Excellent Eastwood

NRO ^ | 28 Feb 2018 | Peter Tonguette

[Rummyfan]

A great director gives American heroes their due.

‘Old soldiers never die; they just fade away,” said General Douglas MacArthur, but what about old directors? In the fall of 2016, as the presidential contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton raged on, I caught up with the latest film of one such director, a man who at that point had been perched behind cameras for some 45 years: Clint Eastwood.

On the strength of such spare, sinewy masterpieces of action as Pale Rider (1985), Unforgiven (1992), and A Perfect World (1993) — as well as the gentle, good-natured character studies in Breezy (1973) and Bronco Billy (1980) — Clint Eastwood was, I had long thought, one of America’s finest directors. In recent years, however, I feared that he had begun to slip ever so slightly: Changeling (2008) was too dependent on the dubious talent of Angelina Jolie, and J. Edgar (2011) too dependent on the old-age makeup layered on Leonardo DiCaprio.

So I waited a while to catch Sully (2016), the director’s docudrama-like treatment of actions taken by pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger (Tom Hanks) to bring about the safe landing of US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River in 2009. By the time I saw it, the drama had already been in theaters for about a month, earning more than $100 million at the box office. The film’s subject matter also gave me pause: Was a crash landing that unfolded over just 208 seconds sufficient to support an entire film that needed a beginning, middle, and end?

[marktwain]

Hmmm...

Some films I will watch.

[broken_clock]

Clint Eastwood gets it.

[utahagen]

Was this reviewer drunk when he watched 15:17 to Paris? As a conservative, a Clint Eastwood fan, and someone in touch with how deeply most members of the media detest our country, I was disposed to like this movie. However, I was stunned by how appallingly bad it was. It's as if the grade school the three real-life heroes attended raised 100k via GoFundMe and made the movie with only that money. Even the several accomplished character actors in the movie were appallingly bad. Jenna Fischer, for example, should enter the Witness Protection Program for a few months. Speaking of Fischer, here's an example of how inexplicably badly done this movie was: Fischer, who played one of the main character's mothers, looked EXACTLY the same in two scenes, even though she was supposed to be twelve years older in the second scene. I think she was even wearing the same shirt. Really: the movie is that bad.

And the writing? I shuddered during the school scenes, which were akin to bad afterschool specials from the 70s, meaning ones that were so bad they were never aired. Casting the real people to play the main characters in the movie is a good way to teach non-actors that acting really is a craft that requires talent, skill, and training. The heroes were not actors when they saved the lives of those people on that train and they weren't actors when they made this movie.

I expected to like this movie; I assumed it would be well made. Unfortunately, the movie stinks. I cannot believe it was produced in Hollywood, never mind by Clint Eastwood.

[pbear8]

Good article, thanks for posting.

[SkyDancer]

Well our family saw it and liked it. Yeah, the acting was a bit campy but professional actors would have made it more a melodrama than real life. I’m too busy watching the film than to notice blatant mistakes; I wait for the professional “oops there” people to point those out later. There’s a website that does actually that but don’t remember which one.

[Thibodeaux]

Clint directed this movie at 86, from his office on the studio grounds of 30 years.

He is showing the way....... think 90

[gnarledmaw]

Didnt see it yet.

Ageing: Not everyone is the same. For some reason one of my grandmothers aged to 70 by the time she was 50 yet didnt age another day until her 90s. I doubt I would have noticed the actress not changing.

[utahagen]

You would have noticed. Yes, some people hardly age, yet they may brush their hair out of their eyes or change their blouses or have slightly different highlights. I’m not kidding when I say this production was so lazy that it was as if two scenes that were supposed to have occurred twelve years apart were shot in the same afternoon without making even the slightest change in anything about the actress.

[Rummyfan]

With a username of Uta Hagen you have a dramatic arts background?

[heterosupremacist]

utahagen: tell us what you REALLY think?

[aspasia]

A lot of Eastwood films are quite pedestrian. He’s actually good at making this style of film. Nothing deep, mostly sensible.

[utahagen]

“A lot of Eastwood films are quite pedestrian. He’s actually good at making this style of film. Nothing deep, mostly sensible.”

Yes. However, this latest Eastwood film cannot touch the quality of the least polished Eastwood film that came before it.

[utahagen]

Am chuckling...

[Auntie Dem]

I have shirts that are 18 years old (not worn every week, but semi-regularly). I have a pair of Florsheim wing tips that are 35 years old, and still look new. Keep them clean and polished and only wear them about once a quarter. I’m keeping them to be buried with them on. Hopefully that won’t happen for another 25 years. If anything, I look younger than I did 12 years ago. I liked the movie—won’t earn an oscar, but I chose it over seeing Black Panther. I chose wisely.