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Clint Eastwood’s About Face
By Kyle | October 2, 2008
Clint Eastwood spent the 60s and 70s making westerns, military movies and cop movies. Now he’s making anti-westerns, anti-war pictures and…guess what? His latest is an anti-cop picture, “Changeling,” which I saw this morning in its North American debut, I think, at the New York Film Festival. This Angelina Jolie-starrer is about a single mom in 1928 LA whose son disappears. The cops find her son in Illinois and return the boy to her–only she says it’s not her son. What gives? The police are corrupt.
Strangely, for a guy who has spent most of his career at Warner Bros. and who speaks warmly of that old-fashioned “Warner DNA,” the film is being released by Universal. In fact it’s the finest Bette Davis picture of 2008, with all of the classic Warner Bros. stock elements–the feminism, the prison drama (slightly modified as the insane asylum) and the little-guy-against-the-system storyline. In other words, it’s not far off the mark from what Lifetime cable TV does. In one particularly hard-to- swallow scene in this allegedly “true story,” the increasingly skeletal Jolie, who weighs about as much as a gymnast, grips a hardened killer much bigger than herself by the lapels, slams him up against the windows and smacks him across the chops, demanding information. The audience is supposed to cheer. I chuckled. Actually, maybe it’s more of a Joan Crawford picture.
Topics: Movies |
October 2nd, 2008 at 5:53 pm
It’s ashamed to see Clint moving away from the more patriotic and frankly conservative pictures he became famous for. Nothing he’s done strikes me as especially “anti-American” by any means but I sure do miss having Hollywood on our side. Though “Letters From Iwo Jima” was laughably inaccurate during some parts for anyone even moderately familiar with the conflict.
October 2nd, 2008 at 7:32 pm
Eastwood’s ability to mature and grow as a filmmaker is remarkable given his advanced years. But he’s still a flawed talent — one given to injecting seriously loopy scenes in just about all his pictures. The Jolie beatdown sure sounds like his calling card.
I miss Clyde.
October 3rd, 2008 at 11:25 am
Well to be fair, the LAPD of the 1920s was not like the spit-shined department
of William Parker; it was more like the outfit seen in ‘ChinaTown’ and even
“L.A. Confidential” which is actually set right before the Parker approach seen in “Dragnet”. Spacey’s Jack Vincennes, and Cromwell’s Dudley Smith
are clearly emblematic of this.
The distinction is that detectives like
E”Dirty Harry” Callaghan, are skeptical aabout institutions; represented by the shigher levels of the SFPD and the judges who throw out the cases. He ppoints out the corruption,incompetence;
that point is made more clearly in the “Gauntlet”, which wasn’technically not a Dirty Harry Film; but it
illustrated how a corrupt judge would do anything to silence a troublesome witness. He didn’t give up on the system, despite his frustration with it, unlikely the helmeted former Vietnam
Vets contingent of the LAPD; which formed a police death squad; in “Magnum Force” who in the end were not ‘lone guns’ but supported by the Police Superintendent played by Hal Holbrook; who would later play “Deep Throat”. TThey served more like an urban version oof the Chuck Norris war films, or even
the Rambo films. Since “Unforgiven” followed by “Flags/Letters”and “Million
Dollar” he has gone almost to the nihilist, edge; Grand Torino will clearly indicate this.
October 4th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
Kyle,
You pointed out what annoys me about women being so “tough” now. A stiff wind could knock them over and I’m expected to believe that Angelina Jolie or Halle Berry could kick some guy’s arse? Really????
It’s bloody ridiculous.