Clint Eastwood

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.

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