NYFF Podcast. Changeling.

Rallying to the defense of Clint Eastwood's Changeling [site] are Mike D'Angelo and Glenn Kenny; arguing the case against it are Andrew Grant and Aaron Hillis.

To listen or download click here.

"Why this film was chosen as the Centerpiece for the 2008 New York Film Festival is beyond me," grumbles Marcy Dermansky.

"Changeling opens - as did George Romero's Land of the Dead - with a semi-ironic use of an old-time Universal Studios logo, hearkening back to lionized days of old from a present-tense vantage point," writes Keith Uhlich for UnderGround Online. "The joke of it is that the sentiment, in both cases, is a pose. Like Romero with Land, Changeling director Clint Eastwood is as lost with where movies came from as with where they are - his film (based on the late-20s/early-30s era true story of Los Angeles-residing mother/martyr figure Christine Collins) is a rootless jumble of tones and plots, a desiccated nowhereland, like something waiting to be feasted on by Stephen King's ravenous Langoliers."

"Before we get to Changeling, here's a quick recap of Clint Eastwood's 38 years as a director." And that's where Leo Goldsmith goes for two generous paragraphs at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. Then: "I rehearse all this at length because it helps me in some way to account for the origins of Changeling, Eastwood's new film, and a work of cinema so poorly conceived and executed, so crudely constructed in nearly every way, so slick, false, and tasteless, that its provenance is otherwise difficult to comprehend."

"Bad Clint Eastwood movies tend to play like parodies of good Clint Eastwood movies, and his latest, a loose dramatization of the Wineville Chicken Murders and the accompanying media blitz and police scandal that rocked Los Angeles in the late 1920s, is almost a bigger muddle than Flags of Our Fathers," finds Ed Gonzalez in Slant.

"There are three or four movies competing for attention within Changeling, and unfortunately for Clint Eastwood, they're all equally dreadful melodramatic drivel," writes Nick Schager.

"I'm frankly fascinated that this film wasn't made sooner; the inherent sensationalism of such a story (serial murders, police corruption, false imprisonment) seems like an elaborate ready-made thriller." Tom Treanor at the filmlinc blog: "Eastwood has a careful eye for the newly-burgeoning Los Angeles of the early 20th century (evidenced by an opening flyover shot of the tree-lined suburbs and contrasted by an analogous closing shot of the bustling city proper); the film is wonderfully consistent in its setting and demonstrates a dazzling command of 1920s/1930s period detail. Jolie's performance is admirable; her mega-stardom (thankfully) does not corrode her character, and she crafts Christine Collins without the abject ferocity one would typically expect of an 'Angelina Jolie' performance."

"Changeling, embalmed by Ms Jolie's waxworks performance and a sepulchral production design, adds no luster to Mr Eastwood's reputation or the festival's," writes Manohla Dargis. "It will doubtless earn Ms Jolie another shot at an Oscar." Also in the New York Times, Stephen Holden: "Changeling often feels more like a Ron Howard movie (Mr Howard, one of its producers, was set to direct at one time) than like an Eastwood film, because it doesn't simply press your buttons, it hammers them," writes in the New York Times.

"This is, after all, a Clint Eastwood movie," offers the L Magazine's Mark Asch: "it's going to uphold traditional storytelling values in a way that reminds us what's important (accessibility, mostly) about understated, stylistically conservative mainstream cinema."

Nathaniel R "really wanted to love Changeling" but "I just couldn't find much to root for."

Online viewing tip #1. The Guardian has video of Jolie and Eastwood.

Online viewing tip #2. IFC has video of the press conference.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes.

Updates, 10/10: "After the (relative) moral relativism of Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), Clint Eastwood's Changeling is the Star Wars of the woman's weepie," writes David Phelps in the Auteurs' Notebook: "stark sides of good and evil and a sweet, innocent piece of play-dough caught between them to be molded into a fighter to save the universe. This is movie-as-claptrap-contraption, in which a perfect mother's victimization by vainglorious bureaucrats and loony killers serves as audience victimization as well, 90 minutes of masochism to enable another hour of catharsis."

"Trudging forth with an ominous gait, haunted from the outset by its own narrative and formal inevitability, Changeling is a musty lament for something long gone - a lost child perhaps, but more so this sepulchral cinema of quality." Eric Hynes in Reverse Shot: "Watching it, one can only try to locate whatever semblance of life remains, then tramp the dirt down."

Brandon Harris finds Changeling "simultaneously calculated and engrossing.... Sure the entire thing stinks of Oscar bait, its too long, it artificially reassures us of the power of justice and it doesn't live up to the other masterful works of Eastwood's late period, but the 78-year-old filmmaker newest work contains some genuinely terrific minuate (Manny Farber would have called it Termite Art), notably John Malkovich's performance, Tom Stern's moody camera work and the entire sequence in which Collins, after claiming the found child is not hers, is harassed and ultimately detained by the LAPD, who forced her into an illegal internment in a brutal women's mental institution."

Update, 10/17: Rachel Abramowitz has a longish backgrounder on the crime itself in the Los Angeles Times.

Posted by dwhudson at October 9, 2008 12:31 AM