![\"Book](\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/leatherheads.jpg\")
You might remember hearing about this George Clooney football movie. I am not sure how many people saw it. When you come right down to it, you could say that about a lot of George Clooney movies: You’ve heard of it, but you’ve not seen it. He made some interesting selections at the peak of his movie bankability: Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?<\/em>, The Men Who Stare At Goats<\/em>, Syriana<\/em>, Solaris<\/em>–sometime after 2000, he decided his name alone could bring people in, and I guess it did, but not many. Although, to be honest, I guess I have seen a number of those in the theater, so perhaps I am speaking here without data to back it up (a blogger, abstracting incorrectly? Heaven forfend!).<\/p>\nAt any rate, it’s probably best to not think of this as a football movie or a football comedy but more around the drama of the logistics of having a professional football team in the early part of the 20th century. Clooney plays Dodge, a player\/coach for a fictional Duluth professional football team struggling to remain solvent as they barnstorm the Midwest to play other teams in similar situations. When the team goes under, Dodge convinces a college star and recently returned World War I hero (Carter Rutherford, played by John Krasinski) to play for his team to draw people into the stands–even though the team doesn’t really exist. As they start attracting crowds, a female reporter played by Ren\u00e9e Zellweger is investigating whether Carter’s war exploits were oversold.<\/p>\n
So the focus is not on the playing of the football but rather the off-field antics as Dodge woos Lexie, the reporter, and tries to keep the plates of running the football team spinning.<\/p>\n
So although it’s a comedy, like The Men Who Stare At Goats<\/em> and Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?<\/em> (I admit twice I added the appropriate second comma to that title, but that would be [sic]<\/em>), it’s amusing in spots at best and that’s about it. Perhaps Clooney would indicate it’s too sophisticated for me. Perhaps he would be correct.<\/p>\n The war story, though, I recognize that as based on Sergeant York’s story, which was believed initially and then doubted for a time as more skeptical generations arose<\/a> but has more recently been sort of verified. Although Carter’s story of his battle differs–he awakens from a drunken stupor to find he’s behind a German advance and captures a bunch of them from there–one can see the influence. I guess I’m not sophisticated enough to celebrate tearing down icons, even fictional ones. (As a reminder, I watched Sergeant York<\/a><\/em> with Gary Cooper in 2020 and read Sergeant York: His Own Life Story and War Diary<\/a><\/em> last year).<\/p>\n At any rate, I don’t know if I will rewatch this DVD, but I can if I want. Which is unlike football comedies like Necessary Roughness<\/em> and The Waterboy<\/em> which are more comedic and more focused on the football qua<\/em> football.<\/p>\n As a closing thought, I have to wonder if George Clooney got the sense that he was a modern Cary Grant–I know some press compared him to the black-and-white star back in the day. But Grant’s comedies, such as His Girl Friday<\/em> and even The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer<\/em>, are funny<\/em>. Or maybe just funny to people steeped in the tropes of black-and-white. Who can laugh at the jokes at Shakespeare and Jonson without reading the footnotes first. By whom, I probably mean me<\/em>. And, for the record, I have never considered going Clooney<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You might remember hearing about this George Clooney football movie. I am not sure how many people saw it. When you come right down to it, you could say that about a lot of George Clooney movies: You’ve heard of it, but you’ve not seen it. He made some interesting selections at the peak of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30984"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30984\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30985,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30984\/revisions\/30985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}