Invictus

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Eric
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Post by Eric »

I read your take and appreciated it, Daniel, but in support of my case when it comes to the board's Eastwood agnostics, I submit as evidence the not one but two would-be rousing, rah rah unity, power-ballad-accompanied montage sequences that appear no less than 10 minutes apart.

And I actually don't hate rugby. I just think Eastwood didn't really photograph it in any compelling manner.
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Post by dws1982 »

Sonic Youth wrote:But could you give an initial verdict, especially since I'm probably off to see it in an hour?

My initial thoughts would be that it's not as deeply personal as some of his work, but not as detached as parts of Changeling were. One absolutely stunning sequence, although I think that sequence may be fairly divisive. Interesting look at the importance of symbology as a political tool. It's easy to dismiss as an Ebony and Ivory type of thing, and the screenplay does push the racial harmony thing a bit much, but it's also important to realize that racial reconciliation was necessary for South Africa to begin moving forward at that time, which is why that the 95 World Cup was important beyond simple bragging rights. Eastwood's style is so casual, maybe not anti-narrative, but he's more definitely interested in evoking moods creating a believable atmosphere than in advancing plot. That's what I really love about many of his films, but I'm not sure that it really serves this story.

I'd probably also say upgrade a bit if you think the 95 World Cup is one of the best sports stories ever, and downgrade a bit if you hate rugby.




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Post by Sonic Youth »

But could you give an initial verdict, especially since I'm probably off to see it in an hour?
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Post by dws1982 »

Anyone who has grown tired of Eastwood's run over the past several years need not bother with this. They'll hate it.

As I usually do with Eastwood films, I'll probably see it again (sometime over Christmas) before rendering a final verdict.




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Post by Bog »

As by and large the other Eastwood homer around here, I must say Flipp cannot be too far off saying this must be a chore to endure. Avoidance just seems so much more satisfying so as not to be as disappointed as Eric has already shown. This will not occur of course, I will check it out eventually.

I consider all of the Ted Turner cable trio of Midnight, Absolute Power, and True Crime to all be a completely different level of Eastwood. I know we've had the True Crime debate before but they're all basically throw-aways.

Nothing will recapture Unforgiven's brilliance in my opinion, but he has become a trustworthy filmmaker as far as what you got throughout this decade.
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Post by dws1982 »

Eric wrote:It sounds like the odds of you actually disliking an Eastwood film at this point are about nil. Nevertheless, I expect Invictus may be the litmus test anyway.

I've never been able to force my way through Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, despite multiple attempts, and have no desire to sit though Absolute Power (outside of a few sequences), The Rookie, and Firefox again. Not wild about Changeling, and Mystic River has not aged well. But I see your point.




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Post by Eric »

It sounds like the odds of you actually disliking an Eastwood film at this point are about nil. Nevertheless, I expect Invictus may be the litmus test anyway.
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Post by dws1982 »

Eric wrote:Invictus, meanwhile, is absolutely terrible. Right down there with the worst moments in Flags of Our Fathers.

I loved Flags of Our Fathers when I first saw it and love it just as much many viewing later, so that actually intrigues me a great deal. Something about Invictus makes it seem like one of Eastwood's more for hire types of jobs (Changeling, Mystic River), rather than one of his very personal jobs. Flags of Our Fathers also gave that impression, when it was actually one of the most deeply personal films of his career (and easily one of the most misunderstood films of the decade), so maybe I have something to be hopeful for.




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Post by Eric »

dws1982 wrote:Armond White's review, like too many of his reviews now, is like some online joker's imitation of White.
I presume you've all seen this: http://twitter.com/ArmondWhite

Invictus, meanwhile, is absolutely terrible. Right down there with the worst moments in Flags of Our Fathers.
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Post by dws1982 »

Sabin wrote:Eastwood has no grasp of symbolism, metaphor and declines vivid imagery
Armond White is many things, but I know he's not an unintelligent man. But he insists on writing such stupid things.

Invictus may be terrible or may be a masterpiece (I'm not anticipating it the way I have some of Eastwood's recent films), but Armond White's review, like too many of his reviews now, is like some online joker's imitation of White. Once in awhile he may say something insightful, but his main interests are not in film, or pop culture, but in axe-grinding.
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Post by Sabin »

Armond takes down Invictus, praises A Single Man.

The Distance Between Narcissism
Colin Firth turns in the finest acting of his career in 'A Single Man'; and Eastwood fumbles his subject with 'Invictus'
By Armond White
.......

Invictus
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Runtime: 134 min.
A Single Man
Directed by Tom Ford
Runtime: 99 min.


THE IDEA OF MORGAN FREEMAN playing Nelson Mandela in Invictus is not only dull, it’s redundant. (yup, this is why we have him. Every once in a while, he says something like this. I feel like I've been waiting for Morgan Freeman to play Nelson Mandela for so long that I've already conceded him the Oscar and watched him do it in theaters and on DVD.)

That’s why this week’s most remarkable acting is by Colin Firth in A Single Man. It reveals seldom-depicted emotional complexity, while Invictus invites Freeman to do more variations on godlike dignity.

Fashion designer Tom Ford’s directorial debut, A Single Man, treads the gray area between gay white male privilege and unabashed narcissism. He adapts Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel about George Falconer (Colin Firth), a British professor who enjoys middle-class Los Angeles luxuries—though with an outsider’s isolation—when the sudden death of his lover throws him into brooding self-pity. Ford flashes back to Falconer meeting his younger lover, a sleek ex-military man (Matthew Goode) in contrast to the mourner’s ironic pursuit by a young student (Nicholas Hoult) in a white mohair sweater.
The film is swathed in early 1960s style (just like TV’s Mad Men) because Ford sees male vanity as a form of self-consciousness. Ford’s style isn’t original; he indulges the same neophyte’s artiness as Julian Schnabel’s Before Night Falls and Everrett Lewis’ The Natural History of Parking Lots—a kind of designer queerness—but Firth cuts through the sentimental fabric with Falconer’s crumbling defenses. His grief, horniness and anger are each precisely proportioned despite scenes that drift from showcasing mood to attitude. It is the year’s most subtle movie acting and the finest performance of Firth’s career.

Firth has worked up to Falconer starting with his gay role in 1984’s Another Country, then recently in Mamma Mia! and St.Trinian’s. His heterosexual bids, like in Bridget Jones’ Diary, were never so ardent; his bland virility seems stirred by his male costars’ prettiness. Falconer’s implicit chicken-hawk yearning (also the subtext of last year’s affecting Isherwood documentary Chris and Don) creates a rare portrait of gay masculine audacity.While Ford tends to celebrate it, Firth’s reserve checks it so that Falconer/Isherwood’s alternative-life indulgences (including suicidal melodrama) are not overly romanticized.
Invictus practices a cynical romanticism in director Clint Eastwood’s deification of Mandela.

(I'm going to interrupt here and just marvel at how forcibly White takes this movie down in the coming paragraph. Just...WOW.)

You have to look at it as an Obama allegory—the almost comic proposition of a black man elected president in a racist, white-minority country. Otherwise, its story of Mandela becoming South Africa’s president—presumably for the primary purpose of encouraging the country’s Springbok rugby team to win the World Cup—seems a lunatic combination of the messianic and the idiotic. Eastwood prevents Freeman from doing an in-depth characterization, it’s all surface: Mandela’s tall, slightly stooped stance and measured speech.
Remember how the real Mandela’s appearance at the end of Spike Lee’s Malcolm X dead-assed the already overlong movie with incomprehensible speechifying? Apparently Eastwood decided to answer last year’s war-of-words with Lee by making this Mandela biopic. Problem is, Lee’s the superior director of pop-art polemics. Eastwood has no grasp of symbolism, metaphor and declines vivid imagery; the last half-hour is a tedious, literal rugby match (footballers’ haunches straining and pushing against each other). Eastwood bungles his subject. Essentially, Invictus is just like Cry Freedom where a black hero needs a white box office counterbalance (Matt Damon as South Africa rugby star François Pienaar). When Freeman’s stoic, astute Mandela answers every question, contention and dissatisfaction with divine wisdom (or a sports-fan smile) he dead-asses this movie, too.

But A Single Man isn’t a popularity contest. Instead, its hermetic tone has the quality of a looking-in-the-mirror ego-examination. Male desire and self-regard (that longing for the boy in himself) are genuine obsessions, if far from the Death in Venice profundity that Isherwood or Tom Ford intended. Julianne Moore’s confidante role provides necessary balance, although her Britishisms are too much of an act. It makes Colin Firth’s diffidence that much more admirable. His superlatively discreet characterization does honor to the legacy of gray-area performances by Michael Redgrave, Dirk Bogarde, Peter Finch and Alan Bates by matching their delicacy, strength and authenticity.
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Post by flipp525 »

This just looks like such a chore to sit through. Ugh.
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Post by Sabin »

Gleeb gives it a B+. And yet it sounds like faint praise.

Invictus (2009)
Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman | Dec 09, 2009
DETAILS
Release Date: Dec 11, 2009; Rated: PG-13; Length: 134 Minutes; Genre: Drama; With: Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon

Clint Eastwood's Invictus sounds like a drama of paint-by-numbers nobility, the kind that can make you dread awards season. It stars Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela — that's like a monument playing a monument — and though the film is set during the stormy period just after Mandela was elected South Africa's president in 1994 (he was 75), it's not a complex portrait of a society in transition. It's a sports drama that hinges on Mandela's attempt to rouse and unify the nation by turning its nearly all-white rugby team — the Springboks — into the 1995 World Cup champions. Since that strategy centered on Mandela's alliance with the team's captain, Francois Pienaar, Invictus is yet another movie that refracts black struggle through the eyes of a white hero — in this case, Matt Damon looking so blond that he's practically Aryan. Ladies and gentlemen, line up those Oscars!

But before we overdose on cynicism, let me say that Invictus, while it does have moments of stodgy uplift, is more fascinating — and intelligent, and moving — than it sounds. It's really about the inner workings of politics, and about how Mandela made a hugely counterintuitive decision: to embrace the Springboks even though they were despised by the nation's black majority (the team wore the colors of the apartheid-era flag). He knew that supporting the ''enemy'' would 
 symbolize a laying down of old hatreds, thus paving the way for a new nation.

It's thrilling to watch Freeman do his perfect imitation of Mandela's lordly, formal cadences. That's because Freeman captures the mind behind the manners: Mandela the crafty persuader who orchestrated his fan worship of the Springboks as an act of high-wire rebellion. Invictus often suggests a spiritual link between Mandela's cunning and the strategies of Barack Obama, with a rough parallel between the film's righteously angry black South Africans and the progressives whom Obama won't appease. The film's speechifying is at times overexplicit, yet Freeman lets the words breathe, and Damon, as the cautious Afrikaner brought to a higher place by Mandela's authority, acts with a 
 coolly impassive fervor. And how is Invictus as a sports movie? Let's just say that its lump-in-the-throat climax is predictable, but that doesn't mean it's less than earned.
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Post by Sonic Youth »

Invictus
3 December, 2009 | By Mike Goodridge
Screendaily
Dir: Clint Eastwood. US. 2009. 133 mins.



An old-fashioned crowd-pleaser which is both a rousing sports movie and a testament to the nobility of Nelson Mandela, Invictus is another strong entry in Clint Eastwood’s fast-growing body of work. Boasting a finely controlled central performance from Morgan Freeman as Mandela, the film details how South Africa’s first black president used the 1995 Rugby World Cup to unite the black and white populations in his country.

South African stories have failed to perform at the box office of late (Catch a Fire, Country of my Skull), but Invictus benefits from the Eastwood stamp, the clout of Warner Bros as a studio distributor and two big stars – Freeman and Matt Damon (who is the focus of the key art for the film). The sports component might be a problem in a rugby-phobic nation like the US but it will be an added benefit in bringing out international audiences, especially younger men who recall the upset of South Africa beating New Zealand in the dramatic final.

If the film might appear self-important or didactic going in, that would be to underestimate Eastwood’s skill at using humour and humanity to take any hot air out of his own sails. Nelson Mandela is portrayed not as a saintly figure but as a smart operator, a playful, warm man with his own longings and shortcomings. He even defies his own cabinet and supporters by urging them to support the Springboks, the country’s predominantly white rugby team whose green and gold colours have acted as a taunt to the oppressed black population for decades.

Mandela, newly sworn in as president, believes that forgiveness is key to the country’s progress; he rejects proposals to change the name of the team from Springboks and befriends its captain Francois Pienaar (Damon), encouraging the side to coach young black kids around the country as a PR exercise to help sport heal the rifts of apartheid.

Although the team has been performing badly, he rallies them to up their game for the upcoming World Cup and they begin an unlikely winning spree that takes them all the way to the final. But, once there, they must face the “unbeatable” New Zealand side the All Blacks and their formidable star player Jonah Lomu.

Eastwood ambles into the story at a leisurely pace, introducing Mandela’s divided security team – half black and half white – led by Jason Tshabalala (Tony Kgoroge) and his personal staff (including Adjoa Andoh as Brenda Mazibuko, his chief of staff) who are all bemused at their leader’s interest in the white sport of rugby union. Eastwood also subtly weaves in a few moving moments referring to Mandela’s 27 years in captivity.

The final 40 minutes leave any such subtlety behind, however, detailing the bone-crunching action of the match with heart-thumping manipulation. It’s a brilliantly shot and cut section which will move the hardest of audience members.

The film is not the best-looking of the year, and some of the interior scenes are unnecessarily murky. Eastwood also goes overboard with the music - some score by Kyle Eastwood and Michael Stevens, some songs by South African group Overtone - although the combination of the national anthem followed by the World Cup song World In Union help stir up the emotions effectively in the finale.




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