Clint Eastwood

It’s a real “validate the oldies” trip that I imagine was meant to make lots of aging boomers feel better about the advent of their later years.

Macho, what did you do with my Gran Torino this time?

have been watching some of the early films he directed and starred in - Play Misty For Me, High Plains Drifter, The Gauntlet. They had a very 70s macho mindset, but he was hot

Play Misty is hilarious and Jessica Walter just does that performance for the next 40 years (and it rules)

I really liked Richard Jewell

pretty impressive he directed and starred in a movie at age 90 something

Paint Your Wagon must be the most embarrassing Hollywood movie of the 1960s.

I liked The Outlaw Josie Wales

pretty impressive he directed and starred in a movie at age 90 something

― treeship.

American Soldier made $547 million. I mean:

American Sniper grossed $350.1 million in North America and $197 million in other territories for a worldwide total of $547.1 million, against a budget of around $58 million.[4] Calculating in all expenses and revenues, Deadline Hollywood estimated that the film made a profit of $243 million, making it the second-most profitable film of 2014 only behind Paramount's Transformers: Age of Extinction.[37] Worldwide, it is the highest-grossing war film of all time (breaking Saving Private Ryan's record)[38] and Eastwood's highest-grossing film to date.

people like sniping

https://tenor.com/view/stinky-clint-eastwood-coffee-gif-4550317

Breihan's piece on the film in his Popcorn Champs series is worth a read:

https://www.avclub.com/american-sniper-fought-a-culture-war-on-the-box-office-1847138948

(Said film is also the last non-franchise number one of the year in the US; ever since then it's been Star Wars or Marvel or -- per his next entry -- Bad Boys, thanks to last year's, how to put it, abbreviated schedule.)

Indeed. This is otm:

I don’t think American Sniper glamorizes Chris Kyle, but it definitely valorizes him, which isn’t quite the same thing. The movie’s depiction of Iraqis is deeply fucked. The enemy sniper, for instance, gets action-movie gun-preparation scenes, with ominous supervillain music. Another Iraqi figure, a made-up character known as The Butcher (Mido Hamada), uses a power drill to torture a little kid to death in front of his family. When Kyle says, “They’re fucking savages,” the movie seems to agree. That could just be the nature of its subjective approach, but it’s those moments where American Sniper feels most consciously political. Maybe Eastwood is making a point about how war flattens things out and forces people to force each other into clear-cut friend-or-enemy categories. Or maybe Eastwood really is depicting Iraqis as savages. He never makes this stuff easy to figure out.

Eastwood, like John Milius or early Oliver Stone, dresses liberal empathy in right wing drag.

the Cry Macho trailer had my gf and me rofling p hard yesterday when we went to see Pig (which was also very funny—some parts intentionally, some almost certainly not)

anybody have any strong opinions whether A Perfect World holds up? I think I liked it at the time but haven’t seen or even really thought about it since its late 90s frequency (iirc?) on basic cable

I saw it again a couple years ago. Poky in places. The interplay with Laura Dern's a bit tired in its Eastwoodisms (In the Line of Fire, by contrast, remains fresh).

Watched Unforgiven for 1st time this weekend. Hackman was great, Eastwood was just sorta…there. I'd heard his performance was well-regarded but don't know why. And I kept expecting his character arc to be something other than the very predictable one it wound up taking. It's more than 2 hours long but not much happens. A decent western overall but not one of my favorites.

The Richard Harris section is dead. And loooooong.

I'd heard his performance was well-regarded

probably a halo effect from his also being the director and the film being a critical success. I thought the production design was the star of that movie and the script was pretty poor stuff.

xpost It's not terribly necessary, but I didn't mind it that much on recent rewatch, and it's an important way to underscore the different degrees of ruthlessness the movie depicts.

Clint himself has gotten lots of mileage out of depicting himself as vulnerable, or incapacitated, from the spaghetti westerns on up. Unforgiven was one of a few more obvious apotheosises (is this a word?) of this.

Yes. I liked his performance as well, but kept waiting for a payoff or twist that never came. Meanwhile the transformation of Schofield Kid (also very predictable) occurs in like one shot of his face and one line.
It's pretty fucked up that the only westerns to win best picture are Cimarron, Dances With Wolves, and Unforgiven.

Xp to Alfred

I also found it deeply weird that neither Eastwood nor writer David Webb Peoples once mentioned Ned's race aloud, nor was it commented on when the sheriff and his people lynched him.

xps some also count No Country among the westerns that won BP but I'd beg to differ

and fwiw the Academy doesn't have a much better track record when it comes to nominating the best westerns either...

In Old Arizona (1929)
Viva Villa! (1934)
Ruggles of Red Gap (1935)
Stagecoach (1939)
The Ox-Bow Incident (1943)
Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
High Noon (1952)
Shane (1953)
Friendly Persuasion (1956)
The Alamo (1960)
How the West Was Won (1963)
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
True Grit (2010)
Django Unchained (2012)
The Revenant (2016)

Solid stretch:

Stagecoach (1939)
The Ox-Bow Incident (1943)
Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)

The Ox-Bow Incident was the last movie to be nominated for best picture and nothing else, I believe.

That's the one of those 3 I haven't seen. Should I?

Yes. A clumsily powerful anti-lynching picture. Dana Andrews and Jane Darnell like you'd never seen them or would again.

Generally well regarded, then and now:

https://letterboxd.com/notpaulinekael/film/the-ox-bow-incident/

A Western set in Nevada in 1885 that is also an attempt at a poetic tragedy about mob violence. Two cowboys (Henry Fonda and Harry Morgan) ride into a small, lonely cattle town and become involved in the hysteria of a lynch mob. Three innocent men (Dana Andrews, Anthony Quinn, and Francis Ford) are hanged, while we see not only their fear and despair, but the varied motives of the members of the posse who take justice into their own hands. It's easy to be put off by the studio sets and lighting and by the 40s approach to a "serious" subject, but the director, William Wellman, has made the characters so vivid that after many years people may still recall Frank Conroy as the sadistic Southern major, and the rapid changes of expression of William Eythe, as his son. With Harry Davenport as Mr. Davies, Leigh Whipper as Sparks, and Jane Darwell as the cackling, lewd old woman who enjoys the excitement--a much better performance than her Ma Joad in THE GRAPES OF WRATH. From the very fine novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark--it has ambiguities that Lamar Trotti's script couldn't encompass; reading the book expands the movie.

SPOILERS above, technically.

god, I forgot Anthony Quinn was in it.

Good cast! Thanks y'all, putting it on my list.

I just started to watch "Unforgiven" and thought it was the worst movie in the world

as an actor his "just sorta...there" persona has been his essence

Firefox wasn't very good

Or late '90s/early'00s dreck like True Crime and Blood Work.

xpost there was a movie about a web browser?

You're right Dan, which is why the "mysterious stranger" character is his best. Once you try fleshing it out or just giving him more dialogue, it falls apart.

I thought Firefox ruled when it came out, but haven't seen it since

I didn't see it until now, wonder what I would have thought of it then

Iirc I definitely slotted it as a kid along with the other military assault aircraft projects, like Blue Thunder and Airwolf.

The film was shot on a $21 million budget, the largest production budget ever for Malpaso.[2] Of that amount, over $20 million was spent on special effects.[3]

Firefox did rule if, like me, you were 12 or so and watched it a lot on HBO. Very much proto-Tom Clancy, or at least the novel it was based on was (was a sequel too, IIRC)

anybody have any strong opinions whether A Perfect World holds up?

I've been watching some of his more recent movies lately, and A Perfect World might have been the best of them. The ending is way drawn out and some of the scenes with the man himself and Laura Dern and Bradley Whitford are superfluous, but pretty much every scene between Costner and the kid is great

I also really liked Changeling. Mystic River was ok, Gran Torino pretty bad. No desire to see American Sniper

'Must think in Russian...Russian...Russian...Russian'

"Heartbreak Ridge" was another 80s 'boy we Americans got a spoilin' for war and get that big L in Vietnam off the books' setup. It's also the beginning of many roles for Clint as the old haggard hard ass.

Like Firefox, I have not seen either one since I was a teenager but I liked them both back then.

Heartbreak Ridge was ... Grenada? Iirc it was one of those more "prestige" riffs on "Rambo," along with "Uncommon Valor" a few years earlier. Man, Ted Kotcheff (90! Still alive!) had a weird career.

It's funny to think of "A Perfect World" as one of his more recent films. Almost 30 years ago! He's had an impressive run, or really, more accurately, several of them.

I mean, for him it is recent but it probably reflects on my age too. I referred to Bruno Mars as a "newer" artist in my class one time a few years ago and my students all laughed at me

Hah, yeah, I think my point was that as far as Clint is concerned, "A Perfect World" was at one point a late career peak, but now it's more like a mid-career peak and the beginning of another imperial phase. Unforgiven, A Perfect World, In the Line of Fire, Madison County (take a breath for a couple of years), Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, the WW2 films, etc. He's been totally hit or miss for many years, but that's largely because he keeps cranking them out. Around 20 films in the last 20 years, half of which he stars in *and* directs!

Actually, ITLOF aside, he only stars in movies he directs.

Yeah, but not every movie he directs. Just about half, I think.