Posted on 02/20/2005 11:54:47 AM PST by COUNTrecount
Regarding Clint Eastwood movies: Some things never change. He doesn't do middle class. He prefers a well-told story to fashionable technical experiments. He's not afraid of corniness. And his characters will fight to maintain decency in indecent times.
His films operate in a moral universe that's more particular to movie genres than to the real world. To do right in an Eastwood cop flick, you have to do a little wrong. There is also suffering, punishment, hurt sometimes meted out with a hefty side of sarcasm (Eastwood is the most unheralded comedian in Hollywood).
These traits are constant. But some things in Eastwood do change, namely Eastwood himself.
The films he has directed and acted in reveal a movie star who has rethought his persona, from impenetrable macho to reflective inward gazer. Partly, this is the product of seniority. He'll be 75 in May, and in the last two decades, he's had a high time chuckling at and genuinely exploring his mortality. But more crucially, you can see his deepening as a director and as an actor in relation to the women in his films.
Laughable as a lover, Eastwood was once credible solely as a fighter. But in 1992's "Unforgiven" he wrestled with the myth of himself as an icon of American masculinity, and since then he has seemed completely comfortable taking the women in his pictures seriously.
Although their fates are the same, there is a vast emotional distance traveled, for instance, between Jessica Walter's nutjob stalker in 1971's "Play Misty for Me" and the champion boxer Hilary Swank plays in "Million Dollar Baby," which is up for seven Academy Awards next Sunday. Walter succeeded in getting on Eastwood's last nerve. Swank has clearly gotten close to his heart.
In the 1970s and through the 1980s, Eastwood
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
Personally, I like Clint better in the "Spaghetti Westerns" and "Dirty Harry" flicks he did long ago. His newer stuff isn't my cup o' tea.
The last one he did that I liked was "In the Line of Fire".
A man's got to know his limitations.--Dirty Harry.
" you've got to ask yourself just one thing, do you feel lucky?"
After The Unforgiven, his macho could go no further. That is the most macho I have ever seen.
That is what Hollywood used to do. Before a "small" film was a 25 million dollar budget, the studios could take the best talent available and bring the great stories to the screen. Good for him. We could use more.
But "Bridges of Madison County?" Why, Clint, why?
How many women has he impregnated?
his best role at anything he has played was, Rowdy..the westerns would be next on my list..don't care for any others
"Will do ya, punk"?
Hated "Mystic River". Yuk.
I think it has more to do with his lowered testosterone level.
That depends, did he pay for any of their abortions? That can cover a multitude of sins. Heck, just supporting abortion is enough to elect a womanizer president.
I bet you didn't like High Plains Drifter !
That would explain his really good acting in "Bridges of Madison County".
Clint Eastwood ... same age as my dad ... there's a visual for you ... Glad to report my dad has not mellowed at all!
If cancer didn't get mine, he would have still been riding horses and keeping my mom barefoot and pregnant hehehe.
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