The Scoop: 1985, R, Directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Clint Eastwood and Michael Moriarity

Tagline: Hell has come home.

Summary Capsule: The Man With No Name saves a mining settlement with no hope

Heather’s Rating: Two out of ten overblown egos

Heather’s Review: I’ve been home for a visit for two weeks and, even wrenched from the bosom of my beloved Netflix account, I’ve been able to get in quite a lot of movies. The beauty of cable (which I am too miserly to buy for myself) is that there’s always a movie on. Last Sunday ABC was running a marathon of movies featuring Hollywood’s iconic heroes. My nephew and I were just being lazy and hanging out for the afternoon. We caught the end of Two Mules For Sister Sara and made the unfortunate decision to watch Pale Rider, which came on right after.

I reviewed TMFSS a while back and, having never seen a Clint Eastwood movie before, I fell in love and decided I had to watch everything that he’s been in. Except for Every Which Way But Loose. I just don’t think I can get behind that. I should have gone with something tried and true like Dirty Harry or The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Instead I got stuck with a shameless Clint Eastwood vanity project.

Pale Rider (an allusion the Biblical description of Death upon a pale horse) tells the story of a small settlement of miners who are being bullied out of their land by a greedy landowner and his son (who looks like a cross between Elijah Wood and Toby Maguire). Their salvation comes in the form of a nameless preacher who shows up while one of the miners is ganged up on by six of the landowner’s thugs. Our hero, known only as “Preacher”, halts the attack by pulling out some fancy karate gimmicks with a hickory axe handle and handily dispatching of the group. Hull (Michael Moriarity) thanks Preacher and asks him to come back with him and help the miners. Preacher agrees and sets in motion a wave of awe and google-eyes from everyone he encounters.

Honestly, folks, I don’t know where to start. I knew my nephew and I were in trouble when, five minutes into the movie, we were treated to a young girl burying her dog and saying The Lord’s Prayer over the fresh grave, inserting her own commentary after every line. She says things like “The Lord is my shepard. I shall not want. But I do want”. I don’t know what Clint was going for, but the result was just forced and weird and the audience has to suffer through a whole prayer’s worth. We would have changed channels at this point, but this was already proving to be excellent fodder for the MST3K treatment.

This Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Preacher flick relies on Clint Eastwood’s ability to be awesome to carry the goofy scenes and implausible romantic triangle involving the aforementioned fourteen-year old girl and her mother. I wish I were joking, people. Hardly a scene went by that didn’t have my nephew and I cringing or guffawing. Halfway in we watched Preacher take a sledgehammer to a man’s cashews and then help him back to his horse. The man, who is the landowner’s main muscle, thereafter becomes “good” and helps Preacher throughout the rest of the film, leading me to believe that the man is either a complete idiot or is into some seriously weird kink.

I can’t begin to describe the stomach-shrinking creepiness of the scene where the fourteen-year old professes her love to Preacher and tries to seduce him. Yes, you read that correctly and no, I will not relive my horrible memories by explaining. Might I add that the scene begins with the girl saying to him “This is where I buried my dog”? I don’t know what drove you to think up that scene, Mr. Eastwood, but I know that there’s professional help available for what ails ‘ya.

All of this was so distracting that I can’t even recall whether or not the acting was any good. It wasn’t distractingly bad, except in the case of Megan (the…erm…driven teenaged daughter). Maybe Clint’s intention was to make everything and everyone else so secondary that the audience would focus only on him, hoping for some bloodshed to break the tedium and idiocy. Whatever the case may be, I think I’ll be steering clear of any future films directed by Mr. Eastwood unless I get some very convincing arguments for them (and a dose of Vicodin).

Clint Eastwood was trained by Shaolin monks in the arts of axe-kickery

Didja Notice?:

• Eastwood can kick eight dudes’ butts with a stick but can’t put out a match with a tub full of water?
• “This is where I buried my dog” actually surpassed the level of awkwardness acheived by “This is where the fish lives”?
• What on earth is that thing sitting on the steps when Preacher steps out into streets?
• Who’s idea was it for the marshall to call out “Prrreeeeaaaacherrrrr…” over and over, echoing into the  moonlight, through the mountains. What, is he a coyote?

Intermission!:

• The train station built for production was used again late in 1988 for Back To The Future, Part III

Groovy Quotes:

Preacher: Good gun for buffalo. The problem is there aren’t any hereabouts.
Hull: I’m going with you.
Preacher: No buffalo where I’m going, either.

Eddie: It was him. Him and his men. They shot him. Forever. The bullets kept hitting him. Forever.

Sarah Wheeler: Who are you? Who are you… really?
Preacher: Well, it really doesn’t matter, does it?

Megan Wheeler: Preacher? Preacher? We love you Preacher… I love you!… Good-bye!

If You Liked This Movie, Try These:

• A Fistful of Dollars
• 3:10 to Yuma
• The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

The Scoop: 1992 R, directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, and Morgan Freeman

Summary Capsule: A reformed outlaw is tasked with carrying out two more murders, of men who arguably deserve killing. Can he pull it off while still holding on to his newfound morality?

Drew’s Rating: Get three stars ready. My mistake… four stars.

Drew’s Review: I’ve mentioned this in past reviews, but little of what we commonly associate with westerns is representative of the true “Old West.” As Garth Ennis espoused in his introduction to the fourth volume of Preacher, a real cowboy was more likely to be killed by syphillis or his horse than a bullet, and if he did die by gunplay it was probably because someone snuck up behind him with a shotgun. John Wayne westerns from the 50s aren’t exactly noted for their realism, a situation partially remedied by the down ‘n dirty spaghetti westerns pioneered by Sergio Leone in the 70s. Even so, there’s still the nigh-superhuman gunplay of the Man with No Name; who, moral ambiguity notwithstanding, generally ended up protecting the weak and punishing the wicked. All of which is a roundabout way of bringing us to Unforgiven, an attempt to present an even harder, less fanciful take on the true Old West. It’s fitting that director Eastwood is also the star, because in many ways it serves as a bookend to the spaghetti westerns Clint starred in years earlier, albeit not an uplifting one. In short, it’s not difficult to imagine William Munny as an aged Man with No Name or Outlaw Josey Wales, one whose mythic nature faded away with his youth, leaving him older, sadder, and merely mortal.

William Munny is a retired thief and gunfighter who gave up his violent ways for the sake of his wife. Dead now, she left him with two children and a quiet life of farming, which suits Will fine. But events conspire against his peaceful existence when a cowboy viciously scars a prostitute’s face for giggling at his “teensy little pecker.” (And ladies, while that’s unconscionable, do learn the lesson: just lie and say it’s the biggest ever. Really.) When the cowboy and his friend are let off with a slap on the wrist by town sheriff Little Bill (Gene Hackman), Delilah’s fellow prostitutes offer a $1000 bounty for anyone willing to kill the pair. This draws the attention of the Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett), a young punk who fancies himself a killer and who offers to split the bounty with Will in exchange for his assistance. Highly reluctant but needing the money (and rationalizing that anyone who cuts a woman deserves killing), Will recruits his old partner Ned (Morgan Freeman) to help, and the trio set off to earn the reward. But Little Bill is determined to maintain order in his town at all costs and to stop anyone foolish enough to try for that thousand dollars… with extreme prejudice, if necessary. Of course, that’s assuming the older, mellower Will and Ned are still capable of the murders they so callously performed in their younger days.

A word of warning before I go any further — it’s hard to discuss this movie without giving away major plot points. Therefore I recommend, if you haven’t seen it yet, that you stop reading now and go rent the movie, because it is definitely worth it. Anyone who continues reading from this point on does so at their own discretion.

If you haven’t guessed from the title, Unforgiven is a bleak movie. It’s very good and powerful — great acting, won tons of awards — but it is not full of heartening moments and happy endings. More than any film I’ve ever seen, it highlights the reality of the Old West, how there were no “good guys.” No character behaves to the moral standards we as moviegoers expect out of even our most grizzled anti-heroes, be it sadistic sheriff Little Bill, married Ned taking advances on the reward in terms of “services rendered” by the prostitutes, or the biographer who attaches himself to whomever the reigning alpha dog is. Nor is this limited to the characters themselves, as Unforgiven also highlights the brutal reality of gunplay in a way few movies do. It’s easy for us to become inured to violence when every villain meets their end with a puff of smoke from the hero’s gun, a quick grunt, and a fall away from the camera. Done, and who cares, right? They’re evil. But it’s something different entirely when we’re forced to listen to a man’s agonized moans as he dies slowly from a painful gutshot, when we’re confronted with the fact that even villains have real human emotions and fears of dying. Takes a little bit of the luster out of killing in the name of “justice”… and if nothing else, that’s something we could all stand to be reminded of from time to time.

While not a sentimental movie, Unforgiven does offer one emotional scene that’s heartbreaking to watch, as the scarred Delilah offers Will a “free one,” similar to those that Ned and the Kid have been collecting from her friends, as an advance on killing her attacker. Determined not to dishonor his wife’s memory, Will demures, and naturally the damaged girl takes it the only way anyone could in such circumstances, trying to cover up how deeply his refusal hurts her. Yet the gentleness in Will’s voice as he realizes his mistake and clumsily tries to explain that it’s not because of her scars… really, the scene serves as a perfect counterpoint to the climax in the bar, highlighting the constant struggle in Will’s personality between what he was and what he’s tried to become.

Ultimately the point Unforgiven makes — and it’s a grim and discomforting one, but not necessarily untrue — is that you can try like hell to change who you really are, but all it takes is one unfortunate event to bring your real self thundering back to the forefront. At its core, it’s the story of a man trying desperately to escape his past, a man who spends 95% of the movie telling anyone who’ll listen how he’s changed, how he ain’t like that anymore; who, even when pulled back into old habits, attempts to rationalize his actions and cling to some semblance of his hard-won morality. And a man who, in one dark, terrible, blood-soaked moment, throws it all away and embraces his true nature, and in so doing damns himself for all eternity. I mentioned earlier that Unforgiven is not a happy movie, and so it isn’t. But it’s a film rife with great performances, a more accurate depiction of history than you’ll find many places, and most importantly, something to say. Perhaps it’s not the most uplifting message, but it’s one you need to hear at least once, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a better vehicle for it than Unforgiven. Don’t hesitate to check it out.

What NRA members think of to achieve orgasm.

• Unforgiven is the third western to ever win a Best Picture Oscar, following Cimarron in 1931 and Dances with Wolves in 1990.
• Just as William Munny descends from Clint Eastwood’s earlier western characters, so too did he directly influence the creation of the Saint of Killers, a major villain from Garth Ennis’s acclaimed Preacher.
• I always felt bad for the other cowboy, the one who didn’t scar Delilah. Granted he’s got crappy taste in friends, but is that really worth killing him over? He did try to make amends.
• The irony of Will taking Ned’s rifle with the words “I ain’t very good with one of these” is nice, contrasting with the Man with No Name’s ability to sever a rope with a bullet from hundreds of yards away.
• While Will’s first drink of whisky after years of sobriety is a pivotal moment — it, not the killing of Davey, is the true sign that he’s re-embraced his old ways — it’s handled so subtlely that at first I didn’t even notice it happening.

Is It Worth Staying Through The End Credits?

After the credits it reads “Dedicated to Sergio and Don,” a reference to Eastwood’s directorial mentors Sergio Leone and Don Siegel.

Intermission!

This movie contains a ton — and I do mean a TON — of homages to past westerns. Among others, when asked the order in which he chose to shoot, Will responds that he just “got lucky,” a tweak of Eastwood’s earlier film The Outlaw Josey Wales, where Wales gave a long, detailed explanation of the order in which he chose to shoot four men based on their eyes and holsters. Also, Will’s children are named Will and Penny, a reference to the western Will Penny, and Little Bill’s last name is a callback to True Grit.

Groovy Quotes

Alice: Just because we let them smelly fools ride us like horses doesn’t mean we gotta let ‘em brand us like horses. Maybe we ain’t nothing but whores, but we, by god, we ain’t horses.

Andy: Clyde, you got three pistols and you only got one arm!
Clyde: I just don’t wanna get killed for lack of shooting back.

English Bob: Well actually, what I heard was that you fell off your horse… drunk, of course… and that you broke your bloody neck.
Little Bill: I heard that one myself, Bob. Hell, I even thought I was dead, ’til I found out it was just that I was in Nebraska.

Little Bill: Being a good shot and being quick with a pistol, that don’t do no harm, but it don’t mean much next to being cool-headed. A man who’ll keep his head, not get rattled under fire, like as not he’ll kill you.

Will: It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away all he’s got, and all he’s ever gonna have.
Schofield Kid: Yeah. Well, I guess they had it coming.
Will: We all have it coming, kid.

Little Bill: Well, sir, you are a cowardly son of a bitch. You just shot an unarmed man.
Will: He should’ve armed himself if he’s going to decorate his saloon with my friend.

Little Bill: You’d be William Munny out of Missouri, killer of women and children.
Will: That’s right. I’ve killed women and children. I’ve killed just about everything that walks or crawls at one time or another. And I’m here to kill you, Little Bill, for what you did to Ned.

Little Bill: I don’t deserve this… to die like this. I was building a house.
Will: “Deserve”’s got nothing to do with it.
Little Bill: I’ll see you in hell, William Munny.
Will: …Yeah.

• The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
• The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
• The Searchers

Tagline: CLINT EASTWOOD…the deadliest man alive…takes on a whole army with two guns and a fistful of dynamite!

The Scoop: 1970 PG, directed by Don Siegel and starring Clint Eastwood and Shirley MacLaine

Summary: A money-minded gunslinger and a sexy nun team up with Mexico for a showdown against the French, and afterward everyone will eat Freedom Fajitas.

Heather’s Rating: This weekend I’m going to Tijuana to look for one of those exploding piñatas.

Heather’s Review: I’m lucky that my sisters aren’t as mean spirited as I am when picking out movies for someone else to review (ask Drew or Kaleb for more clarification on that). Two Mules For Sister Sara is the second movie I’ve reviewed at my sisters’ request and I enjoyed it just as much as the first. Here’s the skinny for those of you who aren’t savvy to what’s going on:

In order to introduce my sisters, who are not cult fans, to our site and pique their interests I suggested that they each pick any film they would have me review and, regardless of what it was, I would review it. First was My Big Fat Greek Wedding, second was this Clint Eastwood vehicle. I’m happy to report that I came out of the experience unharmed. I was dragged out of my cult cavern into the blinding light of “regular” movies and I didn’t burst into flames, my eyesight stayed intact, and I haven’t been forever scarred. In fact, both were very good movies that I otherwise might not have seen.

Our protagonist in TMFSS is Hogan (Clint Eastwood), a loner who is traveling through the desert on his horse with no name. He comes across a woman, nearly naked and being threatened by a group of men. He neatly offs all three of the men and swaggers over to his damsel in distress, who is wearing naught but a black cloth around her, probably expecting a little “reward”. His swagger is brought to a standstill when he finds out she’s “Sister” Sara. Noticeably frustrated, he wants to know what a nun is doing out there. Sara reveals that she is running from the French, who are after her for helping the Mexican rebellion raise money. She was sneaking her way back to Chihuahua to assist the revolutionaries when the men…er…sidetracked her. Hogan is headed to the same place she is to help with the same cause, albeit for less noble reasons. The only money he cares about raising is for himself. They team up, Sara for protection and Hogan for inside information Sara can give him to help with his mission. This movie follows our unlikely duo as they alternately snipe at each other and save each others’ lives, culminating in a battle against the French garrison and a little surprise about Sister Sara.

There was no lack of action here, what with Eastwood either shooting or exploding something every few minutes. That reminds me…this marks my first ever Clint Eastwood movie, and I have to say “Cripes, but Clint Eastwood was young!”. I can see how he became so iconic. He’s a great actor, and he just defines manly and powerful. Same goes for his character, Hogan. The guy decapitated a rattlesnake, managed to blow up a train while falling down drunk, and had a burning arrow pulled through his chest. I thought I was gonna have to pull out my Swiffer to mop up all the machismo oozing out of the screen.

Trust me, you want to watch this if you’re in the mood for a good, lighthearted movie. And hey, if life’s been treating you good lately then I suggest it as a decent date rental as well. It’s the kind of movie you can really get into, whether or not westerns are your thing. The pace never bogs down, it has a great humorous tone, and both Eastwood and MacLaine give performances that really make you interested and believe in their characters. It’s fun to watch them banter back and forth, not wanting to admit how much they really do need one another. They have a very equal relationship in that way, with each of them possessing strengths the other one could use, and going back and forth saving each others’ lives.

I have but two complaints. One is that horrible soundtrack. It’s some goofy western-ish track with donkey sound effects and brief bits of women singing in Latin. It’s a disjointed mess. Blech. The other gripe is about the fake blood. You see, the thing about shooting an action movie in color is the stuff has to look somewhat realistic. More than once I found myself marveling over just how much that “blood” looked like tempura paint. It’s hard to feel for a supposedly wounded character who looks more like the victim of a daycare finger-paint fight than an arrow through the chest.

If you have been so far unconvinced to watch this film then I ask you: How can you not like a movie that gives you a nun punching a cowboy in the face?

The Church will make allowances for this

• The donkey sound effects punctuating the soundtrack. Hokey, Hollywood. Ho-key.

• If there’s a situation, Clint’s going to find an excuse to use gunpowder in it.
• What were those things that fell out of the train? They looked like gold bars, yet nobody showed any interest in them.
• El Gato Negro. A decidedly unmanly name for a bar, don’t you think?

Intermission:

Elizabeth Taylor was originally supposed to play Sara, but the the salary she was asking for was too high. I’m sure I’m not the only one that thinks that would have been weird.

Shirley MacLaine openly fought with both the director and Clint Eastwood.

We'll blow you sky high, la la la! Whoops! I mean Happy Independance Day, France la la la!

Hogan: All the women I’ve ever known were natural-born liars but I never knew about nuns until now.

Colonel: You don’t know my men. They’re tough, courageous…each one of them a Mexican patriot.
Hogan: Idn’t that sweet? Well, I happen to be a Hogan patriot and I’d like to have some dynamite with me.
Colonel: That’s fine. You show me the tree it’s growing on and I’ll have my men pick it.

If You Liked This Movie, Try These:

• Paint Your Wagon
• The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
• Dirty Harry