David Vining's Blog, page 107

The Dead Pool

Where Sudden Impact felt like someone inelegantly added Harry Callahan to an unrelated script, The Dead Pool feels like some taking the most generic cop script in existence and changing the generic cop’s name to Harry Callahan while still managing to get Clint Eastwood to reprise the role for the last time. That’s not to say it’s bad. That’s also not to imply it’s good, either. It’s an incredibly middle of the road yarn that would have been completely forgotten if it weren’t for its place as...

Heartbreak Ridge

Do you ever see a movie that feels small and effective in that small space, and then it expands ineffectively into a larger space and just kind of loses itself? That’s what I feel about Heartbreak Ridge. I wasn’t completely in love with the film for its first four-fifths or so, but I was increasingly enamored of the tale of a man outside of his time, trying to justify his own existence on two different fronts. And then it went into a combat situation that feels completely mishandled consider...

A Second Look at Pale Rider

So, Pale Rider was one of those movies I randomly watched and reviewed a few years ago. I’d never seen it before, and I was underwhelmed. I was looking forward to revisiting it to see if my opinion would change on a second viewing as well as within the context of Eastwood’s overall directorial filmography.

I actually went back and re-read my original review (I’ve changed how I write them a good bit, it seems) mostly to figure out the specifics of what my problems had been.

Caught up, I...

Tightrope

The rumors are rife with this one that Clint Eastwood took over the directing reigns from the credited writer/director Richard Tuggle when Tuggle proved to work too slowly, much like the rumors on Magnum Force. So, I figured that I might as well check it out in this run of Clint Eastwood directed films.

As was evident from The Gauntlet, Clint Eastwood was very self-aware of his image, most particularly about the character of Harry Callahan. In the previous film, he made a dumb, loser of a...

Sudden Impact

The first Dirty Harry film where Clint Eastwood has an official directing credit (he did a bit of directing on the first one and is rumored to have shadow-directed the second when Tim Post didn’t work fast enough for his liking), Sudden Impact became a Dirty Harry film late in the screenplay’s pre-production life. It was originally just a story of a woman taking revenge on her rapists, and everything in the final film that comes from that original idea is what works best. Almost everything p...

Out for a bit…

The wife and I are off for our now annual anniversary cruise.

I have scheduled reviews upcoming, and I’ll be back on Thursday. Unless the ship gets taken over by pirates and we get sold into slavery. Fingers crossed.

Honkytonk Man

After the special effects dominated Firefox, Clint Eastwood went off for a few weeks to make a little movie about a singer in the Great Depression who takes his nephew halfway across the country, bonding along the way and imparting some life lessons. It seems pretty obvious to me which one Eastwood had his heart in, and which one was done purely for commercial reasons. Working with one of his many children, Kyle, Eastwood, working from a script by Clancy Carlile based on Carlile’s book of th...

Firefox

One for Eastwood (Bronco Billy), one for the audience (Firefox). Eastwood really seemed to be in this alternating take on things at this still early bit of his directing career. He was going from little character pieces about men he saw himself as and more action/thriller fare that should be bringing in the audiences to the theaters. Eastwood was better at the personal stuff, if you ask me. Firefox isn’t bad. If I had to use a single word to describe it, I’d call it competent. Unlike The Eig...

Bronco Billy

After the raucous action film The Gauntlet, Clint Eastwood took to a script by Dennis Hackin about an aging cowboy with a Wild West show, far removed from the time of cowboys and Indians, trying to make his own, little way in the world. Eastwood is quoted as saying that Bronco Billy is the one movie that most exemplifies what he tried to say as a director (as quoted in a book published in 2009). Usually, when directors say this sort of thing, it’s not typically their big successes but the li...

The Gauntlet

Clint Eastwood seemed very self-aware of his image, and The Gauntlet feels like an attempt to subvert the image he had cultivated through the Dirty Harry series of films, which he thought was over after The Enforcer. Warner Brothers would come to him a few years later carrying a very large bag of money to change his mind about that. However, before then, Eastwood made a film about a cop, not the best cop but one of the worse ones. An unremarkable and alcoholic metro cop from Phoenix who gets...