The Good German
Genre: Drama/Mystery/Thriller
Cast: George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, Tobey Maguire, …
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Release: (2006)
If you were a made Hollywood insider with the kind of heat that I’ve got, you’d know a thing or two about the real George Clooney. Being that I’d prefer to keep my name circulating on the A-list guest lists for a little while longer, I’m not going to go around shooting my mouth off about any of the real inside stuff, like the bondage videos, but I can tell you that one thing those closest to GC know about him is that he is a real practical jokester. And we’re not talking just whoopee cushions or fake birthday candles here, we’re talking about a guy who would secretly manipulate your diet for three years to give you real, uncontrollable gas one day or incrementally replace your bedroom wallpaper with sheets of an asbestos-laced exact replica until you get asthma and can’t blow out your regular birthday candles one day. Classic Cloon-dawg.
So now that you know, it should be as clear as something preposterously clear to you what Clooney was doing with his 2006 neo-noir effort, The Good German. He was obviously playing an elaborate joke on every old person in America. Otherwise, judged solely on its own merits, there really would be no explanation for this seemingly pointless effort. But as a joke on old people, it’s actually quite brilliant.
Just imagine their excitement when they first heard that there was an old-fashioned, black and white, wartime romance talkie coming out. “Finally,” they’d say to themselves, “a real whizzbang caper go to, without having to watch a bunch of daisy eggs and smoked chippys runnin’ around, poppin’ each other over a couple sticks of tea for two hours.” Soon, joes everywhere were all throwin’ in their sawbucks, like a bunch of maroons, to get a bus out to the home to take them and some of the dames down to the passion pit for this one. And right from the old-timey opening credits, for just a moment, everything was aces. Just like GC planned it.
After he lulled them in for a few minutes with the hard, curt dialogue and rolling backgrounds of an old, studio to get the nostalgic feel just right … BAM, extended close-up of Tobey Maguire’s gasface as he finishes up business with an accommodating prostitute! For the ones that survive this round of heart attacks, he starts lulling them back into submission. Another several minutes of snappy banter, sharp dressers and important clues just laying around for our hero to find when …BLAM, a nightstick beating to the face and a splattering of f-bombs! Colostomy bags in theatres across America simultaneously explode all over the place, while somewhere in a Spanish villa, George Clooney is laughing his ass off. (Me, too, Cloon-tanger. Freakin’ classic, bro.)
For the rest of you Z-listers, other than the odd spectacle of occasionally getting to see what an old-time movie might have looked like if they had been able to get away with the gratuity of today, there’s nothing really interesting about this movie to watch. George Clooney plays George Clooney, which is oddly appropriate since he would have made just as good a 30’s idol as he does a superstar of today. Tobey Maguire plays an aw-shucks private with a nasty side, and Cate Blanchett plays the love interest of everyone involved, with just enough melodrama to be perfect as an old-school screen siren and really annoying to modern audiences. And since it’s not in the theatres anymore, you can’t even go just to watch old people slowly walking out in disgust, muttering angry curses at the gawt-dammed state of the gawt-dammed world. If you want my advice, next time you’re looking for something to do, give this flick the old twenty-three skidoo, take that dame down to the drum, drop a fin on some good corn and just play your cards there.
I’ll be at 40/40 with Cloonatic and the Pitt-bull if you need me.
Grading
Story: B-
Acting: C+
Visuals: B
Originality/Innovation: B+
Enjoyability: C-
Overall: C+
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