I’d Love To Turn You On At The Movies #231 - Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997, dir. Clint Eastwood)

         Anyone who knows me isn’t even a little bit surprised I’m writing a review about Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. It’s got all the things I love: true crime, the occult, John Cusack, and it’s set in the South. Based on John Berendt’s non-fiction book of the same name and directed by Clint Eastwood, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil brings all the southern charm Savannah, Georgia has to offer - along with all of its dirty laundry.

The basic plot of the film is as follows. John Kelso (John Cusack), is sent to Savannah to write a 500-word article on a Christmas party held by eccentric local Jim Williams (Kevin Spacey). When Williams kills Billy Hanson (a baby-faced Jude Law) in what Williams said was an “act of self-defense,” Kelso decides to stay and cover the trial. Kelso gets sucked into the drama of the trial and Savanah itself, describing it as “Gone with the Wind on mescaline.” It’s the local characters that Kelso meets during his time in Savannah that really make the film.

 Mandy Nicholls (Allison Eastwood, Clint Eastwood’s daughter) is a love interest of sorts for Kelso, as well as helping him break into the morgue to solve the mystery of what actually happened the night Billy Hanson was shot. Sonny Seiler (Jack Thompson), Williams' attorney and the owner of the University of Georgia mascot - a long line of English bulldogs named Uga (pronounced “UGH – uh”), adds that unique Southern charm that only Savannah natives can offer. Fun fact about the film - the real life Sonny Seiler plays the judge in the murder trial. Kelso and Williams make a trip to Bonaventure Cemetery to see voodoo practitioner Minerva (Irma P. Hall) in an attempt to communicate with and help calm Billy Hanson’s spirit. Kelso is skeptical to say the least, and Cusack’s scenes with Minerva are some his best acting in the film; he seems genuinely bewildered by what she says and does. But in the end she gives him some great advice - “to understand the living you gotta commune with the dead.” Quite possibly the strangest character Kelso comes into contact with is Luther Driggers (Geoffrey Lewis), a man who keeps flies on strings attached to a shirt and threatens to poison the water supply almost daily with a mystery substance he keeps in a vial that goes with him everywhere, even while he eats his lunch at Clary’s Café. If he enjoys his lunch he will put the vial back in his pocket and be on his way while the entire café breathes a sigh of relief. Last, but certainly not least, playing herself because there isn’t another human on this planet that could do it, The Lady Chablis, a transgender club performer and all around iconic Southern Lady. Kelso comes into contact with her after learning she may have some information about Hanson’s relationship with Williams. The Lady Chablis has her fun with Kelso, making him take her along as his date to a debutante ball he is attending and delivering the best life advice and the best line in the film: “Two tears in a bucket, motherfuck it.” I quote it all the time and most people don’t have a clue where it comes from.

            I can’t talk about this movie without talking about the music. The real Jim Williams lived in famed songwriter Johnny Mercer’s house and Eastwood chose to use the real house in the film (which is now called the Mercer-Williams House and is open for public tours). Hell, I even made my parents take me on a tour of the Mercer-Williams House on a family trip to Savannah. Yes, that’s right, I’ve been in the room where all this went down. This is the reason every song used in the film is a song written by Johnny Mercer. It opens with an absolutely haunting version of “Skylark” sung by k.d. lang. Rosemary Clooney, Cassandra Wilson, Tony Bennett, Allison Eastwood and even director Clint Eastwood contribute covers of some of Mercer's most iconic songs. It keeps that theme of Southern charm going throughout the entire film.

What is most striking about this film is Eastwood cast as many real life people as he could, The Lady Chablis and Sonny Seiler are just a couple of them. It’s what makes the film, which is already based on a true story, work. What better to make something feel more authentic than casting the real life people who were involved? The entire film is a good romp around Savannah, and Eastwood made use of this unique southern town, highlighting many of its most iconic landmarks and colorful locals. I find it to be a highly entertaining film, perfect for a lazy afternoon watch full of laughs, voodoo, an invisible dog being walked on a leash, murder, and a whole lot of Southern charm.

-Anna Lathem  

I’d Love To Turn You On At The Movies #187 - Honkytonk Man (1982, dir. Clint Eastwood)

I’ve mentioned in previous posts here my affinity for the Western genre. When I was little, my brothers and I would spend entire weekends watching them on television with my father. At the time, I don’t think I really paid much attention to them and didn’t really care either way. But Westerns on the TV meant Saturdays with my dad, and those were pretty special to me. Eventually, I grew to appreciate them for what they are and now when I watch them, I tend to get transported back to third or fourth grade, staring at our giant old wood-framed console TV that didn’t have a remote. I wasn’t in fifth grade in the 60s or anything, this is just the dirtball TV we had in 1986. But that is neither here nor there.

The point is, I loved to sit around watching Westerns with my dad and among our favorites were Clint Eastwood movies. But I’m not going to talk about The Man with No Name franchise, as the point of this column is to suggest things that you, the reader, may have missed. It’s not very likely that you’re a fan of Westerns and have never heard of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Nor am I even going to talk about an Eastwood Western film for that matter, because if you’re like me, if you even think the word “Western,” an image of Clint as the titular Outlaw Josey Wales probably pops into your head. Today I’m going to talk about Clint’s 1982 film Honkytonk Man.

It took me a while to come around to Honkytonk Man, actually. For the most part, I preferred Clint Eastwood as a Western outlaw. Even the Dirty Harry series, which I love now, I had a hard time with for a while. I just didn’t have any interest in seeing him try to be tough guy in the modern world, I guess. But Honkytonk Man was the first movie I remember enjoying Clint in that wasn’t a Western.

Set in the 1930s during the Great Depression, Clint plays Red Stovall, a singer-songwriter and alcoholic drifter who is trying like hell to get to Nashville so he can try out for the Grand Ol’ Opry as a country singer. In the opening scene, Red drunkenly careens up onto the front lawn of a rural Oklahoma farm house just moments after it is hit with an aggressive dust storm. The farm belongs to his sister and her family who are all too familiar with this kind of behavior from Red. The family, discovering that Red has an advanced case of tuberculosis, take him in. While there, he forms a bond with his nephew Whit, played by Clint’s son Kyle Eastwood in his film debut. Red decides to take Whit with him on a road trip to Nashville so that Red can finally pursue his dream. The two share a series of adventures, including robbing a poker game, performing at a juke joint, a brothel visit, and a jailbreak. When they finally reach the Opry, Red is too sick to finish, botching his audition with a series of coughing fits. The performance is, however, caught by a record executive who offers Red studio time to record his songs.

What I love about this film, aside from the killer country soundtrack by the likes of Porter Wagoner, Ray Price, Marty Robbins and Eastwood himself, is that the character of Red is such a different kind of role for Clint. While he does have some of that familiar gruff, icy exterior (particularly when sleeping off a hangover), there is a vulnerability to the dying man that really sets Red apart from other Eastwood characters. A child of the Depression himself, perhaps Clint saw something in the story that struck a chord with his own childhood when he decided to take on the role (and the director’s chair). Whatever the reason, Eastwood brings the melancholy of this character to life with the help of his evolving relationship with the young boy. Red gets the boy involved in some unsavory practices, but there is a real family bond there that is at times very touching. In Honkytonk Man, Clint is given the chance to prove to the world that there is more to his acting than just violent thuggery.

As a director, Clint really shines here as well. The film is visually stunning, filmed on location in various parts of Northern California and Nevada, which act as the Middle America backdrop for the duo’s family road trip. Again, in every way, the film is very different from the usual gun porn fodder that Clint is known for, but take a chance on Honkytonk Man. It’s a true character study of the traveling troubadour, perhaps a character you’ve heard about before in some of the best country songs.

-         Jonathan Eagle

I'd Love to Turn You On At the Movies #62 - High Plains Drifter (1973, dir. Clint Eastwood)

It’s hard to watch High Plains Drifter, and not think of Clint Eastwood, the film’s star and director, forty years later, speaking to an empty chair at the Republican National Convention. The movie is full of twisted American right-wing ideology that wasn’t apparent to me the first time I saw the film on the late, late show, when I was in high school. Back then I just thought it was a trip, full of spaghetti western spaciness: long, well composed shots of sweaty, road-worn men riding across the windswept desert, an eerie soundtrack a la Ennio Morricone, and the surreality of the low budget sound effects, the boots of the swaggering gunslingers scratching out a hypnotic rhythm across the dirt of Main Street, the ever howling wind. In the end Eastwood has a whole town painted red and writes hell across the welcome sign, which is one of the best plot twists in the history of the genre. It’s still all that when I watch it now, but it’s also a glimpse into the still-forming psyche of a GOP nut.

            The whole sociopolitical head-trip begins early in the film when Eastwood’s character, a nameless stranger and ostensibly the protagonist, rapes a woman in a horse stable. It’s clearly a rape. She’s screaming and slapping at him as he drags her through the dirt, throws her into a pile of hay, and mounts her, but after a while she seems to be enjoying it. Throughout the movie the woman reappears several times, and in each instance she’s enraged at having been raped, shouting and begging the townspeople to punish the man, but they shrug her off, say she wanted it, that she’s only mad because he didn’t come back and give it to her again. Of course all this brought to mind those two recent Republican Senate candidates who lost because they said a pregnancy caused by rape is god’s will, which isn’t exactly a Republican ideal, but still. No, the right-wing themes become more apparent in the way the townspeople react to him and how he reacts to them. Instead of throwing Eastwood in jail or driving him out of town, they enlist him as their protector against three violent bad guys who are about to get out of jail who will certainly come and destroy the town. At first, Eastwood turns them down, but they offer him anything and everything he wants, so he promptly promotes a midget to sheriff and mayor, and goes around redistributing all the wealth, making the bar owner provide free liquor to everyone, the cobbler give away free boots, and so on. In other words, he’s a Communist dictator, albeit an ironic one. In truth he’s a true American, a rugged individualist; he just steps into the role of a Lenin or a Stalin to teach them all a lesson, because in the end they’re just namby-pamby liberals, too weak and fearful and corrupt to take matters into their own hands. Communism-by-way-of-rapist-tyrant is what they deserve.

            The movie came out to strong reviews, and it maintains a high rating at Rotten Tomatoes, but not everyone is a fan, not even all those who lean to the right. Upon its release, John Wayne, an outspoken SoCal Reaganite, groused, “That isn't what the West was all about. That isn't the American people who settled this country.” And while the same could be said of every one of Wayne’s films, it’s beside the point: Westerns aren’t about the time of the Great West, they’re about the time in which they were made, and this came out in the summer of 1973, when the world was closing in on Nixon and his 18 minutes of missing tape. It’s a peculiar time for Hollywood. Anti-heroes and unhappy endings were very much in vogue, and while this reflects a very real feeling that American society was falling apart, it also shows a time when Americans’ distrust of government was nearing its peak. Eastwood stepped into this climate and delivered a tour de force of macho bleakness, which might well have been what he intended to recapture when he stepped out on the stage in Tampa and, after declaring himself a “conservative” and not a “left winger… left of Lenin,” says, to a chair, “We own this country. We -- we own it. It is not you owning it, and not politicians owning it. Politicians are employees of ours.”

            - Joe Miller

I'd Love To Turn You On - At the Movies #37 - Bird (1988, dir. Clint Eastwood)

Movies about music and musicians are a dicey proposition at best. So many of them fall flat. I mean, how often have you watched one and said to yourself  “gee there’s so and so pretending they are so and so.” In other words it is hard to suspend disbelief when you are watching something with so much sub-context. We all have such strong impressions of musicians and what they must be like outside of the spotlight that depictions of them often feel wrong or off somehow. The music side of it complicates things further when an actor clearly is not a player and their fingering or the way they hold the instrument looks phony. Of course nothing is worse than the director just not getting the musician and whitewashing the facts of his or her life to make them more palatable for the masses. Clint Eastwood’s Bird avoids all these pitfalls and in the process captures the era beautifully and presents Forest Whittaker as one of the greatest actors of his generation.

Charlie “Yardbird” Parker was a complicated man; sublimely talented and highly intelligent he was also tortured by feelings of inadequacy, driven to suicide attempts by crippling bouts of depression and victimized by the twin assaults of racism and drug addiction. He was introduced to heroin as a teenager and the junkie life defined his fate for the rest of his life. Eastwood’s movie focuses on all the right stuff. First and foremost it completely gets the music right. Forest Whittaker clearly studied Parker as his body language and handling of the saxophone are spot-on. After only a few minutes my disbelief was suspended and I felt as though I was watching Charlie Parker himself, not an actor portraying him. The soundtrack utilizes original Parker recordings mixed with modern musicians, which give them both authenticity and modern production values. Thus it all sounds correct, and of the times. One really gets a feeling for Parker’s ability to solo and improvise, and how his unique style built upon his influences and revolutionized all jazz soloists who followed him. Most specifically, Parker’s profound influence on a young Red Rodney (real name: Robert Chudnick) played with wide-eyed innocence by Michael Zelniker is explored to great effect. Rodney comes to Bird as an acolyte, desperate to just be near the man, but ends up playing with him and following him down the road of heroin addiction. The other major relationships explored are those with his long suffering wife Chan Parker and fellow bebop pioneer Dizzy Gillespie. Parker was irresistible because of his overwhelming talent, but at the same time he was unreliable in every way. He was often too stoned or drunk to play, he womanized constantly and he hurt all those closest to him. Gillespie (played by Samuel E. Wright) is his friend, mentor and champion yet he recognized Parker’s tragic flaws and didn’t make excuses for them. In one pivotal scene the two men stand by the ocean discussing their fate and Gillespie tells Parker “If they kill me (white society) it won’t be because I helped them do it.” He is referring to Parker’s own self-destructive behavior, which he can’t seem to curtail and rightly predicts Parker’s sad fate. Dizzy loves to play with Bird, but sees him as the tragic mess he is. Diane Venora plays Chan Parker as a very modern woman who is trapped by her love for a guy she can clearly see is no good for her. Yet, they marry (her white, he black and all that went with that in our society in the mid 20^th century), have children, and try to forge some sort of domestic happiness. It is heartbreaking to watch, because it is so clear that he is not up to the task. He can’t keep his instrument out of hock, so how is he supposed to provide for a wife and kids?

The real power of Eastwood’s accomplishment comes in the constant juxtaposition of Parker’s golden talent with the clay and mud of his day-to-day life: he was hounded by police trying to shake down a junkie, he was disapproved of for fraternizing with white women and he was constantly out of work because of his unreliability. But then, Eastwood shows many scenes of Parker onstage, using his horn to soothe the savage beast that raged within his soul. Jumping around in Bird’s history, Eastwood manages to keep the thread of time clear even as we go from scenes of a young Parker learning his trade and being humiliated by his inadequacies, to a man at the height of his powers, knocking the jazz world on its ear with his mind-blowing improvisations, to a washed up has-been who doesn’t understand the new world of showboating rock and rollers, all in no particular order. Unstuck in time, the movie weaves a majestic tapestry that gives one a sympathetic understanding of Parker’s brief 34-year life. The greatness of his talent is clear, the depth of his junkie depravity is clear and by the end of the movie these two factors merge to offer a startlingly honest and compelling portrait of one of the greatest musicians who ever graced a stage. Bird is that rare artistic accomplishment that makes one confront the uncomfortable truths that surround the creative process. Often the angels that give one his inspiration come hand-in-hand with the devils that rob him of his talent.

- Paul Epstein