Personal: January 2009 Archives

Doug shot this video after lunch in Santa Monica over Labor Day weekend. I just got around to posting it today...

I thoroughly enjoyed it. Doug and our friend much less so. David Denby:

The movie was not written for Eastwood, but it still seems to be all about him--his past characters, his myth, his old role as a dispenser of raw justice. Growling and muttering, Eastwood appears to be offering a satirical critique: this hoarse-voiced, glaring, absurdly nasty old man is what Dirty Harry might have become. The movie, which Eastwood directed with his usual vigor, has plenty of violent scenes, but it's mostly a rueful comedy of enlightenment: by degrees, Walt comes to admire his neighbors; he realizes that he has more in common with their quiet self-discipline than with the hollow consumerism of his sons and their grasping kids. Walt's final acts in the neighborhood struggles come as a shock, but, in retrospect, they make perfect sense as Eastwood's personal renunciation of vengeance and also as a kind of down payment on an altered American future.