Little Bill Daggett: “You’d be William Munny out of Missouri. Killer of women and children.”

Will Munny: “That’s right. I’ve killed women and children. I’ve killed just about everything that walks or crawled at one time or another. And I’m here to kill you, Little Bill, for what you did to Ned.”

So goes the exchange between the sheriff and the gunfighter before Clint Eastwood’s final blazing showdown — in a Western anyway.

At least that’s what Eastwood claims in one of several interviews included in the extras of the 20th anniversary Blu-ray edition of “Unforgiven.” The actor/director says he always intended the 1992 horse opera to be his last, and so far he’s kept his word.

But he certainly left the genre with a bang, literally and figuratively speaking, with his character gunning down five men in one blazing swoop, and his movie raking in big bucks at the box office and four Oscars at the 1993 awards ceremony for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Gene Hackman as Little Bill Daggett), Best Editing and, for Eastwood, Best Director.

It is only the third Western after “Cimarron” (1931) and “Dances with Wolves” (1990) ever to win a Best Picture statuette.

So how could a story about an outlaw who’s killed women and children garner so much adulation?

Perhaps it was how Eastwood, directing from David Webb Peoples’ superb screenplay, portrayed the grim consequences of violence, and how he dealt with themes of aging, human limits and mortality in an a starkly honest and sometimes moving way.

Eastwood sat on this script for years, waiting until he was old enough to play Munny, a reformed outlaw and killer, struggling to raise two children on a failing farm, until a bounty offered by vengeful prostitutes lures him out of retirement. The excellent Morgan Freeman plays Munny’s old partner, and Hackman is convincingly mean-spirited as the brutal sheriff of Big Whiskey, Wyo., where the action centers.

Photographed in artful noir tones by Jack Green, Eastwood’s last roundup is now packaged inside a 54-page hardback book full of behind-the-scenes photos and insight, complete with four documentaries and an episode of the ’50s TV series “Maverick,” guest-starring a very young Eastwood as — what else — a gunfighter.

— Gene Triplett

One of the most indelible images from all the movies of 2010 is that of Helen Mirren, wearing a Martha Stewart hairdo and an elegant floor-length white evening gown, cutting loose with a heavy-barreled .50-caliber Browning M2HB machine gun without batting an eyelash. She must have undergone some boot camp-level firing range training to pull that off, because it’s next to impossible not to blink when discharging such a weapon, even for seasoned firearms enthusiasts.

But that’s why she’s just as convincing as a former MI6 assassin in “Red” as she was as Elizabeth II in “The Queen.” And she’s just part of what makes this action-comedy from director Robert Schwentke so much fun. Bruce Willis is in top form as the smirky, wisecracking hero Frank Moses, a former black ops agent whose retirement is interrupted by a CIA hit squad that’s out for his blood. Frank is forced to pull his old team back into action, including Victoria (Mirren), who’s now running an upscale bed-and-breakfast; mad Marvin (a hilariously wild-eyed John Malkovich), who lives in an underground lair camouflaged by a junk car; and Joe (Morgan Freeman), who’s just turned 80 and is dying of stage 4 liver cancer in a nursing home.

They’re an unlikely wrecking crew, but the new breed of CIA youngsters is no match for these wily vets when the bullets start to fly and many explosions begin to blow the lid off the biggest conspiracy in U.S. government history.

Unfortunately, the DVD extras are in no way as spectacular as the film’s nonstop thrills and laughs. Pop-up trivia balloons offer useless information about the number of shades of red that exist (285) and the penalty for kidnapping in Louisiana, deleted scenes are boring (which is why they were deleted) and so forth. But this DC Comics graphic novel-based thriller is the best of its genre in recent memory, and worth owning or at least renting.

— Gene Triplett

Listed on wimgo Movies under Comedy drama

BY DENNIS KING

It’s that time of year when movie critics everywhere are busy with bookkeeping, tallying up 2010’s screen offerings and issuing their Top 10 lists.

But dictating the year’s “best” films is so often a rote ritual, driven by urgencies of the upcoming awards season and marked by a certain inevitability as studios march out their prestige pictures and promotional blitzes to generate maximum holiday fanfare. Thus, many top 10 lists are necessarily top-heavy with these inescapable Oscar contenders.

The fated suspects show up on every list – “The Social Network,” “Inception,” “The King’s Speech,” “Black Swan” and so on. And rightfully so. These are indeed among the year’s indisputable best. (* Below, see the 10 best voted by members of the Oklahoma Film Critics Circle. A worthy roster indeed.)

In a mild act of rebellion, we hereby issue our highly subjective list – not of “bests” but of “favorites.” These movies might not show up on others’ lists and they might not figure into the manufactured hype of the pre-Oscar run-up, but they’re movies we found among the most thoughtful, stimulating and/or fun and entertaining in 2010.

Here they are, in no particular order:

- “Metropolis” – Though it was originally released in 1928, the restored version with 25 minutes of formerly lost footage makes Fritz Lang’s futuristic silent masterpiece feel finally complete, like a brand new film. Its release was truly one of the year’s highlights.

- Steig Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy (“The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” “The Girl Who Played With Fire,” “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest”) – Taken individually, the films of this Swedish-language trio had their excesses and lapses. But collectively, their chilly Nordic noir style, psychological complexity, exhilarating thrills and indelible characters added up to a relentlessly haunting and compelling time in the theatrical darkness.

- “The Ghost Writer” – Roman Polanski’s personal and legal demons notwithstanding, the Oscar-winning maker of “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Chinatown” showed he still has the master’s touch with this cool, cunning and polished political thriller that packed in loads of sinister, Hitchcockian intrigue and a memorable climactic wallop.

Ewan McGregor

- “My Dog Tulip” – While “Toy Story 3” will certainly garner the lion’s share of animation kudos, this modest, hand-drawn treat for canine lovers (originally released in 2009 but just now making U.S. rounds) adapts British academic J.R. Ackerley’s wise and prickly 1956 memoir of life with his exuberant German shepherd. It’s a human-scale story that’s a tad more sophisticated, rough-edged and offbeat than the broad-stroke, family-friendly stuff that studio animation units have polished to glossy perfection.

- “Leaves of Grass” – Tulsa native Tim Blake Nelson corrals an unruly passel of influences – classics, philosophy, spiky comedy, bleak drama, the Coen brothers – to produce a smart, funny and bracingly irreverent journey back to the quirky offshoots of his Okie roots. All the parts come together neatly in this light-dark film (the title itself suggests a heady dichotomy – wacky tobacky or the words of Walt Whitman?), which is graced with an uncanny duel performance by star Edward Norton.

Norton and Norton

- “Restrepo” – Few films capture the gut-level jolts of panic, fear, exhilaration, macho humor and numbing boredom that informs this stunning documentary which charts a year with one American military platoon posted in Afghanistan’s deadliest valley. Writer Sebastian Junger (author of “The Perfect Storm”) skips the politics of the war and concentrates on the daily grind of the combat soldier. The result is harrowing and enlightening in a way that makes us think about the war viscerally, without the petty fog of punditry.

- “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work” – Comedienne Joan Rivers – acerbic, opinionated and strident – is not everyone’s cup of tea. But in this nakedly revealing documentary she emerges as both a savvy and vulnerable survivor, a tough woman with a grinding work ethic and an endless (some would say crass) hunger for celebrity. It parts the curtain of celebrity culture, and what it shows us isn’t always pretty but is always funny and thought-provoking.

- “Red” – This is how you make a formula action blockbuster (with a savvy AARP vibe). Surrounding the droll Bruce Willis with a nicely aged supporting cast – Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Richard Dreyfuss, Ernest Borgnine – this swift, engaging spy romp expends loads of bullets and bombs in service of pure popcorn entertainment and makes other blockbusters seem puny and pompous by comparison.

- “Inside Job” – No one will confuse this pithy piece of documentary journalism with popcorn entertainment. But as an exhaustive and infuriating look into the darkest heart of Wall Street greed, it’s a movie that should not be missed by Average Joes with paltry bank accounts and 401(k) retirement plans. Amoral financial “insiders’ have pushed the country to the brink of ruin while padding their pockets with obscene profits, and director Charles Ferguson’s film brings home with chilling clarity the enormity and tragedy of our badly broken banking system.

- “A Film Unfinished” – Media’s capacity to sell “the big lie” was never so profoundly and disturbingly demonstrated than in this potent documentary built around Nazi archival film supposedly depicting the daily lives of happy and well-off Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. Director Yael Hersonki reassembles all of the SS propaganda footage (the film unfinished) and contrasts it with recollections of Holocaust survivors and a chastened SS cameraman to create of vivid, horrific portrait of genocide unfolding.

* OFCC Top 10:

“The Social Network” (best of the year)
“Inception”
“Black Swan”
“The Fighter”
“True Grit”
“The King’s Speech”
“Toy Story 3”
“Winter’s Bone”
“The Kids Are All Right”
“127 Hours”

BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK – Being John Malkovich – consummate film and stage actor, theatrical impresario, opera director, disco owner, clothing designer, international bon vivant – is clearly something the man relishes while not taking himself too seriously.

While mixing it up with journalists during a press day hosted by Summit Entertainment on the release of his latest film, “Red,” Malkovich proved himself a man for all seasons while spanning such topics as his acting philosophy; his love of costumes, props and fashion; his attitude toward directors and his surprisingly enthusiastic embrace of critics.

For “Red,” he plays Marvin Boggs, a deeply paranoid, ex-CIA operative who is forced out of reclusive retirement by his former, over-the-hill colleagues when they themselves become assassination targets in a dastardly government conspiracy. Malkovich, who joins an all-star ensemble featuring Bruce Willis, Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman, Richard Dreyfuss, Mary-Louise Parker and Ernest Borgnine, waxed on about the pleasure of watching other actors work.

“I thought this film would be absolutely fun,” he said. “All of the cast I knew slightly. Helen I knew more, but I have run across Morgan several times when I lived in New York and we both just did theater, and I always found him very charming and fun to be around. And Bruce I knew probably the least, although I’d come across Bruce a couple of times and had nice chats with him before. They’re all pros.

“I like watching all these people. They know what they’re doing,” he continued. “Of course, I’ve seen Richard Dreyfus in tons of things, but working with him was maybe one of the bigger surprises because having never worked with him you really see why he was one of the biggest movie stars in the entire world. He’s absolutely fantastic to watch, and I think all of us felt that way. Not that we were shocked or stunned, but I think we all felt that way, that it was tremendous fun to watch Richard.”

Malkovich said he was only vaguely familiar with the graphic novel on which “Red” is based, and he grinned slyly when told it was much darker and more violent than the movie.

“So it’s more a violent book than comic book,” he quipped. “I met the author, but I didn’t read it. The truth is, unless you’re involved in the adaptation or unless you have sufficient lead time and you’re in a position with the people producing it, it doesn’t do any good to read a book (of the source material) because what you’re going to be making is the screenplay.”

On his approach to film acting:

“All I do is read the screenplay many, many times, and then when you show up you get a sense of what people are doing,” he explained. “And I always look at the whole thing, not really what I’m doing because whatever I’m doing will happen anyway. I look at the whole thing and see basically – are you a point or a counterpoint in this scene, in this story, at this moment? That’s really how I look at things.

“People often ask me about roles,” he said. “I’ve done a few films where I’ve had a fantastic role, and even maybe I was OK in it. But if the film isn’t good you’re much better off not having made it. Even if it was a wonderful role. If the film doesn’t work it’s just a big waste of time and money and effort.”

From his background in theater, Malkovich said he developed a skill in films of using props and costumes to distinguish characters.

“I have a tendency to have very good relationships with costumers,” he said. “Generally, I collaborate quite closely with them, and even have several very good friends who are costumers. But obviously it’s a very important element of what I do. Or it could be in collaboration with the makeup artist or wig maker or whoever it is. Anything that has some impact in a visual term, because that’s the first thing an audience sees. I spent a lot of time with the armorers on this movie discussing the various weapons.”

When he was told that Helen Mirren said she based her character, a sniper turned domestic diva, on Martha Stewart, Malkovich laughed.

“I actually base all my characters on Martha Stewart,” he said. “Somehow people lack the discernment to have ever grasped that. That’s very funny, what Helen said. That is really good.”

Malkovich said he has always had an affinity for clothes, and that has allowed him to broaden his horizons beyond acting.

“I’ve always loved clothes and fabric and details,” he said. “I always liked to look at photos of people dressed up when I was a kid. But not even dressed up in the super glamorous way but to just to see what people wore and how they presented themselves.

“ And I have for a long, long time been a fabric collector – that’s totally removed from any kind of fashion thing,” he said. “And then I spent many years working off and on in fashion. I think it’s also connected to the fact that I studied costuming and costumed in the theater. I have a very specific notion about how a thing should or shouldn’t look. I wrote and directed three little fashion films for my friend Bella Freud, an English designer, which I loved working on. I just did a lot of work in fashion over the years.”

All of which, Malkovich said, lead to him creating his own fashion line.

“It’s called Technobohemian,” he explained. “I stopped a line I had four or five years ago, and for this one I’m right now working on our forth collection for fall-winter 2011. It is out of Prato, next to Florence.”

Most people would think an actor of Malkovich’s stature might be reluctant to give much control of his performances over to directors. But, he said, he enjoys being closely directed.

“Quite closely, which is what I prefer,” the actor said. “When you go into editing it’s exceedingly important that the director has a catholicity of options. I think there are basically two schools of acting – some actors are highly reticent to commit anything to celluloid that is not their choice. In other words, they have an idea about it and they want pretty much exactly that or only that.

“Now I have nothing against that,” he said. “Then, there’s probably another type of actor, which is what I am, which I would prefer that the director make clear what he wants from me. Not to the extent of being a crypto-fascist, because I’ve certainly encountered that and it’s kind of dull.

“Of course, there are directors who leave you completely alone and that can be OK, too. Really, I can go either way, or any of a hundred ways. Because my basic feeling is directing a movie is, more or less a terrible job. And why not try to be a helpful and constructive presence on the set. It’s not an easy job and that’s at least what I’ve tried to do in my career.”

Malkovich’s expansive, philosophical attitude toward his art also extends to reactions from critics. He welcomes their input, good or bad.

“One must always remember that the very same thing that causes person X to love something you do is that self-same thing that causes person Y to detest you and person S to be utterly indifferent,” he explained. “This is life. And it behooves performers starting out that once you put yourself in the public eye, there will be people who profoundly dislike you. And all gradations in between. It’s OK. When I read that review (a particularly scathing from he got recently from a Turkish critic), besides thinking it was extremely funny and well written, I could kind of agree or I could take the point. I’ve made a lifetime of fairly in-depth self-criticism, but people are welcome to help.”

Maybe they’re rusty relics of the 007 days, when the espionage game seemed to be played with a sly wink by operatives on both sides of the Iron Curtain. But the retired secret agents

Richard Dreyfuss, John Malkovich, Morgan Freeman, Bruce Willis

of the revved-up “Red” prove that there is still loads of firepower and dark humor in their over-the-hill spy craft.

Adapted and expanded from a dark, violent, 66-page DC Comics graphic novel by Warren Ellis, “Red” comes to the screen with an all-star cast and a tongue-in-cheek attitude that makes its explosive mayhem and ever-mounting body count seem like an entertaining lark.

The story follows a template set by “Charade,” the classic 1963 Audrey Hepburn-Cary Grant romp, expanded on by “Romancing the Stone,” the 1984 Michael Douglas-Kathleen Turner gambol, and played out by rote with Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz in last summer’s “Knight and Day.” As per formula, a naive damsel is thrown together with a cool man of the world, whose motives are vaguely sinister, and sets off on a hair-raising, bullet-riddled, chase-filled duel with shadowy villains.

“Red” opens with a vision of the mundane suburban retirement of Frank Moses (Bruce Willis), a former CIA spook, who battles his boredom by striking up a long-distance telephone flirtation with Sarah Ross (Mary-Louise Parker), a chatty help-desk operator at a government retirement bureau.

But the tedium of Frank’s retired life is shattered one night when a so-called “wet team” of shadowy, black-masked assassins shows up and shoots his ticky-tacky tract house into a pile of smoldering splinters. Frank falls back on his old spook ways, disappearing underground and showing up across country at Sarah’s house, convinced that whoever is trying to kill him will inevitably go after her.

Soon, Frank and the reluctant, disbelieving Sarah are on the lam and dodging the dogged efforts of hotheaded CIA assassin William Cooper (Karl Urban) to eliminate them, with extreme prejudice.

In a map-hopping sequence of funny reunions, Frank tracks down a colorful cadre of former spy cohorts: Morgan Freeman’s wily old nursing home denizen, Joe; John Malkovich’s rabidly paranoid recluse, Marvin; and Helen Mirren’s elegant sniper turned happy homemaker, Victoria.

Throw into the mix a cunning old Russian spymaster (Brian Cox) with romantic designs on Victoria, a crotchety old secrets-keeper in the CIA’s deepest vaults (Ernest Borgnine) and a megalomaniacal military contractor (Richard Dreyfuss) with dastardly ties to the ambitious U.S. vice president, and you have a fairly generic recipe for an explosive, action-filled espionage thriller with a bloody sense of humor.

Screenwriter brothers Jon and Erich Hoeber spin all the elements with cutting-edge cool, and director Robert Schwentke (“Flightplan”) orchestrates the unlikely merger of action, comedy and tart romance with solid craft and an invigorating sense of fun.

While “Red” doesn’t blaze any new trails in its well-trod genre, it does step lively with a great cast working at the top of their games. Willis, all smirks and wisecracks, is the consummate old pro at this sort of thing. Malkovich, with his weirdness and doughy physicality; Mirren with her steely elegance; Freeman with his wizened world-weariness; and Parker with her screwball sense of comedy quirkiness — all make this gang of past-their-prime spies seem like ready-for-prime-time players.

— Dennis King

MOVIE REVIEW

“Red”

PG-13

1:50

3 stars

Starring: Bruce Willis, Helen Mirren, Mary-Louise Parker, John Malkovich, Morgan Freeman, Richard Dreyfuss.

(Intense sequences of action violence, brief strong language)

Listed on wimgo Movies under Action

BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK — Imagine Martha Stewart brandishing a blazing automatic weapon, dispatching scores of marauding thugs, then going home, tying on an apron and a sweet smile and

baking a cake.

That’s essentially the image Helen Mirren had in mind when she stepped into the role of Victoria, retired British assassin turned bed-and-breakfast maven, in the star-studded action-comedy “Red.”

The Academy Award-winning actress who in 2003 was named a Dame of the British Empire for her services to drama was appropriately decked out in a royal red jacket as she faced a room full of journalists at the Four Seasons Hotel for a pre-opening news conference hosted by Summit Entertainment. “Red” (drawn from a pop-cult DC Comics graphic novel) is an old-school action picture about an aging band of former espionage operatives who are jarred out of retirement when they become targets themselves for assassination by CIA hit squads.

With an ensemble that includes Bruce Willis, John Malkovich, Morgan Freeman, Richard Dreyfuss, Mary-Louise Parker and Ernest Borgnine, Mirren said she was challenged to find a proper way to approach the darkly comic story and to hold her own with the powerhouse cast.

“I approached it very seriously, like I do everything,” she said. “It’s not a comedy, really. It’s a comedic action picture, or something like that. It’s always great to find someone that you can pin your character on. Obviously, in ‘The Queen’ it was very easy to find the person to pin the character on. She’s called Queen Elizabeth.

“But here I was kind of looking for who this woman might be, and then I had this flash of inspiration, and Martha Stewart came into my mind. And I thought, that’s who it is, it’s Martha Stewart,” Mirren said. “From that point on, I based everything on Martha Stewart. The hair was Martha, the color even; the clothes were Martha.

“Because I thought Martha Stewart combines this perfect combination of sweetness and gentleness and unbelievable efficiency with this kind of laser-like ability to concentrate and get the job done. And I thought that was the perfect sort of thing for Victoria.

“So I had a picture of Martha up in my trailer and in the makeup room, so every day I could look at her and be inspired,” she said. “That was just my secret story. I mean, obviously, I didn’t try and imitate her or impersonate her. That wasn’t the point. It was just getting inside of Martha.”

Mirren said the inspiration came partly from firsthand experience.

“I have been on (Martha’s) TV show, actually,” she said. “The woman is amazing. I watch her show, and I’m always sitting there with a note paper jotting down ideas. She’s an amazing fund of lovely domestic information that I love. When I was on her show, I think we repotted something — I do love gardening, and I know quite a bit about gardening — and we were repotting or regenerating geraniums or something like that. I can’t quite remember.”

Noting that this role is far afield from her 2006 Oscar-winning turn in “The Queen” and her upcoming, gender-bending performance as Prospero (or Prospera) in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” Mirren said she relishes variety in her acting choices.

“The whole idea is to do something different from what you’ve just done, and, you know, ‘The Queen’ was an incredible experience for me in terms of the attention the film got,” she said. “But that kind of attention kind of sticks, and I was getting a bit sick of people saying, ‘Oh, you’re so regal and you play all these queens.’ I thought, actually I don’t play queens, I play all sorts of different things. For a long time before that I was a police detective (in PBS’s “Prime Suspect” series) and I transmogrified into ‘The Queen.’ And you just want to always try to push the last thing out of people’s minds so they can look at you in a fresh light.”

If queenly reserve defined her last major film role, Mirren said the elegant but deadly British secret service sniper Victoria constitutes an invigorating change of pace.

“It’s always great fun to do action scenes,” she said. “They’re called action scenes because they do the acting for you. You don’t have to ‘act’ in action scenes; the action does it all for you. It’s great. And I was very lucky because a lot of my action scenes were with John Malkovich, and he was just so good at all that gun stuff. He was just brilliant. I mean, John with all those big guns, you wouldn’t believe it.

“The difficult thing I found was not sticking my tongue out as I was shooting my gun,” she said. “Because you tend to go (sticks out her tongue), and they would say, ‘Helen, that doesn’t look very professional.’”

Of the film’s huge arsenal of military-grade automatic weapons, Mirren expresses a careful ambivalence.

“I don’t like to ever say a gun is fun, but guns can be fun in the sense of target practice,” she said, carefully choosing her words. “Trying to hit a target, carefully, is interesting. And I guess on that level I liked the sniper gun. I can’t believe I’m even saying that.

“But the guns I found most horrifying were these small machine guns,” she continued. “They’re terrible because you can cause such havoc. I mean I could literally wipe almost all of you out (nervous laughter from the collected press) if I had one here. I haven’t got one here. That would be a headline, wouldn’t it? But I mean, awful, these little hand machine guns that can do terrible things. Dreadful, dreadful.”

Bruce Willis, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren

Malkovich, in a separate interview, expressed a more abstract admiration for the film’s heavy weaponry. He plays the decidedly unhinged former black-ops assassin Marvin Boggs, who appears to have a very complicated psychological relationship with his oversized guns.

“The Swedish K (M45 submachine gun) is one of the most elegant form-meets-function guns that ever existed. I wish I had one. I don’t mean right now,” Malkovich said with a sly grin. “I like to squeeze off a few rounds like everyone else. I don’t hunt or anything like that. I did show Helen the sign over the armorer’s door which said, ‘If you know how many guns you have, you don’t have enough.’ And Helen said she was going to use that for a Christmas card.

“Guns, I wouldn’t want one, really,” he continued. “But I can appreciate their designs or the elegance of a design or how it actually functions. I’m happy with that, but I’m not packing and I won’t be anytime in the near future.”

Listed on wimgo Movies under Action

BY DENNIS KING

Ernest Borgnine, Bruce Willis

NEW YORK — The reluctantly retired spies of “Red” find their enforced idleness a soul-deadening curse. So when they’re forced to take up arms again to battle a nefarious government conspiracy, they are born anew.

During a recent news conference for the film hosted by Summit Entertainment, the stars were asked about their own plans or visions of the perfect retirement. Here’s what they said:

Helen Mirren, 65

“As night follows day, inevitably it will happen, but I have no idea what I’d do. I think we all have a dream of what it would be like not to work and to grow heirloom tomatoes. And I do have that dream. It would be lovely; I do love gardening and all of that. But I do love my work, and mostly I love the people that I get to work with. In my job I get to constantly meet and work with and be involved with clever, imaginative people who constantly surprise you and push you forward and inspire you. So I think I would miss that a lot if I didn’t work anymore.”

John Malkovich, 56

“My feeling about that is they’ll retire me when it’s time, and they won’t have the slightest compunction about that, nor should they. I will have lived a very, very long, incredibly blessed life. I will have had the most extraordinary, pretty much undeserved opportunities for 34 years now. I will have worked with and had the pleasure of having met some of the most incredibly interesting people and some of most gifted filmmakers around the world. So, when they retire me — yeah, sure, I’d miss the people, as Helen said. But that’ll be that. Playing golf? Probably not. I’ve never really thought about that. That’s almost an existential conundrum. Oh, I don’t see the point of it, really. It doesn’t make sense to me to retire from what you love.”

Morgan Freeman, 73

“You’re asking if I live into my 90s and can no longer get work, what would I do? I really haven’t thought about it. I’m like George Burns, I expect to be working well into my late 90s, because they’re going to figure out a way to use me, even as a corpse. But I think once you get too old to work you’re too old to do anything. So you might as well just lie down somewhere. That’s my thinking. You gotta have a reason to get up in the morning and go somewhere and do something. And if I don’t have work … well, I don’t know. The people who look forward to their retirement must not be enjoying their life nearly as much as I enjoy mine.”

Bruce Willis, 55

“I’ve never really thought about it as work. I still don’t look at what I do as work. There are a lot of people who do work hard and have really difficult jobs, and whether it’s digging holes in the ground or carrying cinder blocks up a hundred-foot ladder to a roof, that is something that feels like work to me. I think defending your country and being prepared to sacrifice your life is a really difficult job. I think actors catch a break. We have it easy. It’s a real novel thing to see actors like Eli Wallach and Ernest Borgnine still show up for work. I’m as fascinated by their talent and enthusiasm as everyone else was when they first watched them 40, 50, 60 years ago.”

Ernest Borgnine, 93

“Hey, I’m 93 years old. It’s all gold from here.”

Bruce Willis: “Wow! I’ll take 93 right now.”

Listed on wimgo Movies under Action

BY GENE TRIPLETT

Here are a couple of things about Clint Eastwood that might surprise most people:

1. He’s not particularly enamored of guns.

2. One of his best friends is a major film critic.

Now, considering that he rode to fame on a horse, blowing away five bad guys at a time with a single-action Colt .45, and then drove on to superstardom in an unmarked police car, single-handedly offing whole gangs of robbers with a .44 magnum (“the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off”), bringing an avalanche of criticism down on his sandy-haired head in the early days of his career, with accusations of fascist politics and being possessed of no creative ambition beyond making lucrative, violent action flicks, you have to ask yourself: Do I know how he became one of the most respected filmmakers in the world in his later years?

Well, do ya, punk?

Film critic Richard Schickel knows. He’s followed Eastwood’s career not only as a journalist but as a close friend of 34 years.

Clint Eastwood and Richard Schickel

chronicles Eastwood’s journey, from the actor’s first bit part in “Revenge of the Creature” (1955) through his latest directorial effort, the Nelson Mandela biopic “Invictus,” in a sumptuously illustrated, 288-page book, “Clint: A Retrospective,” published in  March by Sterling Publishing ($35).

A 24-page excerpt from the book can be found in a new DVD box set, “Clint Eastwood: 35 Films, 35 Years at Warner Bros.,” which was released in February. Containing 34 of Eastwood’s Warner films, from “Where Eagles Dare” (1968) through “Gran Torino” (2008), plus a 22-minute, Schickel-directed documentary, “The Eastwood Factor,” it is the largest box set ever dedicated to a single artist. Suggested retail price: $179.98.

Schickel met him in 1976, the year Eastwood directed and starred in the now-classic Western “The Outlaw Josey Wales.”

“It just sort of grew like friendships do,” Schickel said in a recent phone interview from his Los Angeles home. “We hang out a certain amount of time; we talk a lot on the phone because I’m in L.A., and he’s largely in Carmel when he’s not doing postproduction or whatever. So, when he’s in town, we often have dinner or something like that.”

When asked what Eastwood is like offscreen, Schickel‘s instant response is, “Well, he’s not Dirty Harry, I’ll tell you that.

Eastwood as "Dirty Harry."

“Clint has a good, low-key sense of humor. He’s a very ironic sort of a guy. He’s always open to the oddnesses that we all encounter in life and takes a sort of amused interest in them. You know he is a hard-working man, there’s no question about that. On the other hand, it seems to me that he paces himself very well through life. He gets a lot of work out, but I would never call him a workaholic.”

Schickel said Eastwood sets aside plenty of time to be with his wife of 14 years, Dina, and his younger children, and loves to “goof around playing golf or traveling.”

As a friend, Schickel describes him as “dutiful” and “loyal.”

“He’s the kind of man who, if he makes a commitment, whether to make a personal appearance or have dinner, he will be there. I mean there’s never any last-minute feeble excuses.”

On Eastwood the artist, Schickel speaks from 43 years of experience as a film critic for Time and Life magazines and as an award-winning documentary filmmaker, expressing the utmost admiration and appreciation for most of Eastwood’s work (with the exceptions of “Firefox” (1982), “The Rookie” (1990) and “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” (1997), which he considers to be directorial missteps).

He especially holds 1971′s “Dirty Harry”— directed by Eastwood mentor Don Siegel — in high regard, despite criticism from many quarters that it was an excessively violent, “fascist” statement.

“I think he’s had an honorable career,” Schickel said. “Even ‘Dirty Harry’ is in a certain sense an el primo genre movie. I mean, it’s about a tough cop. There’s a lot of movies about tough cops, (but) there’s a lot of soulfulness in ‘Dirty Harry.’ He’s a lonely guy. He has trouble relating with women.”

Schickel also thinks “Dirty Harry,” like many of Eastwood’s films, demonstrates the horrific consequences of violence rather than glorifying it.

Eastwood as "Blondie" in Sergio Leone's "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly."

“Like most Americans, if you believe the polls, he’s not a gun freak,” Schickel said. “It kind of comes up in ‘White Hunter, Black Heart.’ The character he’s playing in that wants to shoot this elephant. He says, ‘I don’t really understand that. I never shoot guns except pretend guns in movies. I don’t hunt animals.’

“And I think that’s a mainstream American view. He’s come out on subjects like abortion rights, and that’s a mainstream American view. He’s fiscally conservative, he’s for balanced budgets and so forth, but socially he’s kind of liberal-minded, which I kind of think America is, actually. There’s a lot of stir and kerfuffle about tea parties and stuff like that, but most Americans aren’t that way. Those are distinctly minority views.”

And Schickel thinks Eastwood’s mainstream philosophies shine through in his characters and his films, partially accounting for his tremendous and long-lasting popularity with the moviegoing public.

“I think that appeals to people. I think he’s low-key and sensible and not an ideologue, and all that appeals.”

But Eastwood also applies his low-key approach to acting, which apparently doesn’t appeal to Oscar voters, who have awarded his directorial talents (“Unforgiven,” “Million Dollar Baby”) but continually passed him over for a best actor trophy.

“Everybody won Oscars for that (‘Million Dollar Baby’). Hilary Swank did. Morgan (Freeman) did. (Eastwood’s) was a terrific performance. I don’t quite understand that prejudice, because the thing about Clint is that he loves actors and acting and being around actors. … They don’t quite want to acknowledge his expertise as an actor.”

Schickel said Eastwood’s acting style is understated and subtle — maybe too subtle for Academy voters’ tastes.

“He’s not a guy who rips and tears and snorts a lot.”

And that’s another trait that makes Eastwood such good company, onscreen and off, according to the critic.

“He manages all this stuff with considerable grace and good humor,” Schickel said. “He’s a very good friend, I think. I mean, he’s very loyal. … Amongst my circle of friends, I really count him as a major friend.”