Earlier this year, we saw the release of the mammoth 35-movie, 35-DVD Clint: 35 Years boxset. The last two weeks have seen a flood of Eastwood-starring and -directed movies hit Blu-ray, some in mini-collections. If I were laid up in a hospital for a few weeks, it'd be a great time to wheel in an HDTV and a pile of Blu-rays and get to know his filmography better. I watched Invictus and the new Extended Cut of Richard Schickel's career retrospective piece The Eastwood Factor in the same afternoon recently.
I just don't get all the hate for Invictus. I get Americans not relating to it like they would Miracle or other "USA! USA!" sports movies. I get older critics being more open to it because they grew up reading newspapers and really possessing a desire to know more about the rest of the world. My generation got used to the internet good and quick, and unless there's a three sentence version of the news, they don't care. Without the nationalistic "that could have been me", my set goes "so we know they won, who cares, bo-ring".
Aside from the light parallels to recent US politics (the power of symbolism, post-racial implications), Invictus has nothing to do with the United States, nor should it. It's a foreign film in English directed by an American. That kind of chimera doesn't have a pre-established expectation from the hordes of bloggers that shat on it last year, so I think they checked out 15 minutes in. It takes some patience and a passion for history to care about Invictus, and that's just gone out of style in recent years. The only thing that took me out of things or bothered me remotely was a single music cue, and if you've seen the movie, you probably know just which one I'm referring to here.
The extras, like those on most recent-vintage Eastwood pictures, are substantive and worthwhile, if a bit redundant in places. A great deal of real people portrayed (and not) in the movie appear in these supplements. The Picture-in-Picture feature allows you to skip to the next "focus point", so if you just want to see those bits and not watch the entire movie over again, you can. I wish that DVD producers were this conscientious all of the time. "Mandela Meets Morgan" is about Freeman's character work and includes footage of the real Mandela interacting with him. "Matt Damon Plays Rugby" is a short piece on Damon's big bulk-up. The snippet of Eastwood Factor on the disc is the same as the one from the 35-film boxset. I didn't watch the Invictus Music Trailer.
The "Extended Cut" of Richard Schickel's The Eastwood Factor aired on TCM the other day and came to DVD two days ago and is all of $10.99 at Amazon. It's equally made for the Eastwood obsessive or neophyte, and runs 88 minutes. The bit that dropped my jaw was the look inside Eastwood's costume archive on the WB studio lot. Below is a screencap, which their publicists hate me for doing, but it serves the story and reader best, so I ignore their commands at my own peril:
