Clint Eastwood came about Changeling, a period piece true story about a child kidnapping in late 1920s Los Angeles, as a director for hire. His skill is there, but not necessarily his passion. Angelina Jolie stars as the single mother whose son disappears, a working class mom who looks like a million buck under her dowdy frocks (because she’s Angelie Jolie, of course). The police are little help, and when they finally “reunite” her with the errant boy, they respond to her quite legitimate complaint that the kid they returned is not her son by tossing her in the loony bin. It turns out the women’s wing doubles as a prison for inconvenient witnesses and problem dames, and they don’t even need to hold a trial! It’s a terrific looking film and a pretty fascinating true story, and the muted-trumpet score recalls Chinatown, another period piece about corruption in old Los Angeles. But the most gripping section of the film involves a hard-bitten cop (Michael Kelly) following a questionable lead from a genuinely shaken runaway boy to the chilling discovery of the graves of serial-killer’s child victims. Clint seems far more engaged in the ambivalence of this tough-guy cop who is unsure whether the kid’s telling the truth (and surely hoping that he’s making this story up), almost brutal in his brusque treatment until he’s faced with the terrible truth and his own guilt about adding to this young boy’s ordeal. The film earned three Oscar nominations (for Jolie’s portrayal of the long-suffering but undaunted mom, for its Art Direction and Cinematography).

Read my DVD review on MSN here.

I Served the King of England is the latest from Czech New Wave legend Jiri Menzel. He channels the big-hearted spirit and satirical playfulness of his classic comedies (like Larks on a String) into this deft little satire of a big-hearted opportunist (Ivan Barnev) in 1930s Czechoslovakia who sides with the so-called master race (one that looks down on him) over his countrymen for love and money: he’s smitten with a German Fraulein (Julia Jentsch). Menzel treats this cheerful little man more as an innocent than a traitor and Barnev plays him as a silent movie clown with hearty sexual appetites. He’s willfully blind to his moral compromise as a young man but faces up to his actions as an old man. It’s funny and heartbreaking and there is a joy to Menzel’s filmmaking.
Read more »

Dirty Harry delivered justice from the barrel of a .44 Magnum

Clint Eastwood was a Western icon for a fistful of spaghetti Westerns and cynical American copycats. When he strapped on his .44 Magnum to stride the streets of San Francisco as Inspector Harry Callahan, known to the squad as Dirty Harry, Eastwood turned his frontier persona into an urban cowboy on the mean streets of our urban world.

He didn’t get his nickname for hygienic reasons. Everyone offers a different explanation for it: His partners have a habit of landing in the hospital or in the morgue. He’s been known to bend the law in the pursuit of justice. He’s an equal-opportunity bigot.

Harry has the best explanation: “Every dirty job that comes along. …”

In Dirty Harry, Callahan tracks a psychopath with a sniper rifle trying to extort the city for a small fortune (at least by 1971 standards). The killer signs his ransom demands “Scorpio,” a not-so-veiled reference to the Zodiac killer, who terrorized the San Francisco Bay area for years. The real-life serial killer eluded capture, but on the big screen we get a pure law-and-order fantasy, and closure from the end of a barrel.

Harry Callahan was made to order for an audience nervous about escalating urban violence in the ’70s, a go-it-alone John Wayne cowboy for the modern era. Despite comments about his “long hair” from fellow cops, he’s as square as they come. And as ornery.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he growls. “‘Did he fire six shots or only five?’ Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself a question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?”

That’s as much dialogue as Eastwood ever delivers in a single scene. He tends to let his eyes do the emoting and his gun do the talking. He doesn’t let distractions like civil rights and rule of law stop him from delivering justice to the scum on the streets. The film’s tagline says it all: “You don’t assign him to murder cases, you just turn him loose.”

In real life, we’d be terrified of Harry and the loose cannon he calls a handgun. On the big screen, we applaud his frontier justice on the mean streets of our modern urban America.

Originally published as part of the “MSN Cadillac” series.