David Vining's Blog, page 104

The Mule

Clint Eastwood was done telling stories about real heroes for a bit, and he turned his attention to a role he could pick up himself. His first self-directed acting role since Gran Torino a decade before, this feels like Eastwood finding a story that tickled him and finding the money for it quickly. Based on the real life adventures of Leo Sharp, a WWII vet who became a drug mule for the Mexican drug cartels, Eastwood and his screenwriter Nick Schenk, created a fictional character (this time ...

The 15:17 to Paris

The final installment in Clint Eastwood’s unofficial “real heroes” trilogy, The 15:17 to Paris is easily the weakest of the three. Choosing to make an entire feature film out of an event that lasted roughly thirty seconds was a tall order to begin with, but he managed to successfully make one out of an event that lasted 208 seconds with Sully. Maybe he could do it here? No, not really. I don’t want to pile onto the film as Eastwood’s worst (The Eiger Sanction still exists), but this is defin...

Sully

The second entry in Clint Eastwood’s informal “real heroes” trilogy, Sully tells the story of the Miracle on the Hudson, and it does it in an interesting way. Essentially swapping out its first and second acts, the tale of Captain Chelsey Sullenberger making impossible decisions to safely land an airliner on water is less about the event itself and more about the fallout, about the need of people to tear down someone who did something great. It ends up feeling a bit wan, like its trying to m...

American Sniper

This might be the most stylistically atypical film Clint Eastwood made in his entire filmography. It’s a cross between a combat film and a character piece, and the combat part is filmed with surprising energy by Eastwood. I mean, he obviously didn’t have the camera in his hands running around amidst the gunfire and explosions because of his age, but it’s the sort of thing that he hadn’t really done before. This is one of the few times where Eastwood seems to have tried to be something of a c...

Jersey Boys

I have a feeling that the appeal of this film to Clint Eastwood wasn’t narrative but the evocation of the time of his youth, the music, the people, and the setting. Through movies like Gran Torino and Space Cowboys, it was obvious that Eastwood was looking at the contemporary world with contempt, and Jersey Boys allowed him time to simply disappear into that past he yearned for, at least for a time. That desire to evoke the era seems to have been the only thing that really ignited his imagin...

J. Edgar

I have a thing against biopics, but this one about the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover actually sidesteps a lot of my issues in a creative way while also leaning into some of the more standard tropes. At least Leonardo DiCaprio doesn’t play J. Edgar Hoover when he was nine years old. Clint Eastwood brings his polished professionalism to the film as director, filming the script by Dustin Lance Black with his normal high contrast visual style and strong directing of actors. It’s an interesting fi...

Hereafter

For about the first two-thirds of this film, I was ready for the kind of dizzying wrap-up of three thematically connected storylines into a crescendo that lifted the whole thing up. And then, I instantly got deflated and the film never really even tried to get to where I thought it was going. Clint Eastwood said that the film was inspired by French cinema, and it’s obvious that one of the big influences was Trois Couleurs by Krzysztof Kieslowski. However, Kieslowski was always more subtle an...

Face to Face

It’s been a long time since I started writing movie reviews, and what really started it all was my desire to review every film in the 39-film boxset of Ingmar Bergman films that the Criterion Collection released (I think I still haven’t reviewed A Ship to India). It’s not a complete set of his whole body of work, though, and one key piece that was missing was Face to Face, produced by Dino de Laurentiis instead of Svenskfilmindustri, probably why Criterion couldn’t get the home video rights ...

Invictus

This feels like a fairy tale. Born of Morgan Freeman’s desire to play Nelson Mandela in a film about the South African leader’s life, it is a celebration of the man and his triumph in bringing the embittered, divided nation together through bread and circuses. It’s ultimately about Mandela’s vision at a united South Africa and the power of unpolitical sports spectacles. That fairy tale aspect ends up making me question a fair amount of the specifics in the history presented, but Invictus is ...

Gran Torino

Following up a grand, period piece, Clint Eastwood gravitated towards a much smaller script by Nick Schenk (based on a story that he and Dave Johannson came up with) that feels like Eastwood just playing himself. The last time a role so fully felt like Eastwood playing himself was Honkytonk Man, another story about a father and substitute son, and that was in a very different point in his life. Now, in the late-2000s, Eastwood is far more cantankerous, more fully an old man in every sense of...