynical to the point that Batman barely crossed the 200 million mark domestically throughout its entire theatrical run. And I do mean barely. There is no lengthy internet video tearing this movie to shreds on the internet that needs to be more accurate in it’s complete despondency. This movie is that bad.
SOLARIS
Have you ever watched a movie trailer with a large budget, has a big movie star, and looks nice on the screen… And wonder why it exists or who it’s being made for. I can only assume the answer is yes because we live in a time where you might see 50 or so kinds of those movies being released for a streaming service. And that’s the thing, that’s is exactly what SOLARIS is. It is a Netflix-worthy romance film set in space that is way too slow and complicated and tries to be a mixture of TITANIC and 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY for no reason.
TICKET TO PARADISE and ONE FINE DAY
Definitive proof that putting Clooney as a romantic lead doesn’t equate to an interesting film. (except OUT OF SIGHT). Am I insane, or are there very noticeable strengths that men like Hugh Grant, Billy Crystal, Ben Stiller, Tom Hanks, and John Cusack have when they’re put in romantic comedies than men who are overt Hollywood sex symbols like Patrick Dempsey, Channing Tatum, and Gerard Butler, Bradley Cooper, and Clooney?
It does not make any difference when it comes to these two particular romantic comedies. Both of these films are run-of-the-mill in every single solitary way. They’re not disastrous romantic comedies by any means, but it’s borderline not entertaining to watch a romantic comedy go through every beat you’ve seen a thousand times up to that point. These films are 26 years apart, yet the overtly familiar romantic comedy beats are still being regurgitated.
INTOLERABLE CRUELTY and BURN AFTER READING
**Mini Rant on deck**
Let me take the time to talk to the avocado toast-eating, USC film school-obsessed, Stella Adler graduating film snobs out there who worship filmmakers in a cult-like fashion and find it absolutely sacrilege to criticize anything that they do. THESE MOVIES ARE NOT GOOD.
I know that hurts your delicate sensibilities to all you Coen Brothers worshipers. Yes, they are all-time greats. Yes, they are the definitive filmmakers of their generation. But many of their comedies are very hit or miss all the time. For every BIG LEBOWSKI, RAISING ARIZONA, FARGO that you get, you’ll get INTOLERABLE CRUELTY or BURN AFTER READING. INTOLERABLE CRUELTY is flat-out boring. It’s slow-paced, and Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones have zero chemistry. F****** zero. BURN AFTER READING has a very impressive cast with one of the most dog**** third acts I have ever seen in a movie in my life, and I am not being hyperbolic. The climax of this movie is literally somebody reading what happens to every other character from a sheet of paper as an epilogue. It’s the very definition of telling, not showing. GTFOH with the love for this movie.
CINEMATIC APOGEE
Tilda Swinton won the Oscar in 2008 for Best Supporting Actress for a film called MICHAEL CLAYTON. A movie in which I believe her to be the co-lead as it tells the story of both Michael Clayton, a corporate fixer who’s fallen on hard times and is in a full-blown existential crisis, and her character Karen, a woman who is the legal counsel to an evil corporation that makes weed killer that poisoned a bunch of people. She’s given the resources to eliminate all that stands in her way to clear the corporation of any wrongdoing, and that’s precisely what she does. Throughout the film, we see her going from being overtly stressed in doing one nefarious act after the other to the end of the film, where she completes her iniquitous journey completely relieved. She has left scorched Earth in her wake, killing a whistleblower, and it kind of feels generally unfair. In real life, we see corporate figures like this win all the time. And usually, when a movie covers subject matter such as this, there’s always one instance of a corporate figure getting away scot-free, which is the point of the film. Upon seeing it for the first time, it seemed like that would be the point of this film. Karen makes her closing deal, walks out of the foyer, takes a deep breath of relief, and turns around…. ….. And then this happens.
There is no better ending in any movie of the entirety of the 2000s than MICHAEL CLAYTON. So many satisfying things happened in that exchange, highlighted by the quiet devastation in the face of Swinton as a completely swagged-out Clooney fires missile after missile into her confidence, completely dismantling it into rubble. Karen completely deserves everything that happens in this scene, and justice is emphatically served. This is followed by Clayton going to a cab and simply asking him to drive around the city to calm himself down. He looks out the window, and there is this amazing moment that I can only describe as serenity. It’s a very calming scene shot in one take.
This was a scene filmed in a cab on a busy street with no permit. Because of that, Clooney admitted some time after the film was released that in that long one-take sequence, he was looking outside of the window at fans who were chanting his name and trying not to bust out laughing at some of the things that they were doing to try to get his attention, but in watching this film for the first time, you do not know that information.
It is a testament to the absolute greatness of this film, its writing, and its performance that this part of the ending feels so gratifying. You wander through the streets with Clayton to close out the movie, wondering if he’s feeling a great sense of relief for what he’s just done or guilt for everything he’s done before that. It’s just so perfect.
**************
George Clooney was declared an old-school type of movie star from the jump. He was a guy with matinee idol looks and a swaggering charisma that only he had, but also a genuine affability and a relatability to everyday people who aren’t even remotely that ridiculously good-looking. Clooney was one of the most notable actors of the 2000s, starring in multiple bangers that seemed to cater to this special kind of movie starness that he possessed. I think of the shot in Ocean’s 11,  when they’re waiting at the airport, and it’s just Clooney sitting next to Matt Damon and Brad Pitt. And every time I think about that picture of them, I can’t help but think of the different types of movie stars that currently exist.
Pitt represents the ridiculously good-looking, impossible male beauty standard that has always been the key characteristic of a movie star, going all the way back to the 1940s. Ryan Gosling, Zac Efron, Henry Cavill, Jason Momoa, and pretty much anybody with the last name Hemsworth all seem to be next-generation versions of what Pitt brought to the game in the early 90s.
Matt Damon is just about receipts. Box office receipts from working with a zillion different directors in a zillion different kinds of films that all have found financial success. He’s by no means not handsome, but calling him a sex symbol seems to be a stretch. Damon reminds me a lot of Tom Hanks in terms of the versatility of what he can do, and it’s not limited to his artistic choices by a sex symbol status. I’ve always considered Damon to be from the tree of everyman types like Michael Keaton, Chris Pratt, and Keanu Reeves. There are also a bunch of character actors I can name in that particular description who also fit that mold.
And then there’s Clooney, who has kind of represented a mixture of both of these things. His version of movie stardom has been unique. I don’t think there’s anybody like him in that department, but he does define what it means to be a movie star.
