New REVIEWS AND OTHERWISE: 1970s WESTERNS: CLINT EASTWOOD/GENRE DECONSTRUCTION

 The latest episode continues my occasional examination of 70s Westerns (essentially the last hurrah for the genre before it became mostly niche product seen in 80s art houses).  First 12 minutes on Clint Eastwood, with a shoutout to Burbank’s LexG and his comprehensive podcast episode on Clint’s career from Sergio Leone’s Man With No Name trilogy to 1990’s THE ROOKIE, which could be regarded (in spirit) as a better farewell to Dirty Harry Callahan than Clint and Buddy Van Horn’s THE DEAD POOL.

Remainder of the episode defines deconstruction of the Western as a conscious veering away from traditional storytelling by way of scripting, aesthetic choices, directorial/actor decisions.  Films discussed include McCABE AND MRS. MILLER, BUFFALO BILL AND THE INDIANS, BAD COMPANY (1972), THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JUDGE ROY BEAN, ZANDY’S BRIDE, THE MISSOURI BREAKS and PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID (with mentions of Sam Peckinpah’s later BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA and CONVOY).

https://open.spotify.com/episode/7pC8HI5tw0s6nlHVC4n88N?si=RZ6tnfK6RoifNrYiRp71NA&dl_branch=1

Clint Eastwood at 91

I was too young for the original run of RAWHIDE, but I can remember the impact of Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name in the Sergio Leone trilogy released 1967-68 in America.  Eastwood, dispensing with niceties and amused/bemused by the transparent scheming of others, was a transgressive figure in an era where John Wayne’s unyielding patriarchy was still a predominant influence on mainstream Westerns.  In those days, black and white stills of Eastwood wearing his trademark poncho were turned into posters bought by antiestablishment youth.

And we know the rest of the story: Eastwood became a director in the early 70s, began courting film critic Respect with 1976’s THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES—and, as filmmaker, has a canon that mixes thoughtful classics (BIRD, WHITE HUNTER BLACK HEART, UNFORGIVEN, MYSTIC RIVER, LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA, the underrated CHANGELING, FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS) with simple reactionary shoutouts to his aging, first generation audience who want their political/social conservatism validated (HEARTBREAK RIDGE, GRAN TORINO, THE MULE, RICHARD JEWELL).  One hopes Clint’s latest in a subgenre of valedictory films, CRY MACHO, will be a try-following-this mic drop to an almost seven-decade career.  [UPDATE 9/20/2021: It isn’t.  Less reactionary, but also paced like drinking a glass of warm milk before bedtime.]

Clint Eastwood, the p-word, and ancient notions of manhood.

http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a46893/double-trouble-clint-and-scott-eastwood/

In his auteurist prime (essentially from THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES to LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA), Clint Eastwood had people like Roger Ebert and Richard Schickel (among other critics/journalists) to burnish a relatively positive image of him as a politically conservative filmmaker who could also provide strong (by 70s/80s/90s genre film standards) female characters.  And in films like the now-mostly-forgotten WHITE HUNTER BLACK HEART or Don Siegel's THE BEGUILED, Eastwood dared (unlike a lot of his peers past and present) to examine the harm unfiltered machismo can do to others.

Of course, none of that matters to younger generations.

And I cringed along with them when Eastwood embarrassed himself at the 2012 Republican convention by insulting an invisible straw-man version of Barack Obama sitting in a prop chair (presuming Mitt Romney operative Stuart Stevens thought he was inviting the we're-all-in-this-together Clint Eastwood who filmed the commercial extolling Chrysler and Detroit auto manufacturing).

So, at the age of 86, Clint Eastwood (along with up-and-coming son Scott) sits with interviewer Michael Hainey for ESQUIRE in his comfortable Malpaso offices on the Warner Brothers lot and snarls about the passing of the era of just accepting the occurrences of racial and other prejudices instead of challenging them.  Then, more scowling about today's too-sensitive "pussy generation."   Finally, a mixed verdict on Donald Trump; Clint thinks that Trump has said "a lot of dumb things" but can't bring himself to vote for Hillary Clinton.

And there's also this landmark of non-feminist patriarchal thinking from Clint--which likely won't persuade online Millennials to spend time separating the wheat from the chaff of his filmography (including the Charlie Parker biopic BIRD, which helped make Forest Whitaker a star):

ESQ: Clint, your father retired when he was sixty and died at sixty-four. Does his death haunt you? Like, "If I stop working, I will drop"?

CE: Maybe. A lot of people when they retire, they just expire. It happens to men more than women. Women usually have great interest in the family, because the family's always growing and they're always coming to the rescue.

SE: [Laughs.] Are you talking about my mom?

CE: For a man, once you've sired your pups, you're done.

Poetry video CLINT EASTWOOD IN ITALY

Selection of Twitter comments re Clint Eastwood's GOP convention speech.

Maybe Clint is a sleeper agent for the Democrats sent in under deep cover to make the Republicans look stupid. No wait, that's Romney.--Simon Pegg

Clint Eastwood on the phone with Obama now: "It all went according to plan,sir." --Chris Rock

I know what it was like for Clint Eastwood. In my career, I’ve talked to more than a few “empty chairs.”--Conan O'Brien

If Clint wanted to run for important office, the Base would veto him. He's speaking to the Republican Party of his memory.--Roger Ebert

Clint's imaginary Obama uses the F bomb. My imaginary Obama feels Clint really humiliated himself tonight and feels bad for him.--Sean Mannion

Dear GOD... let's hope that Eastwood doesn't die before making something great. This and his wife's reality show would be sad last memories.--David Poland

Analyzing Mitt Romney and opening act Clint Eastwood..

If you're Clint Eastwood, you're used to running things and getting your own way.  This probably explains why Clint's Thursday night GOP convention speech (demonstrating a willingness to try for improv comedy; i.e. the Empty Chair prop) had the air of something that might be seen in a luxury restaurant/penthouse at a Republican candidates fundraising dinner with millionaires/billionaires (and no ordinary people) in attendance.  I can easily imagine the Mitt Romney entourage giving Clint a prepared speech--and Clint throwing it aside saying "I'M NOT GONNA READ THIS CRAP!"  Ergo, the rambling ruminations which sounded a lot like Clint's character putting down all in sight during the early reels of GRAN TORINO.

As for Mitt Romney: There was a lot of rose-colored Remembrances of Simple Loving Times Past rhetoric which gave me the impression that both Peggy Noonan and Karen Hughes may have contributed to his speech.  There was the inevitable attempt to link Barack Obama to Jimmy Carter.  And, most sickening, the primal Dog Whistle to the conventioneers and TV/online audiences: "THE HELL WITH CLIMATE CHANGE!  I'LL MAKE YOU FEEL GOOD ABOUT YOURSELVES JUST LIKE REAGAN DID!"

A few comments on THE HUNGER GAMES.

Yes, I broke down and saw THE HUNGER GAMES.  And, no, I haven't seen the BATTLE ROYALE films--so I had no existing bias about comparing one battle-to-the-death vision to another.

It wasn't excellent and it wasn't terrible, either.  Just another opening film of a young-person's-book series (don't like using the word "franchise"), carried handily by Jennifer Lawrence and much of the supporting cast.

Given Gary Ross' track record as a MOR writer-then writer/director (BIG, DAVE, PLEASANTVILLE, SEABISCUIT), I wasn't expecting an action classic like the just-opened THE RAID: REDEMPTION, but THE HUNGER GAMES a la Ross is a proficient-enough film which suffers from some conceptual timidity.

Not having read the Suzanne Collins trilogy of books, I'm not completely aware of how much watering down was accomplished to make the current, reach-for-smelling-salts, edition of the MPAA grant a PG-13 rating.  But it was too easily noticeable that a key violent sequence (beginning of the Games) was cut in such a way that it looked like someone had presssed a Fast Forward button on a VCR/DVD player to avoid dwelling on messiness and particular details of murders (presuming this was the sequence subjected to additional editing by the British Board of Film Censors to achieve the UK equivalent to PG-13).

More on the editing---because a film can be edited digitally on computers doesn't mean that most of the shots have to be chopped to the length of time it would take a person to snap a frail wishbone.  Granted, Gary Ross isn't Michael Bay and the goings-on are intelligible, but it doesn't hurt to hold a shot/shots in a sequence more often for greater effect (such as in the scene involving Katniss and Peeta the night before the games begin).

In terms of the depictions of terror/anguish amongst the young people waiting to see if they will be asked to kill and/or die, I'm assuming that intensity was muted during the scripting stage to avoid uncomfortable parent/child conversations and/or screening walkouts.  And, in a film which depicts a lottery system for choosing participants not unlike the Vietman-era draft, the young people's reactions tend towards the stoic, it's-better-to-obey-than-rebel variety (with Katniss' younger sister being the major exception).  Perhaps to Lionsgate execs, it's a sensible creative decision given that THE HUNGER GAMES, on the day I saw it, played in a multiplex running a US Marines commercial exhorting potential applicants to run towards dangerous situations.

Kudos to Tom Stern (usually a cinematographer for Clint Eastwood) for not overindulging in the desaturated-color-during-shooting-or-in-postproduction process that he went to town on in Eastwood's recent J. EDGAR.

Finally, a footnote: Peter Watkins' 1971 film PUNISHMENT PARK isn't great as human drama (it's intended more as antiwar/antiauthority social commentary), but it's worth a DVD rental as a 60's Counterculture ancestor to THE HUNGER GAMES (the game the youthful participants play in PUNISHMENT PARK is a variant on Capturing the Flag).

Another poetry video for Funny Or Die--CLINT EASTWOOD IN ITALY

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/3a447214d3/clint-eastwood-in-italy

Richard Schickel's nuclear hatred of Robert Altman--as man and filmmaker.

It's official now: Richard Schickel, longtime film critic/essayist/enemy of Hollywood Commies/hagiographer of Clint Eastwood, doesn't like Robert Altman. Here's Schickel dumping on a new oral history of Altman, while grudgingly admitting to partially liking McCABE AND MRS. MILLER, NASHVILLE and CALIFORNIA SPLIT:
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-book22-2009oct22,0,2690542.story

[UPDATE 10/30/09] Since Schickel's review was published, there's been a fair amount of disagreement going on, from LA TIMES film gossip columnist Patrick Goldstein to filmmaker/Altman disciple Alan Rudolph. Here's an excerpt from a letter actor Jim Beaver (DEADWOOD) wrote to the TIMES (found this on USENET's group rec.arts.movies.past-films):
However, the fact that no one I know who takes film seriously has much respect left for Schickel's opinions does not lessen the intensity with which we feel bewildered and often angered with how he has become some sort of éminence grise in the public eye, the wise and irrefutable voice of "film history" as represented in TV specials and DVD commentaries. Publications such as the Times and organizations such as the AFI and many other public dispensers of information or perceived wisdom about film history often turn to "experts" such as Schickel who have managed the leap from reviewing movies to a hallowed place where they are the authority of first resort whenever a book on film needs reviewing or a talking head is needed on CNN after a film legend has died. I know hundreds of people who know more, understand more, and are able to discourse more usefully on film than Richard Schickel ever could, yet I daresay he is asked to review more books on film than any other reviewer in America. This latest diatribe is perhaps the most flagrant example of his unsuitability for the unelected post he has been raised to. I hope at some point the brand known as "Richard Schickel" stops being pasted onto every article relating to film and that actual, as opposed to presumed, experts be given a chance. I bear Mr. Schickel no malice and am grateful for his early contributions to my knowledge of film. But enough is enough. His slander of Robert Altman ices a cake that is far too stale.

Regarding the Academy Award nominations.

First, here's the always-provocative Nikki Finke's article on this morning's Academy Award nominations: http://www.deadlinehollywooddaily.com/nominations-for-81st-academy-awards-this-am/

My take on two of the most notable omissions from the list:
1. The Academy rightly judged Clint Eastwood's GRAN TORINO as just-average formula filmmaking that marked an end to Clint's run of quality pix from MYSTIC RIVER to (some will argue with me on this) CHANGELING. If Clint had truly wanted a plausible shot at a Best Actor nomination/win, he wouldn't have turned down the lead in Paul Haggis' IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH (Tommy Lee Jones gave a fine performance in the role).

2. I'm a bit annoyed at the Academy's music branch for only giving three nominees for Best Song--one of them a semi-forgettable end-credits Peter Gabriel number from WALL-E and two from SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE. Nothing against SLUMDOG (which now looks like a lock for a Best Picture win), but Bruce Springsteen's low-key end-credits song for THE WRESTLER (which can be heard on his soon-t0-be-released album WORKING ON A DREAM) was too good to ignore. It appears that the Academy wants only upbeat, ennobling fare which can make for big production numbers--unfortunately.

And congratulations to the documentary branch for nominating Werner Herzog's criminally underseen Antarctica documentary feature ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD. Highly recommended as a DVD rental--get the Blu-Ray version if you can.