Scarlett Johansson, Matt Damon

Although it’s far superior to last summer’s toothless comedy “Zookeeper,” and it holds the promise of something warm and friendly from long-absent director Cameron Crowe and the always reliable star Matt Damon, the feel-good family film “We Bought a Zoo” is an odd cinematic creature that’s neither fish nor fowl.

Part drama of family loss, father-son conflict and middle-aged anxiety and part cuddly comedy of cute kids, cuter animals and budding romance between a widowed father and a harried zookeeper, the story is well-meaning but suffers from the same problem that sabotaged Crowe’s last picture, 2005’s rambling “Elizabethtown.” It’s a hodgepodge of interesting, potentially compelling parts that never quite gels into a satisfying whole.

Crowe and his co-writer Aline Brosh McKenna (“The Devil Wears Prada”) aim for something heartwarming and PG-rated in this Americanized adaptation of British journalist Benjamin Mee’s touching memoir about buying and restoring a ramshackle zoo in an effort to heal his family while his wife was dying of brain cancer.

The film moves the tale from Devonshire, England, to Southern California and casts Damon as Mee, an adventure-seeking newspaper writer still grieving over the recent death of his beloved wife (played in flashbacks by Stephanie Szosak).

Mee casts about looking for a fresh start and a way to connect with his two confused kids. Angry teen son Dylan (brooding Colin Ford) channels his bereavement into macabre drawings of bloodletting and decapitations and gets expelled from school. Seven-year-old daughter Rosie (adorable Maggie Elizabeth Jones) misses her mom and looks to her overwhelmed father and anguished brother for support.

In a fit of inspiration – and against the advice of his banker brother, Duncan (Thomas Haden Church in roguish comic support) – Mee quits his job in L.A. and invests his inheritance in a rural property of 18 acres that includes the ramshackle Rosemoor Animal Park.

There, he’s suddenly in charge of a ragtag crew that includes workaholic animal lover Kelly (Scarlett Johansson in an underwritten part) and a menagerie of shaggy, sickly endangered animals (including Buster, a 650-pound grizzly bear, and Spar, an ailing and decrepit tiger).

As the overwhelmed new owner works to bring the park up to code against the nitpicking of an antagonistic inspector (John Michael Higgins), halting but inevitable romances play out between Mee and Kelly and Dylan and wide-eyed young zoo hand Lily (Elle Fanning, too sweet and dreamy by half).

It all works its way toward an ending of uplift, and true to form the music-savvy Crowe punctuates with an eclectic soundtrack of oldies and contemporary tracks (ranging form Bob Dylan and Neil Young to haunting songs by composer Jonsi of the Icelandic cult band Sigur Ros). But even here, Crowe seems a little rusty and uncertain as he hits a few notes too heavily – like when he backs a rainy-day montage with Randy Newman’s funereal “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today.”

That’s the story of “We Bought A Zoo.” It’s a shaggy, loose-jointed movie with a good heart that we want to love a lot more than we actually do.

- Dennis King

“We Bought a Zoo”

PG
2:04
2 1/2 stars
Starring: Matt Damon, Scarlett Johansson, Thomas Haden Church, Elle Fanning
(Language and some thematic elements)

BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK – While neither Emily Blunt nor Matt Damon profess to be New Age-y advocates of either free will or fate, each star of the cosmic-romantic thriller “The Adjustment Bureau” can relate a personal story in which the hand of providence appears to have steered them on a path that profoundly shaped their current lives and careers.

Matt Damon, Emily Blunt

Amid much furrow-browed contemplation over the movie’s philosophical quandary – do we control our own destiny, or is our fate preordained in the Big Book of Life? – the two stars sat down recently for a Universal Pictures press conference at the sky-high Mandarin Oriental Hotel.

“The Adjustment Bureau,” inspired by an intriguing Philip K. Dick short story titled “Adjustment Team,” casts Damon as David Norris, a Kennedy-esque New York politician on the brink of winning a U.S. Senate seat. Blunt plays Elise Sellas, a free-spirited ballet dancer whose bohemian allure spells love at first sight for the straight-arrow politician. But their unconventional love affair threatens to upset the ledgers of destiny, and so the dour men of the Adjustment Bureau work behind the scenes to keep David and Elise apart.

The stars were asked if either had experienced the hand of fate intervening in their own lives.

“I remember I didn’t get into this very amazing school that my sister went to, and I wanted to be just like my sister,” said Blunt (“The Devil Wears Prada”). “It’s a school called Westminster in London and it’s fiercely competitive. She gets in because she’s a brainiac, and I don’t because I’m obviously not. I remember at 16 just being devastated. I felt so inferior that I hadn’t gotten in.

“So I went to my second-choice school, which had a good drama department,” she said. “I previously hadn’t considered acting, but I did a play through my school that went to the Edinburgh Festival. I got an agent; he’s still my agent. And now I’m here with you nice people. And if I’d gone to Westminster I wouldn’t be doing this job. Guaranteed. So that was weird. At the time it seemed devastating and so sad, but really it was meant to happen.”

Damon (most recently seen in “True Grit” and “Hereafter”) initially joked about the question.

“Well, clearly for me, passing up the chance to be in ‘Avatar’ to do ‘Green Zone’ was one of those moments,” he said. “Because ‘Avatar’ didn’t do well and the DVD for ‘Green Zone’ is going to go right through the roof.”

Then, he considered it more seriously. “I do end up thinking about jobs. There are so many roads not taken. There’s a Garth Brooks song, it’s called something like ‘Thank God for Unanswered Prayers,’ and I think of all those movies I auditioned for and jobs I was desperate to get that I didn’t get that really turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

“And looking back on my life and my career I feel like I tried to control as much as I could, but a lot of it is down to luck,” he said. “There was a Werner Herzog movie called ‘Rescue Dawn’ that Christian Bale did, and Werner and I were talking about that – this is eight years ago – about me possibly playing that role and I was really strongly considering it.

“But instead I met with the Farrelly brothers, and I remember talking to my mother and she said, ‘you know, you don’t always have to go into a jungle and lose a bunch of weight. You’re allowed to have a little fun,’” he recalled. “And I did the Farrelly brothers movie (conjoined twins comedy ‘Stuck on You’) and that was where I met my wife (Luciana). Four kids later, and I guess that was a pretty fateful decision.”

Passing on “Avatar?” Damon was asked if that was a dicey choice or a dire trick of fate.

“It wasn’t anything against ‘Avatar.’ I talked to (James) Cameron, I read the script, I knew the movie was going to be a very big hit, you could see,” he said with a sheepish grin. “And I really wanted to do ‘Avatar’ to work with Cameron and watch him direct, because I was going to learn a lot. It was just that we were finishing ‘The Bourne Ultimatum’ and I couldn’t leave.

“I joke that I passed on ‘Avatar’ but really my schedule made it an impossibility for me,” he said. “But, in terms of ‘Green Zone,’ Paul (Greengrass), one of my best friends in the business and a director I love, wanted to make a movie about Iraq and about the original lie that got us in there. And so I really wanted to go do that. My decisions are usually based on the director.”

George Nolfi is the screenwriter who penned “The Bourne Ultimatum” and “Oceans Twelve” and is making his directing debut in this film. In adapting Dick’s stripped-down short story he managed to graft a fairly elaborate love story onto the narrative that presented some challenges for the actors.

“To me that was the tricky part,” Blunt said. “The questions I had tonally of what the movie was. What are we doing? And George encouraged us and we just decided to submarine everything and be naturalistic and not that ‘Matrix’-esque flying around on wires doing crazy stuff. These are pretty accessible sci-fi characters.”

“Yeah, the tone stuff we weren’t in charge of. That was the director’s job,” Damon agreed. “But for us, we thought, well, this is a love story with this other whole (sci-fi) element in it. But what really has to work, what we can control, is the relationship between us. And so we just worked on the scenes to make them feel right.”

Blunt said an additional challenge, and thrill, in making the movie was working on location at several iconic sites around New York City.

“I was like a kid. It was so exciting to be able to shoot at the Statue of Liberty,” she said. “But then the down fall is you have 400 random strangers watching you do a very emotional scene, which is pretty embarrassing.”

“Yeah, we did that scene at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, and obviously you can’t shut down the Stature of Liberty,” Damon said. “So there were like 400 people going to see the Statue and they’re like, hey, a movie is getting filmed. And so they just sat there, and we’re yelling at each other ‘I love you!’ And they’d go ‘Cut’ and there’d be a pause and everyone would applaud.”

“There was one really bad moment where we’d managed to get it together,” Blunt recalled. “We’d been laughing because it was so mortifying, the whole thing – Matt managed to get it together, he was there, he was really in it, and then someone in the crowd goes (low, guttural voice) Matt Daaamon. And he looked at me and said, ‘this is the worst day of my life.’ But it was fun. Yankee Stadium was pretty cool.”

Both Blunt and Damon expressed admiration for the stories of the late science fiction writer
Philip K. Dick, whose work has served as source material for such films as “Blade Runner,” “Total Recall” “Minority Report” and more.

“George basically took just the central idea of Dick’s story, and the rest he really invented himself,” said Damon. “This whole love story, really the core of the movie, is an invention of George’s. This is the least kind of Philip K. Dick of all Philip K. Dick movies, in a way, with the whole love story and romance.”

Listed on wimgo Movies under Science fiction

Beware of men in sharp suits and snappy fedoras. They just might be efficient and officious agents of The Big Boss, assigned to keep us on fate’s straight and narrow path and prevent us from straying off into the thorny thickets of free will.

John Slattey and Matt Damon

That’s the core idea behind “The Adjustment Bureau,” a smart if occasionally wobbly amalgam of thriller, love story and science-fiction conjecture extrapolated from a very short 1954 story by sci-fi guru Philip K. Dick.

Screenwriter and first-time director George Nolfi (“The Sentinel”) deftly incorporates the core idea of Dick’s speculative story (that our destinies are tightly scripted and controlled by a behind-the-scenes cadre of spiffily tailored, hat-wearing bureaucrats working for some unspecified big-brother power) and weaves it into a star-crossed love story with headlong chase sequences and subtly sinister thriller undertones.

Despite carrying a heavy load of thematic freight and projecting an uncertain tone, the story trips along lightly, thanks to Nolfi’s minimalist approach to special effects that turns New York City into a mind-bending M.C. Escher landscape of magical doorways and labyrinthine passages opening onto such iconic locales as 30 Rockefeller Center, Yankee Stadium, the Statue of Liberty and more.

And stars Matt Damon and Emily Blunt as the accidental lovers turn in nice, naturalistic performances that conjure up some pretty potent and engaging romantic chemistry.

The story opens with a meet-cute encounter in a men’s room, where Damon’s brash politico David Norris, just defeated in a close Congressional race, runs into Blunt’s beguiling ballet dancer Elise Sellas, who is hiding out after crashing a wedding party.

Sparks fly immediately, but skulking around the edges of this love-at-first-sight pairing is a shadowy gang of buttoned-down men in fedoras, led by the no-nonsense Richardson (“Mad Men’s” John Slattery) and his furtively sympathetic underling, Harry (Anthony Mackie).

In a brisk series of narrative strokes, we learn that these guys are metaphysical operatives of The Adjustment Bureau (“We are the people who make sure that things go according to plan,” Richardson says), that David and Elise’s meeting was a mistake due to Harry’s tardiness, and that in order to set the lovers’ fates back on course (David toward a Presidential bid; Elise toward international acclaim as a choreographer) the two must never cross paths again.

To emphasize the point, Richardson gives David a peek behind the bureaucratic curtain and informs him that if he attempts to see Elise again, “We’ll erase your brain.”

Naturally, love and free will are not to be held to fate’s rigid rules, and David defies the bureau and goes in search of Elise. This sets up an ominous intervention by the bureau’s big cheese, Thompson (an imposing Terence Stamp), and the film’s second half turns into a frantic, physics-defying chase as David persuades the disbelieving Elise to follow him on a desperate dash toward love.

Damon, filmdom’s quintessential Everyman, and Blunt, quirky, sexy and irreverent, are an engaging enough pair to make us overlook most of the story’s gaping plot holes and its too glib treatment of some pretty hefty thematic issues (theological, philosophical and practical).

But as a light, winning entertainment that piques our curiosity, doesn’t insult our intelligence and delivers a satisfying romance wrapped in pleasant thrills and a cosmic conundrum, “The Adjustment Bureau” gives us just cause to doff our fedoras.

- Dennis King
“The Adjustment Bureau”

PG-13
1:39
3 stars
Starring: Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, John Slattery, Anthony Mackie
(Brief strong language, some sexuality and a violent image)

Listed on wimgo Movies under Science fiction

These days, it seems that everything in popular culture is fair game for pundits to politicize.

Example: When it comes to portraying Rooster Cogburn, the “one-eyed fat man” in the two film interpretations of Charles Portis’ “True Grit,” it seems that stars John Wayne (in Henry Hathaway’s 1969 version) and Jeff Bridges (in the Coen brothers new version) don’t exactly see eye to eye.

In the novel, Cogburn is said to have lost one eye in a Civil War skirmish. But, although Portis describes the gnarly old lawman as sporting a mustache, he says nothing about Rooster wearing an eye patch.

In both film versions, Rooster wears an eye patch, although Wayne, the hardcore conservative, portrays him as clean-shaven while Bridges, the outspoken liberal, plays him wearing a scruffy beard.

But it’s the placement of the eye patch really sets political bloggers off on wild tears of conspiratorial speculation.

Consider this from the political blog American Thinker:

“One of the interesting decisions that was made during the filming of ‘True Grit’ was the placement of Rooster Cogburn’s famous eye patch. In the original film John Wayne wore the eye patch over his left eye which allowed him to view the world through his right eye, as the Duke was inclined to do. … In the remake Jeff Bridges covers his right eye leaving his left eye fully exposed, as a subtle reminder of where his ‘Crazy Heart’ resides.”

The blogger goes on to speculate, “If this film should achieve the level of success that many are predicting it will, it could open the door to other revisionist remakes. Imagine if you will (liberal actors) Matt Damon starring in ‘Sergeant York,’ Sean Penn and George Clooney in ‘Big Jim McLain’ or Josh Brolin playing George Gipp in ‘Knute Rockne, All American.’”

Bridges, when informed of the eye-patch debate by one newspaper writer, reportedly joked, “I’m a commie,” then shrugged off any political subtext by explaining simply, “I tried it on the right eye, and it felt good. But on the left eye, not so good.”

So in the blink of an eye, political conspiracy squelched.

- Dennis King

BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK – As an actor, Clint Eastwood has dispatched more than his share of fictional adversaries into the great beyond. But as a director, when it comes to the mysterious passage from life to death, he admits he doesn’t have any answers. Only questions.

Clint Eastwood

And those are posed with admirable art, rigorous curiosity and glancing uncertainty in his new film “Hereafter,” a moody, yearning examination of life’s most nagging question: What happens to us after we die?

At a press conference hosted by Warner Bros. before the film’s closing-night premiere at the New York Film Festival, director Eastwood and his cast engaged in a rambling exchange with film journalists that sometimes smacked of an airy New Age seminar on the afterlife.

“Most religions seem to ponder the afterlife, but I thought this was interesting because it wasn’t really a religious project,” Eastwood said. “It had a spirituality about it, but it was not necessarily tied in with any particular organized thought.

“And I think everybody, whether you believe in the afterlife or the chance of this near-death experience and coming back, whether that has really happened or not, I don’t know, certainly everyone has thought about it at some point in time,” he said. “And it’s a fantasy that if there is anything out there like that it would be terrific. But that remains to be seen.”

“Hereafter,” which stars Matt Damon as a self-questioning San Francisco psychic, interweaves the stories of three unrelated people in far-flung locales struggling with the overwhelming tragedy of sudden death and seeking to find answers about eternal life.

Matt Damon

“It was a terrific script,” Damon said of Peter Morgan’s speculative screenplay. “It was really tight. It read like a play in a sense where sometimes when you do a play you just explore the material and every answer you need is there. I’m somebody who does a lot of research normally on my own, but in this case I really didn’t want to go down the rabbit hole. It was really all on the page.”

“The film is really a story of inquiry and curiosity and a feeling of incompleteness and a feeling of living with mystery,” said Morgan, whose resume includes celebrated scripts for “Frost/Nixon” and “The Queen.” “And that’s something that unites every one of us. Other than the act of being born, none of us know where we’re going. None of us has any idea, and we’re going to do all of it alone. I thought it would be quite interesting just to provoke those questions without offering any answers. You know, it’s very private.”

Eastwood emphasized that the film poses mysteries with no concrete solutions.

“The questions are there,” he said. “You pose the questions and then it’s up to the audience to meet you half way and think about it in terms their own lives and what their thoughts are or what experiences they might have had.”
For his part, Eastwood said he has had a couple of brushes with death that left him vaguely wondering about eternity.

“I remember when I was very young, my dad was taking me into the surf on his shoulders and I fell off,” the director said. “And I can still remember today, even though I was probably 4 or 5 years old, I can still remember the color of the water and everything as I was being washed around in the surf before I popped to the surface again. But at that age you don’t think too much about (death).

“And then years later, when I was 21 years old, I was in a plane and we had to ditch off the coast of Northern California in the wintertime,” he recalled. “And I must say that as I was going in to shore I was thinking that I should be thinking about my demise, but all I was thinking about, as I saw some lights in the far distance, I said, ‘somebody is in there having a beer and sitting next to a fireplace, and I just want to be in there. So I’m going to make it.’

“And that was the determination,” he continued. “but there was no sense of fate out there. I don’t think you get a chance to think that much. When you get that much time to think you’re usually going to be OK.”

Eastwood, 80, whose burgeoning resume has put him in the director’s chair for both personal, human-scale dramas and epic, action-packed sagas, said he had to perform a delicate balancing act in “Hereafter.” The film opens with a stunningly realistic, large-scale depiction of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people before segueing into the more intimate, intermingling stories of his characters’ tortured questing.

“I thought an unusual aspect of the script was taking actual events and placing them into a fictional story,” Eastwood said. “And so the tsunami of 2004 out in the Pacific was one and then the London bombings of 2005, of course. I thought that was a unique thing to do.

“But the tsunami sequence was very difficult to do,” he said. “I thought that would be prohibitive and where would we do that. In the old days I suppose you would have done that on the set and you’d have done little set pieces and turned a lot of water lose.

“But with the element now of computer-generated effects you could go ahead and do it. Even though water is probably the most difficult thing to do in a CGI basis,” he said. “I have a guy named Michael Owens who worked with me on ‘Letters From Iwo Jima,’ ‘Flags of Our Fathers’ and back as far as ‘Space Cowboys,’ and he kept very much hip on the technology as it had been improving over the years. And we went through it and figured out what shots we would need to do live, and then we did it. But it took us a lot of different places.”

Eastwood said they shot some live sequences in a giant water tank in London and then went to Maui and shot in the ocean and on the streets of Lahaina.

“From then on it was piecing all the elements together with the connective shots,” he said. “If you don’t pre-plan, CGI is the most expensive thing in the world. So you have to plan every single shot, and that’s normally not the way I shoot. But this time it worked out rather well.”

Eastwood admitted the tonal difference between the tsunami sequence depicted in the film’s preview trailers and the smaller-scale story that follows might be confusing to some film goers.

“With trailers you’re most of the time fighting the studio because they want to tell the whole story in a matter of 30 seconds,” the director said.

“Any marketing department is always going to want to show the scope,” said Damon. “And (the tsunami) is an incredible sequence. I understand you want people to be totally surprised by it, but at the end of the day they’re in that situation where they want people to come see the movie. With ‘The Informant’ I kind of jokingly went on David Letterman and intercut scenes from ‘Transformers’ into the trailer to try to get people to go, just to say, ‘yeah, it’s about a whistleblower but a lot of (stuff) blows up, too.’”

“Yeah,” Eastwood agreed. “I would have preferred not showing the tsunami (in the trailer) and just having it sprung on everybody, but that’s just not the practicalities of life. You do want people to come in and see it and hopefully they’ll enjoy it.”

Bryce Dallas Howard, left, and Matt Damon.

“Hereafter” begins placidly enough as it introduces us to Parisian TV news anchor Marie Lelay, vacationing at a balmy Indonesian beach resort with her producer-lover. While on an early morning shopping stroll to buy souvenirs, Marie and others in the busy street market become vaguely aware of a far-off roar and a stiff, rising breeze.

Those are eerie precursors of the massive tsunami that roared across the Indian Ocean in 2004, pummeling the coastline and sweeping some 230,000 people to their deaths. Director Clint Eastwood recreates that disaster in horrifying, hydraulic, chaotic detail with a realistic, workmanlike special-effects sequence (much of it achieved through CGI) that puts the razzle-dazzle trickery of most younger Hollywood blockbuster turks to shame.

But that’s merely the storm before the calm. “Hereafter” quickly shifts into a somber, pensive mood as it ventures to three countries and visits the lives of three desperate people forced to confront death and struggling with nagging questions about what comes after.

The film — contemplative, oblique and deliberately paced — seems at first blush an unlikely New Agey departure for the famously steely, straight-shooting director. But on second thought, in Eastwood’s earthy cinematic realm, sudden death is a prevailing presence, and the hereafter is often the ultimate destination for the good, the bad and the ugly who populate his films.

Death hovers over this story like an elegant, jazz-infused pall as Eastwood works mightily to pull all the film’s disparate elements into a harmonious whole.

The script by Peter Morgan (“The Queen”) interweaves three story strands — revisiting the mournful Marie (Belgian actress Cecile de France) after her near-death experience in the tsunami; looking in on George Lonegan (a solid Matt Damon), a reluctant San Francisco psychic whose gift has become a soul-crushing burden; and introducing us to hardscrabble London twins Marcus and Jacob (nonacting, 12-year-old brothers George and Frankie McLaren) as they fend off social services and cover up for their drug-dependent mother.

Marie, once a confident, rising media star, is haunted by visions of mortality and now questions everything she once held dear. George is determined to put his psychic powers on the shelf, but the pleas of a greedy brother (Jay Mohr) and a stalled romance with a charming cooking-class student (Bryce Dallas Howard) make him doubtful he can ever have a normal life free from intimations of death. And sudden tragedy sends twin Marcus on a quest to find a noncharlatan psychic who can put him in touch with the afterlife.

Eastwood’s great skill as a director has often enabled him to transform soft, fuzzy narratives to a tougher plane. He’s possessed of a dead-on bunkum detector that allows him to tamp down cliches and homilies, inject a healthy jolt of pragmatism and bring out the best in potentially mushy material (see “The Bridges of Madison County”).

In his measured, unassuming style, he allows the action here to unfold naturally — letting the story threads come together (perhaps a little too neatly), allowing his actors to invest their melancholy characters with a hard-won sense of hope, if no real semblance of eternal certainty. Even with a slightly forced, feel-good ending, questions linger, answers remain elusive. “Hereafter” starts with a bang but ends, like life, with that final cosmic query lingering in the air.

— Dennis King

MOVIE REVIEW

“Hereafter”

PG-13

2:08

3 stars

Starring: Matt Damon, Cecile de France, Bryce Dallas Howard, Frankie and George McLaren, Jay Mohr.

(Thematic elements including disturbing disaster and accident images, brief strong language)

BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK – At 80 years old, Clint Eastwood says he is not ready to hang up his spurs as a filmmaker.

The actor turned four-time Oscar winning producer-director (for producing and directing “Unforgiven,” producing “Million Dollar Baby,” and for lifetime achievement with the Irving Thalberg Award) is currently releasing his 34th title as a director – “Hereafter,” an ambitious, autumnal drama that contemplates death and the afterlife.

Clint Eastwood and Cecile de France

But at a Warner Bros. press conference accompanying the film’s release, Eastwood brushed aside any notion that he was contemplating his own mortality or even thinking of retirement.

“There’s a Portuguese director still making films at a hundred years old,” Eastwood said, “and I plan on doing the same thing.” (Manoel de Oliveira is actually 101 years old and recently released a new film, “O Estranho Caso de Angelica,” set in the 1950s, and telling the story of a photographer who is asked by hotel owners to take portraits of their recently deceased daughter.)

Still, Eastwood said he did wonder at the phenomenon of many great, iconic Hollywood directors whose work trailed off as they aged or who left the director’s chair while they still seemingly had stories to tell.

“Hereafter” star Matt Damon, appearing in his second film with the director, said he’s been amazed at Eastwood’s speed, ease and fearlessness as a filmmaker.

“I actually asked Clint on ‘Invictus’ about directors as they got older,” said Damon. “Why was it that they historically seemed to fall off? I remember asking him, ‘why is that?’ Because Clint’s obviously completely avoided that. And he thought about it for a good 10 seconds and then just said, ‘I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense to me.’

“It doesn’t to me either because presumably the older we get, the wiser we get, the more knowledge you have about filmmaking, the more different types of films you’ve made,” Damon said. “And so it is kind of mystifying to me that many of the great directors, not all of them, but many of them kind of fell off as they got older.”

“I was always sort of shocked about that, too,” Eastwood agreed. “I knew Frank Capra a little bit, and I spent some time with him in the summers and he was always so bright I wondered, ‘why isn’t this guy still working?’ And I also knew Billy Wilder somewhat, and he had actually stopped working in his 60s. And I thought, that’s amazing, here’s a guy that lived well into his 90s and didn’t work. I never could figure that.

“I figure your best work should be at a point where you’ve absorbed all this knowledge,” Eastwood continued. “Now, maybe they just didn’t keep up with the times or they picked story material that didn’t work and they have a few pictures that don’t do so well and then all of a sudden, you know people are very fickle, the Hollywood thing is very fickle and they kind of move on.”

Quick to dispel any doubts about Eastwood’s enthusiasm and vitality, Belgian actress Cecile de France, 35, who plays a Parisian TV journalist swept up in the tsunami in “Hereafter’s” massive, special-effects heavy action sequence, said working with Eastwood was an exhilarating experience.

“I was very pride to do my own stunts, no?” De France said in halting English “And of course I remember a very good memory when we were shooting in Hawaii. Clint jump with us in the big waves in the ocean. The little crew were in the water, and Clint just take his shirt off and came in with us. It’s an amazing memory for me.”

Eastwood said his longevity is largely a matter of good luck, but he is aware of some adjustments and limitations he’s observed as he’s gotten older.

“Everything for me is spontaneous. ‘Unforgiven’ is an example of a script that I liked right away, but thought I’d like to do this when I’m older,” he said. “So I stuck it in a drawer for 10 years. Other projects just come to me. ‘A Perfect World’ or whatever. And I have no rhyme or reason. I wish I could give you some pseudo-intellectual thing that would be great. And maybe if this was a French cinema class I’d have to fake something. But if I started evaluating myself I’m afraid that I would not be able to fake intelligently about every project and the various makings thereof.”

Listed on wimgo Movies under Drama

The bleak dead of winter is a time that tries movie lovers’ souls. It’s when over-hyped holiday blockbusters and Oscar-buzzed prestige pictures have settled in for their long winter runs. It’s when studios look to dump obvious turkeys, formulaic programmers and hard-to-market odd-goods on the cabin-fevered masses. It’s the traditional in-between season when studios are preoccupied with awards and seem to give short shrift to new releases.

But from now until the first inklings of spring, there are a indeed a handful of big-studio releases that promise a little heat to relieve the winter doldrums.

Here are a few “event pictures” that should feed our movie jones until April.

“Legion” (Friday). God is angry, and the Apocalypse is nigh in this thriller that sports Paul Bettany as a studly Archangel Michael, who appears at a greasy-spoon diner to say grace over a pregnant waitress whose baby is the only hope for mankind. First-time director Scott Stewart, former head of a cutting-edge FX company, promises awesomely celestial special-effects battles as legions of macho angels descend on Earth.

“The Wolfman” (Feb. 12). Universal Pictures mines its vaults to resurrect one of its most hair-raising monsters in this butched-up, retro retelling of the popular old folk tale. Benicio Del Toro plays a nobleman who returns to his ancestral land when he learns that his brother and many villagers have been fatally mauled by a nightmarish beast. With a classy cast that includes Anthony Hopkins and Emily Blunt and a reliable director in Joe Johnston (“Hidalgo”), this could be frightfully good.

“Shutter Island” (Feb. 19). Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio reunite in this thriller about a psychotic killer (Emily Mortimer) who disappears from a fortress-like mental institution and the U.S. Marshals (DeCaprio and Mark Ruffalo) who come to track her down. Skeptics wonder why this big-name, big-budget project was relegated to the off-season, but fans of Scorsese shudder with anticipation at what the master will do with this tantalizing formula.

“Alice in Wonderland” (March 5). Who better to translate the crazy-weird visions of Lewis Carroll to the big screen than Tim Burton? The eccentric, hyper-artistic Burton imagines a 19-year old Alice (Mia Wasikowska) returning to the magical world of her childhood storybook adventure and trying to put an end to the Red Queen’s reign of terror.

“Green Zone” (March 12). Matt Damon reunites with his “Bourne Supremacy” and “Bourne Ultimatum” director Paul Greengrass in this political pot-boiler about a U.S. Army officer who goes rogue in search of weapons of mass destruction in an unstable Middle Eastern region. These two certainly know how to pump up the action and maintain stomach-knotting tension.

These high-profile releases should deliver the goods. And for dedicated movie lovers willing to search the far corners of the multiplex, a few limited-release movies (such as “Frozen,” “The Yellow Handkerchief,” “Greenberg,” “The Runaways” or “I Love You Phillip Morris”) might provide some off-Hollywood winter solace.

– Dennis King