From my review in Taki's Magazine of the drama starring Matt Damon:
The octogenarian Eastwood’s late success has held out hope to aging baby boomers that experience, guile, and a sense of perspective will help them get by when they can no longer outwork the young bastards.
Read the whole thing there.
re: Recurrent tidal wave nightmares.
ReplyDeleteI have them, too. Must be some psychic scar left over from being knocked down by a big wave when I was very young.
Steve Sailer doesn't know it yet but he will probably retire on his earnings from a screen play about the Armenian Mafia in LA. He will also write a race realist, dark comedy version of Grand Canyon, that absolutely stomach churning, diversity celebrating movie about how everyone was going to get along after the Rodney King riots. Somehow it will involve the California housing bubble and the subprime mortgage meltdown.
ReplyDeleteOK first the site looks really gay. Why did Taki change? To re-brand for his daughter? Second, you are one of the few reviewers I trust. So why the truncated reviews? And third what about the relationship between the mostly white SA rugby team and their black fans there's got to be a story in that from you. Did I miss it? Seems a mirror of the American White fans Black team thing. Should be up your alley.
ReplyDeleteThis is a movie I'd see on Netflix if at all. Why not tell me about a movie I might see in the theaters?
Eastwood’s late success has held out hope to aging baby boomers that experience, guile, and a sense of perspective will help them get by when they can no longer outwork the young bastards.
ReplyDeleteI don't know. Is there any evidence that Eastwood works less hard than other directors?
It's funny that you frame many issues in terms of tension between groups: young vs. old, white vs. purple, etc.
ReplyDeleteTolkien had a dream of a great wave "coming in ineluctably over the trees and green fields". It must be a common dream, by the sound of it. I've never had that one though.
ReplyDelete"Where life has no value, death has its price."
ReplyDelete--For a Few Dollars More.
The problem with Eastwood is even though he can be a fine director, he's not a writer and thus has been at the mercy of other people's scripts.
ReplyDeleteSome directors write their own scripts, and some are adept at rewriting other people's scripts. Eastwood is more a craftsman than a true artist with a personal vision, and so his movies succeed or fail on the strength of the original script.
Because Woody Allen writes his own scripts, his movies, good or bad, are all of one piece.
ReplyDeleteEastwood, because he relies on the script of others and has been more a solid craftsman than a personal stylist, has never been a true auteur.
With solid material(and good actors), he can do wonderful work--Mystic River and his crowning achievement, Flags and Letters--, but when the script is piss-poor(as with Absolute Power), Eastwood is little more than a hack director. Welles, Hitchcock, Leone, or even Don Siegel could use an inferior script as the basis for tremendous cinematic fireworks, but no such luck with Eastwood. He's a good carpenter but not an architect. He needs the blueprints of others.
"Anonymous said...
ReplyDeleteIt's funny that you frame many issues in terms of tension between groups: young vs. old, white vs. purple, etc."
Yeah, because tension between different groups has absolutely no place in human events. That's why the sum total of human history has been as warm, fuzzy, and uplifting as Fred Rogers talking about puppies.
I thought Eastwood's previous movie, the one about the white-hot issue of racial tension between Hmongs and old crusty whites, was pretty crappy.
ReplyDelete"the You-Know-Whoms are going ape-shit over the WASP-ish-ness of that movie."
ReplyDeleteAndrew O'Hehir is a you-know-whom?
Also: Salon (along with Slate) is one of the most annoyingly ad-heavy sites I know, which is why I never read it.
Welles, Hitchcock, Leone, or even Don Siegel could use an inferior script as the basis for tremendous cinematic fireworks, but no such luck with Eastwood
ReplyDeleteLet's be realistic here. Welles and Hitchcock had their share of forgettable movies.
And to say that Eastwood is not in their class as a director is not to say that he's bad at it.
Salon (along with Slate) is one of the most annoyingly ad-heavy sites I know, which is why I never read it. .
ReplyDeleteYou ought to use Firefox browser with the ad-block plug-in.
Generally, Eastwood has been pretty good at picking screenplays. "Hereafter," though, is a bad exception. I'm never before seen a screenwriter announce in promotional interviews that he thought his screenplay needed a second draft, as Peter Morgan has done here. Morgan has also admitted that if he were directing it, he would have thrown away two-thirds of the script about the Frenchwoman and about Matt Damon's character and had the screenwriter expand the part about the English twins into a full movie.
ReplyDeleteEastwood's kind of an auteur of Depression-era cheapness. In "Gran Torino" there's a scene where Eastwood's cranky old codger here's a noise in the garage at night, grabs his shotgun, goes into the garage, and turns on the hanging lamp. He then hears another noise, swings around, and accidentally hits the lamp with his gun. The light swings all over the place, making a crazy effect, heightening the tension.
ReplyDeleteNow, what makes that scene enjoyable is that you just know that Clint probably saw the same effect in a B movie in 1939, remembered it, and was very pleased by the fact that he could put it in his 2008 movie for about the $25 the hanging lamp cost a prop guy at Home Depot.
If it was a David Fincher movie, the scene wouldn't be as fun because most of the enjoyment comes from your realizing how cheap the scene was to film and how much that miserliness warmed the flinty cockles of Clint's heart.
"...here's a noise"? Now I don't feel so bad about my typos.
ReplyDeleteI was lovin' Gran Torino until right near the end, when Eastwood and/or the screenwriter used one of the most tiresome, phony plot devices that Hollywood foists on the public: the "reading of the will." Have you ever been to a reading of a will at a lawyer's office?
Ya know why not? There's no such thing, that's why not. Hooray for Hollywood.