> Retire, Brian. You're no Clint Eastwood!
When Eastwood was the age DePalma is now, his last 4 movies were
Gran Torino - At the time, this felt, commercially and thematically, like the perfect note to retire on.
Invictus - Inoffensive taken in isolation, but I think this is just boring and anonymous.
Hereafter - I still haven't seen this, but I expect it to be bad.
J. Edgar - You know what I think of this.
The next movie he directed was Jersey Boys, which NOBODY seemed to care about and which I remember seeing absolutely nothing about at the time, and American Sniper, which was huge but pretty mediocre, IMHO. And I really do not think that he would have accepted American Sniper as a project earlier in his career, because Chris Kyle's family was involved in the project in ways that he probably would have thought was unacceptable.
So if THAT had been his final run of 5 movies, then unless one of the two I haven't seen really surprised me then I'd think that was a value 5-for the-price-of-4 package for Tarantino's claim about directors ending with 4 duds.
Since then, I like Sully, but he didn't need to be the one to make it as long as it wasn't given to someone who would go out of their way to ruin it.
The 15:17 to Paris - Most people seemed to hate this, I kind of liked it because 1) it was short and not boring and therefore fine to watch 2) it seemed like it could have been a conservative crowd-pleaser like American Sniper, but he turned it into an idiosyncratic personal project that would have had no market value in any era of Hollywood. That said, I'm really not in a hurry to watch it again.
The Mule - Oh great, this is totally redeeming, a second shot at retiring on a perfect note, is he retiring now?
Richard Jewel - Still haven't seen it, no idea if I expect it to be good or not.
Cry Macho - I saw someone call Richard Jewel "Clint Eastwood's Frenzy." I can't evaluate that without seeing it, but I'm skeptical. However, this is kind of his Family Plot, in that it's likeable and feels more like the kind of movie that makes me a fan than alot of his later stuff, but the technical regression is on display as well. And I'm not saying it's actually close to being as good as Family Plot.
I've read that he's appearing in but not directing a wildlife documentary called Why On Earth, that he's making another movie, and that Warner Bros. is dumping him, so I think the "other movie" is Why On Earth which he isn't directing, and that he might be done as a director, but I'm not sure.
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