Clint eastwood

Sunday

Bill Kauffman

My biggest regrets

Regrets, I've had a few, but unlike Mr. "My Way," mine are enough to mention. (Didn’t Hoboken Frank at least regret slapping Ava Gardner or hanging out with Joey Bishop?) “When you see the end of things coming close and staring at you,” as Jason Robards tells his son in Ray Bradbury’s filmic adaptation of his own novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes, “it’s not what you’ve done that you regret — it’s what you didn’t do.” (For good or ill, cataracts prevent me from seeing the coming end.) Surely some missed opportunities are worth missing. For instance, I doubt if any of the awestruck Lou Reed fans whom the rock’n’roll coprophage famously invited to defecate into his mouth regretted turning down the chance.

regrets

Tuesday

Amber Duke

Remembering Toby Keith

Country music star Toby Keith died Monday night at the age of sixty-two after battling stomach cancer for a year and a half. Keith’s music career spanned three decades and he racked up twenty #1s, seven Grammy nominations, nearly two dozen combined wins across the ACMs, CMAs and AMAs — and was given the Country Icon Award at the 2023 People’s Choice Country Awards. In 2021, President Donald Trump awarded Keith the National Medal of the Arts. He’s a member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame.  Toby Keith’s legacy goes beyond his success on the music charts, and he was no stranger to criticism.

toby keith

Monday

Nicky Otis Smith

John Wayne behind the blue line

Stars don’t sell movies anymore. They’re even becoming hard to distinguish. Which Chris is in Guardians of the Galaxy and which one plays Captain America? Is Emma Stone in Harry Potter or Cruella? Interchangeable entertainers are nothing new, and I’m sure moviegoers in the 1940s got the Roberts Walker, Taylor, Young and Montgomery mixed up, but those names still sold the movie. Why would anyone pay money to see something called The Clock in 1945 unless it starred Robert Walker and Judy Garland? Could a movie really be that good unless it had Bette Davis or Marlon Brando, Eddie Murphy, Bruce Willis or even Adam Sandler?

Wayne

Monday

Alex Perez

Eternal Eastwood

No other actor epitomizes traditional masculinity and classic cool quite like Clint Eastwood. He long ago ceased being human and transformed into the American Man. When you watch an Eastwood movie, your understanding of Clint as the ultimate symbol of a bygone America is so potent that an otherwise mediocre movie like Gran Torino feels greater than the sum of its parts because of his mere presence. This is what an American man is supposed to look and sound like, you think, as Clint snarls and puts up his dukes. These young whippersnappers, they’re no good now, you hear. Which is to say that when you watch one of his films, you’re not watching the actor become a different character, but rather hoping to see ‘Clint Eastwood’.

eastwood

Wednesday

Stephen L. Miller

Why is everyone pretending reporters never sleep with sources?

No filmmaker knows quite how to push the collective buttons of the American media like Clint Eastwood. He does it purposefully, deliberately and even at almost-90 years of age, artfully. His choice to release a new biopic about Atlanta-bombing-hero-turned-suspect-turned-victim Richard Jewell at this particular moment is a blatant shot across the bow at a corporate media that sees itself as the flawless hero in a tale of them versus Donald Trump in a struggle for the American soul. The media has seemingly played right into the narrative trap Eastwood has set, by casting themselves as the real victim of a vicious smear machine in the story of Richard Jewell.

richard jewell

Sunday

Dominic Green

Feeling lucky, pops?

No one plays Clint Eastwood better than Clint, but many people could direct a Clint film better than Clint himself. The strengths of Eastwood as actor — a steely isolation and an unremitting eye for the right profile — became the weaknesses of Eastwood the director. The actor’s ability to slow time and stop the action so that everyone waits for his next squint, a trick exploited so cleverly by Sergio Leone, became the director’s solipsism and self-regard. As Leone recognized, Eastwood’s gnomic emotions and grunted speech were an asset to the spare machismo of the Western. The Westerns in which Eastwood auto-directed as lead actor remain excellent exercises in genre: High Plains Drifter (1973), The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), Pale Rider (1985), Unforgiven (1992).

clint eastwood mule