George Clooney Research Articles

My Life Wasn't Like George Clooney's

My Life Wasn't Like George Clooney's

The Dickens Checklist

The Dickens Checklist Dominic Rainsford (bio) The Dickens Checklist, recording new publications, doctoral dissertations, and online ressources of significance for Dickens studies, appears in each issue of the journal. A cumulative edition of the Checklist, consisting of listings since vol. 37, no. 1 (March 2020), is available at dickenssociety.org, and will be updated once a year. Secondary Sources: Biography and Criticism Baynes, Tom. "Three New Sources for 'Locksley Hall': Goethe, Byron, and Dickens." Notes & Queries, vol. 68, no. 3, Sept. 2021, pp. 299–301. [OT] Boehmer, Elleke, and Dominic Davies. "Empire: The Nineteenth-Century Global Novel in English." Globalization and Literary Studies, edited by Joel Evans, Cambridge UP, 2022, pp. 80–94. [DS] Cambridge, Nicholas. Bleak Health: The Medical History of Charles Dickens and His Family. Edward Everett Root Publishers, 2022. Cook, Susan E. "Hidden Mothers: Forms of Absence in Victorian Photography and Fiction." Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, vol. 17, no. 3, Winter 2021, www.ncgsjournal.com/issue173/cook.html. [BH] Dickens Quarterly, vol. 39, no. 2, June 2022. [Edin Plevljaković, "Charles Dickens's International Copyright Advocacy and Its Indirect Reflection in Martin Chuzzlewit," pp. 121–37; Lee Jackson, "Dickens and the Historical Imagination," pp. 138–58; Mizuki Tsutsui, "The Morality of Fiction-Making in Our Mutual Friend," pp. 159–75; William F. Long, "'Particulars as to the Proposed Interment of Charles Dickens at Rochester,'" pp. 176–99; Catherine Waters, "'An Evening with Charles Dickens' on the Nineteenth-Century Lecture Circuit," pp. 200–14; Winter Jade Werner, review of Dickens and the Bible: "What Providence Meant," by Jennifer Gribble, pp. 215–17; Dominic Rainsford, review of The Artful Dickens: Tricks and Ploys of the Great Novelist, by John Mullan, pp. 218–22; Iain Crawford, review of Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion, by Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, pp. 222–26; Valerie Purton, review of The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, by Giles Whiteley, pp. 226–29; Dominic Rainsford, "The Dickens Checklist," pp. 232–35] Dickens Studies Annual, vol. 53, no. 1, 2022. [The Editors, Introduction, pp. v-viii; John Gordon, "Troilism, David Copperfield, and the Problem of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick," pp. 1-19; Sharon Murphy, "'[A] hungry, ragged, and forsaken little boy': The Significance of the Street Arab(s) in The Moonstone and The Sign of Four," pp. 20-41; Mark M. Hennelly Jr., "Through the Looking-Glass: 'Full of All Manner of Curious Things,'" pp. 42-69; Lydia Craig, "An Overview of Digital Resources for the Study of Victorian Fiction," pp. 70-87; Leslie S. Simon, "Recent Dickens Studies: 2020," pp. 88-175; Edward Guiliano, Anne Humphreys, and Natalie McKnight, "Ways of Seeing Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction, Volumes 1–52," pp. 176-238.] The Dickensian, vol. 118, part 1, no. 516, Spring 2022. [Emily Bell, "From the Editor," pp. 3–4; Maria Ioannou, "'[M]ore letters to write … than the Home Secretary': The Relationship Between Dickens's Letters and the Writing of His Characters in Bleak House and Great Expectations," pp. 6–21; Colin Flight, "The Mystery of 'Edwin Drood': An Architectural Clue," pp. 22–27; William F. Long, "Mr Dickens Encloses a Trifle: Early Acts of Benevolence," pp. 28–39; Takashi Yoshinaka, "A Note on the Ambiguity of 'Out' in Great Expectations," pp. 40–42; Robert Butterworth, "'The Hymn of the Wiltshire Labourers' and Its Contexts," pp. 43–56; Paul Schlicke, "Dickens in My Life," pp. 57–60; Malcolm Andrews, Letter to the Editor [re the Pickwick Club], pp. 61–62; Catherine Quirk, review of Victorians on Broadway: Literature, Adaptation, and the Modern American Musical, by Sharon Aronofsky Weltman, pp. 64–66; Rick Allen, review of The Urban Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century European Literature: City Fissures, by Patricia Garcia, pp. 67–69; Valerie Tosi, review of Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature: Economics and Political Identity in the Networks of Empire, by Philip Steer, pp. 70–72; Katie Holdway, review of Picturing Pickwick: The Art of The Pickwick Papers, exhibition at the Charles Dickens Museum, pp. 74–76; Lydia Craig, review of Mr Dickens is Coming!, performance by Gerald Dickens, pp. 77–79; Nigel Rodenhurst, review of The Tender Bar, film directed by George Clooney, pp. 80–81; James Hamby...

Re-imagining the Past and Mastering the Present: The Power of Analogical Arguments in American Presidents’ and Celebrities’ Discourses

Inspecting the genealogy of American statecraft discourse, it seems that historical knowledge grasped out of past experiences has been framed as a social reality that has been justified with consistency and uncompromising conviction by different political actors to contain global threats. The present article studies how analogical analysis is engaged in linking various texts of different genres, though displayed by different actors at different points in history, embed common themes and ideologies. In this regard, this study is an attempt to uncover the analogical construct underlying US presidents’ (George W.H. Bush and George W. Bush) and celebrities’ (Ben Affleck and George Clooney) discourses by investigating the extent to which their analogical reasoning contributes to the construction of common ideologies. To unpack this argument, the paper also scrutinizes the linguistic parameters of analogies by delineating the linguistic devices aimed at reinforcing the tenor of the analogy. To study the implications of the analogical arguments communicated in the language of these political actors, the research adopts a theoretical scheme combining Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis and Analogy. The findings bring out that their analogical reasoning, reinforced by linguistic toolkits, draws on the retreat strategy to legitimize US foreign policy in the Third-World.

The Arc Toward Hope in Postapocalyptic American Films: From On the Beach to The Midnight Sky.

An arc toward hope in postapocalyptic American films can be seen between Stanley Kramer's 1959 film On the Beach, based on Nevil Shute's 1957 novel of the same name, and George Clooney's 2020 film The Midnight Sky, adapted from Lily Brooks-Dalton's 2016 novel Good Morning, Midnight. Clooney's film makes direct and indirect references to On the Beach, which brought international attention to the threat that radiation fallout from nuclear weapons could end all human life on Earth. In On the Beach, no one survives. Already underway before the COVID-19 pandemic developed, Clooney's ambitious project for The Midnight Sky underwent a script revision after filming had begun to accommodate the unexpected pregnancy of its lead actress. In the revised ending, there is hope, albeit slight, that the expectant astronaut couple aboard spaceship Aether might avoid the environmental disaster from the unspecified "event" that has occurred on Earth by returning to the moon of Jupiter their mission had explored and found capable of sustaining human life. Released on Netflix in December 2020, The Midnight Sky was viewed by millions even as the first vaccines for COVID-19 were becoming available. The arc toward hope, Clooney believes, is the right ending.

‘Boris’

‘Boris’

Monuments Women and Men: Rethinking popular narratives via British Major Anne Olivier Popham

AbstractIn recent years, the work of the American Monuments Men has been celebrated in popular histories and culture, such as bestselling books by Robert Edsel and a feature film directed by George Clooney (The Monuments Men, 2014). While public awareness of Nazi art looting and the courageous work of American cultural officers is long overdue, these popular narratives elide the role played by women and other Western Allies and fail to address the corps’ greatest failure: the incomplete restitution of Jewish assets. This article explores these factors through a case study of British Major Anne Olivier Popham (1916–2018), who served the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFA&A) division in Bünde from November 1945 to October 1947. Drawing on Popham’s diaries held at the Imperial War Museum in London, the author’s interview with her, and British and American archives, the case study yields important insight into personnel recruited by the MFA&A, gender relations among the officers, methodological dilemmas presented by the use of first-hand accounts, and the ongoing need for transnational restitution efforts.

Celebrities’ Role in the Conflict Resolution Processes: George Clooney in South Sudan

The present article discusses the role of celebrities in the conflict resolution processes presented by the case study of George Clooney’s engagement in South Sudan. Methodologically, it is a critical discourse analysis of published articles in selected media. The main argument of the article is that the role of celebrities in conflict resolution processes is overestimated by media and the image of celebrities’ involvement reproduces stereotyped understanding of distant regions as lacking agency and dependent on the actors from the West. The image of Clooney’s role in the South Sudanese peace process creates an idea that celebrities have been crucial actors in this process. The present article brings critical new insights on the engagement of celebrities, including the fight against the violation of human rights and points out the corruption of South Sudanese politicians.

George Clooney, by Paul McDonald

George Clooney, by Paul McDonald

Cognitive Neuroscience: Why Do We Get Lost When We Are Stressed?

A recent study in humans shows that stress increases our reliance on familiar routes during navigation. This research explains how increases in cortisol, a biomarker of stress, disrupts navigation-related brain circuits, resulting in less efficient navigation.

Portfolio

Portfolio Jibz Cameron aka Dynasty Handbag (bio) Fascist Dictatorship Makeup Tutorial Tutorials are ubiquitous now, and a language well understood for communicating needed skills. So it was a perfect platform to relay useful information to the masses about how to look your best under the new regime! Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Dynasty Handbag, Fascist Dictatorship Makeup Tutorial (2016), Digital video. Courtesy the artist. [End Page 88] Vague I appropriated Madonna's appropriated "Vogue" as a launchpad for anti-precision representation. The concept that Madonna should need a safe space to give herself a platform to express herself is itself inappropriate and offensive. This is also a response to living in LA, without clarity. Where I never know if I am on a date, making a development deal, or simply taking a two-hour hike midday–mid week. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Dynasty Handbag, Vague (2016), Digital video. Courtesy the artist. I Can't Stop Thinking 'Bout Having Sex With You Girl The country music structure is a beautiful simpleton relief from the complex lesbian emotional landscape. Staying rooted firmly in fantasy is a perfect way to avoid commitment. Soggy Glasses, A Homo's Odyssey In the common representation of the hero's journey, man gets to meet his mortality and contend with his morality. Women often meet their mortality only when they are in fear of being R'd or murdered by a man or an alien that represents a man. I wanted to take back the dark night of the Dark Night and plop myself in this allegory. What does my mortality look like without the heteronormative prison that makes a woman's exploration suffocate? Do we get to know our [End Page 89] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. Dynasty Handbag, I Can't Stop Thinking 'Bout Having Sex With You Girl (2016), Digital video. Courtesy the artist. bodies? Our creative selves? Do we get to rest a bit and watch a remake of The Perfect Storm wherein Linda Greenlaw, the first female fishing boat captain, is the complex hero of the story and not just a foxy piece that worries about the safety of George Clooney? [End Page 90] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 4. Dynasty Handbag, Soggy Glasses, A Homo's Odyssey (2014), Performance. Photograph by Alex Escalante. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 5. Dynasty Handbag, Soggy Glasses, A Homo's Odyssey (2014), Performance. Photograph by Alex Escalante. [End Page 91] Jibz Cameron aka Dynasty Handbag Jibz Cameron is a performance/video artist and actor living in Los Angeles. Her multi-media performance work as alter ego Dynasty Handbag has spanned fifteen years and been presented at such institutions as MOCA Los Angeles, PS1, Joe's Pub, The Kitchen, REDCAT, The Broad Museum, Hammer Museum, New Museum of Contemporary Art—New York, among others. She has been heralded by the New York Times as "the funniest and most pitch perfect performance seen in years" and "outrageously smart, grotesque and innovative" by The New Yorker. She has written and produced seven evening-length performance pieces and countless short works that have been performed in clubs and venues internationally. She has produced multiple video works and two albums of original music. In addition to her work as Dynasty Handbag, she has also been seen acting in films, theater, and television (internet web series no one has seen). She works as a professor of performance and comedy related subjects, as well as lecturing and teaching workshops. Jibz also produces and hosts Weirdo Night!, a monthly comedy and performance event in Los Angeles. Copyright © 2020 Wayne State University Press

Flying Solo: Mobility in Up in the Air

This article analyses the film Up in the Air (Jason Reitman, 2009) to explore one of the ways in which mobilities are reflected in twenty-first century cinema. The film’s main character, played by George Clooney, is presented as a hypermobile traveller that is constantly “on the move” and that has adopted a rootless, nomadic lifestyle that enables him to move at will. Combining contemporary critical theories on mobility with close textual analysis, this article examines the specific type of mobility embodied by the film’s protagonist, based on weightlessness and incessant, frictionless movement, as well as the effects that large-scale mobility has on people’s identities and on the ways in which they relate to other people. As will be argued, the protagonist’s mobility is portrayed differently as the film develops, calling attention to the shortcomings of the highly mobile way of life in the contemporary world. Keywords: Up in the Air; mobility; mobile elite; mobile intimacy; George Clooney; gender

Investigating the Comprehension of Negated Sentences Employing World Knowledge: An Event-Related Potential Study.

Previous event-related potential (ERP) studies comparing affirmative and negative sentences revealed an N400 for semantically mismatching final words, resulting in a larger N400 for false relative to true affirmative sentences and an opposite effect for negative sentences. Hence, the N400 was independent of the presence of a negation. However, the true negative as well as the false affirmative condition often contained entities or features from different semantic categories and thereby with weak feature overlap, such as e.g., A cat is (not) a saw or Fears are (not) round, which were then compared to true affirmative and false negative sentences containing entities with stronger feature overlap and partially even hyponomy relations, e.g., A cat is (not) an animal or Planets are (not) round. Employing world-knowledge variations, in the current study, we investigate whether increasing the feature overlap between the entities of all conditions leads to similar ERP-patterns as in the previous studies. For this purpose, we use sentences of the following type: George Clooney is (not) an actor vs. George Clooney is (not) a singer where both target words describe a similar profession and thereby function as alternatives to each other. However, in line with the previous studies, we find a truth by polarity interaction, namely, the N400 ERPs are significantly larger for false compared to true affirmative sentences, whereas the effect for negative sentences shows a reversed, though not significant, trend. Overall, the ERP-data suggest that the integration of a negation with the information in its scope is neither fully incremental nor fully delayed, which might be linked to the use of cohyponyms and to the increased feature overlap between alternatives (e.g., actor, singer). Additionally, questionnaire-based rating data show that affirmative sentences are perceived as more natural than negative sentences, and, moreover, that true sentences are perceived as more natural than false sentences, independent of their polarity.

Self-Reference enhances memory for multi-element events judged likely to happen in young and older adults

ABSTRACTWe investigated whether the strategy of self-reference can benefit memory for multi-element events, a kind of relational memory that is relatively less studied but highly relevant to daily life. Young and older adults imagined different person-object-location events with reference to themselves and two famous others (i.e., George Clooney and Oprah Winfrey), rated the likelihood that each event would happen, and then completed incidental memory tests on different pairs of elements within the event. We found that self-reference enhanced memory for object-location and person-object pairs in both age groups. Such self-reference effects were observed consistently only for events rated as likely to happen. There was also an overall memory advantage for the higher-likelihood events, which did not differ between young and older adults. Further, the self-reference effects were not correlated with memory functioning in either age group. Retrieval of within-event associations showed a significant level of dependency, which did not differ as a function of reference condition or likelihood category. These findings highlight the ways in which self-reference and prior knowledge improve relational memory, and suggest that the advantage of self-reference is not attributable to increased dependence of elements within complex events.

Why Does George Clooney Make Coffee Sexy? The Case for Attribute Conditioning

When a celebrity (e.g., George Clooney) endorses a brand (e.g., a coffee type), people’s assessment of this brand typically changes. We suggest that the mere repeated pairing of celebrities with brands imbues brands with the celebrities’ attributes. We call this effect attribute conditioning, which is, more generally, the phenomenon that people assess a stimulus’s attributes differently as a results of its pairing with another stimulus possessing that attribute. We review evidence showing that this effect goes beyond evaluative-conditioning effects, that it is not a demand effect, and that it is easily shown with many attributes (e.g., sexy, athletic, healthy) and many different stimuli (e.g., faces, shapes, brand logos). In addition, we review process evidence supporting the hypothesis that the effect is based on a memory structure that links the mental representations of the paired stimuli. We conclude with a brief outline of possible applied (e.g., marketing) and theoretical avenues for further research.

Has George Clooney peaked? This algorithm knows

Has George Clooney peaked? This algorithm knows

FILM IN REVIEW

1 8 8 Y F I L M I N R E V I E W C H A R L E S T A Y L O R No contemporary filmmaker has shown the versatility of style and subject that Alfonso Cuarón has. Cuarón first got noticed in this country with his fourth film, Y Tu Mamá También, an earthy, raunchy road comedy that played as if Henry Miller had written an ode to the horny sons of the Mexico City bourgeoisie. He zigged from Mamá to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the first film that hinted that the series could be something more than competently filmed illustrations of J. K. Rowling’s books. Cuarón had already had experience adapting children’s literature. His first American film was a startlingly sensual adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess. The movie has such vividness of detail and intensity of emotion that you surrender to it just as you might have surrendered to Burnett when you read her as a child (or, as I first did, in my twenties). Cuarón followed A Little Princess with his marvelous modern-day version of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, starring Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow in the Pip and Estella roles. It was not a happy experience . The studio, Twentieth Century Fox, interfered with the film, removing it from its scheduled Christmas release date and dumping it into theaters in the dead month of January. Most 1 8 9 R critics were happy to follow the studio’s lead and dismiss it, and Cuarón himself reportedly doesn’t like it, but along with David Lean’s 1946 version of the same novel and Carol Reed’s 1968 Oliver!, it’s the best Dickens film, lush and strange and true to its source as well as to its own vision. The late film critic Robin Wood cited it as an example of a movie adaptation that was faithful yet so free that viewers forgot about the source and entered fully into the world the film created. After the Harry Potter film, Cuarón turned to another unlikely literary source, the mystery novelist P. D. James’s Children of Men, transforming her rather sour conservative dystopia about a future in which childbirth has ceased into what the critic Amy Nicholson called ‘‘a grim nativity.’’ Perhaps the only fitting equivalent to Children of Men is Ingmar Bergman’s greatest film, the 1968 Shame, which, like Cuarón’s movie, gives as bleak a view of the future and of human nature as could be imagined without ever becoming inhuman itself. Like Bergman’s movie, Children of Men knocked you flat. So did Cuarón’s last film, Gravity, in which a space shuttle is destroyed, leaving two astronauts (Sandra Bullock and George Clooney) floating in the cosmos while trying to rescue themselves. Despite its epic setting Gravity is perhaps the most intimate of all Cuarón’s work: we are alone with the only human presence in the vastness of space, and the furious will to survive flickers against the overwhelming fact of our mortality and our insignificance when measured against creation. Gravity felt like an implicit refutation of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick’s film showed no feeling for the passing of its human characters, bland to begin with, but welcomed rebirth via technological advancement represented by the gooey symbolism of the Keane-eyed star child. (The film’s famous final image looks like one of Operation Rescue’s more acceptable posters.) Gravity, on the other hand, beginning in space, was a passionate odyssey of return to earth and thus an implicit return to all that is human. Its final image, Sandra Bullock taking tentative steps on terra firma, couldn’t help but recall Kubrick’s apes walking upright. But instead of people being left behind in the chain of cosmic evolution, Cuarón gave us a pilgrim returning home, intensely aware of and grateful for her humanity. If Gravity was an epic film told intimately, Cuarón’s latest film, 1 9 0 T A Y L O R Y Roma, is an intimate...

Intubation and Love, and: Hot Second

Intubation and Love, and: Hot Second Carmen Giménez Smith (bio) Intubation and Love Avert the decay of your glopping bodies at Seattle Grace. You can self-diagnose the inside and outside of each patient. Everyone is the top of their field, and they're always at work. They don't even need apartments and should have created a shared living thing at Meredith's. Seattle Grace is haunted and no one talks about that. Surgeons are gods because they cure us, but these guys don't really cure us because they're not doctors, but mimics. I'm the George Clooney some doctor said some time in the late 20th and he felt better about himself. Meredith's voiceover essentializes disaster. A nurse gets stabbed by an unstable patient who will not be crazy but rather brain-tumored. One of the top surgeons disregards a girl complaining of stomach pain who later spews blood into the air and activating his/her genius and compassion in the nick of time. Hospital procedurals are directly responsible for longer wait times in doctors' offices. I watch the show as if a facet of each character is a piece of Shonda Rhimes. Christina sharpens her teeth on her own brilliance, the cycle of workaholism, for example. She says what we had been holding in for so long. I most love Miranda Bailey's flintiness and ambition and ferocity because she's the one who has to do the most work to establish authority while the male doctors around her all have sex with their students. I interpret this whenever someone says: Someone calculate the cost of the remodeling, the unveilings, all the new signs, the weird socialist clinic, plus workmen's compensation, rampant malpractice, sexual harassment suits, financial mismanagement, humanitarian projects, and the 3D flesh printer. I bet the books aren't square. [End Page 171] In one episode a man shows up with a tree limb in his chest and I lose interest because I'm pretty sure they already did the tree in the chest meaning I already learned this lesson. I get it, Meredith. You fucking save lives. I only need 30% of the show's narcotic effect. Gossip without community. Scandal and Grey's on Hulu while I fold laundry and I can also plot a getaway with my girlfriend, but the boy's things won't pick up themselves, then I have a meeting. The emails won't finish themselves, so I give over my night to words, and the day to the house's body. An E.R. resident gets hit by a bus. A boy gets impaled by a fence, a plane crash kills and maims a bunch of them and they survive with only the broadest and most fleeting strokes of PTSD. A train crash, a character-changing brain tumor, a hostage situation, an explosion, an escaped prisoner. Shonda Rhimes lives by the book, then reinvents it chapter by chapter. Shonda Rhimes invents the twee soliloquy (2005). Shonda Rhimes kills off the entitled woman (2007). More interracial couples in what seems the entire history of television, and effortlessly, or we don't see the effort. The second time I see the first season I see compliance and the edge of her style. Even when I stopped watching, I read the recaps for about three years. They were like Christmas newsletters and I'd sometimes have to google Anatomy Arizona to see a picture. Eventually I missed the visual/aural of Seattle Grace and its plot meat. My mother dazzled me with her ability to anticipate a plot point when I was a little girl. Now I see how they make a story in the shape of my demographic fantasy life. Have you ever tried eating Seventh Seal ? Grey's is like a husband of 100 years. We don't even say a word to one another, just fall asleep at exactly the same time. A patient's backstory helps us decide who dies and who lives. Thanatos. Sometimes chaos kills someone whose death surprise us. Their stories are only allegories. Broken bodies help the surgeons process. How much is Mc Dreamy making? The show's...

Vitafiction and virality: Celebrities fictionalizing the self online

Celebrities playing fictionalized versions of themselves in commercials, campaigns, and video spots have become an increasingly viral phenomenon. The George Clooney commercials for Nespresso are circulated and promoted on various media platforms, segments from The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon are released on NBC.com and shared on YouTube, and some videos are explicitly created to go viral and even published on social media sites. In this article, I draw on recent work in fictionality studies and studies of virality to investigate how the celebrity trend of ‘vitafiction’ possesses a viral potential. In vitafictional performances, the relationship between fiction and reality is thematized through a concurrent surplus of fictionality and biographical details, which invites recipients to negotiate between the celebrity’s performance and the receiver’s media cultural knowledge. Taking vitafictional performances in two online circulated spots as case studies – ‘Bono rides a bike with Jimmy Fallon’, a spot for The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon, and Peter Jackson’s Facebook video post ‘Home Invasion’, a video that thematizes Jackson’s role as director of an episode of Doctor Who – this article demonstrates how the equivocality that is central to the vitafictional performance comprises a force that prompts receivers to circulate the vitafictional message. It is argued that the mediatization of society and the virality that this brings about create new possibilities for the impact of this kind of celebrity self-fashioning.

American Made by Doug Liman (review)

Reviewed by: American Made by Doug Liman Michael Ray FitzGerald American Made (2017) Directed by Doug Liman Produced by Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, Doug Davison. Cross Creek Pictures/Imagine Entertainment/Universal Pictures. Theamericanmademovie.com. 115 min. Some people can never get past the image of Tom Cruise dancing around in his skivvies in 1983’s Risky Business. Granted, that was 34 years ago; he was only 21 then (he’s 55 now). In my view, Cruise was at his best in comedic or semi-comedic roles. Cruise makes a sort of return to form in American Made, directed by Doug Liman, a story based on the real-life exploits of CIA contract pilot Barry Seal, and does a remarkably competent job of it. He captures Seal’s blend of frat-boy insouciance, confusion, and fuck-it-all willingness to fly by the seat of his pants— literally. As Seal, he doesn’t seem to know what is going on most of the time but is willing to throw caution to the wind and see what happens. The results are usually—but not always—stupendous: sometimes comedic, occasionally tragic, but rarely a dull moment. Despite Cruise’s comedic style, American Made should by no means be categorized as a comedy, although it does pack plenty of laughs. Sarah Wright is perfect as Seal’s bleach-blond, former-cheerleader-turned-KFC-order-clerk wife. One of the most hilarious scenes in the film is where Seal asks her if she trusts him: “Fuck no!” comes her disarming retort. She of course has every reason in the world not to. Impressively, both actors get their respective southern accents right without laying it on too thick. That’s more of an [End Page 16] accomplishment for Cruise than for Wright, who hails from Kentucky. Another compelling aspect of the movie is its historical accuracy. It captures Seal’s story—based Shaun Attwood’s book of the same title—fairly accurately, pulling no punches: Even that icon of US conservatism, Ronald Reagan, gets skewered. However, George H.W. Bush, a prime suspect in Attwood’s book, gets a free pass, probably because he is still around and still carries a lot of clout. None the less, American Made could hardly be accused of dishing pro-American propaganda like so much of Hollywood’s output featuring the likes of George Clooney or Ben Affleck. Thankfully conspicuous in their absence are the seemingly obligatory car chases and explosions that are de rigeur; on the other hand, there are certainly enough riveting airplane antics and near-crashes alongside plentiful gales of gunfire to satisfy most action fans. Michael Ray FitzGerald Jacksonville University and College of Coastal Georgia Copyright © 2018 Center for the Study of Film and History

See it now: queer history and archival fantasy

ABSTRACTGood Night, and Good Luck, George Clooney’s account of journalist Edward R. Murrow’s public struggle with Senator Joseph McCarthy, includes archival footage of McCarthy, HUAC hearings, and other 1950s televised ephemera; it is in this archival footage that the film’s most obvious queerness can be found, in the figures of Roy Cohn and Liberace. This paper examines the formal and thematic effects of the film’s archival footage in view of the sexual and political issues in the whole of the film. The overt thesis of Good Night, and Good Luck is that in 2005, as in the 1950s, freedom of political dissent is under threat and must be defended. Where politics are concerned, the film suggests that very little has changed since the 1950s, yet where sexuality is concerned, both straight and gay viewers may congratulate themselves on our progress. That liberal self-congratulation belies the film’s sexual sleight of hand: only by localising gay male sexuality in the caricatured figures in archival footage can the film entertain, and even celebrate, an extraordinary intimacy among straight men – Murrow and producer Fred Friendly. Thus the archival footage is not the space of reality but of the film’s governing and pervasive fantasies.