Clint Eastwood

y'all know there was a japanese remake of unforgiven in the works? starring ken watanabe? do they transpose it to early meiji period japan?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2347134/

i feel like japanese remakes of recent american films is an underappreciated phenomenon. for example, there's a remake of "sideways," but almost nobody outside of japan seems to be aware of it.

Would so watch both of these. Is the Sideways remake widely available?

no, not at all. you can get a japanese dvd w/o subtitles.

the unforgiven is hard for me to watch b/c of all the people who don't like or know westerns who claimed it was "revisionist" and "the best western ever" and i'm conscious of that inflated sense of importance that both eminates from it and was accorded it

but all told it is hardly a bad movie

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Friday, August 30, 2013 10:35 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

but it is revisionist... that's just a description of its genre, not its quality...

i think it's a really impressive movie tho... including the dialogue. "deserve's got nothin to do with it," c'mon, thats freakin great. little bill has to be hackmans best character. love the way the interiors are shot, inky black rooms lit only by oil lamps, even when its daytime its dark. i really love that all these wild west badasses were stinkin drunk when they did all their killing and that the guys who lasted were just the dudes who had the nerve to keep their guns steady and not rush their shots. i dig morgan freeman having shitty eyes and not being able to kill anyone when it comes down to it... same w/the scofield kid, blubberin about ned while clint is takin swigs and staring off in the distance. watched it again not long ago and i hadnt forgotten these details, their meaning registered with me when i was a kid, but it hadnt struck me before how right they were. also its badass that munny "prospers in dried fruit" or w/e at the end. i guess yeah everything the film's "saying" had already been covered way before it came along, but that doesnt make it inapt

i feel like japanese remakes of recent american films is an underappreciated phenomenon. for example, there's a remake of "sideways," but almost nobody outside of japan seems to be aware of it.

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Saturday, August 31, 2013 8:38 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark

is it really a phenomenon? i cant name any examples other than those two

how can it be "revisionist" of the western genre when so is like every "A" western made after (and some before) 1950?

what do you think a revisionist western is?

Does revisionist western mean anti singing cowboy stereotype or more anti the stereotype where good guy wears white with ten gallon hat/bad guy wears black dude outfits?
So everything post the mid 50s for the most part could fall into the genre? Sorry taht is probably a bit of an exaggeration and I'm not sure where the recent Lone Ranger falls into that. Maybe The Lone Ranger was the archetype image of what was being revised?

After the early 1960s, many American film-makers began to question and change many traditional elements of Westerns. One major change was in the increasingly positive representation of Native Americans who had been treated as "savages" in earlier films. Audiences were encouraged to question the simple hero-versus-villain dualism and the morality of using violence to test one's character or to prove oneself right.

as pointed out above, this had been happening prior to the 60s.

as i've said before, Clint's mentor Don Siegel did the whole "violence is bad" thing much less pretentiously with John Wayne's swan song The Shootist.

imo its any western that deliberately subverts the conventions of the studio-era western; and specifically if it challenges the heroic myth that the western was created around, that of the right to expansion and primacy of the American settler (who always embodies the best qualities of americans, puritan work ethic etc). The Lone Ranger (2012) is pretty aggressive about evoking the 70s new hollywood westerns that did this.

but the self-consciously "revisionist" western started in the studio era.

some 1950s (and even 1940s) "adult" westerns already less-than-subtly (which is to say, quite obviously) playing with the heroic mythology of the cowboy, the frontiersman, etc. and lots of 1950s and later westerns were fairly obviously allegorical, dealing w/ civil rights movement, southeast asia, etc. "new hollywood" westerns just took this to greater levels of explicitness (see e.g. "soldier blue"). there are some comic westerns from that era that fuck with the genre's conventions pretty fulsomely ("kid blue") and others that just kind of tear it apart ("the last movie"). but mostly there's just a continuum of self-consciously "revisionist," let's-call-white-supremacy-and-manifest-destiny-into-question from early 1950s onward.

btw wrt native americans both western films and lit were depicting them "positively" (if cliché) since forever. there was never a time when the western genre _only_ depicted indians as bloodthirsty savages. not even at its origins in the memoirs of first encounters etc.

which is not to say that unforgiven sucks b/c it isn't "original," just that it's in a long tradition. unfortunately by the early 1990s i guess a lot of folks had forgotten that tradition and greeted the film like it was utterly sui generis (clint eastwood would not have been one to make this mistake btw). i like the movie i just have a hard time forgetting this critical context, not least since the film has some elements of bombast that almost seek to invoke it. i prefer clint's earlier westerns (though not his comic "western," bronco billy, which I think was just limp).

Clint on Jersey Boys and American Sniper:

http://variety.com/2014/film/news/clint-eastwood-jersey-boys-american-sniper-1201216714/

Never realised Gran Torino was a such a massive worldwide $270m grossing hit, can't even remember if it was any good.

It was too bad, but I got the feeling that a few too many people liked it cause it featured a "hero" who got to regularly spew racial epithets.

One of the co-writers of Jersey Boys on stage and screen is a former co-worker of mine. (Not the one who co-wrote Annie Hall.)

can't get down with few dollars more receiving 1/3 votes of fistful

just thinking the same thing!

might argue it's the "best" of the 3

I think so

caught them all at the local indie cinema last summer along with a few other leones, there's an argument for each I think

no once upon a time in the west obv

early Sniper reactions

https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-clint-eastwoods-american-sniper

Is Sully too boring to get its own thread? This negative review, from an Eastwood-defender, summarizes it thusly:

Just like its subject, it's workmanlike and boring. And just like its subject, it will be celebrated widely and in full throat in conflict with its desire to be a working-class martyr. The most iconoclastic thing about it is that it clocks in at 90 minutes and change when Awards Season wisdom suggests it needed to be around 135 minutes. Brave.

I thought this asshole said he would stop making movies at least 10 years ago

No way in hell they could've stretched this to 135 minutes without sending people out the door. The whole water landing sequence is shown TWICE (same shots, takes, everything), the pacing makes no sense, and all the NTSB villain stuff is just patently untrue and obvious to anyone that was watching the news in 2009. None of that shit happened, and everyone remembers how it went down: Sully was rightfully called a hero, did some press, then hang on bit too long and it was like we get it guy, go away. I found the two plane crash nightmares really offensive and unnecessary, especially with the movie opening on the same weekend as the anniversary of 9/11. It's so padded even at 96 minutes, I mean there just isn't any story there - they had to invent a conflict with the NTSB and show multiple sequences twice, all for some stiff American-Hero-is-challenged-by-the-govt angle. And seriously fuck off with planes plowing into buildings in Manhattan.

hes a backwards old dude who doesn't care about stuff, why would you have high expectations

Remember when they called that second lord of the rings movie the twin towers as a cash in

Maybe Clint just slapped his name on it. I agree that a
Robert Rodriguez interpretation would be more awesome

I skipped the screening.

Movies don't need to be judged on accuracy. But why would Eastwood go out and say “The investigative board was trying to paint the picture that he had done the wrong thing,” when that is a complete lie? And why would the producer say: “It’s not a documentary. But at the same time it needs to be an authentic view of what Sully and Jeff experienced, and this was what they faced. This was what they went through.” When it's factually, provably not?

Well, at least Sully isn't introduced raping a woman 'til she likes it, so it's definitely one of Eastwood's lesser offences.

"Until I read the script, I didn't know the investigative board was trying to paint the picture that he (Sullenberger) had done the wrong thing. They were kind of railroading him into 'it was his fault,'" Eastwood said in a publicity video for the Warner Bros. film.

Idiot...

Saw this over the weekend, thought it was a pretty solid late Eastwood film. The first crash sequence is strong Fordian "community comes together" stuff, and felt really well put-together to me. The interplay between the strange, blaring media hype and the bland, anonymous spaces (hotels and conference rooms) where the characters were forced to dwell felt interesting to me, ymmv of course.

also, this from earlier in the thread:

The whole water landing sequence is shown TWICE (same shots, takes, everything)

is just not at all true, the first sequence only shows a couple glimpses of the cockpit, while the second one takes place almost entirely inside the cockpit. And though there's a lot of talk of the movie being workmanlike, I think the pacing is fairly strange, because the entirely film is basically the subjective post-trauma experience of Sully.

The NTSB stuff is obviously not accurate, but the NTSB investigators are all basically the externalized surrogates of Sully's own self-doubt. I can appreciate that within the context of the movie while also knowing that it's a crock.

Is there another director in American history with Eastwood's box office at his age? I'm amazed that has streak continues.

His

i doubt it, the only Hollywood equivalents I can even think of are Sidney Lumet and Robert Altman, and they were still younger than Eastwood is now when they made their last films. And of course those films were not box office successes on the level of Eastwood's recent work. Maybe John Huston was close? Most of the incredibly successful classical hollywood directors (hitchcock, hawks, ford) were all in their 70s when they made their last movies.

My review.

oops sorry -- wrong thread

Wrong thread but awesome anyway

lol thanks

Sully is pretty good! Funny despite the attempt at unorthodox structure, the crisis scenes are the highlight.

I wonder if Laura Linney will get any more exclusively-on-the-phone roles.

In the Line of Fire plays really well as a spoof

Aww, I remember it being quite good as an action flick. Maybe I shouldn't ever bother revisiting it?

Just through a different lens

Tightrope is a pretty daring investigation/indictment of the Clint the Cop icon -- also, Genevieve Bujold -- but also has some hokey touches I hadn't remembered from '84.

Any hints on the gauntlet?

Anyone rewatch the original The Beguiled after seeing the remake?

directing himself again

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-5911117/Clint-Eastwood-88-paces-set-Mule-returns-acting-six-year-hiatus.html

Who is the oldest actor to get lead billing in a studio movie? My best guess is George Burns in 18 Again!, when he was 92. So Clint is only four years shy.