Clint Eastwood is a legendary in Hollywood for his no nonsense approach to filmmaking. He’s not Stanley Kubrick who would do 200 takes of a head turn, or Christopher Nolan whose camera technique is sharp as a tack. His unfussy approach to storytelling often gives his films a unique energy all their own, a style born out of confidence and almost 70 years I’m standing in front of or behind a camera.
Depending on your level of cynicism, “Cry Macho,” his new road trip movie now playing in theatres, is either the work of a filmmaker so confident in his craft he trusts the audience will follow him wherever he goes, no matter how meandering, or a slender, slapdash exercise in myth building.
Set in 1979, the story begins when wealthy Texas ranch boss (Dwight Yoakam) calls in a favor from former employee Mike Milo (Eastwood). He wants the former rodeo star and ranch hand to travel to Mexico, find his estranged thirteen-year-old son Rafo (Eduardo Minett) and bring him back to the States. The boy’s mother (Fernanda Urrejola) is an aristocratic woman with a short temper who seems to care nothing about her son. “Take him if you can find him,” she hisses. “He’s a monster.”
Mike tracks down Rafo at a cockfight, where he is about to put Macho, his prizewinning rooster, into the ring. “He is not a chicken,” Rafo says, “he’s Macho.” The boy agrees to head to the States with Mike, excited at the prospect of becoming a real cowboy on his father’s ranch.
Along the way the surrogate father and son duo hide out from the Federales, meet a kind-hearted cantina owner (Natalia Traven) and learn the true meaning of what it means to be macho.
Based on a neo-Western book by N. Richard Nash that Eastwood has been circling around for decades, “Cry Macho” isn’t story driven as much as it latches onto the framework of the road trip genre to find momentum. It’s a low energy film that is more character study of a man forced to reassess the way he has lived his life. “This macho thing is overrated,” he says.
The movie’s meta aspect is its strongest feature. Eastwood has spent his career as a personification of machismo, and now, at a frail looking 91 years-old, he is making a comment not only on his character Mike, but of all the characters he has played before. It’s hard to watch “Cry Macho” without picturing “The Outlaw Josey Wales” or “The Unforgiven,” and those memories color every frame of the new film.
Unfortunately, those reminders may also make you nostalgic for the days of “The Outlaw Josey Wales” and “The Unforgiven.” “Cry Macho” has compelling ideas at its core, but is marred by Minett’s emotive performance, direction that feels directionless and the most laughably inept henchman in the history of film. Eastwood is stately, a lion in winter, but the film feels unambitious, lacking in the drama that would have made its messages on masculinity more potent.
For a short time Richard Jewell was a household name, first for being a hero, then a villain, then a curiosity, a man who was railroaded by the press and the very people he revered, law enforcement. “Richard Jewell,” a new film from director Clint Eastwood looks at the man behind the headlines.
Based on the 1997 Vanity Fair article “American Nightmare: The Ballad of Richard Jewell” by Marie Brenner the film stars Paul Walter Hauser as Jewell, a law and order man, who believes in rules and dreams of being a police officer. When he isn’t studying the penal code in the bedroom of the house he shares with his mother (Kathy Bates) he works security gigs, like patrolling the grounds at Centennial Park in Atlanta during the 1996 Summer Olympics.
When he spots a suspicious package the on-duty cops say, “It’s probably someone who run off drunk,” but Jewell insists they investigate. What happens next few minutes came to define his life.
The abandoned backpack contains three pipe bombs. “The biggest I’ve ever seen,” says a bomb expert.
Jewell’s suspicious nature saves lives and at first he is treated like a hero. Book deals are offered and he’s on every news broadcast in the country. “Tom Brokaw was even talking about you,” says his mother. But soon the story changes. His socially awkward nature and law enforcement aspirations make him the target of an FBI investigation. They wonder if he manufactured the crisis so he could be a hero.
After a loose-lipped FBI agent (Jon Hamm) spills the story to seductive reporter Kathy Scruggs (Olivia Wilde) Jewell becomes front page news as a false hero with only lawyer Watson Bryant (Sam Rockwell) to help navigate the firestorm of controversy that follows.
Eastwood and screenwriter Billy Ray paint in rather broad strokes. The villains of the piece—the FBI agents who think Jewell is “guilty as hell.” and Wilde’s reporter, not the real-life bomber who is barely mentioned—twirl their metaphorical moustaches as they work in tandem to prove Jewell’s guilt, both offering up a cartoonish but entertaining take on their characters.
The heart of the film is closer to the Jewell home. Bates brings some real emotion to the role of a loving mother whose life is turned upside down but, by the time the end credits roll, this show belongs to Hauser and Rockwell. The chemistry, obvious affection and occasional exasperation between the two is winning and authentic. Rockwell brings his usual offbeat charm to the role of the dogged attorney but it is Hauser who leaves the lasting impression. In what should be his breakout film, the actor, best known for a supporting role in “I, Tonya,” gives an indelible performance. Jewell is an underdog, a Paul Blart with a heart of gold nearly crushed under the weight of powers far more powerful than him. His growing sense of frustration at his treatment by the FBI comes to a crescendo in a scene that allows him to win back some of the dignity that has been stripped away from him. In Hauser’s hands a character that could have been played as a bewildered screw-up becomes a likeable man with both pride and a sense of purpose.
“Richard Jewell” is the best film of 2019 to include a Macarena dance scene. It’s also a timely and searing indictment of the abuse of trial by media; of how an everyman’s life was almost ruined at the hands of people who traded on misinformation. Eastwood gives Jewell his due, humanizing a man who was treated like a story and not a person. Unfortunately, Eastwood also takes liberties in the way he portrays the reporter Scruggs, who died in 2001. Playing fast and loose with the unproven accusation that she traded sex for information, he does exactly what the media did to Jewell, point a jaundiced finger at someone who did nothing wrong.
Check out Richard’s interview with Spencer Stone, Anthony Sadler and Alek Skarlatos, the three real-life heroes who star, as themselves, in Clint Eastwood’s new movie “15:17 to Paris.”
On Aug. 21, 2015, three American men — the Air Force’s Spencer Stone, student Anthony Sadler and Alek Skarlatos of the National Guard — were on holiday. As their Paris-bound train hurtled across the border from Belgium into France, another man, 25-year-old Ayoub El Khazzani, armed with an AKM assault rifle, a pistol and a bottle of gas, opened fire in a passenger cabin in an apparent terrorist attack.
The three men, all in their early 20s, leapt into action and with the help of two other travellers subdued El Khazzani, ending the siege and saving the life of a passenger who had been shot in the neck.
Their heroics saw them inducted into the French Legion of Honour as knights and feted by then U.S. president Barack Obama. An autobiography, The 15:17 to Paris: The True Story of a Terrorist, a Train, and Three American Soldiers, was a bestseller and is now a movie directed by Clint Eastwood.
“We met (Eastwood) at the Spike TV Guys Choice Awards,” says Stone. “He was giving us the Hero Award. We knew that making real-life stories into movies was right up his alley as a director so we thought, ‘We have to mention something to him, even if it is as a joke or whatever.’ We said, ‘We’re writing a book right now! You should turn it into a movie. Ha. Ha!’ He said, ‘Send me the book. I’ll tell you what I think.’”
Three months later a call came. Eastwood even put on hold a project he was working on at the time so he could begin their film.
“We thought that would be enough,” says Sadler. “Clint Eastwood is picking up the picture. We made it! This is it! Three weeks before shooting he calls us into a meeting and we think we’re going to meet the actors who are going to play us. He says, ‘You guys mind re-enacting things for us?’ He kept talking, hinting for us to be in the film. We’re like, ‘No way he’s saying that,’ so we stopped and said, ‘Mr. Eastwood are you asking us to be in the film?’ He said, ‘Yeah, why not?’ Minds blown at that point.”
None of the three have any previous acting experience but say that Eastwood, who insisted they not take acting classes, brought out the best in them.
“We were all anxious to do our first scenes,” says Stone, “but honestly after our first one with him, we relaxed. He’s such a chill guy and the atmosphere on set is so chill. He and the crew make things easy for you. Once we got a few scenes under our belt it became pretty fun.”
Skarlatos, the quietest of the trio, chimes in: “Honestly, it was a lot of fun. It was not a traumatic experience for us because nobody died, first of all, and for us, only good things have come out of it. Doing it again was therapeutic. Going over all the details was very helpful because I was able to kind of close that chapter. Doing it with Clint Eastwood was the coolest experience.”
As for the veracity of the film, Skarlatos says the movie captures “who we are as people, how we interact with each other and how the events transpired on the train.”
On January 15, 2009 Sully Sullenberger was an airplane captain with forty-two years experience piloting a plane on a routine run from New York’s LaGuardia Airport to a stopover at Charlotte Douglas International Airport. The next day he was a worldwide hero, an instant celebrity.
Shortly after take-off his plane was disabled by a flock of Canadian Geese who flew into the engines, knocking out the plane’s navigating system. In just under four minutes Sullenberger assessed the situation and, realizing there was no time to turn back, made the decision to land the craft on the Hudson River. The risky landing was successful and all 155 passengers and crew survived with only minor injuries.
To this day the now-retired pilot says when he flies “other passengers often tell me, ‘I feel so much safer now that you’re on the airplane with us.’ I’m not quite sure why they do, but I’m just glad they do.”
The Miracle on the Hudson, as the New York press dubbed it, is now the subject of Sully, a biopic from director Clint Eastwood and star Tom Hanks.
The pilot says, “Watching the film, especially in the IMAX format makes you feel like you’re on that flight with us,” but doesn’t bring back the anxiety of the day for him.
“Enough time has passed,” he says, “and I’ve had enough time to process this and make it a part of me and not something that just happened to me. I don’t have quite the same emotions I had during that day, that flight, but the very first time I saw this film with my family it was a very emotional experience for all of us. The second time I watched the film I was able to take it in as more of a usual movie going experience and see some of the things I wasn’t able to see the first time.”
As for having Oscar winner Hanks portraying him Sullenberger says, “We talked in some detail about the script and the obligation he felt to get it right because after the film was completed I would be going back to living my life and would have to live with however he portrayed me on screen.”
Now that the movie is finished he laughs, “It is a weird experience to see someone else onscreen portraying you and speaking words you actually spoke.”
Sullenberger’s story doesn’t end with the landing. In the years since he has been named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential Heroes and Icons, written bestselling books and become a spokesman for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. It’s a whirlwind that changed his life forever.
“My family and I think of this story in two phases. There was the trauma of that flight itself and then the trauma of suddenly becoming a world recognized public figure. Once my name had been discovered by the press an onslaught, a tsunami of attention happened very quickly. Within a few months we had received 50,000 communications. Emails, letters, requests. The press was camped outside our house for ten days. It was just overwhelming. It very quickly required finding a new way of living this life as public figures. We had to become more complete versions of ourselves to be able to do that.”
“Life is easier in the air,” sighs First Officer Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart). Easy? Not when the plane you are piloting is subject to a bird strike that disables two of the engines. That’s the story told in “Sully,” Clint Eastwood’s real-life account of ‘Sully’ Sullenberger’s miraculous landing of a disabled plane on New York’s Hudson River.
Tom Hanks plays the title character, a pilot with 42 years experience. “It’s been my life,” he says of aviation, “my whole life.” January 15, 2009 started off as a routine day for the seasoned pilot. As the captain of US Airways Flight 1549 he left New York’s LaGuardia Airport for a stopover at Charlotte Douglas International Airport when his plane was disabled by a flock of birds who flew into the engines, knocking out the plane’s navigating system. In just under four minutes Sully assessed the situation and, realizing there was no time to turn back, made the decision to land the craft on the Hudson River. “I’ve delivered one million passengers over 40 years,” he says later, “but will be charged on 208 seconds.” The risky landing was successful and all 155 passengers and crew survived with only minor injuries. “It’s been a while since New York had news this good,” says one airline official, “particularly with an airplane in it.”
The film dramatizes the landing but spends most of its time in the aftermath, the resultant onslaught of publicity and some very difficult questions from a National Transport Safety Board investigative panel.
“Sully” is a slight but entertaining movie. Because we know how it ends Eastwood’s attempts to create tension by and large don’t work. Its you-are-there recreation of the landing is exciting when it places the viewer in the plummeting metal tube—the mantra “Brace for impact” will forever be branded on your brain—melodramatic when it hits the water. It’s the centerpiece of an otherwise movie talky movie.
The ditching of the plane may get your pulse racing but it is the personal story that will stay with you. As Sully Hanks is dignity personified. Questions gnaw at him in the days leading up to the inquiry, causing sleepless nights and mild friction with his wife Lorraine (Laura Linney) but he remains steadfast. It’s old school heroism and it looks good on Hanks.
As a function of the story, but also, I suspect, as a preference of the filmmaker, technology is downplayed throughout. When the NTSB uses computer simulations to attack Sully, Skiles, who has most of the good lines in the film, says, “They’re playing Pac-Man while we’re the ones flying the plane.” The point being made is that computers lack the human touch but it does feel a bit like Grandpa complaining that the new fangled television remote is too complicated.
“Sully” is a well-constructed, occasionally exciting old-fashioned story of heroism in the face of modern cynicism.
Broad vocabulary, grammar and syntax are the domain of humans, but science tells us millions of species communicate by using body language and intuitive calls. Chimps can be taught to sign simple phrases and elephants have individual sounds to signify danger and emotions, but complex storytelling is left to us humans.
Unless you’re at the movies. This year, theatres have been overrun by hordes of anthropomorphic animals. From Zootopia and Nine Lives to The Secret Lives of Pets and The Jungle Book, animals have been talking up a storm.
This weekend The Wild Life becomes the latest animated film to tell a story from the point of view of wildlife. A riff on Daniel Defoe’s classic tale of survival, Robinson Crusoe, the film’s narrator is a bright red parrot named Mak (David Howard).
In this version, Crusoe crash lands on an island where animals rule and must work with the chatty Mak, a tapir named Rosie and Kiki the kingfisher to save their home from an invasion by some savage felines.
Disney has the grandest tradition of talking animals — Mickey Mouse to The Little Mermaid’s Sebastian the Crab and Jiminy Cricket to name just a few — but they are not the only ones putting words into our pet’s mouths.
Flushed Away comes from Aardman, the animation company behind Wallace and Gromit.
The story of an upper class pet mouse flushed down the loo by a bullying rat features great animation, an all-star British voice cast and something that all kids love — toilet humour. It swirls along at quite a clip, effortlessly mixing literate verbal and visual jokes — we glimpse a cockroach reading Kafka’s Metamorphosis — with potty humour that’ll appeal to the kids.
G-Force’s talking crime fighting guinea pigs come courtesy of über-producer Jerry Bruckheimer. The voice cast includes not one, but two Oscar winners, which may be an indication that the recession has finally taken root in Hollywood.
When the best gig Penelope Cruz can get involves saying lines like “Oh, I have to save his fur again?” you know times are tight for A-listers.
Pixar’s Ratatouille is an unusual cross between America’s Next Top Chef and Willard. Remy (voiced by Patton Oswalt) is a sophisticated rodent with a highly developed sense of smell and a wicked sense of humour.
While his rat brothers and sisters are happy to simply survive by scavenging through the garbage, Remy aspires to culinary greatness. Ratatouille does something no other film has been able to — not that a lot of have tried — it makes rats cute, lovable even.
On the live action front, Zookeeper, or as any Kevin James movie could be called, “Fat Guy Falling Down… A Lot,” plays like Dr. Doolittle if Dr. Doolittle was a romantic comedy for kids. Luckily the animals come to the rescue. Luckily the monkey from The Hangover 2 has some of the film’s best lines. Adam Sandler provides the monkey voice, but also listen for the beastly vocal work of Cher, Nick Nolte, Don Rickles and Sylvester Stallone.
Early on in “American Sniper,” the latest film from director Clint Eastwood, it is explained that the world is made up of three types, sheep, wolves and sheepdogs. Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) is a sheepdog, a man predisposed to protecting those around him, whether it is with his fists or with his preferred method weapon of choice, a McMillan TAC-338 Sniper Rifle.
Rodeo rider Kyle is prompted join the Navy SEALS after watching scenes of terror on the news. His natural ability with a gun makes him a deadly sniper and soon he racks up a kill record that earns him the nickname The Legend. Protecting his brothers-in-arms comes with a heavy price, and soon his two realities—his family life stateside with his wife Taya (Sienna Miller) and the world of war—become confused. After four tours of duty and over one hundred confirmed kills, he must adapt to being a father, husband and Navy SEAL.
The first twenty minutes of “American Sniper” are captivating. Eastwood builds tension in the opening minutes and maintains it through a flashback that sets the stage for the action that is to come. It’s crackling, riveting moviemaking that suggests greatness to come.
Unfortunately Eastwood lets it go slack. Like the old saying goes, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” and Eastwood dutifully does so, staging sniper scene after sniper scene, broken up by the more personal story of Kyle’s PTSD.
Some of the war scenes have impact. A firefight during a sand storm is harrowing, but too often the marksman scenes are repetitive and without any real dramatic heft.
On the human side of things Cooper does a good job at subtly playing out Kyle’s inner life. When his wife says, rightly, “If you think this war isn’t changing you, you’re wrong,” Cooper internalizes his feelings and the result is an effectively played and smart representation of how war affects soldiers without any unnecessary histrionics but without this central performance, there wouldn’t be much left here.
“American Sniper” is based on the true story of an American hero but feels like it only tells half the story. War and heroes are complicated things and the ever-growing understanding of PTSD isn’t deepened by soap opera dialogue like, “Even when you’re here, you’re not here.” Despite Cooper’s efforts to humanize Kyle, Eastwood has made a movie about an emblem, not a man.
Overall the movie feels like a well intentioned but shallow salute to the men and women who go to war.
For it’s rotating selection of Four Seasons hits like “Sherry” and “Walk Like a Man,” “Jersey Boys” could be called a jukebox musical.
But not only for that reason.
Like a coin-operated jukebox that relies on push buttons, stacks of vinyl and electric inner workings to make music, “Jersey Boys” feels like a mechanical retelling of the popular Broadway show.
The story begins in 1951 Belleville, New Jersey and follows childhood friends Frankie Valli (John Lloyd Young who won a Tony for his performance of Valli on stage), Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza) and Nick Massi (Michael Lomenda) from the streets to the studio and with the addition of songwriter and keyboardist Bob Gaudio (Erich Bergen), from clubs to concert halls as the Four Seasons, one of the biggest selling acts in rock history. Hits like Big Girls Don’t Cry, Walk Like A Man and Can’t Take My Eyes Off You kept them at the top of the charts but ego, in-fighting and money troubles blew them apart.
Clint Eastwood has turned his camera on the Broadway hit, creating a fourth-wall-breaking musical that sticks to the basics of the original show. They were a proto-boy band—imagine New Kids on the Block without a drum machine—rubbing shoulders with the mob (in the form of Angelo ‘Gyp’ DeCarlo played by Christopher Walken) while presenting a clean-cut image that masked their scrappy real lives.
Eastwood sets up the story of the band well enough. From their hard scrapple beginnings to the height of their success, it’s a rags to riches story and when it focuses on the four band members it works. Unfortunately it takes a cast of characters to tell the tale and Eastwood seems content to allow his supporting actors to go off the charts theatrical.
Kathrine Narducci as Mary Delgado, Frankie’s wife and the woman who advised him on the sexiest spelling of his stage name (replacing a “y” with an “I” in Valli), for instance, is given a juicy scene near the beginning of the film only to allow it to spin out of control into a caricature of a femme fatale.
Speaking of stereotypes, Mike Doyle seems to be doing his best Paul Lynde impression as producer Bob Crewe.
By the time the end credits roll it’s clear that the movie is a caricature of a real life story. Nothing feels completely genuine, as if the theatricality of the stage version bled into the film.
There are some lovely set pieces that evoke an idealized 1950s New Jersey. In them the local beat cops know everybody’s name and girls at bars fall instantly in love with doo wop band singers. It feels like a postcard to the idea of what the 1950s and 60s were like. Eastwood has smoothed away all the hard edges, leaving only a finely polished “Happy Days” back lot style vision of the era.
What remains unchanged is the music. The songs are undeniably catchy and well performed by a cast, three quarters of which come from the various incarnations of the stage show. They are earworms that sound authentic, by and large thanks to Young who perfectly mimics Valli’s soaring multi-octave falsetto voice.
The bulk of the movie, unfortunately, doesn’t soar as high as Young’s voice. The Broadway show is basically a rock concert with a story. The big screen treatment requires more. As game as the actors are, they aren’t supported with enough real humanity in the script to make the audience care about them as people. The songs will stay in your head, the characters won’t.
