"In Eastwood's filmography knowing how to use a gun and the consequences of that knowledge are addressed in the hands of fathers and their sons, whether they be surrogate or natural born. The most famous example of this is in Unforgiven (1992) where William Munny (Clint Eastwood) consoles “the Schofield Kid” (Jaimz Woolvett) after he kills a man for the first time. The Kid is struggling to grasp what he has just done. He's in disbelief, chugging whiskey and holding back tears before Munny utters a few words on killing that resonate beyond Unforgiven and are applicable to many of Eastwood's films. “It's a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away all he's got...and all he's ever…

After tearing down the western in Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood decided to do some mythmaking of his own, about an outlaw instead of a lawman. His mastery of relaxed pacing makes this a pleasure to watch, but not without darkness - the late sequence with Costner's Butch Haynes coming harrowingly close to gunning down a family In-Cold-Blood-style is a great illustration of how heroes sometimes (maybe inevitably) end up failing us.

But my favorite part of the movie is T.J. Lowther as Butch's 8-year-old "hostage" Phillip. Movie history is full of precocious, hyperverbal youngsters who talk like grownups and are able to fully articulate all of their complex emotions in a way that adults aren't even able to in the real…

A Perfect World was a commercial success, but critically it is considered one of Clint Eastwood's underrated greats. It does have some tonal issues, never really being able to balance its generally good-nature with its more unsettling subtexts. What it flourishes from is a clean, uncomplicated narrative that knows where it is going and reaches its destination cleanly. The ultimate conclusion is far from surprising, but the journey of getting there is both heartwarming and provoking, a potent mix of feelings. Although, it doesn't truly come to its own until the final leg where all the bottled up emotions and gradually developed themes come to a head.

The plot is simple: an escaped convict takes a young boy hostage and…

The whole movie is in the scene where Butch holds the farmer at gunpoint and forces him to express his love for his son, with his own proxy son looking on.

Fathers and sons, cycles of toxic masculinity, and the need to create a theater of reality to process it, understand it, live with it, and heal from it. Passing down then not only lessons learned but the scars earned in learning them. The deep human fallibility inherently mixed into any such grand lesson.

There's a fable-like quality to the circumstances, with Phillip having essentially not ever encountered his male nature or its influence. His mother an over-nurturing foil (the no trick-or-treating, essentially lying about his father's return to protect…

Clint Eastwood Study: Entry #41

Eastwood's directorial follow-up to Unforgiven is a deceptively modest affair, which plays at times like a mash-up of several of his earlier films (Escape from Alcatraz and Honkytonk Man especially) while unquestionably emerging as its own, distinct piece of work. To watch this is to watch a filmmaker taking full advantage of a blank check , finding the soul in what could easily have been an overly-precocious, obnoxiously sentimental film. The naturalism of the main child actor ultimately manages to justify Eastwood's decision to cast someone so raw and inexperienced in the role (something he's always done), and Costner delivers a truly stellar performance in a role that allows him to fully explore one of…