The Descendants

Must be hard to portray someone your polar opposite.

All This And George Cooney, Too!
The Telluride Film Festival has hosted many famous people over the past 38 years, including celebrated filmmakers and actors. But there’s something about George Clooney that makes women swoon and men want to hang out with him. He’s a Movie Star, and while he wears other hats (and wears them well) there’s no getting around his personal magnetism. He charmed everyone he met this past weekend, graciously posed for pictures, and reaffirmed his reputation as an all-around good guy.

He also happens to be the star of an exceptionally fine film which made its world premiere at Telluride: The Descendants, directed and co-written by Alexander Payne. It won’t reach theaters until just before Thanksgiving, but I have no problem calling it one of the year’s best films—an encomium I doubt I’ll have to revoke at the end of December. After its first screening, when Todd McCarthy asked him about playing some highly emotional scenes, Clooney modestly replied that all he did was take his cues from Payne. The director in turn said he casts his movies well.

Like so many great films, this one is difficult to pigeonhole: it’s about a man facing a family crisis (as a husband and father) along with a daunting business decision that involves his many cousins, who all live in Hawaii. It’s sprawling and continually surprising, infused with high drama and well-calculated humor. In short, it’s about the absurdity and unpredictability of life. I loved it.

Read More about the festival at the link!

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From Variety

Release Date Of Alexander Payne's The Descendants Bumped Up Five Days

2011-09-08 14:04:38 Author: Eric Eisenberg

As is tradition, this year's Thanksgiving movie release schedule is absolutely packed. Building on the number of wide releases that were sent to theaters the day before the holiday last year, this year features four movies that will be fighting for your family's attention. For fans of funny bloodbaths there's Piranha 3DD; for those who always follow the great filmmakers there's Martin Scorsese's Hugo; for audiences that was nostalgia chills there's The Muppets; and for people who can't wait for the December holiday season there's Arthur Christmas. With such intense competition one can easily understand why a film would want to switch release dates, and that's exactly what The Descendants is doing.

Variety reports that the Alexander Payne film, which premieres this weekend at the Toronto International Film Festival, has moved its release up by five days and will now come out on November 18th. But while the move may get the film away from the Thanksgiving crowds, the move may be an example of jumping out of the pot and into the fire. While The Descendants will be starting in limited release, its direct competition on the third weekend of November is The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn (Part One) and George Miller's Happy Feet Two. The film, which stars George Clooney, Judy Greer, Matthew Lillard, Shailene Woodley, Beau Bridges, and Robert Forster, is about a man who reconnects with his two daughters after his wife is put on life support after a boating accident and is also is also forced to face off with the man with whom she has been having an affair.

Payne's movies have never been blockbusters, but I have a terrible feeling that The Descendants is going to get absolutely buried. I have to wonder why they didn't move the film backwards instead of forwards, as December 2nd currently has no wide releases. Let's hope that George Clooney's appeal will be enough to give the movie some legs.

George Clooney Takes Toronto: Is The Descendants the Next Top Oscar Winner?

"Welcome to the George Clooney Film Festival," director Alexander Payne said to a packed house at Toronto's landmark Elgin Theatre, where The Descendants was about to play. Clooney, the star of Payne's comedy-drama as well as the star and director of the political satire The Ides of March, later strode onstage in all his regal good humor, as if this was not his third festival in three countries on two continents in 10 days; he had already promoted one movie or another in Venice and Telluride. (The slugabed skipped the fest in Deauville, France.) Torontonians get juiced queuing for some 300 films from such distant lands as Cambodia and Cuba, Norway and South Africa, but TIFF's purest heroine is Hollywood stardom — the red-carpet parade of celestial glamour — and they don't come much starrier than Mr. C.

If Clooney was pooped from prolonged exuding of his patented E.C. (effortless charm), he didn't show it during The Descendants' post-screening Q&A. Having turned 50 in May, People magazine's two-time Sexiest Man Alive declared that he was now "AARP's Sexiest Man Alive — Still Alive." When the audience couldn't hear a questioner, Clooney reported that he "was saying because he's in the front row how much younger I looked." And when Amara Miller, who plays his younger daughter in the film, started rhapsodizing about working with him, he suggested that it was a paid testimonial by taking out a $20 bill to slip to her.

What The Descendants couldn't quite match were the high expectations on which it floated into town. The film, which graces the New York Film Festival next month and opens in real theaters Nov. 18, had won raves in a sneak preview at Telluride; and The Wrap's Steve Pond, who in Sept. of previous years had recklessly and correctly predicted that The Hurt Locker and The King's Speech would be the Oscar champs, sight-unseen, named The Descendants the winner of next year's Best Picture statuette. That's heavy baggage for any movie. But Clooney had met with striking success two years ago in Toronto, when he brought another semi-risky dramedy, Up in the Air. And there was reason to hope that Payne, directing his first film since the beguiling Sideways in 2004, could harness his bright, lightly satiric tone to Clooney's genial éclat. See Alexander Payne's Sideways in TIME's Top 10 Sloppiest Movie Drunks

It didn't happen, at least not for one admirer of both men's work. Watching this adaptation of Kaui Hart Hemmings's 2007 novel about a man facing family crises in the modern Eden of Hawaii, I wanted The Descendants' elevated sentiments to wash over me, inundate me in its lapping warmth, like the restorative waters on a Kauai beach. I'm a notorious softie, and I found things to like about the film, most particularly Clooney's performance; but I remained untouched. I must have been wearing my wet suit.

Clooney plays Matt Hill, a Hawaiian real-estate magnate whose family, on the island for centuries, must soon dispose of a huge plot of prime land it has long held. That dilemma is pushed aside when a water-skiing accident leaves Matt's wife Elizabeth (Patti Hastie) in an irreparable coma. Since her will specifies that she be taken off life support, Matt takes their two daughters — the rambunctious Scottie (Miller), 10, and rebellious Alex (Shailene Woodley), 17 — and Alex's goofy boyfriend Sid (Nick Krause) on a journey to tell Liz's relatives and close friends that they should visit her in the few days before she dies. "Everybody who loved Elizabeth," he says, "deserves a chance to say goodbye." But what if she loved one of these close friends back? Alex tells Matt that Mom may have had an affair, just before she was stricken, with a realtor named Brian Speer (Matthew Lillard). On the far side of this Pacific paradise, Matt grapples with feelings of bereavement and betrayal.

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lucy wrote:Pics at link are the most recent photos taken of his backyard in LA, unless the ones of him and SK were taken there.

cindigirl wrote:Cinderella, thanks for the link of his backyard. I hope he doesn't consider this his swiming pool. Looks more like a coy pond. LOL

cindigirl wrote:I really wish there were more trailers for the Descendents movie. I remember before UITA came out there were tons of them. All we've gotten so far is just a few seconds. And, yes November is a long time to wait. I'm impatient.

Phila. Film Fest opens Oct. 20

Choices include Sundance and Cannes films, local premieres, docs about two local boxers.
September 25, 2011|By Carrie Rickey, Inquirer Movie Critic

Like Crazy, a "captivating" romance between an American and his English girlfriend who runs afoul of immigration authorities, will open the 20th annual Philadelphia Film Festival on Oct. 20, J. Andrew Greenblatt, PFF executive director, announced Saturday.

The 15-day, 120-movie cinextravaganza closes with The Descendants, Alexander Payne's sharp dramedy starring George Clooney as a father who reconnects with his estranged children. (Although the festival officially ends Nov. 3, its closing night gala is Oct. 29.)

Other highlights of the festival that will feature films acclaimed at the Sundance and Cannes Film Festivals are two movies about movies: My Week With Marilyn and The Artist

Ticket information is available at 267-239-2941 or the PFF website, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]