Clint Eastwood

Thursday, Feb 18, 2010 1:20 AM UTC

Lakeside Retirement Movie Club: “Dirty Harry”

Join my mom and her friends at the retirement home as they debate salad dressing, Clint Eastwood and the '70s

By Deven McKay

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Close-up profile shot of Clint Eastwood as Harry PHOTOGRAPHS TO BE USED SOLELY FOR ADVERTISING, PROMOTION, PUBLICITY OR REVIEWS OF THIS SPECIFIC MOTION PICTURE AND TO REMAIN THE PROPERTY OF THE STUDIO. NOT FOR SALE OR REDISTRIBUTION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Mom: Harrumph.

Me: Why you pouting, Mom?

Mom: ::sigh::

Louise: It’s my fault, Deven.

Mom: I’m fine. ::sigh::

Me: I grew up with that “I’m fine.” You’re not fine.

Mom: I am too.

Me: Miss Louise, what happened?

Louise: I picked the movie this week. Betty was in charge of directing the flier. She got a bit confused.

Mom: I was not confused. You were confused when you told me.

Louise: I didn’t realize there was a mix-up until I saw the flier in the elevator yesterday.

Mom: Now I look like a fool.

Louise: Now Betty, you do not. It was a mistake anyone could have made.

Mom: You should have realized something was wrong when I told you that was Deven’s favorite story when she was a child.

Louise: I might have if Deven wasn’t such an unusual girl. I could see how “Dirty Harry” might have been her favorite story as a kid.

Me: Are you talking about “Harry the Dirty Dog”? I did love that book.

Mom: Hmm. So if you really think about it, it’s Deven’s fault. Deven, you shouldn’t be so weird.

Me: Nature or nurture, I don’t see how you’re going to completely escape culpability on this one.

Mom: Pffffttt … nature, nurture, another made-up PBS thing. Thank you, Louise, I feel better.

****

Tansy: Wow. Shooting right off the bat. This is going to be good.

Louise: Look how young he looks, not at all like he looks on the salad dressing.

Me: I think you’re thinking of Paul Newman.

Tansy: I think about Paul Newman all the time.

Thelma: He’s dead.

Tansy: Well, I’m not.

Mom: Our mayor probably has $100,000 in a bottom desk drawer.

Louise: If he didn’t, he could just call Bill Gates. He’s very paleontological too.

Me: I think you mean philanthropic and, again, it’s Paul Newman with the salad dressing, not Clint Eastwood.

Louise: Don’t be silly. Clint Eastwood didn’t invent computers.

Me: …

Tansy: I don’t want him to pay. I want a blood bath!

Mom: At my last retirement home we had a man that wandered around looking like he was in an excited state. Turns out he was just stealing fruit from the dining room.

Louise: Is that Huggy Bear? I bet this is where he got his start.

Tansy: When do we meet the dog?

Mom: There’s no dog. It’s Deven’s fault.

Tansy: Woohoo! Shooting! Wow, he’s just firing bullets into the crowd. They don’t let them do that on “Law and Order.”

Mom: That’s because the “CSI Miami” people would get them.

Thelma: Say you’re feeling lucky! Say you’re feeling lucky! Oh. He’s not feeling lucky. Damn it.

****

Tansy: He’s getting a new partner. I bet this is where the dog comes in.

Mom: There’s no dog, Tansy.

Tansy: The chief just said his new partner is Chico Gonzalez. It’s going to be a police Chihuahua!

Mom: For Pete’s sake, Tansy. Chico is that Spanish man in the room with them.

Me: I want to see a movie about a police Chihuahua. They could call it “Bloody Ankles.”

Mom: Dirty Harry is a bit like you, Thelma. He hates everybody.

Thelma: I don’t mind being called Dirty Thelma. Sort of has a ring to it.

Tansy: That boy with the ice cream will never know it was his lucky day.

Mom: Boobies!

Me: Bob’s not here. Does anyone else need to go to the bathroom?

Thelma: They’d have to be better boobies than that to make me need to tinkle.

Me: I’m sorry I asked now.

Mom: Is that Bruce Wayne that’s going to jump off the roof?

Louise: No, everybody looked like Batman in the ’70s.

****

Tansy: He keeps looking into windows. Maybe he’s a Peeping Tom.

Thelma: Don’t ever answer the door naked. I’m talking to you, Tansy.

Tansy: Then don’t ring my bell after 9.

Mom: This is exciting and all, but why wouldn’t they just stand by the building exits and nab him then?

Louise: The way I remember it, this movie made a lot more sense in the ’70s.

Mom: Remember how many people were getting buried alive back then? It was a fad.

Thelma: It’s a fad around here that people just get buried.

Tansy: I’m going to see what I can hide in my sock.

Thelma: That’s all we need, Tansy, you wandering around in ripped-up knee highs with steak knives poking out.

Mom: Rats, he didn’t get mugged.

Tansy: Maybe this is the part where the dog saves him.

Louise: There is no dog, Tansy.

Mom: I bet this is a setup.

Thelma: This is a lot like a “Rockford Files” I saw. Except it’s not as funny and doesn’t make as much sense.

Tansy: Shoot him! Stab him! Sic the dog on him!

Thelma: Calm down, Tansy. Sooner or later the guy will die.

Tansy: Well, sooner or later we’re all going to die. I just want to see this guy die.

****

Mom: ::gasp:: He’s free? Oh, he’s going to have to kill him now!

Me: Boobies!

Thelma: Nope, still don’t have to pee. Why is he paying that guy to beat him? Is he a pervert?

Louise: He’s a pervert, but he’s having that guy beat him up to make it look like the salad-dressing guy is stalking him.

Me: That’s not … oh, never mind.

Tansy: Did you see that? He just whacked that guy over the head with a bottle! WHACK!

Louise: Kids aren’t that stupid. They would know this guy was a weirdo. And nowadays the kids wouldn’t be singing “Old McDonald,” they’d be singing some kind of horrible song about lady butts.

Mom: If they had “CSI Miami” back then, this would have all been over with in the first half hour.

Me: OK, so let me get this straight: Harry is a rogue kind of cop. Shoots into crowds, doesn’t follow orders, antagonized the bad guy, messed up an arrest that resulted in the guy going free after he murdered several people, but the city of San Francisco is picking him to make the second money drop?

Mom: San Francisco is kind of a crazy city, Deven. That’s probably why they picked it to shoot the movie in. That, and this was the ’70s. They did stuff like this in the ’70s.

Me: Why do you think that?

Mom: There weren’t computers and cable everywhere back then. You could do stupid stuff and it wouldn’t end up on TMZ.

Tansy: He jumped on top of the bus! Shoot him! Shoot him!

Thelma: Now where is he going? Is this a gold mine?

Tansy: SHOOT HIM! SHOOT HIM!

Thelma: If we get lucky, maybe it will be a murder-suicide.

Tansy: HE SHOT HIM!

Mom: Five shots or six? Didn’t he shoot about 20 times already?

Louise: Well he’s finally dead.

Mom: Those kids are going to need therapy. That would have made a better movie.

Tansy: Ohhhhhh … I bet that’s where the dog comes in. They’ll have the kids do that doggie therapy.

Mom: ::rolls eyes:: Yes, Tansy, that’s where the dog comes in.

Tansy: Did the salad-dressing guy donate the dogs?

Deven McKay writes for Open Salon. More Deven McKay.

Friday, Dec 11, 2009 3:16 AM UTC

Clint Eastwood’s “Invictus”: Can rugby heal a nation?

The director's sports drama stars Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela and Matt Damon as the world's oldest teenager

By Stephanie Zacharek

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UMD-07142-v03r MORGAN FREEMAN as Nelson Mandela in Warner Bros. Picturesâ and Spyglass Entertainmentâs drama âInvictus,â a Warner Bros. Pictures release.(Credit: Keith Bernstein)

Even though it’s based on real events, there are moments in Clint Eastwood’s “Invictus” that seem as artificial as the thatch of bright dyed-blond hair on Matt Damon’s head. Damon’s character here is Francois Pienaar, the captain of the South African national rugby team, the Springboks, which made a historic leap for its country when it won the World Cup in 1995. In our first glimpse of him, he’s a bulked-up lug of a guy taking up real estate on his mother’s living-room couch, accepting the super-nutritious power shake she’s concocted for him. With his button nose and beefy build, he looks as if he’s auditioning for the title of World’s Oldest Teenager.

Francois will be instrumental in a plan hatched by then-recently elected President Nelson Mandela, played here by the aggressively noble Morgan Freeman. The country’s black population — the majority — hates the nearly all-white Springboks, seeing them as a relic of apartheid; they attend Springbok matches, but they all too happily cheer for the opposing team. The country’s National Sports Council is even making moves to abolish the team, but Mandela intervenes. Wouldn’t it be more unifying, he wonders, to make all the people of his country, black and white, love the Springboks? And so he woos Francois, drawing him into a Springbok image makeover that includes sending the team into townships to play ball with the impoverished black kids who live there.

And that, in a more succinct nutshell than the rambling filmmaker Eastwood would ever give us, is the gist of “Invictus,” a mildly rousing and reasonably satisfying picture about one man’s efforts to mend the rifts among his countrymen. “Invictus” is much longer than it needs to be: Like most of Eastwood’s movies, it drags when it needs to sprint. The first half-hour in particular is a slog, a Mandela primer in which Freeman gets to show off how suitable he is to play a great world leader. He makes much use of the patented sly, witty smile, turning it on as if on cue, and imparts words of wisdom in gently rolling, master-thespian tones. Admittedly, after you’ve been the voice of God weighing in on the life-and-death saga of penguins, there probably aren’t many heights left to scale. Playing a figure as lauded and beloved as Nelson Mandela is an understandable next step.

But if you can get through that first half-hour of setup, “Invictus” becomes both more ideologically resonant and more fun. Once Freeman has established that he’s playing a Great Man, he relaxes a bit and starts to play a human being. And even Damon’s hair begins to look less comical. Eastwood is often lauded for his great artistry as a filmmaker, though more often than not he’s merely trotting out hoary clichés (both thematic and visual) and cobbling them together in rickety constructions that vaguely resemble a grand, old-Hollywood style of filmmaking. Eastwood’s style isn’t interesting; what is interesting about him, particularly in more recent movies like “Gran Torino,” is his B-movie-style bluntness when it comes to social issues. In “Gran Torino,” he played a retired Detroit autoworker who was at first dismayed to find his nice white neighborhood invaded by Hmong immigrants. And then gradually, he gets to know his neighbors as people and realizes they have the same sturdy values of family and community that younger white people — even members of his own family — have lost. He also realizes he just likes them.

Is that idea blindly conservative or socially progressive? It’s both, which is why, when he’s not making dreary prestige pictures like “Changeling,” Eastwood’s sensibility (if not his color-by-numbers filmmaking) offers some intriguing puzzles and contradictions. “Invictus” is deeply conventional in many ways: There are places where Eastwood and his regular cinematographer Tom Stern let the camera linger on an image or a face (usually Freeman’s) for too long, the better to allow us to drink in what they perceive as its greatness — and a little greatness goes a long way.

But for a picture with so much invested in its staunch sense of social justice, “Invictus” ultimately goes down not as medicine but as entertainment. The script, by Anthony Peckham (adapted from John Carlin’s book, “Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation”), makes its points clearly and succinctly, alluding just often enough to Mandela’s 27-year imprisonment under the repressive white South African government. Eastwood isn’t trying to give us a primer on South African history, thank God. But he does make use of bold shorthand to convey a sense of the conflicts and adjustments that South African citizens have had to struggle with. At one point he shows Francois’ parents (played by Patrick Lyster and Penny Downie), sitting placidly in front of the television news, making cheerfully dismissive comments about Mandela’s policies as their black housekeeper (Sibongile Nojila) silently irons in the background — when she looks up at the television screen, what she sees there obviously means something very different to her. As a device, that shot is as obvious as hell; then again, apartheid wasn’t subtle, and its scars haven’t been easy to smooth over.

Eastwood eases up considerably when it comes time to show us the big decisive match against the New Zealand team. He doesn’t shoot the game in a way that would help outsiders understand it, but at least he keeps things moving. By this point, Freeman has completely eased into the performance. The movie doesn’t have to stress that Mandela was never much of a rugby fan. And so, in the picture, when he allows himself to be pulled out of a meeting of international bigwigs to be informed of a crucial Springbok victory, Freeman plays the moment with the grace of an unselfconscious, excited kid: By that point, Mandela has been caught up in the thrill of the sport — it’s no longer just a diplomatic tool. Damon, too, comes to look more comfortable in his role as an overgrown galoot, and he adds some shading to it: As Francois becomes swept up in Mandela’s plan, his enthusiasm makes him almost physically buoyant — his muscles no longer seem to weigh him down.

And at the beginning of that final match, we’ll see Francois’ parents standing with their housekeeper, singing the newly adopted South African national anthem. The father struggles with the words, but at least he’s trying. “Invictus” is a strange piece of work. At its worst, it’s ploddingly inspirational. But Eastwood, regardless of what his personal politics are, does seem to be using this episode from recent history as a way of reminding us that even social changes that appear to descend upon us rapidly have, in reality, been years in the making. Problems don’t fix themselves overnight, or without effort. There’s no point at which a society, or a country, can say, “We’re finished changing now.”

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Stephanie Zacharek is a senior writer for Salon Arts & Entertainment. More Stephanie Zacharek.