David Vining's Blog, page 105

Changeling

A period piece about a single mother looking for her lost son? This couldn’t possibly be a Clint Eastwood film, could it? Well, if you’ve been paying close attention to what Eastwood’s been trying to say over the previous several decades, it’d be easy to see that Changeling actually fits really well into his body of work. He is essentially a studio director in the modern era, after the fall of the studio system, so, similar to a filmmaker like Fritz Lang, you can’t pinpoint the same kind of ...

Letters from Iwo Jima

The second half of Clint Eastwood’s Iwo Jima epic, Letters from Iwo Jima is the first film in his career that I’m tempted to label as mawkish. I think it may be the music. Wonderfully acted with a much clearer narrative throughline than its predecessor, it’s the tale of men facing certain death. Never budging from its point of view of the Japanese during World War II, it’s an engrossing look at the other side of the war that seems to stack the deck in its own favor while going so whole hog i...

Flags of Our Fathers

This might be the most ambitious project that Clint Eastwood ever took on as a director. It was so ambitious, actually, that it became two movies. He wanted to show both sides of the fighting at Iwo Jima, but there was simply too much material and the two halves were just split into separate films, this and Letters from Iwo Jima. Aside from that, though, there’s still an incredible ambition to this half that deals with the Americans who raised the iconic flag on the fifth day of the month-lo...

Million Dollar Baby

I don’t know what it was about the early 2000s that turned Clint Eastwood’s directing output around from largely middling fare to seriously fantastic filmmaking, but it honestly could be no more than him suddenly deciding to direct better scripts. He should keep doing that. What he found with Million Dollar Baby, a script by Paul Haggis, was a tragedy that gave him time to shine both in front of and behind the camera. I don’t often get a bit choked at movies, but this is the first Eastwood m...

Mystic River

Give Clint Eastwood a great script for a drama, and he’s going to make a great movie. He may not always be able to modify his filmmaking style appropriately to different genres, but he is very good at the slow burn drama. Written by Brian Helgeland (a screenwriter of, shall we say, inconsistent results) based on the novel by Dennis LeHane, Mystic River ends up feeling like yet another reaction to Dirty Harry from Eastwood. Here’s a tale of vigilante justice born of a very realistic portrait ...

Blood Work

Every law enforcement film Clint Eastwood made that wasn’t a Dirty Harry film feels like a reaction to Dirty Harry. Blood Work feels like, “What if Harry Callahan got really old and had heart problems?” I’m actually kind of surprised this isn’t an outright entry in the Dirty Harry franchise. Of course, Eastwood isn’t playing a San Francisco police detective but an FBI agent, but he’s not that far removed in temperament from Callahan. That is pretty obviously what drew Eastwood to the materia...

Space Cowboys

The first film Clint Eastwood made that wasn’t based on a book in several years, Space Cowboys is a fun, geriatric adventure for most of its running time. Without taking itself too seriously through its first two acts, it is consistently entertaining until it suddenly shifts tones to become far more serious when all the fun drains out of it. It’s a sad ending to what had been a modestly ambitioned yarn that had used its aging movie stars extremely well for so long.

The movie begins with a...

True Crime

Taking another contemporary literary source and adapting it to uneven results, Clint Eastwood’s True Crime does some things quite well but fumbles in some of the more important aspects of the story it’s trying to tell. This is the second time I’ve seen this, and I ended up with pretty much the exact same reaction the second time as the first. I got into and fell out of the narrative here and there until the lead up to the ending where I was getting on board until the actual ending where I ju...

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

Clint Eastwood takes on yet another popular contemporary novel, and this is the least of the bunch. I have not read the source book written by John Berendt, but from what I’ve read the appeal of it was the lurid and somewhat fantastical reality that was this little corner of Savannah, Georgia, almost like a Southern Gothic Fellini adventure, along with the lurid details of a murder trial. Given the very difficult task of adapting the fairly hefty book was John Lee Hancock who wrote Eastwood’...

Absolute Power

This is a real change of direction for Eastwood. The Bridges of Madison County following the elegiac A Perfect World felt like a natural progression, but moving from The Bridges of Madison County to a violent, Hitchcockian thriller about corruption at the highest levels of governmental power is a real turn of events. Eastwood adapts the novel by David Baldacci using a script by William Goldman and turns out a well-made and entertaining thrill ride that doesn’t quite have the weight and heft ...