Of all the movies making a play for the awards season this fall, George Clooney‘s “Ides Of March” is getting into the mix early. Already running the Venice/Telluride/TIFF gauntlet and hitting theaters next month, it will be first out of the gate and it will be interesting to see if audiences respond to a political drama even with the dynamite pairing of Clooney/Gosling. Reviews have been respectable though not ecstatic thus far, with our man Venice noting, “it’s not as accomplished and impassioned as ‘Good Night and Good Luck,’ but unlike ‘Confessions of a Dangerous Mind‘ [but] it’s tonally assured, and…very watchable…we had a blast. Whether wider audiences enjoy it as much remains to be seen (although we’re fairly sure that it’s early anointment as an Oscar front-runner will disappear quickly), but it at least happily confirms that Clooney the director is here to stay.”
While this writer hasn’t seen the film yet, we’ve been told the trailer is actually pretty spoiler heavy so with three more clips now arriving for “Ides Of March” we suppose we would advise to proceed with caution. Unlike the first clip which focused on the flirty back and forth between Ryan Gosling and Evan Rachel Wood, these spots get right into the political intrigue of the story about a twenty-something presidential campaign spinmeister/wunderkind named Stephen Myers (Gosling) and the dirty pool he plays to get his candidate (played by Clooney) the nomination against a rival senator. Certainly, we like the even, sober tone of these clips but we wonder with the country already in the early throes of the next election if this will resonate or moviegoers will prefer some escapist entertainment instead.
“Ides Of March” hits theaters on October 7th — watch the clips below.
Being a film about politics, ‘The Ides Of March’ will be a very important movie.
Tom Cruise and Johnny Depp should be doing movies like this.