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“Invictus” means “unconquered.” The poem of that name, by 19th century Scotsman William Ernest Hensley, is said to be Nelson Mandela’s favorite. As the title of Clint Eastwood’s new film, which opened last week in the U.S., the word has a dual significance. Mandela, played to perfection by Morgan Freeman, claims that it helped carry him through his 27 years of incarceration at the hands of the Apartheid. When Mandela writes out the verses and gives them to Springbok team captain Francois Pienaar --- another perfect portrayal, this by Matt Damon--- they become the symbol and inspiration for the South...

South Africa is plagued with astonishing levels of crime and poverty, its peoples segregated and suspicious of one another. But the new Clint Eastwood-directed movie Invictus says that’s all okay, because the country’s rugby team won a few games in 1995. Coming off last winter’s excellent and far more challenging Gran Torino, Invictus is shockingly pedestrian and cliché-ridden. Its level of racial naivety makes it a sort of Driving Mr. Damon, with Morgan Freeman accepting a demotion from his usual roles as God or the president of the United States. This time he merely plays a saint — Nelson Mandela....

Clint Eastwood is better known for his fists than his fashion sense, but that didn't stop GQ magazine from naming him a man of the year. Eastwood joins Barack Obama, Tom Brady, the three stars of "The Hangover" and "Star Trek" actor Chris Pine on five special covers for the December issue (www.gq.com), which hits newsstands Tuesday. Eastwood talks politics, love, religion, diet and women in a wide-ranging interview with deputy editor Michael Hainey, who calls the 79-year-old the "patron saint of late bloomers." .......[snip] .......[snip]We're "becoming more juvenile as a nation," he said. "The guys who won World War...

PARIS — French President Nicolas Sarkozy made American actor and director Clinton Eastwood a commander in the prestigious French Legion of Honor on Friday. The citation for the highly coveted decoration said Eastwood, 79, was honored for his body of work, his longevity and his ability to delight audiences around the globe. Former French President Jacques Chirac had honored Eastwood as a knight of the Legion of Honor two years ago, and Friday’s decoration was a step up for Eastwood to grade three on the legion’s five-grade scale. Speaking in English, Eastwood thanked Sarkozy and the French people.

Bollywood star Saif Ali Khan, who is ready with his debut production venture Love Aaj Kal, was inspired by Hollywood actor Clint Eastwood to get into the business of making movies. Saif is a huge fan of the Hollywood legend and is quite fascinated by his work. "Once, when Saif was reading Clint's interviews, it was mentioned that he was planning to start a production house. When Saif read this, he was quite inspired by it. He was shooting outdoors and in the middle of the night he called up Dinesh Vijan and told him about the whole idea of...

Clint Eastwood and Minorities Mix Like Fire and Gasoline: Clint Eastwood is a man I can respect. A living movie legend, Clint Eastwood has directed dozens of classic movies and starred in many more films. For years he played the grizzled, nameless cowboy in the "Dollars" series and countless other Spaghetti Western shooters. He was also the titular hero of the "Dirty Harry" series. Today he continues to contribute to the movie industry by directing movies about flags and very expensive babies. So what does Clint do when old age has weathered his skin and bones? He knees Death in...

Clint Eastwood thinks political correctness has ruined society’s sense of humor. And he was just warming up. He also accused younger generations of wasting their time trying to avoid being offensive. He told the Daily Express that he should be able to tell harmless racial or ethnic jokes without being branded “a racist”...

To my Conservative Friends: Just a few weeks back, I went to see one of the best movies I have ever seen in my forty years. I enjoyed it so much that I veered off my political ranting and liberal tooling for a day to write a review of the film, Gran Torino and to give our man, Clint Eastwood, a pre-congratulatory pat on the back for his inevitable, long overdue Oscar win (you can read my review by clicking HERE). Clint gave an amazingly real, heartfelt performance as Korean War Veteran Walt Kowalski in what was widely viewed by...

This year's Oscar story lines have already been etched in stone — Mickey Rourke as the comeback kid, Slumdog Millionaire as the art-house wunderkind, Milk as the timely social commentary (released three weeks after Proposition 8 passed in California). Yet while the critics have been fussing over wrestlers and Mumbai quiz shows, audiences have been flocking to Gran Torino — an Oscar outcast that's been doing laps around the competition at the box office. At some point this week, the Clint Eastwood drama will pass the $100 million mark, easily surpassing the box-office receipts brought in by not only some...

With all the productions made by Hollywood's leftist actors and filmmakers, it's often easy to overlook Conservatives in the industry. With the widespread release of "Gran Torino," Clint Eastwood's first acted film in four years, the public will receive a bold reminder of a filmmaker who has managed to both act and direct in films with conservative themes for 40 years. "Gran Torino," also directed by Eastwood, features the iconic actor as Walt Kowalski, a retired autoworker and Korean War veteran recently widowed. The traditional Kowalski is perpetually scowling at the world in which he finds himself. He's disgusted by...

During the post-Vatican II push for more "relevant" religion classes, students in my high school "Theology of the Film" course trooped off to see Dirty Harry -- the 1971 drama starring Clint Eastwood as the police lieutenant who violates the law, including the torture of suspects, to protect San Franciscans from a wily serial killer. Afterward, we held the requisite classroom debate on whether Harry was justified in taking the law into his own hands. Most of us teenagers didn't quite understand the point of the discussion -- Harry did what he had to do, right? But our teacher, a...

After going into a coma when Obama won the Presidency, Ed Anger, the original conservative commentator, has been revived by his hatred for the Big Three CEOs and their execution of the auto industry.

DHP Review: Gran Torino Clint Eastwood’s hinted that Gran Torino might be his last turn in front of the camera. If that’s true, he could not have chose for himself a more fitting farewell. Without a hint of the self-referential, Torino touches on the many iconic moments of both his best genre pictures and more serious fare. Most of all, he’s masterfully blended both into a hard-hitting, supremely satisfying story that carries big themes with a deft gentleness. Working from a superb script by relative newcomer Nick Schenk, Gran Torino opens in just the kind of Catholic church you expect...

DHP Review: The Changeling Posted by Dirty Harry Friday, October 31st, 2008 I’ll tweak this into a right and proper review this weekend but let me warn off some of you who might be considering a plunk down of ten bucks. The Changeling lacks story focus and at two hours-twenty minutes is about 40 minutes too long. What opens as an intimate, period piece about a mother searching for her lost son slips a gear and goes all Bette Davis with an unexpected change of scope to a much broader palette involving a gruesome child murderer and police corruption. This...

The United Nations, a body devoted to peaceful resolutions to conflict across the world, may regret appointing the actress Angelina Jolie as one of its Goodwill Ambassadors. In an interview in the current issue of Entertainment Weekly to promote her latest film Wanted, in which she plays a hired killer, she says that she advocates political assassination in extreme cases, a complete no-no as far as the UN is concerned. "I am a strong believer that without justice there is no peace," she says. "I'm somebody who's very curious about the International Criminal Court and supportive of following through on...

(Cut) Eastwood, who turned 78 on Saturday, has become an American filmmaker of the highest order -- he first rode to fame as a rangy, amoral redux of John Wayne but, somehow, came back from the desert as a latter-day John Ford. With that career trajectory, it wouldn't be surprising if Eastwood turned his back on Callahan, whose darkly whispered one-liners (". . . You've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya, punk?" "Go ahead, make my day") were long ago drained of any real danger by stand-up comics, politicians and bumper stickers. It's...

<p>Eastwood has no time for Lee's gripes. "He was complaining when I did Bird [the 1988 biopic of Charlie Parker]. Why would a white guy be doing that? I was the only guy who made it, that's why. He could have gone ahead and made it. Instead he was making something else." As for Flags of Our Fathers, he says, yes, there was a small detachment of black troops on Iwo Jima as a part of a munitions company, "but they didn't raise the flag. The story is Flags of Our Fathers, the famous flag-raising picture, and they didn't do that. If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, people'd go, 'This guy's lost his mind.' I mean, it's not accurate." Lee shouldn't be demanding African-Americans in Eastwood's next picture, either. Changeling is set in Los Angeles during the Depression, before the city's make-up was changed by the large black influx. "What are you going to do, you gonna tell a fuckin' story about that?" he growls. "Make it look like a commercial for an equal opportunity player? I'm not in that game. I'm playing it the way I read it historically, and that's the way it is. When I do a picture and it's 90% black, like Bird, I use 90% black people."</p>

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proved this week that nobody is safe when it comes to government appointments - not even relatives or fellow movie stars. The governor refused to reappoint his brother-in-law Bobby Shriver and fellow acting icon Clint Eastwood to the State Park and Recreation Commission, where both had served for several years. The move stunned park advocates and other members of the commission, who said the two men were outspoken champions of the beleaguered state parks system and had disagreed with Schwarzenegger on a project he had championed. A spokesman for Schwarzenegger said Eastwood and Shriver weren't reappointed because...

Clint Eastwood once said, "I feel very close to the western. There are not too many American art forms that are original. Most are derived from European art forms. Other than the western and jazz or blues, that's all that's really original." People these days don’t really care for westerns anymore, unless Hang ‘Em High is on AMC or something. No one has made a decent attempt at a true western in a number of years. Sure, perhaps we get a Kevin Costner film every few years that takes place in the old west, but it’s not a western. Those...

For those Forum Members who have expressed an opinion on the movie Letters from Iwo Jima, please allow me to share how I re-acted to this film. For lack of a better way to begin, let me say, What “Nice Guys” the Japanese Soldiers Were. It was obvious to me that the Japanese soldiers who fought the Americans on Iwo Jima were not the same soldiers who fought the Americans on Bataan, or were they? As a survivor of the Bataan Death March, I can tell you for certainty, the Japanese depicted in “Letters From Iwo Jima” were in no...

Hollywood icon Clint Eastwood has said he opposed the United States' decision to go to war in Iraq but said he admired the "tenacity" of President George W. Bush. In an interview with Fox News, Eastwood, who has been nominated for a best director Oscar at this month's Academy Awards for World War Two movie "Letters from Iwo Jima", said he was against the US-led 2003 invasion of Iraq. The United States' goal of trying to impose democracy on Iraq was flawed, the 76-year-old said. "I wasn't for going in there," Eastwood said. "Only because democracy isn't something that you...

Michael Medved, on his radio show just now, gave Clint Eastwood's "Letters From Iwo Jima" 4 stars - the highest rating.

Clint Eastwood, formerly a Hollywood favorite among American patriots, is taking some heat for fictionalizing scenes in his latest movie "Letters From Iwo Jima" – scenes that made the Japanese soldiers look more humane than their American GI counterparts. Perhaps the sharpest criticism has come from nationally syndicated talk-radio host Michael Savage, who compared the director unfavorably to Tokyo Rose, the World War II-era Japanese radio propagandist. "The astonishing transformation of Clint Eastwood, from his 'Dirty Harry' days, cannot be more forcefully understood than by appreciating the level to which he has gone in order to appease the liberal gods...

At the link

On February 19 1945 Thomas McPhatter found himself on a landing craft heading toward the beach on Iwo Jima... Sadly, Sgt McPhatter's experience is not mirrored in Flags of Our Fathers, Clint Eastwood's big-budget, Oscar-tipped film of the battle for the Japanese island that opened on Friday in the US. While the film's battle scenes show scores of young soldiers in combat, none of them are African-American. Yet almost 900 African-American troops took part in the battle of Iwo Jima, including Sgt McPhatter...

Flags of Our Fathers Print the Legend Clint Eastwood strips away the myths surrounding the Greatest Generation A single photograph, we're told early on in Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers, can win or lose a war. But sometimes that photo shows us only part of the story, whether it's the part we don't want to see -- slaughtered villagers at My Lai, tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib -- or the part we do, with heroes front and center and the carnage out of view. In Flags, the image under scrutiny is one of the most iconic in American photojournalism:...

What a great movie. Clint Eastwood has done a masterful job showing the terrible struggle we faced at Iwo Jima. It focuses mainly on the three men who were on the war bond tour after the flag was planted. This film should be nominated for Best Picture. Go see it this weekend.

Just caught a trailor - online - of Flags of our Fathers. At the beginning of the trailor, a narrator says "people were tired of war." My question, was that true for back then? Or is that some current crap thrown in?

Buono, il brutto, il cattivo, Il (1966) If this western isnt your cup of tea, then on channel 7 is Pearl Harbor. Or on channel 13 (PBS) is the britcom "Keeping Up Appearances", followed by another britcom called "As Time Goes By". After that, still on PBS, will be the Doris Day movie, "The Glass Bottom Boat" at 9pm (EST)

George Clooney is being hotly-tipped to play Magnum PI in a new movie. Film bosses believe the handsome star would be perfect as the suave private investigator, played by Tom Selleck in the classic TV show. A source is quoted in Britain's Daily Star newspaper as saying: "He is a big fan of the original series. The part is his if he wants it." Meanwhile, George - who split from on/off girlfriend Lisa Snowdon last year - recently revealed he thinks 2006 will be the year he settles down. The 44-year-old heartthrob - renowned for keeping his romantic life under...

“Then what is it you want?” “I want, what they want, and every other guy who came over here and spilled his guts and gave everything he had wants! For our country to love us as much as we love it. That’s what I want!”Such were the words of Vietnam War veteran and American icon John Rambo at the end of Rambo: First Blood Part II, the second highest grossing film of 1985. But despite the boffo success of Rambo and a few other summer flicks, Hollywood 1985 suffered through the biggest box office slump ever recorded. Until now that...

Please view the link for my article regarding Clint Eastwood and military veterans in popular entertainment.

Please view link for my article: "Hollywood's Military Veterans"

At a time when our culture rewards abrasive, in-your-face celebrity, a man whose movie personas embody the quiet American hero and who lives his life with similar humility is reaching a milestone. Clint Eastwood turns 75 next Tuesday. Perhaps not since John Wayne have so many of the qualities that made this country great resided in a single star’s screen portrayals. From action hero roles including soldier, cowboy and police detective to more sensitive, vulnerable characters like a magazine photographer and grizzled boxing manager, Eastwood epitomizes individualism, courage, honor, integrity, patriotism and justice. And he occasionally throws in a few...

Well, I didn't exactly boycott the Oscars, that's a bit too grand. I merely didn't watch the show this year. It was the first time since I was 4 years old, when I dreamed of becoming an actress, that I didn't look forward to the awards in thrilled anticipation. A friend from DC emailed me the next morning. She wrote, "Okay you were right...the Oscars were really boring!" Then because I live and work in Hollywood, she then asked if I knew why Beyonce sang practically all of the nominated songs?" I admitted I hadn't attended any gossipy Oscar watching...

Euthanasia is enjoying its greatest renaissance in the Western world since Nazi Germany. Together with so many other social ideas first popularized in modern times by Nazis and Communists — from abortion to easy divorce — euthanasia's time may have come. Doctors in the Netherlands are euthanizing disabled infants even without parental consent, and Britain's Labour government may be about to legalize widespread euthanasia there. Our own state of Oregon has a physician-assisted suicide law. Hollywood's elite, ever on the cutting edge of evil, gave their implicit imprimatur to exterminating the unfit to live by granting Academy Awards the other...

-snip- O'REILLY: So it was a surrogate father attached to a young woman who is striving. So to you, it was a more relationship film. That was a primary focus of the film. EASTWOOD: Exactly. O'REILLY: And then it gets blown up into an issue film, the euthanasia. Did that surprise you? EASTWOOD: Well, I don't — it could be blown up, but I didn't see what the blow-up is. It's — it wasn't that — it isn't a message for anything. But nowadays — in the old days, it was everybody was talking about the knee- jerk liberals. Now...

Tonight is oscar night. So the million dollar question is Clint Eastwood going to get Oscar for Best Director? This will be revealed in a few hours. But Million Dollar Baby is a Hollywood flick that is anti-Christian. Eastwood -- not as director -- but as star, kills his lover in this film. How can Eastwood be a good guy and kill his lover? The plot is basically that he is a love with a brain injured woman [before the injury]. He feels the need to take her life. [Please note I have not seen the movie -- but that...

Clint Eastwood has acknowledged that a plot twist in Million Dollar Baby that raises the issue of euthanasia "does hit you with sort of a left hook," and that when he attempted to raise money to produce the film "nobody seemed enthralled with that." In an interview appearing in the current issue of Time magazine, Eastwood suggested that he was able to keep the plot twist secret because the movie was made "under the radar. Nobody knew we were making it, and nobody gave a damn that we were making it." Eastwood said that he was surprised that it took...

Feb. 28 issue - Dan Glickman isn't exactly the Hollywood type. More comfortable in pinstripes than Prada, he's a former Clinton Agriculture secretary, Kansas congressman and president of the Witchita school board—and nothing like the flashy, debonair Jack Valenti, the legendary head of the Motion Picture Association of America. After 38 years at the MPAA, Valenti has become a celebrity in his own right, landing his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. But as Glickman heads toward his first Academy Awards since taking over for Valenti as the industry's chief lobbyist, he's the one schmoozing Hollywood directors and...

If you give Million Dollar Baby half a chance, you're gonna cry. "You're gonna cry," the ticket-seller, a Spanish lady in her late fifties, told me. And she was right. Million Dollar Baby is about two kinds of hunger: The hunger for glory that gnaws at those who seemingly have no chance at it, and the hunger for the love that bonds a father and a daughter, even if the two are not father and daughter. Clint Eastwood is hot again. In 2003, his movie Mystic River, in which he did not act, was up for all of the major...

They really should have known it wasn’t going to work out when he suggested that “Ellen DeGeneres has crabs.” Sentiments like that are never positive. Perhaps they also should have reviewed one of his lively comic routines before hiring him. Maybe then they would have learned that he’s a racist swine with a penchant for ideas that would make death row inmates blush. Abortion in America is “beautiful”? Not good. No serious person was really surprised to learn that Chris Rock believes only gays watch the Oscars. After his position on gay marriage was recently exposed—“f*** them fa**ots,” he explained...

To me, Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby is just routine Hollywood product but with a much higher-than-usual schmaltz content. It's not even worth a review. Quite obviously, Hilary Swank's character never had a chance. She was conceived, born, brought to adulthood and finally killed off for no other purpose than the evocation of pathos in her sad ending. From her dirt poor beginnings in a Missouri trailer park, the good daughter of a welfare cheat and an absent father, to her job waiting tables for minimum wage to her burning ambition to box to her apparent friendlessness and lack of...

Orson Scott Card gives here very interesting reviews of The Wedding Date and Racing Stripes. Follow the link to read them. But his review of the Million Dollar Baby is absolutely fantastic: Million Dollar Baby is being touted as Clint Eastwood's best performance ever, and it probably is -- though the film editor didn't have to select the take where snot bubbled out of his nose when he was crying. It's also a fine performance by Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman, with director Clint Eastwood doing a wonderful job of evoking a time and milieu as he draws memorable performances...

The forerunner of "Million Dollar Baby" was the very entertaining Nazi movie "I Accuse," which won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival and was the propaganda that Dr. Goebbels used to convince the German people to switch their vote from "vehemently opposed to the holocaust" to over 60 percent in favor of so-called "mercy killing." In fact, "I Accuse" is a very subtle film that inspired the killing of millions of people. Dr. Joseph Goebbels was the National Socialist (Nazi) propaganda minister from 1933 to 1945. He exploited radio, press, cinema and theater in Germany to destroy the...

Clint Eastwood's ''Million Dollar Baby'' has scored seven Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director. Alejandro Amenabar's ''The Sea Inside'' has come away with two, including Best Foreign Language Film. What links both movies? The message that it's kind to help a paralyzed person die. To our knowledge, few critics have picked up on the films' shared ''right-to-die'' message. Had the plot been racial or homophobic killing, however, we'd be hearing an outcry (if the movie ever got made at all). Why the silence? We think it's because much of society believes it's the right thing to do, to...

Medved on O'Reilly tonight to debate Million Dollar Baby. Fox: 8 Easter / 5 Pacific

Movie star Clint Eastwood is the winner of the best director award from the Director's Guild of America. Eastwood received the prestigious award in Beverly Hills, California Saturday for his critically acclaimed film Million Dollar Baby, beating out fellow American director Martin Scorsese. He was nominated for The Aviator, a biography of the late billionaire Howard Hughes. The 74-year-old Eastwood directed, produced, starred-in and wrote some of the music for his drama about a boxing trainer and reluctant mentor to a scrappy female fighter. The award makes the veteran filmmaker the favorite to win as best director at next month's...

Hollywood is set to honor at the Oscars a violent film that culminates in murder. The Passion of the Christ? No, Million Dollar Baby. Hollywood couldn't bear to see Jesus Christ suffer and die for man's sins, but it watches with bated breath and an approving gaze as Clint Eastwood in Million Dollar Baby kills a disabled female boxer with a grim efficiency worthy of Dirty Harry. Criminal euthanasia is an act of gratuitous violence that Hollywood will celebrate. Normally fans of "obscenity," Hollywood luminaries dusted that word off and used it as a criticism of Mel Gibson's movie. He...

Famed actor and director Clint Eastwood is being condemned by disabled groups who say his award-winning film, "Million Dollar Baby," perpetuates the view that lives of people with disabilities are not worth living. Eastwood directs the film, in which he also acts, with Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman. It's been identified by critics as a top contender for an Academy Award since Eastwood and Swank won Golden Globes for Best Director and Best Actress. The story about a young female boxer who seeks out an elderly trainer to help her achieve her dream of being the best takes a sudden...