The 15:17 to Paris (Clint Eastwood, 2018)

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colinr0380
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Re: The 15:17 to Paris (Clint Eastwood, 2017)

#26 Post by colinr0380 » Wed Feb 14, 2018 2:31 am

davoarid wrote:This part cracked me up—
After the director warmed to the inspirational story and the screenwriter Dorothy Blyskal turned it into a script, Mr. Eastwood began auditioning actors for the leads. Mr. Stone, Mr. Skarlatos and Mr. Sadler suggested in jest that they should be played by Chris Hemsworth, Zac Efron and Michael B. Jordan. “I got a crazy idea maybe these guys should play themselves,” Mr. Eastwood said. “They’re genuinely charismatic. I figured I’d roll the dice, what the hell? What can they do to me at this stage?”
Ah, the Ridley Scott approach!

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tenia
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Re: The 15:17 to Paris (Clint Eastwood, 2017)

#27 Post by tenia » Wed Feb 14, 2018 2:45 am

Actually, neither Iwo Jima nor Letters from our fathers are supposed to appear anywhere in a shot which is supposed to take place in 2002 !

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DarkImbecile
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Re: The 15:17 to Paris (Clint Eastwood, 2017)

#28 Post by DarkImbecile » Fri Feb 23, 2018 7:33 pm

davoarid wrote:I just got back from this and, ooh boy...
I was leaning more toward "woof" or "<hissing intake of breath like I just skinned my knee>" as my post-screening exclamation, but that would also work.

Eastwood's latest is approximately 20% poor-man's-Greengrass true-life drama (mostly effective, actually), 30% bad European travelogue (in retrospect, maybe the movie was just Eastwood's way of treating the guys to the full European vacation they never got to finish), 30% baffling decisions to film seemingly random slice of life scenes that serve no characterization or thematic purpose whatsoever, and 20% God's Not Dead-style proselytizing (a character actor I usually enjoy literally shouts at a public school teacher early on, "My God is bigger than your statistics!", which... let me check... nope, says in this secular public school statistics book that statistics are still statistically larger). This falls squarely into the American Sniper trash can end of his late-career spectrum, never coming close to the imperfect but exponentially superior Sully. I can't think offhand of a worse choice of a major director to work with non-actors, especially with a script so insubstantial that it has no hope of offsetting the weakness of their performances.

I did like the real footage of Hollande's presentation of the Legion of Honor mentioned earlier (I think the actor was for the mid-to-long-range coverage shots, not the speech itself), but I have to admit that I'm baffled that - given the film's presentation of events on the train and my deep read of the Wikipedia article just now -
SpoilerShow
these three got almost sole credit for stopping the attack, when a Frenchman initially confronted the gunman and a dual-citizen French-American wrestled the assault rifle away from him and was shot in the neck for his trouble. Certainly our three heroes deserve all the accolades for their actions, but where was the medal ceremony for these guys? This isn't a criticism of the film necessarily, more the post-event coverage and oddly selective spotlighting of participants.

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Finch
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Re: The 15:17 to Paris (Clint Eastwood, 2018)

#29 Post by Finch » Sat Feb 24, 2018 8:15 am

So is this funny bad or just bad?

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Big Ben
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Re: The 15:17 to Paris (Clint Eastwood, 2018)

#30 Post by Big Ben » Sat Feb 24, 2018 10:32 am

Finch wrote:So is this funny bad or just bad?
Eastwood has made very good films and he's made very bad films. But he's never, ever made something this incoherent before in my opinion. Even the hideously untruthful American Sniper was more coherent than this. Coherent in it's bullshit but still all there.

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DarkImbecile
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Re: The 15:17 to Paris (Clint Eastwood, 2018)

#31 Post by DarkImbecile » Sat Feb 24, 2018 11:29 am

I went into it taking it seriously and hoping it would be a solid representation of the psychology behind a real act of heroism in the Sully vein, so it hit me as only occasionally unintentionally funny (God vs. Statistics, some of the terrible dialogue in the tourism scenes). That said, if you went into it with the right (wrong?) attitude, I could see it being somewhat amusing, but only to certain extent given the central incident.

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knives
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Re: The 15:17 to Paris (Clint Eastwood, 2018)

#32 Post by knives » Tue Jul 10, 2018 10:23 pm

This is an utterly confusing film so it's understandable that it got such a poisonous reception, but I also feel some of it has been exaggerated (like with American Sniper) because people are so turned off by the politics which are pretty invasive. The film is really one half evangelical Stand by Me and nearly one half right wing Before Sunset. There are moments from that later half that makes me really curious to see Eastwood try his hand at a full on Linklater or Jarmusch travelogue. It's really under explored taking up about thirty minutes of the film, but suggests a far greater movie hiding in here. The stuff with them entering their careers particularly the fat guy's concept of military life offers a fascinating look at modern military worship and the practicality of modern military life such as medical classes. As was suggested earlier, though as a positive to the movie considering its goals, this isn't Full Metal Jacket with the brawn and machine being built up. Instead the movie seems to suggest the reverse is necessary in the modern military with intelligence being taught to kids raised on Call of Duty. Actually the film comes across as an amusing critique of millenials that seems far more accurate than I'd expect from an Eastwood movie. It makes me wonder if the central three had a bigger role in the script than was otherwise suggested.

If that sounds effusive, don't worry that I've gone crazy, the first section of the film is pretty objectively terrible if at least fascinatingly so. This section is full of a lot of trite polemics that are annoying on their face. They're made really weird though by some of the contradictory elements though. The much talked about comedic presence is just weird. It says we should take this as a comedy, but is played so sincerely that it is hard to imagine true irony with stuff like the insane statistics line. Some of that is just how grossed out I am by American Christianities so my bias is definitely showing. I wonder if I could have gotten beyond that the way I just take an anthropological on the politics I could have gotten more out of it. After all, the heavy suggestion that the villains of this half, the school, are also deeply christian suggests a more complicated motive as well than I'm really willing to give at the moment.

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