David Vining's Blog, page 106

The Bridges of Madison County

Based on the popular novel by Robert James Waller and with a script by Richard LaGravenese (supposedly shepherded along by Steven Spielberg when he was considering directing the project), Clint Eastwood’s The Bridges of Madison County is a departure from the kinds of movies he’d been making for a while, but also seems like a counter to his earlier Breezy. This is the kind of film that David Lean was making with The Passionate Friends and Brief Encounter and would have fit more comfortably in...

A Perfect World

Clint Eastwood could have retired after Unforgiven, and I don’t think anyone would have blamed him. It was a pinnacle of his career that he was unlikely to ever match. However, Eastwood is a workhorse, and he put out another film the next year from a script by John Lee Hancock. A Perfect World may not be Unforgiven levels, but it indicates to me that Eastwood had reached another level in his directing career and that his previous film wasn’t a fluke. His output through the 80s wasn’t exactly...

Unforgiven

When it comes to Clint Eastwood’s directing work, it’s important to separate the films he made for financial reasons (The Rookie, Firefox) from the ones that were more personal to him (Bronco Billy, Honkytonk Man, White Hunter Black Heart). This feels like the latter, a script he gravitated towards (after decades languishing in assorted places, including his own office when his script reader hated it), that didn’t really have much perceived potential for huge box office gains, and had a lot ...

The Rookie

Obviously an attempt by Warner Brothers to replicate the success of 48 Hrs. from eight years earlier and the Lethal Weapon movies, The Rookie was the price Clint Eastwood had to pay to get the funding for White Hunter Black Heart. And you know what? I think Eastwood just decided that if he was going to “promote” Hollywood like John Wilson in his previous film decried, he might as well have fun with it. And, if he had kept that light-hearted, devil-may-care tone through the whole thing, I thi...

Sam Peckinpah: A Retrospective

When I told Mark Andrew Edwards that I was going to tackle the filmography of Sam Peckinpah, he replied, “That’s strong whiskey.” I think that may have been a bit of an understatement.

This is the man who brought the culturally significant bloodbath at the end of his revisionist Western The Wild Bunch, who filmed the sexual assault and home invasion of Straw Dogs, who made a movie titled Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia where, yes, a man’s head gets carried around in a fly-covered sack...

White Hunter Black Heart

Clint Eastwood so wanted to make this film that he agreed to make the cop movie The Rookie right afterwards for the studio. A film about moviemaking (almost never a great financial prospect) where Eastwood does an imitation of John Huston? A story about a hunter who can’t find his quarry? A movie set in the expensive location shoot of Africa? No, this is one of those weird little character films that Eastwood obviously loved more in line with Bronco Billy and Honkytonk Man than The Outlaw Jo...

Black Hunter White Heart

Clint Eastwood so wanted to make this film that he agreed to make the cop movie The Rookie right afterwards for the studio. A film about moviemaking (almost never a great financial prospect) where Eastwood does an imitation of John Huston? A story about a hunter who can’t find his quarry? A movie set in the expensive location shoot of Africa? No, this is one of those weird little character films that Eastwood obviously loved more in line with Bronco Billy and Honkytonk Man than The Outlaw Jo...

The Dirty Harry Franchise: The Definitive Ranking

This is one of those franchises that probably shouldn’t exist because its first film was so obviously built to be a stand-alone film. The story of a cop who becomes so jaded by the institutional rot around him that he kills the bad guy and throws away his badge probably shouldn’t have been followed up with a sequel where he, you know, still has his badge.

Still, for what it was, a hodgepodge of a series of films made over almost 20 years, there was a surprising amount of connective tissue...

I have returned

The dolphins almost enslaved me, but I bested them in a game of wits.

A Second Look at Bird

Wow…it’s been a long time since I reviewed Bird, Clint Eastwood’s biopic of the jazz musician Charlie Parker. Revisiting it again for the first time in three years, I find that my overall opinion has not changed.

I would say that I’ve added a dimensions to my thoughts on the film, and that’s in large part due to watching it in the context of Clint Eastwood’s body of work as a film director. Throughout all of Eastwood’s work up to this point, the words that I used most consistently were “c...