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
#23 in my ranking of Clint Eastwood's films. The second half of Clint Eastwood's Iwo Jima epic, Letters from Iwo Jima is the first film in his career that I'm tempted to label as mawkish. I think it may be the music. Wonderfully acted with a much clearer narrative throughline than its predecessor, it's the… Continue reading Letters from Iwo Jima
#20 in my ranking of Clint Eastwood's films. This might be the most ambitious project that Clint Eastwood ever took on as a director. It was so ambitious, actually, that it became two movies. He wanted to show both sides of the fighting at Iwo Jima, but there was simply too much material and the… Continue reading Flags of Our Fathers
#28 in my ranking of Clint Eastwood's films. Do you ever see a movie that feels small and effective in that small space, and then it expands ineffectively into a larger space and just kind of loses itself? That's what I feel about Heartbreak Ridge. I wasn't completely in love with the film for its… Continue reading Heartbreak Ridge
#9 in my ranking of Sam Peckinpah's filmography. With The Killer Elite, it felt like Sam Peckinpah had simply lost the ability to make a movie, not just a good movie, but a movie period. Unfocused, lethargic, and pretty uniformly unentertaining or enlightening, it was a once talented director simply lost in material he didn't… Continue reading Cross of Iron
David Vining, Author 