The Good Shepherd

Akash
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Post by Akash »

flipp525 wrote:And from a purely gay boy standpoint, it was kind of hot seeing Matt Damon wrestling nude in the mud with his Skull and Bones brothers in the early Yale section. Very haaawt. Lee Pace pissing on him? Not so much. I've never been a fan of watersports.
LOL. I didn't like the film at all but this was a bit um arousing (btw, have you seen the equally silly "School Ties"? Nice shower scene with all boys including Damon).

It's also funny because very little is still known about the activities at the Skull and Bones Society at Yale. The Yale Daily News publishes a list of all of Yale's secret societies every year (including Skull) as well as all the people who they've uncovered as members. Naturally the Skulls are never happy about this. Also, the one thing that's known about the Skulls is that they routinely have an enormously high water bill every semester, and no one knows why. I guess The Good Shepard's contention is that the water bill is due to homoerotic mud wrestling and water sports? :D
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Post by flipp525 »

VanHelsing wrote:Gambon was the replacement for the late Richard Harris as Professor Dumbledore in the Harry Potter movies.

Ah-ha! There ya go, that's it.




Edited By flipp525 on 1167795385
"The mantle of spinsterhood was definitely in her shoulders. She was twenty five and looked it."

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Post by VanHelsing »

Gambon was the replacement for the late Richard Harris as Professor Dumbledore in the Harry Potter movies.
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Post by flipp525 »

jack wrote:
The two acting standouts for me were the late Michael Gambon and Tammy Blanchard


Michael Gambon isn't dead, Flipp.

Ya know, I have zero clue who I was mistaking him for. Maybe Robert Altman because of the Gosford Park connection? Who knows. Thanks for catching that. I'd hate to think, even erroneously, that we'd been deprived of such a talent.




Edited By flipp525 on 1167794639
"The mantle of spinsterhood was definitely in her shoulders. She was twenty five and looked it."

-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
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Post by jack »

The two acting standouts for me were the late Michael Gambon and Tammy Blanchard


Michael Gambon isn't dead, Flipp.
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Post by criddic3 »

flipp525 wrote:I found this film surprisingly interesting and quite the "stuck-to-your-seats-cinematic-page-turner" (I wanted to jump up and get some popcorn but I was afraid I'd miss something!). It's a little slow and at two hours and forty minutes, it stretches the audience's patience at times, but I managed to get a little something out of it.

The two acting standouts for me were the late Michael Gambon and Tammy Blanchard -- both reappear later in the film quite unexpectedly; both make quite an indelible impression. Matt Damon, one of the most impressive actors of our generation, turns in a very restrained performance and really only lights up with Blanchard.

Angelina Jolie is not miscast so much as she's just given nothing to do. You could see her chomping at the bit for some big scene and when she finally does get it, DeNiro seems to cut it too short.

And from a purely gay boy standpoint, it was kind of hot seeing Matt Damon wrestling nude in the mud with his Skull and Bones brothers in the early Yale section. Very haaawt. Lee Pace pissing on him? Not so much. I've never been a fan of watersports.
No doubt cam will think you've revealed too much. :p

It amuses me that this is the film that drew Mr. De Niro back to the director's chair. So I will probably try to catch it before it leaves theaters.
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Post by Mister Tee »

I've been meaning to write about this since last week.

It's a throughly decent, absorbing, fairly unexciting movie. The first hour I found the stongest: the Yale roots, the OSS activity, and the initial founding of the agency (with interesting side notes, ranging from the affair with Blanchard to DeNiro's prescient skepticism about the wisdom of an un-watchdogged group).

The midpoint I found the least successful, because the domestic drama was completely derivative (as well as far less interesting than the government stuff). I've been seeing that marriage fall apart in movies for 50 years -- in the past, it's been the workaholic CEO/inventor/composer, but the arc is still the same. (I wouldn't blame Jolie for the problems. She was probably cast to inject a little estrogen into proceedings, but the character is too archetypal and thin a 50s housewife to be enlivened by anyone) The terrified-of-his-father weakling child is also a cliche -- you wince for him, but can't work up much fresh response.

I did think the father/son relationship became somewhat more interesting when the kid reached adulthood, and the movie also revived, but at the same time the issues came to seem a bit trivialized. For great affairs of state -- and one of the most infamous foreign-policy bungles of the century -- to be wrapped up conveniently as a development in a paternal conflict seemed a lot less than I'd signed on for. It was fun, but at a lower level than hour one.

But the film has many good points, which I'm probably skimming over. I liked all the intrigue with Russia/UK etc. (though some it verged on confusing); really liked Joe Pesci's short scene; thought the supporting performers did very well throughout; and loved the visual of the son's bride's departure. I do agree with Sabin, that perhaps DeNiro shrouding the film in Godfather-dark was overkill.

I may have been wrong about the wisdom of releasing the film in the Christmas rush. As Leonard Klady says, it seems to have become the serious film of choice among the wide releases, and the holiday-fueled $40 million gross probably will help the film approach break-even -- a status I thought hopelessly out of reach three weeks ago.
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Post by dws1982 »

Given my affinity for all things cloak and dagger, this was a disappointment. It's not bad, but it's fairly lifeless; the cinematic equivalent of circling the runway for three hours: You aren't worried about crashing and burning, but after about thirty minutes, you know that it's not going to take off anytime soon.

I think I would've rather watched Bond again.

More to come (maybe) later tonight.
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Post by flipp525 »

I found this film surprisingly interesting and quite the "stuck-to-your-seats-cinematic-page-turner" (I wanted to jump up and get some popcorn but I was afraid I'd miss something!). It's a little slow and at two hours and forty minutes, it stretches the audience's patience at times, but I managed to get a little something out of it.

The two acting standouts for me were the late Michael Gambon and Tammy Blanchard -- both reappear later in the film quite unexpectedly; both make quite an indelible impression. Matt Damon, one of the most impressive actors of our generation, turns in a very restrained performance and really only lights up with Blanchard.

Angelina Jolie is not miscast so much as she's just given nothing to do. You could see her chomping at the bit for some big scene and when she finally does get it, DeNiro seems to cut it too short.

And from a purely gay boy standpoint, it was kind of hot seeing Matt Damon wrestling nude in the mud with his Skull and Bones brothers in the early Yale section. Very haaawt. Lee Pace pissing on him? Not so much. I've never been a fan of watersports.




Edited By flipp525 on 1167431882
"The mantle of spinsterhood was definitely in her shoulders. She was twenty five and looked it."

-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
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Post by Sabin »

I'm of two minds with 'The Good Shepard'.

The first? Eric Roth's screenplay is fantastic, some of the best writing he's done. He's crafted a world to lose yourself in, and some of the best dialogue of the year. I admittedly have a predilliction for this kind of stuff, so from the get-go, I was hooked. Robert Richardson's photography aids immeasurably, and I wouldn't be surprised to see him pick up yet another Academy Award nomination. All things considered, the source and the means are there.

The second mind is set firmly on Robert De Niro, whose decision from the get-go is to make another 'Godfather' film. The problem with this mind-set is that the 'Godfather'-ness of Coppola's first masterpiece was a mode of compensation for the trashiness of the novel. The world De Niro is recreating certainly has the weight of the world on its shoulders, but the result is dour by even "Birth of the CIA"-standards. He encourages his talented cast to limit their performances to existential brooding, no more so than with with Matt Damon, whose performance is rather thankless, a dour feat of one-note supression that's effective, with a whiff of stagnation. I can't complain, but I wish there was some way of conveying at least a murmur of the man's conflict, which by all reports may really not have been there.

I can't complain too much about the dourness of 'The Good Sheperd', because it's just innately a dour film, but there are so many pleasures in Eric Roth's screenplay that I wish it had found itself in more interesting hands than Robert De Niro's, whose performance features the actor at his dullest. He follows in Emilio Estevez's footsteps of popping up to let the audience know exactly WHY the movie is going wrong through actorly example. 'The Good Shepard' is miles above 'Bobby' and for the most part a good film (again: I dig this kind of thing), but ye Gods, to think about it in the hands of a Soderbergh and I get goosebumps.
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Post by Sabin »

No. 3 on the Gleeb's Best of Year List.

"If you claim to long for movies like the ones they made in the '70s, Robert De Niro's heady and intoxicating inquiry into the early decades of the CIA is what you've been waiting for."
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Post by dws1982 »

Armond White is calling this a masterpiece.

--------------------------------------------------------
De Niro creates a patriotic masterpiece
By Armond White

The Good Shepherd
Directed by Robert De Niro

Every awards season, a superb film gets lost in the shuffle of pseudo-prestigious releases and holiday junk; this year the casualty is The Good Shepherd. Robert De Niro’s decision to make his second directorial effort a low-key epic about the moral cost behind the founding of the Central Intelligence Agency confounds all the nonsense that awards season fervor suggests is essential to film culture. The Good Shepherd is serious in ways most people have forgotten movies could be.

Matt Damon plays Wasp scion Edward Wilson, a member of Yale’s Skull and Bones organization who’s forced to recognize his social privilege. Wilson becomes part of the creation of the CIA when it develops out of the War Department’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which had done investigatory intelligence work during World War II. The Good Shepherd goes beyond the facile intrigue of a spy movie; its span over several decades looks inward at Wilson’s All-American dilemma. This idealized American white male relates to his social advantages with a now-uncommon sense of responsibility. Wilson sacrifices himself—not only to an idea of class but also to feelings of patriotic duty. This may be the boldest movie characterization of the year because it defies the snarky, anti-American, self-hatred and nihilism and distrust of Bush-bashers, also known as Borat-mania.

De Niro has taken a dangerous yet faithful chance, betting on the basic, perhaps nascent, ability of American moviegoers to find their most complex quandaries reflected in movie characters. Damon plays Wilson with a poker face, no longer the enigmatic killing machine of the trashy and tedious Bourne Identity movies. (The Good Shepherd is practically a rebuke of the smirking viciousness of that sub-James Bond series.) It’s through Damon’s blond, wasp visage that De Niro hopes to inspire more than a superficial audience identification with an American type. To watch Wilson dutifully conspire in government bureaucracy, traveling the world on secretive missions and keeping his personal life at bay, challenges the conventional sense of how movie characters win our approval. Only Whit Stillman’s movies have been as well-informed, deeply felt and politically nonjudgmental about America’s Wasp heritage.
The Good Shepherd has been made with full awareness of contemporary, homegrown skepticism about the U.S. government, but it avoids encouraging any easy cynical responses. Empathy for Wilson’s humanity is intertwined with feelings for his patriotism. That’s radical filmmaking even David Lynch might envy.

One of the foremost pleasures of The Good Shepherd (photographed with an emotional palette by Robert Richardson) is watching De Niro conduct a narrative that is always a commentary on the way other movie narratives have constructed American experience. This is meta-cinema—as suggested by the ad copy “Edward Wilson believed in America.” That paraphrase of the opening line of The Godfather takes us through Hollywood’s looking glass where morality has been traded for the suspense of the criminal underworld. The Good Shepherd is the most poignant, intellectual epic since Munich (this script is also by Eric Roth)—primarily due to the way it shows that belief in a political idea and a social entity tests man’s spiritual allegiance. The cast of hard-faced, substantive actors (William Hurt, Billy Crudup, Keir Dulea, Alec Baldwin, Timothy Hutton, Gabriel Macht, Angelina Jolie and De Niro himself in a memorable cameo) is slightly familiar and mysterious—like figures in a passion play.

Ironically, the mythic figure underlying The Good Shepherd is Michael Corleone, another All-American young man who considered that he was doing what was best for his people. Apparently, De Niro extrapolates his own part in the Godfather epic (as Young Don Vito) the same way he used his roles in mob movies to extrapolate the parochial story of his directorial debut, A Bronx Tale (1993). De Niro ties together his own filmography with admirable integrity—transforming the pop excitement audiences take for granted into dramas of unignorable, personal, ethical dilemma.
This compares to the liberal sensibility of such Robert Redford films from The Candidate and Three Days of a Condor to Sneakers, Spy Games and The Clearing. But De Niro’s mix of politics and entertainment is both more populist and confrontational. De Niro’s artistry matches his integrity.
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Post by FilmFan720 »

Tee, I think that you are dead-on with this analysis with the current Oscar timeframe. However, I don't think an earlier release date would have helped Good Shepherd...I saw it with a pretty average crowd (it was one of those radio promotion sneak previews), and they were completely disengaged by the film. It is pretty cold and there is not a lot of action or even suspense in the film, and at the end only got a handful of light applauses. Had this been released in October, it probably would have bombed and been forgotten. What would have saved this film would have been a better award push by the studio, I think. It seems to be a forgotten film by them.
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Post by Mister Tee »

FilmFan, based on your review (and others I've been hearing from reputable sources), this film is Exhibit A for my developing theory that the December Oscar-hopeful crush has become damaging to serious films. By and large, the critics --especially vis a vis awards -- don't have the time or patience for all the films that are thrown at them over a brief period, and they toss aside too many gems. Many seem to have already developed their prize templates (witness this year's continual recurrence of Departed/Queen/United 93); if they let any new film slip in, it's most likely one with a super pedigree (Eastwood; Jackson in '03) or an extremely high profile (Dreamgirls; Munich last time). I'm reading very good reviews for several of the late releases, including this one (to my surprise, I should add -- when I first saw it excluded from awards voting, I erroneously thought it must be a dog). Yet I'll bet it slips through with little public notice, because the critics don't have time to hype it. (And I wonder if this one specifically is taking heat for being a bit long? You can almost hear critics thinking, I can't handle a 2:45 run-time; there's another screening to go to at 6)

I can't help thinking a movie like this would have, contrarily, evoked critical gratitude in March or May or July. Isn't it time for studios to abandon their single-minded October-to-December Oscar focus? The short (mid-January) deadline for Academy ballots makes it ever less likely anything but a heavyweight will emerge from the December glut. Meantime we fans of grown-up movies are denied sustenance most of the year, then glutted with more than we can digest in a few weeks around Christmas.
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Post by Damien »

Wow, Keir Dullea is back? That is very cool.
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