Clooneypalooza: A Star Is Airborne

George Clooney portrays Ryan Bingham in a scene from Up in the Air

Paramount Pictures / AP

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Updated: Dec. 4, 2009

Actors are salesmen. Stories, characters, movies are their products, and they are the packaging and the pitch. That makes film stars the industry's supersalesmen. And no one closes a deal with more assurance or grace than George Clooney.

Not that all his pictures are blockbusters. Since The Perfect Storm in 2000, only his Ocean's (Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen) capers have topped $100 million at the domestic box office. But at 48, Clooney--handsome and affable, with a wit that can deftly cut as it charms--is surely the modern idea and ideal of stardom. Whereas other celebrities seem tortured by the public attention their work earns them, he positively bathes in it. Remember what Mel Brooks as Louis XVI proclaimed in History of the World, Part I? "It's good to be the King." Clooney must think it's fun to be a star. (Read about Clooney in the Time 100.)

He has to enjoy making movies too, since he's in three that will be crowding the multiplexes in late 2009. He plays a "psychic soldier" in the fact-based comedy The Men Who Stare at Goats. He lends his voice to the title character in the animated version of Roald Dahl's children's tale Fantastic Mr. Fox. And opening this weekend, he's a solo frequent flyer and corporate axman in Up in the Air--the apex of this Clooney trifecta and one of the year's most rewarding films.

Animal Farm

Goats, the runt of the trio, is based on Jon Ronson's book about the U.S. military's secret "remote viewing" missions, which trained men to concentrate so hard, they could run through walls. Lyn Cassady (Clooney) is trying to harness his super power for the allied effort in the early days of the Iraq invasion. His student and foil is Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor), a naive journalist in search of a scoop.

At the start of the film, we're told, "More of this is true than you would believe." The story may be all-true, yet as scripted by Peter Straughan and directed by Grant Heslov (co-screenwriter on the Clooney-directed Good Night, and Good Luck), it's hard to believe. The movie strains to find a coherent comic tone; it smashes into the wall of plausibility it's trying to run through. (See pictures of George Clooney at play.)

The only pleasure comes in watching Clooney do one of his favorite things: play himself as an idiot. The oafs in O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Burn After Reading were mere warm-ups for this über-doofus. Striding through Iraq as if he has even a remote view of where he's going, Cassady has a confidence that almost masks his lunacy. Thus, he's the exemplar of a war rationale built on the belief in weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist.

Our hero is back to his dapper self in Fantastic Mr. Fox, directed by Wes Anderson, co-written by Anderson and Noah Baumbach and animated, in gloriously anachronistic stop-motion, by Mark Gustafson. In his corduroy suit, Mr. F. is a woodsy gentleman crook, a raffish Raffles specializing in chickens. When his wife (voiced by Meryl Streep) becomes pregnant, Fox retires to write a newspaper column and help raise his underachieving son, Ash (Jason Schwartzman). Yet the artist in Fox yearns to pull off one last heist: raiding the farms of Franklin Bean (Michael Gambon) and two other big landowners.

See the short list of things to do.

See TIME's 2009 Holiday Movie Preview.