Clint Eastwood's artlessness

I swear that when Clint Eastwood made Unforgiven, he had more ability than the brute efficiency with which he makes movies now.

The latest example of this I’ve been exposed to is American Sniper, the best picture nominee from 2014. It’s not a bad movie, but it rarely clears the artistic bar of presenting a sequence of scenes in a particular order. Which is basically what Clint Eastwood is nowadays.

I swear it didn’t used to be like this. However, the next time I watch Unforgiven, which is one of my top 20 films of all time, I will make a note of whether I was wrong, and that’s really all he had back then – just a better screenwriter, cinematographer and editor.

Eastwood has been working with not great versions of those things recently, though I won’t haul out their names to shame them, especially since I’d probably discover that some of them are actually quite accomplished. Even the accomplished ones, though, are probably limited by Eastwood’s famous “cut-print” approach to filmmaking. He doesn’t do second takes, which is a limitation that is seriously exposed with a movie like last year’s The 15:17 to Paris, which starred non-professional actors. Though to be honest, the performance of Jenna Fischer stood out as needing a second take more than those of the non-professionals.

American Sniper is not without interesting things going on from a filmmaking perspective. To simulate the way that Chris Kyle’s four tours of duty in the Middle East were interspersed with his home life, Eastwood will occasionally go directly from a battle scene to a scene of home life – not because Kyle is thinking about his home life during that battle scene, but because the narrative has chosen to jump forward to that next scene without the traditional markers of leaving a tour of duty, liking climbing on a large military transport with a duffel bag over his shoulder. I applaud that idea, but because it’s Eastwood and because he has lowered my expectations, the decision strikes one as an artless transition rather than an intentional artistic choice.

The abruptness of Eastwood’s endings is what I’m starting to notice is bothering me, combined with their tendency toward corny, unironic patriotism. Even a film I really like, like Sully, struck me as stumbling at its very ending, as the characters chuckle about something inconsequential and the credits just start rolling. If you saw Sully, you probably know what I’m talking about.

The 15:17 to Paris and American Sniper are both pretty terrible in that regard. I don’t recall the exact contours of the Paris ending, since I saw that some eight months ago, but Sniper’s ending is of course fresh in my memory. And I’ll give you a small spoiler alert in case you haven’t seen this movie or aren’t familiar with Kyle’s story.

The last action of the movie involves Kyle (Bradley Cooper) meeting another veteran outside his house, with his wife (an unrecognizeable Sienna Miller) closing the door slowly and ominously with a foreboding she could not possibly have, but which movie characters inevitably have to lend extra gravity to a moment that surely didn’t have any. There’s a fadeout (that’s another artless and very old school technique Eastwood likes) and then you see a funeral procession starting with the words on-screen: “Chris Kyle was killed that day by a veteran he was trying to help.” The very next words, barely three seconds later, are “Directed and produced by Clint Eastwood.” It lands with the same kind of thud as “Poochie died on the way to his home planet.” I had to read up on Wikipedia to find out what actually happened to Kyle, and though Eastwood surely didn’t want to give any spotlight to the actions of Kyle’s killer, there was clearly a better way to do it. I was wavering on three stars for American Sniper until this dud of an ending reminded me of Eastwood’s weaknesses and convinced me that 2.5 was the more appropriate rating.

And as it does in most of his movies, that forlorn score, often composed by Eastwood himself, kicks in, reminding us of the sacrifices of good Americans or some such.

There are a couple problems with the perspective I’m currently offering. One is that Eastwood is my political foe, a true believer in Republican politics and likely all the things it stands for, though I’d like to think his time in Hollywood has given him a bit more social liberalism than most of his political allies. Another is that Eastwood is old. I should not be expecting a now 88-year-old man to be quivering with creative vibrancy, even if he was only 83 when he made American Sniper. Maybe he does those takes so quickly because he’s worried he will die before he finishes the movie. Still, Ridley Scott is 81 and he can still make movies where an obvious attention has been paid to camera setups, editing, and other important aspects of filmmaking as an art.

And it’s not like this has always been Eastwood’s MO. Although I’m listing myself as unsure on Unforgiven, as it has been about five years since I’ve seen it, I feel a bit more confident in saying that films like Letters from Iwo Jima and Hereafter show a considerably greater aptitude for craft (even though it’s been longer than that since I’ve seen Iwo Jima, and even though Hereafter is an actually bad movie – though it has a fantastic opening sequence). Although I haven’t seen Jersey Boys, I figure that since it’s a musical, it’s probably got some panache as well.

I guess part of the reason this is worth commenting on and writing about at all is because I think of Eastwood as someone who does have these instincts toward Filmmaking with a capital F. It’s one of the reasons I raise my eyebrow a bit in interest every time I hear there’s a new Eastwood movie coming out. But it may all just be a mirage, and maybe I need to start going into Eastwood movies expecting less.

I may not get many more opportunities, at least among movies that have not yet been released. Eastwood is rumored to be making a movie called The Ballad of Richard Jewell, but given that it’s midway through 2019 and is still only a rumor, at the very least it will represent an unusually long layoff for the prolific director (who made two films in 2018). He’ll be lucky if he gets it out before his 90^th birthday. Then again, if he decided to start making it tomorrow he could be done with it in three weeks.

There are plenty of Eastwood movies in the past I haven’t seen, and feel like I’m still interested in seeing. I still haven’t seen his most recent, The Mule, which is also supposed to be not great.  Then there’s Jersey Boys, and going back further, Flags of Our Fathers, Space Cowboys, True Crime, The Rookie, White Hunter Black Heart, Bird, Heartbreak Ridge, Pale Rider, Sudden Impact, Honkytonk Man, Firefox, Bronco Billy, The Gauntlet, The Eiger Sanction, Breezy and (breathe) Play Misty for Me. Whew. The guy has been making movies for a long time.

Hopefully some of those movies will showcase the art Eastwood has since lost.

United 3

It took me nearly the whole movie to figure out why there was something weirdly inert about Clint Eastwood's The 15:17 to Paris, beyond the fact that it was shot and edited poorly, and the script spends a huge amount of time on inconsequential material.

At first I thought it was a result of Eastwood's famously or infamously fast pace of making movies -- I suppose "famously" if you're the studio, "infamously" if you are an audience that thought certain scenes demanded a second take. Eastwood usually yells "Cut!" and moves on, making him the anti-Stanley Kubrick. This would certainly provide an explanation for the lackluster performances of the actors.

It turns out that only explains the lackluster performance of actors like Judy Greer and Jenna Fischer, whose small handful of scenes might have all been shot in a single day. There's a different explanation for the three stars of the movie, who were unfamiliar to me, and it took me all movie to figure it out.

They aren't actors. They're the actual characters playing themselves.

It's something I might have known about this movie if it had generated more attention than a mere blip in the cinematic landscape when it came out back in February. But even with the prominent name of Eastwood attached, 15:17 came and went without a second thought for most of us.

I wouldn't have prioritized fitting it in for my 2018 list at all, except that it popped up on Stan, my Australian streaming service. And even though I disagree with his politics, a new Clint Eastwood movie interests me on its own terms. As I said in yesterday's post, I don't let the political views of the filmmakers get in the way of seeing a movie, which is of course the correct approach for a critic. With Eastwood, I'm interested in him partly because of what he's done in the past -- Unforgiven remains in my top 20 films of all time -- and partly because I'm fascinated he can make as many movies as he does, as quickly as he does, and I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. With Eastwood, it has, a number of times.

As an indication of how little I had looked into this movie, I had no idea what it was about. I suppose the title suggested to me some kind of European intrigue movie, as movies on trains often seem to involve spies or murder or some other bit of high concept action in which the train location is central to the appeal.

I had no idea it was a movie about a thwarted terrorist attack that really happened only three years ago. As such, I was really confused when the movie started with a flashback to the childhoods of three American kids. My extreme exhaustion at the time I started watching contributed plenty to this confusion. At 10 o'clock after a busy day, I thought Eastwood's 94-minute film was the only one I had any chance of fitting in before sleep claimed me. (And I didn't succeed, as it required a 30-minute nap in the middle for me to finish.)

The actual subject matter certainly makes more sense for Eastwood at this phase in his career, in which he has already made one film that celebrates the heroism of an ordinary American caught in an unusual situation where he needs to act quickly. In that case, though, Eastwood had the wisdom to cast Tom Hanks as Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger rather the man himself.

The actors weren't really nailing their scenes, though they weren't bad enough for me to identify them as definite novices for most of the movie. I attributed their stilted line readings to Eastwood's process. Only with a few minutes left did I say "Damn, these are the actual guys who thwarted this attack."

I suppose if I had known that going in it would have removed some of the suspense about whether they succeeded in stopping a terrorist from shooting up a train full of people, or at least from shooting up these guys themselves. And by writing this post I suppose I've ruined that suspense for you now. But Eastwood makes this movie in such a workmanlike fashion that it seems like suspense is not even part of the point. He merely wants to celebrate the achievements of these three young men who were traveling in Europe, two of whom were currently in the military. That's honorable, but his approach discards most of the narrative conventions designed to engross a viewer in the story.

As the actual grappling with the terrorist took only a few minutes in real life, and as that's only five percent of the movie even when it plays out in real time, Eastwood unnecessarily shows us long stretches of their childhood getting detentions from teachers and the like. As much time as is frittered away on that is also frittered away on previous legs of their trip, in which they stopped and partied in such cities as Rome and Amsterdam.

Eastwood does make a perfunctory attempt to foreshadow the act of heroism that awaits them on this train, but it's pretty awkward. Jenna Fischer's worst of a couple bad scenes is when she tells her son at the airport that she feels like something big is awaiting him, and verges on the hysterical. Then one of the guys keeps telling his friends that he feels like his life is pointing him toward something big and important. Neither of these actors, the pro or the amateur, sells the lines of dialogue naturally, and Eastwood seems like the amateur in the way he's staged these scenes.

Then there's also this weird anti-French sentiment in the film, which seems there also in a misguided attempt to create some "they should never have been there in the first place" drama. At various points in the film, various characters tell the guys that Paris isn't all that, and they talk on several occasions about skipping Paris. Skipping Paris? Say what you will about the French and the debatable narrative that America has always had to save France in military conflicts in which they've shown ineptitude, you can't just "skip Paris." It's one of the crown jewels of Europe. Get over your distaste for berets and go.

They do go, but even the train scene -- true as it may have been to history -- showcases America saving France's ass again. There's a weird absence of anyone approaching an authority figure on this train, as even after the Americans subdue the terrorist, there's no European security person who swoops in to assist. It's not until they can stop at the next station that the train is boarded by police, who weirdly have their guns all drawn even though someone likely would have been able to tell them that the suspect was already subdued. It's a clear case of too little, too late. The fact that it may have actually gone down this way doesn't do much to excuse it, though the American exceptionalism suggested by the event certainly explains Eastwood's interest in it.

In the final scene, Eastwood seems to honor the French, in a way, by having the French president (not playing himself) give out medals to the three Americans. And though the scene is filmed with a pomp and circumstance (and it's hard to imagine Donald Trump doing the same for three French nationals), it could also be read as another instance of the French supplicating to the Americans. "Thank you for saving us" is the takeaway message from that scene. Or more likely, "Thank you for saving us again."

In the end, the movie that may have provided Eastwood with the most inspiration is United 93. Not only does that movie feature a climactic scene in which ordinary citizens wrestle terrorists who are trying to take over a public transport, but United 93 also features a number of novice actors playing themselves, and therefore living through the events all over again as they make the movie. For obvious reasons it's not the Americans who overwhelmed the terrorists on that doomed flight who play themselves, it's air traffic controllers and other airport staff. That gives the film the sense of verite that is key to its punishing impact on us, while allowing professional actors to sell the tense climactic scene that's so agonizing. Eastwood's attempt at the same type of verite results in non-professionals selling the emotions of the climax, and his gestures toward realism elsewhere involve the inclusion of unimportant details that don't contribute to the narrative.

Advantage: United 93.

When "it was a different time" just doesn't cut it

I had a far more negative reaction to Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter than I probably would have at a time we were all a bit less woke about gender politics in the movies. But I hope I would have had a pretty negative reaction to it even then.

We use the phrase "it was a different time" to excuse a lot of tone deaf treatment of women and minorities in films from decades past ... not to mention, I suppose, to excuse the behavior of Hollywood men who thought it was okay to massage the shoulders of production assistants and occasionally grab a little bit of their asses. We're moving past that second one I hope.

But I still don't understand what the hell Clint Eastwood was thinking in High Plains Drifter.

One of the first things his "man with no name" does in this film is rape a woman. Yes, you heard that right. When a woman comes up to him in the street and gets a bit sassy with him -- after he's just killed three men in the tonsorial parlor, mind you -- I at first thought he was going to be comparatively chivalrous and laugh it off. Even when she slaps the cigar out of his mouth, I figured his reaction would be muted. I mean, he's not going to hit a woman, is he?

Well, he doesn't hit her. He does something far worse.

He grabs her by the arm, hauls her off to a local barn, lays her down in the straw and forces himself on her.

Presumably because Eastwood had an instinct toward what he thought would preserve some of the sympathy for this character, he of course has her "get into it," of sorts, halfway through. I mean, she's a slut, and sluts like to get fucked, don't they? His character would have only done that because he could "see it in her eyes," right?

Ugh.

I was frankly aghast at what I was watching. Yes, this had happened.

I suppose you could say that Eastwood was making some kind of commentary about bad men, and including his own character in that group. This was considered to be a revisionist western even 19 years before the revisionist western he is most associated with, the best picture winner and true classic Unforgiven. You might even say it was bold and/or "brave" for him to throw away a good deal of the audience's sympathy ten minutes into the movie, assuming he had enough sensibility to recognize that an act like this would do that.

But I didn't think that. I just thought it was ugly. The "man with no name" (he really does never give his name, just like in those Leone movies) is supposed to be a badass and someone you want to emulate, and unless the movie is damning his actions in no uncertain terms, it's effectively endorsing them.

Interestingly, the movie does try to damn his actions in a way. The woman he rapes comes upon him in the bath at that same tonsorial parlor and takes about three shots at him at nearly point blank range, and later tells the sheriff that he raped her, even using that very word. But the film portrays this woman as idiotic and venal and weak-willed, a fool that it laughs at every time she's on screen. Never mind the way it makes her so incompetent with a gun that she fires three shots at him from like five feet away and can't hit him.

If the film's awful portrayal of women were limited to this one character that would be something. But the other female character in the movie -- there is literally only one other -- is the innkeeper's wife, a woman who appears to be of strong moral fiber. Until, that is, the scene immediately after Eastwood blows up the upper story of her hotel as an unnecessarily complicated way of killing them men who tried to break into his room and beat him in the dead of night.

In this scene she's understandably furious with him, as he has just essentially ruined her livelihood, not to mention blown up the very place he was hoping to sleep that night. (He had previously ordered the rest of the hotel to be cleared of guests so he could have the whole place to himself, part of the escalating price of defending the town against three miscreants who were just released from prison and are coming to kill anyone within range.) She lets slip that the only place that wasn't destroyed is "our room," meaning the one belonging to her and her husband. So Eastwood raises and eyebrow as if to say "I'll take that one, then."

So then he grabs her by the arm and escorts her down to the room, toward what end I can't say because he knows where it is, so he might as well just go there unaccompanied and make himself at home. When he suggests that he can't sleep with her because he needs a good night's rest, she's so enraged by his ego and his presumptuousness that she grabs a pair of scissors and comes at him where he's lying on the bed. You probably know where this is going. He grabs her wrist to prevent her from plunging the scissors into his neck, and twists this gesture into a passionate kiss. The next shot is of them awakening in the morning in bed together.

Now I'm really pissed.

It's one thing to suggest that women are attracted to mean who treat them poorly, an idea that has some unfortunate truth to it. It's another to have Eastwood essentially rape two of them and have them "start to like it" halfway through.

By the end of the movie I came to realize that Eastwood was probably not trying to hold up this character as a paragon of heroism. But the damage had been done by that point. Even if he has a righteous reason for putting this town in his sites and submitting them to this monstrous behavior -- a reason I don't totally buy, but okay -- you can't just go around killing people and raping people and making it seem cool because Clint Eastwood presents as a badass and he's the star of the movie. That's just irresponsible filmmaking.

Then there's just the inept staging of some of this material. The town is guilty of having been complicit in an event where the three miscreants whipped a local lawman to death in the town square, as none of them did anything to stop it, and in fact, they likely encouraged the act because the lawman was going to blow the whistle on some shady dealings that were helping prop up the town. The staging of the whipping, seen twice in flashback, is really shoddy, even though it was 1973 and they didn't perhaps have the ways of making it look convincing that they would have today.

But even this wouldn't have bothered me so much if Eastwood himself hadn't experienced one of these flashbacks. As he's falling asleep his first night he flashes back to the whipping death of this local lawman ... even though he was not present for the event. That's just lazy filmmaking.

This was only Eastwood's second directorial effort, so inexperience can be blamed for some of this. But the overall feel of the film is shocking and nauseating, and neither of those things in a good way. It feels as though he made Unforgiven almost as an apology for this movie. Will Munny had skeletons in his closet, dozens of them, and may have been guilty of worse crimes even than the "man with no name" of High Plains Drifter. But the fact that we don't see it is the right moral choice, and makes the same point more effectively.

The battle for the biggest output

When a director releases two movies in quick succession, you tend to take notice. It usually says something about how prolific he or she is.

Not every director, mind you. Steven Spielberg had two movies come out a week apart in December, but they were his first two movies as director since the disaster known as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in 2008, so in that case it really was just an accident of timing.

With Steven Soderbergh, it's pure volume of cinematic output.

Soderbergh had a movie in September (Contagion, which I just watched last night) and now one in January (Haywire). He's clearly making them as fast as his body will allow. (Without the content itself suffering, apparently.) It's not the first such period of intense activity of his career, either. Remember, this was the guy who got nominated for best director for two different films in the year 2000 (Erin Brockovich and Traffic, the latter of which netted him the Oscar).

Soderbergh's frenzied moviemaking rate made me think of other directors who are constantly going behind the camera, and three other names immediately jumped to mind: Woody Allen, Clint Eastwood and Michael Winterbottom. Allen's and Eastwood's movies usually make headlines; Winterbottom's don't necessarily, because they're a bit more out of the mainstream. But these are three guys who are constantly delivering new features, presumably on or ahead of schedule, since that would be the only way for them to keep pace with themselves. True to form, each had a film in 2011 (Midnight in Paris, J. Edgar and The Trip).

So I thought it would be interesting to see who's truly the most prolific of the foursome, and I'd love to hear your suggestions for which others might belong in the conversation. (Current directors only, please -- that eliminates all the hacks who made four or five movies a year back in the studio system days.) I have my suspicions, but as I write this, I really don't know who will take the prize.

In order to do this, we'll need to examine each director's career, starting with the year that the least experienced director in the group released his first feature. We'll look at their filmographies from that moment onward, and may have to make some judgment calls if there are films whose status as a feature is borderline. For our purposes, documentaries are considered features because they run at feature length. Before we even start I know there's an asterisk with Winterbottom's The Trip, which was a TV series edited into a feature. However, you could argue that a TV series might take even longer to film than a feature, so Winterbottom should get credit for it and then some.

It turns out that the newest to the game is in fact Winterbottom, whose first theatrical feature was 1995's Butterfly Kiss. (Or 1995's Go Now -- I'm having a hard time telling which one was released first.) He'd made TV movies before then, but his first feature wasn't until 1995.

So starting with the release year 1995 and onward, here's how it looks for each of our contenders:

Michael Winterbottom

Butterfly Kiss (1995)
Go Now (1995)
Jude (1996)
Welcome to Sarajevo (1997)
I Want You (1998)
Wonderland (1999)
With or Without You (1999)
The Claim (2000)
24 Hour Party People (2002)
In This World (2003)
Code 46 (2003)
9 Songs (2004)
Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2006)
The Road to Guantanamo (2006)
A Mighty Heart (2007)
Genova (2007)
The Shock Doctrine (2009)
The Killer Inside Me (2010)
The Trip (2011)

That's 19 titles in 17 years, nine of which I've seen. It appears he has two movies due out in 2012, one of which premiered at last year's Toronto International Film Festival (Trishna), one of which is about scheduled to shoot (Bailout), I guess with the intention of getting released this year. But he loses out due to the timing of this post. (Sorry, I'm not counting the film festival premiere.)

Steven Soderbergh

The Underneath (1995)
Gray's Anatomy (1996)
Schizopolis (1996)
Out of Sight (1998)
The Limey (1999)
Erin Brockovich (2000)
Traffic (2000)
Ocean's Eleven (2001)
Full Frontal (2002)
Solaris (2002)
Ocean's Twelve (2004)
Bubble (2005)
The Good German (2006)
Ocean's Thirteen (2007)
Che Part 1 (2008)
Che Part 2 (2008)
The Girlfriend Experience (2009)
The Informant! (2009)
And Everything is Going Fine (2010)
Contagian (2011)
Haywire (2012)

And Soderbergh takes the lead with 21 films since 1995, 15 of which I've seen. I'm glad he didn't pull ahead of Winterbottom by only one, because I had to make the judgment call to split Che into two films. They were released that way, with separate admissions in most cases, and they contain over four hours of content in radically different styles. If that's not two movies, I don't know what is. (Though since they were filmed at the same time with the same crew, you could just as compellingly make the argument that they should be one film, if in this context you are quantifying a "film" as a distinct project in a distinct location that requires a certain amount of the director's undivided attention. So many ways to interpret the same information.) Incidentally, Soderbergh's Magic Mike is also expected later in 2012, with something called The Side Effects due in 2013.

Clint Eastwood
The Bridges of Madison County (1995)
Absolute Power (1997)
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997)
True Crime (1999)
Space Cowboys (2000)
Blood Work (2002)
Mystic River (2003)
Million Dollar Baby (2004)
Flags of Our Fathers (2006)
Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)
Changeling (2008)
Gran Torino (2008)
Invictus (2009)
Hereafter (2010)
J. Edgar (2011)

Well, Eastwood has let me down. I guess he has only been hugely prolific since 2008, releasing five films since the fall of that year. His 15 movies in 17 years -- 11 of which I've seen -- leave him at a pace of less than one a year. Still, not bad for an 81-year-old, especially when many of his films are painted on a huge canvas and seem to require a great deal of logistics. IMDB doesn't list a 2012 movie for him, so either someone charged with updating his page is slacking, or the man is finally giving his weary bones a short rest.

Woody Allen

Mighty Aphrodite (1995)
Everyone Says I Love You (1996)
Deconstructing Harry (1997)
Celebrity (1998)
Sweet and Lowdown (1999)
Small Time Crooks (2000)
The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001)
Hollywood Ending (2002)
Anything Else (2003)
Melinda and Melinda (2004)
Match Point (2005)
Scoop (2006)
Cassandra's Dream (2007)
Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)
Whatever Works (2009)
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010)
Midnight in Paris (2011)

My suspicion was that Woody would be the most prolific. That's why exercises like this are great. Turns out he's only third most prolific, with 17 movies in the 17 years, 13 of which I've seen. But Woody does get a special commendation for being the only one on this list to make at least one movie (exactly one) in every year since 1995. If I were going only by U.S. theatrical release dates, Cassandra's Dream was released in January of 2008, leaving him with two movies in 2008 and none in 2007. But it played a number of places around Europe in 2007 and is generally credited with that release year. And sure enough, Allen's 18th film in the last 18 years (Nero Fiddled) is due out later this year. If you want to know how far back this streak goes, you have to go all the way back to 1981 to find a year in which Allen did not direct a film.

So our champion is: Steven Soderbergh! The guy who inspired the topic in the first place.

Take a vacation, will you, Steven? You're making everyone else look bad.

M. Clint Shyamalan

I am getting a bit of a Shyamalany vibe from Hereafter.

Let's consider:

Central figure who can speak to the dead? Check.

Blue-toned, ethereal poster that suggests the possible involvement of aliens or mermaids? Check.

Bryce Dallas Howard? Check.

Five people trapped in an elevator where weird things start to happen? Well, okay, maybe not.

But I do think there's something a bit "from the man who brought you Lady in the Water" about this movie. Let's hope I'm wrong.

Actually, Hereafter vibes a couple other movies as well. It's multi-story, potentially planet-spanning narrative structure is reminiscent of Babel, while its images of flood (tidal wave, I think) remind me a bit of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Well, those were both best picture nominees, so I guess it could be worse.

Oh, and from an effects standpoint, I kind of want to see that tidal wave.

I do wonder at what point Clint Eastwood's furious pace of 1+ movies per year will finally render a true dud. His recent output has not been universally acclaimed, but people seem to generally appreciate films like Changeling, Gran Torino and Invictus. Well, if IMDB's timelines are accurate, at least he'll take 2011 off before coming back with Hoover, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, in 2012.

Even though Hereafter is only opening nationwide today, we came close to seeing it last weekend on limited release in Los Angeles. On the day my dad and his wife arrived in town last Saturday, we tried to go see The Town, but the rain had driven every single Angeleno to this one particular theater, meaning The Town was actually sold out. (Because the movie has been out for a month, that surprised us. But as we discovered the next day when we bought our tickets in advance, it was playing in one of the 30-seat couch theaters, explaining its surprise sold-out status.)

Playing in a larger theater, Hereafter was not sold out, but because it started an extra 25 minutes later and we didn't want to be gone from the baby for too long, we had to be worried about length. Seeing the massive line for the parking garage, I'd let my wife out on the curb to buy tickets. She called me with the bad news about The Town a couple minutes later. "Yeah, get tickets for Hereafter, as long as it's not like 2 hours and 20 minutes," I said.

Two minutes after that, she called back. I still hadn't entered the garage.

"It's 2 hours and 20 minutes," she said.