movies

Adams and Eastwood in Trouble with the Curve.

A Swing, and a Miss: Eastwood’s Late-Inning Rally Stifled by Lazy Gameplan as He Has Trouble with the Curve

In the often illustrious career oeuvre of Clint Eastwood, Trouble with the Curve is a minor entry, a cinematic footnote. Worse yet, the screenplay and first-time direction, by Mr. Eastwood’s friend and long-time producing partner Robert Lorenz, seems like a loyalty benefit, a lazy afterthought. After such post-Dirty Harry triumphs as Unforgiven, Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby, color it disappointing.  Read More

movies

DiCaprio as Hoover.

J. Edgar, the Man, Was as Pissy as J. Edgar, the Film, Is Passionless and Plot-Starved

In spite of a fusillade of P.R. overkill about what a brave, risk-taking actor he is, and how he spent five hours a day in a makeup chair squirming, Leonardo DiCaprio’s portrait of a balding, sweaty, gristle-chewing, half-mad J. Edgar Hoover is gimmicky play acting. J. Edgar, Clint Eastwood’s exhausting chronicle of power obsession about the enigmatic, self-serving egomaniac who, as director of the F.B.I., kept America trembling with terror for half a century under the phony guise of patriotism, is a long, tedious and hollow disappointment. Read More

The Last Critic

I Scorn iPorn! My Secret Garden: Organic Soil

When I was a boy, “dirty” was the epithet of choice for the hated other. It wasn’t enough to call someone any of the slurs for being Jewish or black or Latino. You had to put “dirty” before it.

The genealogy of the insult was firmly established in the history of the world. Your tribe-your Read More

Dirty Harry

Michael Caine is such a consummate actor that it’s a major cause of concern to see him in Harry Brown, another hateful vigilante flick the wags in England have already labeled Dirty Harry Brown for reasons that are immediately obvious.

Following in the worn avenger footprints of early gut-riddled Clint Eastwood crime melodramas, Charles Bronson Read More

I’m Cheering for Morgan Freeman

Invictus
Running time 134 minutes
Written by Anthony Peckham
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Starring  Morgan Freeman, Matt Damon

If I went to Clint Eastwood’s rousing, rah-rah Invictus with less enthusiasm than some of my colleagues, it’s because I am weary of all these worthy filmmakers churning out movies about South Africa nobody Read More