Movie thoughts and fiction updates.
#8 in my ranking of Clint Eastwood's films. This might be the most stylistically atypical film Clint Eastwood made in his entire filmography. It's a cross between a combat film and a character piece, and the combat part is filmed with surprising energy by Eastwood. I mean, he obviously didn't have the camera in his… Continue reading American Sniper
#10 in my ranking of Clint Eastwood's films. Clint Eastwood could have retired after Unforgiven, and I don't think anyone would have blamed him. It was a pinnacle of his career that he was unlikely to ever match. However, Eastwood is a workhorse, and he put out another film the next year from a script… Continue reading A Perfect World
#9 in my ranking of Clint Eastwood's films. Clint Eastwood so wanted to make this film that he agreed to make the cop movie The Rookie right afterwards for the studio. A film about moviemaking (almost never a great financial prospect) where Eastwood does an imitation of John Huston? A story about a hunter who… Continue reading White Hunter Black Heart
#11 in my ranking of Clint Eastwood's films. This is just really well-made exploitation, isn't it? I'm not really complaining because Clint Eastwood, in his second outing as director, brings a professionalism and sense of class to both the directing and acting that the basic script doesn't seem to deserve, taking a simple tale of… Continue reading High Plains Drifter
#1 in my ranking of the Dirty Harry franchise. Here we see the influence of Fritz Lang's M decades after its release. There's the emphasis on process and the absolutely insane antagonist serial killer. Where there are differences are the obvious setting changes, but also the focus on an individual investigator and how the official… Continue reading Dirty Harry
David Vining, Author 