yeah well I think that scene in The Rookie is the most famous scene in the movie, it's just that the movie isn't remembered. It gets a bunch of discussion in the film's Wikipedia article.
They Shoot Pictures has 2 Eastwood-directed films in their top 2000, Unforgiven at 299 and The Bridges of Madison County at 921. Yeah, I didn't expect that either. But remember that it's a list made out of other lists. I would have guessed Outlawy Josey Wales or one of the other Oscar winners.
Let's see who on this site
https://www.mistdriven.com/critics/wilmington.html
has it...
Michael Wilmington has it at #6
https://www.mistdriven.com/critics/wilmington.html
and his biggest Critical Partisan, Dave Kehr, made two inconsistent lists for that year has it at 4 & 8
https://www.mistdriven.com/critics/kehr.html
Btw, Kehr liked The Rookie. I think he's the only one. Even Richard Schickel's puff piece bibliography coffie table book on Eastwood bashes it. That book also points out that Bridges of Madison County is an awful book, but praises the script they made out of it.
I think it is a good movie, but I mostly like it because Eastwood gives a great performance in it in some very atypical material. But the frame story scenes are bad and I don't like romantic stories about adultary.
Olivia Wilde is a reporter in Richard Jewel, not a lawyer. That was my mistake.
Paul Walter Hauser gives a bad performance then?
No, he doesn't, the character isn't supposed to be charismatic. He's an unlikeable loser that spends his life trying and failing to work in law informenet and pissing people off by enforcing rules that people don't care about and/or that he doesn't have the authority to enfornce, then his zeal pays off and he saves a bunch of people's lives making a big deal about a random backpack under a bench that none of the other security was worried about. He's not a hero that anyone would want to see themselves in.
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