Motion Picture Gems : Clint Eastwood

Showing posts with label Clint Eastwood. Show all posts

8/26/2022

The Blues Brothers (1980) and Every Which Way But Loose (1978)

I recently had a craving to watch The Blues Brothers again for the 3rd or 4th time. I didn't have the DVD in my collection, so instead of renting or streaming it, I decided to buy the blu ray to add it to my collection. Then enjoyed it again. It was great to see all the legendary music performances by Aretha, Ray, James Brown, and Cab Calloway again. With another repeat viewing I picked up on some subtle jokes and humor I missed the previous times. It's really a crazy movie and even ridiculous and absurd at times but it is still really funny to me to see the Brothers' building blown up, and then in the next shot, see them climb out of the rubble unscratched and unhurt and walk off to their next stop. The chase in the mall is also hilarious to me. It was cool to see all Chicago locations again, and I forgot that Steven Spielberg appears at the end. It is one of those movies I'll enjoy again sometime soon.

For the first time ever, I watched a movie that has long been on my "to-see" list - the Clint Eastwood comedy Every Which Way But Loose. I liked it. It kind of reminded me of the Blues Brothers because throughout the whole movie, Clint and his friends are chased by people that either want to kill him or get revenge for something.

It's another crazy road movie but instead of blues, there's a country vibe to it, and even features a few cameos by country singers Charlie Rich and Mel Tillis. Eastwood manages to get into a lot of dive bar fights, enters street fights for quick cash, and even tries to get his pet orangutan laid at the Santa Fe zoo. Ruth Gordon has a small part as the mother, and she's pretty funny in it, too. She keeps failing her driver's license test, but eventually passes at the end, sort of predicable.

Pretty much the entire movie is ridiculous but really amusing.

Throughout the whole movie, Clint pursues a woman (Sondra Locke), but then at the end when he does meet up with her she blows him off. I liked that ending; it's so unconventional. In the climatic fight at the end Eastwood nearly beats the best street fighter in the nation, but he decides to go down and lose because...well, its left to the audience to decide why. I think it's because he didn't want the fame and reputation.

Eastwood's best friend (or was it his brother - I don't remember) in the film is played by Geoffrey Lewis, who is really good in this part, very believable and funny. Never saw any movie with him before, so I checked out what else he did on IMDB, where I also learned that his daughter is Juliette Lewis. I never knew that.

Read another blog post about this movie from Diary of a Movie Maniac here

Incidentally, the other day I was in a Hallmark store and saw a new Juliette Lewis/"Audrey Griswold" Christmas Ornament for the 2022 season; it's part of a new set of "Christmas Vacation" ornaments -- the others in the set are Chevy Chase, Beverly D'Angelo (who is also in Every Which Way But Loose), and Johnny Galecki ("Rusty Griswold"). Geoffrey Lewis died a few years ago but I'm sure he would have been proud to have an ornament feauring his daughter's likeness, maybe.

6/05/2022

Top Gun (1986), Heartbreak Ridge (1986), and the latest Top Gun

Last weekend I watched two military-themed movies, Heartbreak Ridge and Top Gun, both from 1986. Both have similar parallels and deal with senior officers training younger fighters. In Heartbreak Ridge, Clint Eastwood is a marine about to retire but gets put in charge of training some new recruits including Mario Van Peeples, whose character is really interesting; he's a musician and loves to sing and perform in bars and occasionally gets in trouble or thrown in jail for reckless behavior. Eastwood's character is pretty reckless, too and the two form an unlikely relationship. I'd like to have seen a whole movie about Mario Van Peeples's character, similar to how the "Maverick" character is portrayed as the focus of Top Gun. But it was an okay movie; one needs to keep remembering that it is a movie set and made in the 1980s. One bizarre scene involves the marines trying to make a long-distance phone call with a credit card.

The two Top Gun movies are pretty similar to the Eastwood movie, I feel. In the first movie, the focus is not on the senior officer but of course Tom Cruise's character and friends. For whatever reason, I never saw this movie before last week.... but as I was watching, I was paying close attention to some of the details because I knew there'd be some callbacks in the sequel. The movie was good had some good flying sequences.

Then I saw the sequel, which came out last weekend, and I liked it better than the first. It had some typical Hollywood cliches, but I didn't mind them because I was basically looking for mindless escapism and fun and so I didn't criticize the film too heavily. The sequel is a bit more like Heartbreak Ridge because the "older" Cruise character is now the senior officer on the verge of retiring and faced with training some young hotshots. And I liked that the Val Kilmer character got promoted to admiral, but Cruise never advanced that far. And it was nice to see a diverse group of fighter pilots. And I liked the pairing of Cruise and Jennifer Connelly who is a bar owner and has becomes the love interest. Their scenes were really good and reminded me of Eastwood's and Marsha Mason's in Heartbreak Ridge a little bit, especially the ending.

5/18/2015

American Sniper (2014) directed by Clint Eastwood

American Sniper stars Bradley Cooper as the real life Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle. It was recently released on DVD/Blu-Ray and I was able to catch up with the film, which has been both acclaimed and criticized. The main criticisms seem to stem from objections to the original memoir by Kyle and the US's involvement in Iraq in general. A few months ago, Cooper was a guest on the NPR program Fresh Air with Terry Gross and he talked about how the film is meant to be a character study about Kyle and the toll it takes on him and his wife played by Sienna Miller. It sounded sort of like The Hurt Locker, but with Clint Eastwood directing, I didn't know what to expect.

I have heard people say they won't see it; some say it goes against their values (one person I know got into an argument with someone supporting the film), and another person said they won't see it because they are not Republican and not pro-American. So I'm wondering, is this film so one-sided? Eastwood's films are usually thought-provoking and politically neutral (Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, etc).

After seeing, I'd probably give the movie two stars out of four. Average to me. I didn't think it was a terribly made film but something about it didn't fully satisfy me; something was missing. I liked the idea of exploring the soldier's inner plight and life at home after his deployments (four of them are depicted). And I was impressed with the combat scenes, very intense and realistic, on par with Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers and Letters to Iwo Jima (I only saw parts of those).

Not so convincing (or interesting) to me were the scenes with Cooper and Miller, who I thought was miscast in the role. Her character has many emotional scenes and plays an important part of the film - the film is almost as much about her as it is about Kyle. But I didn't think she had chemistry with Cooper. In the early scenes where they are dating Miller says she doesn't want to marry a soldier. Then later, Cooper asks Miller if she likes country music, and she says no and it made me wonder what they really had in common.

I think there are some good scenes where Cooper deals with his emotions when he's back at home, such as the scene in the bar where he needs some time alone, which I think is one of the best scenes in the movie. I also enjoyed the scenes where he volunteers his time with the wounded vets. I was reminded a little of Hurt Locker and Born on the Fourth of July (1989); both films are better in my opinion.

I wish there were more scenes with Cooper interacting with more people at home - perhaps with other family members, or with an older veteran, say from Vietnam or WWII. There was one or two quick moments with his brother, but I would have liked to have seen more because the Sienna Miller scenes were rather dull to me.

Also I'd like to have seen some explorations of Kyle's faith; his character seems hot-tempered and less than reverent in the beginning of the film. Later he declares his faith in a higher power a few times but it's not explored enough where I understood. Sergeant York (1941) was a better film that explored this theme with more insight I feel.

6/02/2011

Top 10 Box Office Stars of 1976 (USA)

1932| 1933| 1934| 1935| 1936 | 1937 | 1938 | 1939 | 1940 | 1941 | 1942 | 1943 | 1944 | 1945 | 1946 | 1947 | 1948| 1949 | 1950 | 1951 |1952 | 1953 | 1954 | 1955 | 1956 | 1957 | 1958 | 1959|1960 | 1961 | 1962 | 1963 | 1964 | 1965 |1966 | 1967 | 1968 | 1969 | 1970 | 1971 | 1972 | 1973 | 1974 | 1975 | 1976 | 1977-present

The rankings come from Quigley Publishing Co.'s annual list (since 1932) of top money making stars in the USA, which based on a poll of hundreds of theater executives. The list does not rank stars only on how much cash their films made, but on what theater owners say about who attracts audiences on their star power alone.

Since this is the year I was born, this will be the last year that I'll post box office stars with photos.

1. Robert Redford