Clint Eastwood

Also, Clint's "Yeah" near the end is great and/or terrible.

meh, Clint knows a brass-balls Nixonian president when he sees one.

http://www.salon.com/2012/02/06/clint_eastwoods_super_bowl_obama_endorsement/

Some are insisting its just an endorsement of Detroit and Karl Rove is whining about it for various reasons

No votes for Paint your Wagon??

"This is just halftime for American musicals."

It's funny that it gets parsed as political when it's a car commercial using the rhetoric of a political ad, and working really hard not to be political. But, of course, the stuff it's advertising isn't removed from politics, which is what the right is jumping on.

Chrysler wiped union signs off the footage, literally nothing to see here folks

Woah, David Gordon Green directed the ad, and Matthew Dickman (one of the twin poets profiled in the New Yorker a few years ago) was one of the writers.

http://www.wweek.com/portland/blog-28200-see_that_wieden%2Bkennedy_super_bowl_ad_with_clint_eastwood_it_was_directed_by_david_gordon_green.html

bouncing back from your highness

just watched this, anyone who sees anything truly political in it is insane.

Off-topic from Clint, but the similar 2011 Super Bowl spot was good, directed by Samuel Bayer ("Smells Like Teen Spirit"):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKL254Y_jtc

sigh
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoqKdWY692k

does this damage his reputation at all? Or it he so old and such a revered hollywood figure that it doesn't matter?

Yes.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/you-did-great-terrified-personal-assistant-tells-c,29393/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmratV9kac0&hd=1

also: http://www.theonion.com/articles/breaking-john-mccain-just-blew-his-brains-out-duri,29369/

Can only presume everyone pretending to be shocked or disappointed in this is doing so to draw attention away from Mittens.

Does this mean that we can look forward to other Republican leaning actors coming on and saying their best known lines?
Arnie: "RUN TO DA PRESIDENTIAL CHOPPAH!"

New movie in three weeks, start your political based jokes/Photoshopping now:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2083383/

What does invisibama want Clint to tell Romney to do to himself at 6:15?

xp Trouble With The Laffer Curve

What does invisibama want Clint to tell Romney to do to himself at 6:15?

Go fuck yourself

v v classy joke

NYT: "Aides said Mr. Eastwood does not like teleprompters and was trusted to deliver an on-message endorsement."

oh he was ad-libbing up there? you don't say

"I know what you're thinkin'. 'Does he have Barack Obama in that chair or doesn't he?' Well to tell you the truth in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself."

Far from my favourite director--except for Blood Work, don't know that I've ever liked anything, and J. Edgar especially seemed like a waste. I didn't mind Hereafter, though, improbabilities and all. (By which I don't mean the hereafter stuff, which you just have to go with; more like, now I'm mailing off my manuscript, now I'm speaking at a book fair...) Matt Damon is fine in the dropping-out-of-life role. Did not feel like a Clint Eastwood film at all. I wish Arte Johnson had showed up on a park bench at some point, otherwise not bad.

I don't dislike Hereafter (or Blood Work or J Edgar either, for that matter) but I'm still puzzled as to why it turned into a romcom in its last 10 minutes.

you liked Blood Work

True about the last 10 minutes--the rom part, anyway. I don't know if it was more or less preferable to what I expected, some mystical mumbo-jumbo, but it definitely wasn't very convincing.

The first hour or so, though, I was impressed with how even the pacing was, and even found both Damon's and the kid's stories somewhat moving.

I recently tried to rewatch The Unforgiven and found I could not stomach it.

I don't mean the violent ending. I quit watching about 50 minutes in because the dialogue was horrible and the way the characters and plot were being set up were as artificial as the flavor of a watermelon Jolly Rancher, but all the while it was pretending it was the juiciest, ripest watermelon you ever laid a lip to. Nothing about that movie came within sight of any reality that ever was or will be. It even sucked as a pure myth.

i like it

the two iwo jima movies are probably the most interesting of his recent work to me

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

emanates?

it's Unforgiven, guys. The Unforgiven is another western.

I admire the crispness of its dialogue without ever -- then and now -- buying William Munny's rediscovery of his inner T-1000; and, boy, do the Richard Harris scenes drag.

Also...not once was Ned's race mentioned? And he's lynched?

i think i have picked up my mom's old habit (which at one time was very frustrating to me) of adding an article or title to everything.

fast food chains, per my mom: the subway, the burger king, mr. wizard's...

god bless her :)

I found it so ordinary and so plodding, I've never seen it a second time. Was furthermore bothered by what amateurist brings up: the reverential treatment it received, when directors had been killing off and de-mythologizing the Western for 40+ years at that point--at least going back to High Noon and The Gunfighter--and usually in much better films.

Was furthermore bothered by what amateurist brings up: the reverential treatment it received, when directors had been killing off and de-mythologizing the Western for 40+ years at that point

yes indeed. Same year Eric Clapton won Album of the Year: mythologizing a mythology that didn't and could never exist.

There were so many such films in the late '60s and through the '70s, I suppose enough time had lapsed that it seemed new again (helped by the fact it was Eastwood directing).

Also strange that the Academy coronated a comeback when Eastwood's movies, with exceptions, had been modest to huge profit makers for years.

plus the likes of High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider got respectful press (and made money).

I recently tried to rewatch The Unforgiven and found I could not stomach it.

I don't mean the violent ending. I quit watching about 50 minutes in because the dialogue was horrible and the way the characters and plot were being set up were as artificial as the flavor of a watermelon Jolly Rancher, but all the while it was pretending it was the juiciest, ripest watermelon you ever laid a lip to.

Aww, I liked it. My grandfather was in it. He is dead now.

Also, to state the obvious, they never really stop making such films, they just take different shapes in different decades. Right now it's a world-weary Batman, and Scar wears a mask and speaks through a vocoder.

That's a great story about your grandfather.

he had a couple lines, i think he was "man on train" or something.

Clint been overrated after White Hunter, Black Heart

(I still need to see the Streep chick flick)

When I was a kid, my grandparents owned exactly four movies on VHS: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, True Grit, Ruthless People and, inexplicably, The Name of the Rose. In part because I wasn't allowed to play Ruthless People when my younger cousins were around (which was most of the time), TGTB&TU easily became my favourite and most watched of the bunch. Unforgiven was a couple of years later, the first new Eastwood western since my discovery of that film. Going to the movies with a bunch of friends one night, it took quite a bit of encouraging to get some of my friends to see it with me (the group actually ended up dividing up, with the remainder splitting off to see the John Ritter comedy Stay Tuned), Clint apparently not holding much currency among 13 year olds in 1992. I was pleased with myself for having (partially, at least) won my battle and convinced that we were all about to see something awesome.

Then the movie started and...it was quite the bummer. More so than even Batman Returns, which had already significantly bummed us out earlier that summer. Murky, slow moving and talky, what was most disappointing was how sullen and weak Clint's character was. Even the climatic shootout lacked any electricity, as if Clint was merely going through the motions, the film ending not with a ride off into the sunset but a scene of Clint returning home to his pathetic little farm, presumably not far away from death. The film felt so lacking in sensation that by the time its awards season blitz came around, I felt like those awards may as well have been going to Howard's End.

Naturally, I love it now. Gene Hackman's final scene ("I was building a house!") destroys me every time; only Joe Pesci's horrifying death scene in Casino has ever had anywhere near its effect of making me feel so sorry for such an otherwise loathsome character. The film's distinctly literary and nuanced qualities, attributes now routinely credited to Eastwood's far less subtle and definitely inferior recent output, still feel unique and even radical to me (the critic Alex Jackson once explained the difference between the first and second volumes of Kill Bill as the difference between a film and a novel, a distinction that I think even more neatly fits TGTB&TU vs. Unforgiven). The "revisionist western" business is lazy critical shorthand, of course; this is still a genre work, though one that is somewhat unusually concerned with subtext more so than text. It makes perfect sense to me that it shares a screenwriter with Blade Runner.

The film's distinctly literary and nuanced qualities...

I know from literary and nuanced, and wherever Unforgiven strives for these qualities what it delivers is ersatz. It hammers its points home, one by one, with the finesse of a cobbler pounding hobnails in a boot sole. If you want literary and nuanced, watch John Sayles' Lone Star.

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.