This was rubbish.
Sorry, Clint.
High Plains Drifter (1973).
Tag Archives: Clint Eastwood
Million Dollar Baby (2004) is a horrifying watch.
Saw this once. Hated it.
Saw it again last week. Hated it.
Not the movie – I’d say it’s extraordinary, but I hated the experience of watching it. The gloom and the dread and the realism and Clint being a very unhappy Clint. I just mind folk were peeved because he won the Best Director Academy Award over Marty for his The Aviator (2004), a standard Oscar bait biopic and one of the few Scorsese movies not even worthy of a second viewing.
Clint does this thing – he will make five stinkers in a row but then pull a motion picture out the bag that totally blows away all doubters.
But I’m never watching it again.
Heartbreak Ridge (1986).
Is this the only movie ever made about the US invasion of Grenada? I’m not sure but I don’t think any others are warranted.
It’s highly entertaining stuff despite the jingoism when the invasion kicks off. In fact, they should have just ended the movie once Clint sorts out his grunts and turns the shambles of an ensemble into fighting men. I guess audiences craved/crave a shoot-out.
Clint is one hard bastard in this as usual but also funny. And I didn’t know that Mario Van Peebles could act. Perhaps I’ll give New Jack City (1991) a watch. And this wouldn’t be made today with the constant homophobic insults flying around the place. I suppose this was the go-to way to insult someone back then. A product of its time.
A strong 3/5.
Gran Torino (2008). Don’t mess with Clint (or his car).
Clint – we all go by first-name basis with the living legend (LL) – has perfected the ultimate grizzled angry old man with latent empathy. He long ago (even as early as the late ’70s) mastered fading masculinity and here especially he is thoroughly believable because of the asshole that he is. I’ve read many times that he goes for the ‘PC brigade’. I really don’t think he does; he’s just making movies about what he knows, the type of characters he does best, and he simply runs with his instincts as a filmmaker. He’s not exactly going to star in or direct a sequel to The Birdcage (1996).
He is extremely funny here, and the jokes don’t come from the racial slurs; it’s the fact he’s this hard-as-nails old geezer and no one in the movie either expects it nor can handle it.
“Ever notice how you come across somebody once in a while who you shouldn’t have fucked with? …. That’s me.”
He’s quite hit and miss as a director, but when he stars in a film, or one of his own, it’s usually very good.
He must be pushing 100 now. He’s incredible.
Where Eagles Dare (1968) – Wehrmacht Stormtroopers.
Where Eagles Dare (1968) surely must have been watched on a loop by George Lucas as he was penning A New Hope (1977) and the expanded Star Wars universe.
Fan art poster.
Hohenwerfen Castle is this movie’s Death Star, the German troops the most incompetent ever assembled in what is the peak Hollywood WWII turkey shoot; Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood mow the fuckers down like Stormtroopers. Reducing a complex military operation to the wits and whims of two ‘superhero’ protagonists, it’s this blasé depiction of war that has young lads all giddy (“chomping at the bit”) en route to army recruitment offices.
The Wehrmacht grunt here is a Stormtrooper sans the Arctic clobber, and by the end one could be forgiven for thinking that Messrs Burton and Eastwood casually take out an entire division.
It’s quite the escapist experience, and its influence is rampant – the Medal of Honor video game series, for example, is an unabridged adaptation of the movie’s aesthetic. In an ideal Pentagon monopoly on propaganda, the enemy is devoid of dimensions and the battle a cakewalk.
War is no messy struggle when you’ve got personality pulling the trigger.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 