Rails & Ties.

"It's probably not the easiest thing in the world to direct your first feature film when your dad is an icon like Clint Eastwood, but with her feature debut, Rails & Ties, helmer Alison Eastwood makes some smart decisions, most of which involve surrounding herself with people who know what they're doing," writes Kim Voynar at Cinematical, where she talks with Eastwood and Marcia Gay Harden.

"Ms Eastwood's smartest move was to tap Kevin Bacon for one of her leads," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "As Tom Stark, an emotionally tamped-down railroad engineer with a dying wife, Mr Bacon gives the film gravity and energy. Unlike Marcia Gay Harden, an appealing actress who takes on the role of the terminally ill wife, Megan, with rather too much enthusiasm, Mr Bacon plays it as cool as he can."

"The acting is great," agrees Ella Taylor in the Voice, but "there's no saving this mawkish tale - whose best feature is its sense of railway life, and whose worst is its reduction of life's common hurts and losses to puppetry."

"Eastwood opts for the tried-and-true approach of tearjerkers past," writes the AV Club's Keith Phipps, who disagrees with the accolades for the performances: "Bacon in particular is so ungiving here that it's never clear if he's grieving for his wife's plight or preparing to track the cancer down for some vigilante-style justice. That points to the biggest problem with Eastwood's film: Nobody feels anything they're not explicitly told to feel. Not even the audience."

The "one-track thematic obsession that brings everything back to trains... make it hard to resist employing railroad-related clichés generally used to describe things that go badly wrong," writes Carina Chocano. "Having had enough of those to last me a while, I think I'll resist the temptation."

Also in the Los Angeles Times: "The Premise: Megan Stark (Marcia Gay Harden) is suffering from stage 4 (metastatic) breast cancer that, though being "cured twice," has spread to her bones." For the Los Angeles Times, Marc Siegel, an internist and an associate professor of medicine at New York University's School of Medicine, examines the realistic chances for her recovery.

Posted by dwhudson at October 26, 2007 9:03 AM