Film Freak Central

Richard Jewell (2019) - Blu-ray + Digital

***/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Sam Rockwell, Kathy Bates, Jon Hamm, Paul Walter Hauser
written by Billy Ray, based on the article "American Nightmare: The Ballad of Richard Jewell" by Marie Brenner
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Angelo Muredda You'd be hard-pressed to think of a more fateful intersection between director and biographical subject than Clint Eastwood's Richard Jewell, which crystallizes the venerable American filmmaker's aesthetic and thematic interests of late. The infamous minimalist and chair-scolder--hyped to godly proportions in some corners of Film Twitter for his cool efficiency, scorned as a conservative propagandist by others--has been charged since the film's AFI Fest debut last month with cranking out ill-timed "Trumpian talking points" about the FBI and smearing a journalist's good name after her death. While some of the callouts are fairer than others, the uproar has distracted from the quiet dignity and formal strangeness of the work, which deepens Eastwood's recent interest in unlikely American newsmakers with asterisks beside their names and their acts of heroism by grounding itself in the awkward humanity of an even less immediately palatable figure than the inarticulate, gelato-eating Euro travellers who saved lives in The 15:17 to Paris.

Richard Jewell (2019)

***/****
starring Sam Rockwell, Kathy Bates, Jon Hamm, Paul Walter Hauser
written by Billy Ray, based on the article "American Nightmare: The Ballad of Richard Jewell" by Marie Brenner
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Angelo Muredda You'd be hard-pressed to think of a more fateful intersection between director and biographical subject than Clint Eastwood's Richard Jewell, which crystallizes the venerable American filmmaker's aesthetic and thematic interests of late. The infamous minimalist and chair-scolder--hyped to godly proportions in some corners of Film Twitter for his cool efficiency, scorned as a conservative propagandist by others--has been charged since the film's AFI Fest debut last month with cranking out ill-timed "Trumpian talking points" about the FBI and smearing a journalist's good name after her death. While some of the callouts are fairer than others, the uproar has distracted from the quiet dignity and formal strangeness of the work, which deepens Eastwood's recent interest in unlikely American newsmakers with asterisks beside their names and their acts of heroism by grounding itself in the awkward humanity of an even less immediately palatable figure than the inarticulate, gelato-eating Euro travellers who saved lives in The 15:17 to Paris.

The 15:17 to Paris (2018) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Spencer Stone, Alek Skarlatos, Anthony Sadler, Judy Greer
screenplay by Dorothy Blyskal, based on the book by Sadler, Skarlatos, Stone and Jeffrey E. Stern
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Bill Chambers The 15:17 to Paris is quintessential late-period Clint Eastwood, its emphasis on the procedural and the quotidian seeming at once a calculated rebuke to commercialism, vivid demonstration of what a crapshoot Eastwood's philosophy of shooting the first draft is, and proof that he has no desire to rest on his laurels as he nears the age of 90. The choices this movie makes can be so surreally unconventional, however, as to be vaguely ominous; I hope Eastwood's okay. The 15:17 to Paris is based on the would-be hijacking of a train bound for Paris in 2015, and the three Americans who subdued the lone-wolf terrorist--Spencer Stone, Anthony Sadler, and Alek Skarlatos--play themselves. (It's a postmodern ploy that everyone from Abbas Kiarostami (Close-Up) to Betty Thomas (Howard Stern's Private Parts) has attempted, though Eastwood probably had in mind Audie Murphy starring as himself in To Hell and Back, the big-screen adaptation of Murphy's own WWII memoir.) That being said, more experienced actors inhabit the roles in an opening childhood flashback, while Judy Greer and Jenna Fischer play Spencer's and Alek's mom, respectively, and other recognizable faces, including Jaleel White and Tony Hale, fill out the supporting cast. Yet when the vérité shenanigans begin in earnest, Greer and Fischer are still there as the real men's mothers--and, incidentally, haven't aged a day. This is far from as peculiar as things get, but it induces a cognitive dissonance that turns out to be fairly typical of the movie's tone. Watching The 15:17 to Paris is like falling into a low-key fugue state.

Sully (2016) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Tom Hanks, Aaron Eckhart, Laura Linney
written by Todd Komarnicki, based on the book Highest Duty by Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger and Jeffrey Zaslow
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw An elderly film by an elderly filmmaker for an elderly audience, everybody's favourite says-appalling-things old bastard Clint Eastwood directs the guy everyone can agree on, Tom Hanks, in a rah-rah hagiography of Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, the most uncomplicatedly heroic figure in the United States in the last...how long ago was Abraham Lincoln? 151 years? If you don't know, Sully landed an airplane with 155 passengers on it in the Hudson River when bird strikes disabled both of the plane's engines. Multiple dream sequences have Sully imagining what would've happened had he turned his plane over populated areas. 9/11 is referenced often--explicitly and obliquely. An applause-geeking closing title card informs that lots of New Yorkers helped rescue the passengers from the water after the splashdown because New Yorkers are good and America is great, raising the question, Mr. Eastwood, if it needs to be "great again." Maybe it's all gone to hell since 2009. The timing is interesting. Let's call it that.

Sully (2016)

**/****
starring Tom Hanks, Aaron Eckhart, Laura Linney
written by Todd Komarnicki, based on the book Highest Duty by Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger and Jeffrey Zaslow
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw An elderly film by an elderly filmmaker for an elderly audience, everybody's favourite says-appalling-things old bastard Clint Eastwood directs the guy everyone can agree on, Tom Hanks, in a rah-rah hagiography of Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, the most uncomplicatedly heroic figure in the United States in the last...how long ago was Abraham Lincoln? 151 years? If you don't know, Sully landed an airplane with 155 passengers on it in the Hudson River when bird strikes disabled both of the plane's engines. Multiple dream sequences have Sully imagining what would've happened had he turned his plane over populated areas. 9/11 is referenced often--explicitly and obliquely. An applause-geeking closing title card informs that lots of New Yorkers helped rescue the passengers from the water after the splashdown because New Yorkers are good and America is great, raising the question, Mr. Eastwood, if it needs to be "great again." Maybe it's all gone to hell since 2009. The timing is interesting. Let's call it that.

American Sniper (2014) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

***/**** Image B+ Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller, Kyle Gallner, Luke Grimes
screenplay by Jason Hall, based on the book by Chris Kyle
directed by Clint Eastwood

WATCH IN iTUNES

by Angelo Muredda After delivering the first funereal jukebox musical in Jersey Boys just last summer, Clint Eastwood returns to better-fitting material with American Sniper, his most muscular and dramatically charged work in years, for whatever that's worth. The common thinking about Eastwood these days--at least, outside the critical circle that deems his every tasteful composition and mild camera movement a classical masterstroke--is that his internal compass for choosing projects has been off for a while, making him susceptible to the bad taste of undistinguished screenwriters. What's interesting about American Sniper, which works from a dicey script by Jason Hall that's always in danger of becoming either a rote action thriller meted out in shootouts or a rote antiwar melodrama about how veterans never quite make it back home, is how obstinately it resists this narrative. Contrary to the vision of Eastwood as an efficient director prone to gliding on autopilot, American Sniper shows him forging something tough and difficult to grasp out of what might have been on-the-nose material.

Jersey Boys - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

click any image to enlarge

*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C+
starring John Lloyd Young, Erich Bergen, Michael Lomenda, Christopher Walken
screenplay by Marshall Brickman & Rick Elice
directed by Clint Eastwood

WATCH IN iTUNES - USA|CANADA

by Angelo Muredda Clint Eastwood has never been the most self-referential filmmaker, preferring shopworn competence to flashy displays of idiosyncrasy. But it's hard to imagine he's not at least slightly gaming his audience throughout Jersey Boys, an otherwise limp tour through the Four Seasons' early discography. What else are we to make of the gag where baby-faced songwriter Bob Gaudio (Chris Klein dead ringer Erich Bergen) catches an image of his director's grizzled mug in "Rawhide" on a hotel TV? While that feels like a pretty straightforward joke on Eastwood's uncanny endurance all the way from "Sherry" (1962) to Jersey Boys the Broadway musical (2005), it's a bit harder to read an equally surreal moment like the dispute between producer and sometime lyricist Bob Crewe (Mike Doyle) and wise-guy guitarist Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza) over the band's sound. "I'm hearing it in sky blue," Crewe whines in the middle of a recording session, "and you're giving me brown." On the one hand, it's not like Eastwood to take the piss out of his own work, but on the other, what better analogy for his adaptation process can there be than the conversion of a sky-blue all-American songbook to a shit-brown sung résumé, rendered all in blacks and greys save for the odd splash of salmon and the occasional scrap of tweed?

Jersey Boys (2014)

*/****
starring John Lloyd Young, Erich Bergen, Michael Lomenda, Christopher Walken
screenplay by Marshall Brickman & Rick Elice
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Angelo Muredda Clint Eastwood has never been the most self-referential filmmaker, preferring shopworn competence to flashy displays of idiosyncrasy. But it's hard to imagine he's not at least slightly gaming his audience throughout Jersey Boys, an otherwise limp tour through the Four Seasons' early discography. What else are we to make of the gag where baby-faced songwriter Bob Gaudio (Chris Klein dead ringer Erich Bergen) catches an image of his director's grizzled mug in "Rawhide" on a hotel TV? While that feels like a pretty straightforward joke on Eastwood's uncanny endurance all the way from "Sherry" (1962) to Jersey Boys the Broadway musical (2005), it's a bit harder to read an equally surreal moment like the dispute between producer and sometime lyricist Bob Crewe (Mike Doyle) and wise-guy guitarist Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza) over the band's sound. "I'm hearing it in sky blue," Crewe whines in the middle of a recording session, "and you're giving me brown." On the one hand, it's not like Eastwood to take the piss out of his own work, but on the other, what better analogy for his adaptation process can there be than the conversion of a sky-blue all-American songbook to a shit-brown sung résumé, rendered all in blacks and greys save for the odd splash of salmon and the occasional scrap of tweed?

A Perfect World (1993) - Blu-ray Disc

click any image to enlarge

****/**** Image B+ Sound A-
starring Kevin Costner, Clint Eastwood, Laura Dern, T.J. Lowther
screenplay by John Lee Hancock
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw Time and distance have conspired to replace Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven with A Perfect World in my mind as his best film and one of the best movies of the '90s. The two occur within a year of each other and mark, with In the Line of Fire between them, a renaissance of the Eastwood brand that had taken a few licks of late with embarrassments like Pink Cadillac, The Rookie, City Heat, Heartbreak Ridge, and on and on. While I was growing up, Eastwood was a Dirty Harry joke and the guy who acted with Orangutans. The first time I saw him in anything was in Bronco Billy, which, frankly, isn't the first time you want to see anyone in anything. What Unforgiven did for me was inspire a curiosity about Sergio Leone and, with that, a new reason to respect Eastwood's legacy; my first time through A Perfect World disturbed my notion of who Kevin Costner was (baseball player/cowboy) at the height of his power and sway in Hollywood, and I was distracted. Every time I've revisited A Perfect World since (and I've been compelled to revisit it at least once every few years), as Costner's star has faded and Eastwood's elder statesmanhood behind the camera has somehow dwarfed his iconhood in front of it, I feel the melancholy nostalgia of the film more and more. It's an American masterpiece. I make that distinction because it's distinctly American; and I mean it when I say that it's as fine an essay of the dying of an age as anything in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy.

Blood Work (2002) - Blu-ray Disc

**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C-
starring Clint Eastwood, Wanda De Jesús, Jeff Daniels, Anjelica Huston
screenplay by Brian Helgeland, based on the novel by Michael Connelly
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw You can figure out the pivotal clue in Blood Work if not by the title alone--which gives altogether too much away--then surely come the thirty-minute mark. You can deduce the identity of the murderer as soon as he saunters on screen, and you can predict the love story almost before it happens just by dint of the kind of movie that Blood Work is. The only thing you can't figure out is why Clint Eastwood, who sometimes makes interesting movies like Bird, A Perfect World, White Hunter, Black Heart, and Unforgiven, almost as often makes boring, predictable, prosaic movies like The Rookie (1990), Absolute Power, True Crime, and now Blood Work.

Unforgiven (1992) - Blu-ray Disc (Digibook)

***/**** | Image A- Sound B Extras B+
starring Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman, Richard Harris
screenplay by David Webb Peoples
directed by Clint Eastwood

Even if time and HBO's "Deadwood" have made Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven into something less revisionist and more just a furthering of the Siegel/Leone mythology, the fact remains that the picture's earned its place in the company of other flawed masterpieces like The Searchers and The Man from Laramie. At the time of its release in 1992, as my editor Bill once ably laid out, its pending release was actually seen as a joke, earned at the expense of a trio of legendary, completely-indefensible flops. Its serious-mindedness--what appeared to be an unsentimental accounting for the remorseless bastards Eastwood had parlayed into immortality--therefore took audiences expecting another Heartbreak Ridge, "western edition," by surprise.

J. Edgar (2011) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C-
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Naomi Watts, Armie Hammer, Judi Dench
screenplay by Dustin Lance Black
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Angelo Muredda To say that latter-day Clint Eastwood is an acquired taste seems slightly inaccurate, in that it implies a certain consistency on both the filmmaker's and the viewer's part: while even Invictus and the "Touched by an Angel" outtake Hereafter have their fans, you don't find many of them championing, say, the delirious Europop ballads that punctuate the former. ("And it's not just a game/They can't throw me away/I put all I had on the line," sings a mysterious crooner whose song is played in toto as Mandela descends his helicopter and paces the rugby field.) So let's propose instead that the master of sepia's recent output has been rather like a series of inkblots, in which perfectly smart people have seen completely different things. Some, for instance, find much to admire in the simultaneously milquetoast and monstrous Million Dollar Baby, which I've always read as Eastwood's last laugh at disability-rights activists for a failed lawsuit involving an inaccessible inn he ran years prior; others dismiss Gran Torino, his most watchable film since Unforgiven, as a rare spot of trash. All of this is to say, rather sheepishly, that I kind of liked fusty old J. Edgar, even as I recognized it as a train-wreck throughout. People have been very kind to Eastwood in this restless period, calling his choice of projects as disparate as Changeling and Letters from Iwo Jima "varied," but it's only with J. Edgar that I've understood their spirit of generosity: It's such a chameleonic grab-bag of ideas, good and bad, that some of it can't help but appeal, regardless of whether the entire thing works. (It doesn't.)

Vera Cruz (1954) + The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) (DigiBook) - Blu-ray Discs

****/**** Image B- Sound B
starring Burt Lancaster, Denise Darcel, Sarita Monteil, Cesar Romero
screenplay by Roland Kibbee and James R. Webb
directed by Robert Aldrich

****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A-
starring Clint Eastwood, Chief Dan George, Sondra Locke, John Vernon
screenplay by Phil Kaufman and Sonia Chernus
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Jefferson Robbins One mistake in looking at the U.S. Civil War is to assume it began at Sumter and ended at Appomattox. If the wars of living memory have had such tremendous social and personal repercussions, how much could that war among countrymen have? Western movies, for better and often worse, have plumbed this question in the same way noirs and horror movies inquire about their own present moment. Think about the sheer number of greedy killers and dead-eyed psychopaths required to populate "the West" as we came know it through our cinema; what else but a national trauma could create so many murderers and flush them out to the frontiers.

Hereafter (2010) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Matt Damon, Cécile De France, Jay Mohr, Bryce Dallas Howard
screenplay by Peter Morgan
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Ian Pugh It's an age-old problem: how do you make a movie (or write a book, or stage a play) about the broad and ultimately philosophical subject of death? Not like this, that's for sure. Looking and feeling like it was shot from inside an aquarium, Clint Eastwood's Hereafter is a failure of staggering proportions. Three stories intertwine to form a bland whole: George (Matt Damon) is an honest-to-gosh psychic who's trying and failing to stay out of the racket; Marie (Cécile De France) is a French TV presenter who recalls visions of the afterlife after being caught in the Indian Ocean tsunami; and Marcus (Frankie McLaren) is a young lad who seeks answers when his twin brother dies in a traffic accident. Rest assured their paths will cross in profoundly obvious ways as they wrap their heads around the very concept of death and what comes next. I'm certainly not the first person to compare Hereafter to Babel, but Eastwood offers little alternative. Hereafter approaches the various perceptions of death in the same way that Alejandro González Iñárritu approached "life," and the end result is equally bloated and condescending.

Invictus (2009) - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Morgan Freeman, Matt Damon, Tony Kgoroge, Patrick Mofokeng
screenplay by Anthony Peckham, based on the book Playing the Enemy by John Carlin
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw During an awards season seemingly devoted to surveying the racial divide, Clint Eastwood's Invictus lands a glancing blow as a Reconciliation sports melodrama that avoids the hysterical outburst even as it fails to hit one out of the park. Of the two, I think I'd rather the former. Expecting a (more) self-important Hoosiers, I was pleasantly surprised by Eastwood's leisurely, cocksure, tempered-by-age stroll through the first days post-Apartheid as Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman, finally playing Abraham Lincoln) is tasked with the near-impossible job of suturing a nation coming out from under a long Plantation nightmare without his administration becoming exactly what the minority Afrikaner fears. It locates sports as one quick avenue to the heart of the lowest common denominator (just as the existence of Invictus locates film as another), and it fires dual salvos at its audience by first being a sports underdog uplift flick without much sports or uplift, then in not deigning to explain the fundamentals of rugby to its American audience, instead launching a quick jab at America's reluctance to engage the worlds' pastimes (rugby and soccer, notably). What it really does for the race conversation is allow Eastwood the opportunity to at last feature Freeman in a movie designed around him as opposed to having him--as he did in Million Dollar Baby and Unforgiven--function as a comparative component against which the white protagonist is memorialized and measured. Better late than never.

Mystic River (2003) [Widescreen Edition] - DVD|Blu-ray Disc

**½/****
DVD - Image A Sound A Extras B
BD - Image B+ Sound A Extras B
starring Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Kevin Bacon, Laurence Fishburne
screenplay by Brian Helgeland, based on the novel by Dennis Lahane
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw Opening like a Stephen King story of a group of friends falling from innocence into experience, Clint Eastwood's latest elegy for the myth of man strains at the edge of hysterical, offering up a testosterone-rich soup of In the Bedroom parental melodrama that compels for its pervasive doom, but disappoints for its didactic simplicity. Still, there's something to the tribal primitivism of the picture, the idea that man at his essence is composed of balanced portions of nobility and violence and that our society, perhaps, is no different: the past the muddy headwaters of the titular mystic river. The picture is a rhyme of Eastwood's A Perfect World, complete with spiralling shots of the sky through branches--the evocation of a Naturalism at war with any illusion of moral spirituality or humanism, with its heroes criminals shaded equally by the instinct to violence and the instinct to nurture.

Air Force One (2007) + Gran Torino (2008) - Blu-ray Discs

AIR FORCE ONE
**/**** Image B+ Sound A Commentary B-
starring Harrison Ford, Gary Oldman, Wendy Crewson, Paul Guilfoyle
screenplay by Andrew W. Marlowe
directed by Wolfgang Petersen

GRAN TORINO
****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C+
starring Clint Eastwood, Christopher Carley, Bee Vang, Ahney Her
screenplay by Nick Schenk
directed by Clint Eastwood

GRAN TORINO

by Ian Pugh In Wolfgang Petersen's Air Force One, a band of Soviet ex-soldiers (whose leader is played by Gary Oldman, in full Boris Badenov mode) hijacks the President's personal aircraft and in the process facilitates a double-dose of old-fashioned, flag-waving cinematic convention for the good old U.S. of A., just a few short years before 9/11 would fuck up that whole dynamic. The film is nothing more than a dying gasp of Cold War good-versus-evil nostalgia, complete with a no-nonsense Commander-in-Chief impossible to dislike or defy. Harrison Ford is cast as the beloved President/Vietnam vet/all-around ass-kicker, who establishes a stern anti-terrorism decree shortly before literally becoming the one to see his policies through. (He was easily American cinema's most ridiculous angelic-politician fantasy until Petersen outdid himself with Poseidon's New York mayor/firefighter/super-patriot.) Nothing really matters in this scenario, and nothing really has to matter: not the reasons for the hijacking (something to do with commie dictator Jürgen Prochnow and Kazakhstan--almost ten years before Borat established that country as the former Soviet territory no one in the West knows anything about), nor the White House staffers executed during the hijack. It's all pretext for Ford saving his family and the proverbial day.

Dirty Harry [Ultimate Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

DIRTY HARRY (1971)
****/**** IMAGE A- SOUND A- EXTRAS A
starring Clint Eastwood, Harry Guardino, Reni Santoni, Andy Robinson
screenplay by Julian Fink & R.M. Fink and Dean Riesner
directed by Don Siegel

MAGNUM FORCE (1973)
***/**** IMAGE A SOUND A- EXTRAS B+
starring Clint Eastwood, Hal Holbrook, Mitchell Ryan, David Soul
screenplay by John Milius and Michael Cimino
directed by Ted Post

THE ENFORCER (1976)
**/**** IMAGE A- SOUND A EXTRAS B+
starring Clint Eastwood, Tyne Daly, Harry Guardino, Bradford Dillman
screenplay by Stirling Silliphant and Dean Riesner
directed by James Fargo

SUDDEN IMPACT (1983)
*½/**** IMAGE C+ SOUND A- EXTRAS B
starring Clint Eastwood, Sondra Locke, Pat Hingle, Bradford Dillman
screenplay by Joseph C. Stinson
directed by Clint Eastwood

THE DEAD POOL (1988)
***/**** IMAGE A+ SOUND A- EXTRAS B-
starring Clint Eastwood, Patricia Clarkson, Liam Neeson, Evan C. Kim
screenplay by Steve Sharon
directed by Buddy Van Horn

DIRTY HARRY

by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The barrel of a sniper rifle seeps through a memorial-wall dedication to San Francisco's finest, and Don Siegel's Dirty Harry establishes right off the bat that the war on crime is just that: a war; the real question is how to properly fight it when the only real motivators are fear and anger. The film already has its ready-made villain in a fictionalized version of the Bay Area's own Zodiac Killer, "Scorpio" (Andy Robinson, almost certainly the greatest madman in cinematic history), and the viewer encounters a terrifying golem personifying his frustrations with killers consistently eluding a seemingly-helpless police force and criminals who are caught and released back into society on mere technicalities. Dirty Harry only takes the next logical step by pandering to our basest desires with an equally frightening and chaotic icon: "Dirty Harry" Callahan (Clint Eastwood, at the top of his game), an inspector in the SFPD's Homicide department who lost his wife to a drunk driver a while back and now takes it out on the rest of criminal society with his .44 Magnum, blasting a hole through any motherfucker unfortunate enough to disturb the peace in his presence. The French Connection's Popeye Doyle impressed with his dogged determination, but Harry is the genuine realization of a dick-raising fantasy of the quintessential modern man (notice that the numbers of his radio call sign, "Inspector 71," reflect the film's year of release) in that he gives us everything we want without burdening us with the trauma of actually having to become him.

Children of Men (2006) + Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)

CHILDREN OF MEN
****/****
starring Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Charlie Hunnam
screenplay by Alfonso Cuarón & Timothy J. Sexton and David Arata and Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby, based on the novel by P.D. James
directed by Alfonso Cuarón

LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA
***½/****
starring Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Ryo Kase
screenplay by Iris Yamashita, based on the book Picture Letters from Commander in Chief by Tadamichi Kuribayashi and Tsuyoko Yoshido
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw Stop on any single frame of Alfonso Cuarón's remarkable war idyll Children of Men--a film that's rarely in repose, sometimes seeming composed of one long, frantic shot--and I suspect the sharp-eyed, educated viewer would be able to cull a reference to modern art, most likely one about men reduced to their base animal nature. For me, the two visual landmarks come in the form of a cue to the cover design for Pink Floyd's 1977 "Animals" when hero Theo (Clive Owen) goes to see his industrialist cousin Nigel (Danny Huston) for help and a re-creation of Richard Misrach's remarkable series of 1987 photographs documenting, among other things, a dead-animal pit in Nevada purportedly used to dispose of victims of a plutonium "hot spot." Both share a space with surrealism in the positioning of animals (artificial or deceased) in industrial spaces (London's Battersea Power Station is the iconic backdrop of the "Animals" cover) as mute commentary, perhaps, on man's destructive relationship with his environment--a read that jibes comfortably with the thrust of Children of Men, in which we're told that one day in the not-too-distant future, humans suddenly stop reproducing. (Fertile ground for science-fiction, this obsession with progeny (see: everything from Frankenstein to I Am Legend).) The picture opens with a Fleet Street terrorist bombing, a little like Terry Gilliam's dystopic Brazil--though rather than take the easier route of satirizing our current state of instability and free-floating paranoia, Children of Men makes a serious attempt to allegorize it.

Million Dollar Baby (2004) [2-Disc Widescreen Edition] - DVD

**/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C+
starring Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank, Morgan Freeman, Jay Baruchel
screenplay by Paul Haggis, based on stories from Rope Burns by F.X. Toole
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw As a fighter, Clint Eastwood's boxing flick Million Dollar Baby telegraphs its punches, demonstrates some muddy footwork, and, when all's said and done, doesn't pack much of a wallop no matter how many roundhouses it throws to the rafters. It stretches for timelessness, which Eastwood seems to equate with poor lighting and a lack of coverage, and it casts Morgan Freeman in another one of those Morgan Freeman roles where he contextualizes, in his homey, lightly-accented basso profundo warmth, the life and times of the white iconoclast for whom he is the catalyzing agent and confidante (The Shawshank Redemption, Driving Miss Daisy, Bruce Almighty, Clean and Sober). The picture has a framing story and a movie-long narration, two more ingredients in the neo-noir/American Gothic stew that Eastwood has continued to perpetuate long after his twin Americana triumphs A Perfect World and Unforgiven rendered the conversation--at least inasmuch as Eastwood is capable of carrying it--moot. Not to say that Million Dollar Baby is a total mutt, just that it's an obvious, self-important, overwritten thing designed to appeal to specific, stodgy, awards-season prestige audiences that love film so much, this will be the first movie they see this year.

Clint Eastwood: Out of the Shadows (2000)

***/**** Image B Sound A
directed by Bruce Ricker

by Walter Chaw Directed by Bruce Ricker, Clint Eastwood: Out of the Shadows is a particularly good biographical account featuring clips from dozens of the titular subject's work, interviews with former Eastwood co-stars as diverse as Meryl Streep and Richard Burton, and a smooth narration read by Morgan Freeman that links the periods of the actor's professional life with grace and alacrity. Of particular interest are the moments in which such admirers as French director Bertrand Tavernier discuss Eastwood's reception overseas. Blissfully lacking scrutiny into the actor's personal life, the picture is more A&E than E!, choosing the road less travelled in tracing the actor's evolution from studio stable hand to one of the most powerful directors in the United States.