Posted on 12/13/2009 1:06:45 PM PST by Publius804
Clint Eastwood’s Invictus: A Colossal Bore
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.
Although in one scene we are told that Mandela is a flesh-and-blood human being with family troubles, the rest of the movie shows the man working himself to exhaustion, protesting that he is overpaid, putting himself in physical peril for the sake of his country, forgiving sinners, and generally glowing from the halo over his head. As played by Morgan Freeman with maximum beatitude, he’s one of many reasons why this movie is a colossal bore.
Another is Matt Damon who, as the blond captain of the South African national rugby team the Springboks, is a total blank except that he really wants to win. His team plays so badly in the early stages of the movie that he orders everyone to drink the worst beer he can find — to symbolize the bitter taste of defeat. If putting together a championship-caliber team were that easy, wouldn’t the Detroit Lions simply order in a few cases of Pabst?
Despite Eastwood’s eagerness to portray Mandela as a sort of Jesus with a funny accent....
(Excerpt) Read more at pajamasmedia.com ...
I knew it would be. The whole premise is so politically correct that the movie had to be bad.
For the most part he is a pretty OK guy for a hollyweird guy....but Clint has some sort of white guilt problem I never understood....
With Mandela’s ties to marxist leftist regimes its easy to see why a movie glorifying him would be loaded with lies and a bore.
Clint , like all of us have issues . Quilt is not one of them .
I could see this one coming from FIVE miles away.
Good grief, are we incapable as a people of admitting how badly the anti-White movement screwed over South Africa?
The really sad thing is, it’s being done subtly or not so subtly here right now. Whites are being demonized at about every level.
White men are depicted terribly on television these days. Yes there are some bright spots, but by and large they’re just played off as ignorant, insensitive, objects of derision.
When you see someone going after big business, demonizing big business and Wall Street, think about who is really being targeted. Why it’s those evil White guys...
I saw a trailer for this when the wife and I went to see ‘Blind Side.’ Even when I knew it was a Clint Eastwood movie, there was zip in the trailer that made me want to see it. Too bad. I have usually found movies with Morgan Freeman to be as good as any and better than most.
I like Clint very much, but his greatest movie is and will always be: Unforgiven.
Great script, everything in it, every detail , was either perfection or near-perfection.
I wonder if this is Clint’s cinematic response to Spike Lee accusing him of being a racist.
Also, it's said that Eastwood just shoots the script, and that's the movie. More experienced directors rely more on their gut and feel free to shoot things differently on set, and leave footage on the cutting room floor.
It's not that he's a bad filmmaker, just that he's not as good as he could be. Bloodwork was really awful, and I doubt Invictus is as bad as that was.
I wish Clint had a bit of Sergio Leone's continental cynicism or irreverence or ambiguity or whatever. Clint's the good cowboy, the man in the white hat, but what Hollywood sees as "good" and "bad" has changed over time. The roles he played in other people's movies were more complex and ambiguous than his own films are.
Clint is one of my favorites but I will never watch any movie staring Matt dip$hit Damon.
Mandella? Isn’t he the Marxist who took a relatively prosperous country and turned it into a typical African crap hole?
Yep, that about covers it.
**I wonder if this is Clint’s cinematic response to Spike Lee accusing him of being a racist.**
Could be - I would rather believe it’s Eastwood’s method of boring to death all the BS Hollywood celebrities & their sychophants.
Unforgiven was a wonderfully dark movie...
“It’s a hell of a thing, killin’ a man, you take away all he’s got and all he’s ever gonna have”
“Well, he should have armed himself if he was gonna decorate his saloon with my friend.”
That Clint chose to tell the absurd story of the rugby team instead of the true story of chaos and poverty that is post-apartheid South Africa, shows he has lost the ability to see reality. I blame the too young, Mexican wife. He has become another elderly, senile Barry Goldwater.
Why are they making a movie about another worthless socialist?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.