The Dead Pool - 1988 - Dir. Van Horn

FEH. I'm not a huge Dirty Harry fan. Well, I've only seen the first one apart from this and I don't remember anything about it. I mean, I like Clint. But I suppose the series suffers from too many rip offs or something. It was the original, you know. But by the time this movie came out... I don't think that's an excuse. This is just goofy as hell. Jim Carrey and Liam Neeson are in it. And they are both just... dumb... Carrey bows out pretty early on but Neeson is a train of obnoxiousness because clearly, that's what the movie calls for. So I blame the movie on Liam Neeson's bad acting. The series seems to be winking at the audience at this point ("An Asian Partner!?" "You better watch out, Det. Chang or whatever!"). I can't say I was particularly amused or interested in the movie apart from the initial premise... which is very much the premise of a movie that will not be that good. Gambling on Celebrity deaths. Movie making. Serial killing. FEH! I just... it feels SO dated. TO the point where it's just painful to watch. Patricia Clarkson's all right, I guess. And Clint, too! Their scenes are probably the better ones... Maybe. I dunno. It's a bad sign when I'm considering the romantic subplot to be the better part of the movie. Oh man! And that ending is so disappointing. FEEEEEHHHHHH!!!!

Liam Neeson is probably teaching Clint Eastwood something in this scene.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil - 1997 - Dir. Eastwood

I was expecting a murder mystery when I started watching this. It is not a murder mystery. I also didn't realize that it was based on actual events, whatever that might mean. I certainly wasn't expecting anything so... strange. So yeah, clearly, I didn't know anything about what I was getting into. It's a bizarre, uneven film. It seems that Eastwood either didn't know what he wanted to do with the film or he knew but couldn't pull it all together. The film leaps between Courtroom Drama and quirky southern character pieces. The Courtroom aspect bothered me quite a bit. It felt completely dramatic. Perhaps it's the mix of both Spacey and Cusack. Spacey's Southern Gentlemen seems to smile through the charges, as does his lawyer. While Cusack seems to remain distant from the entire procedure. Clearly he's rooting for Williams, but always seems to want to avoid being too involved. So, there never feels like too much is driving the story forward. A by-product of the film's attempt to re-create the feeling of the South? Maybe. The problem is that the "feeling" isn't much more interesting. Characters are lightly quirky, but never deep. He get mere sketches of these people so their existence is simply factual and helps color the film, but it doesn't save it from it's lull. Irma P. Hall ends up being the most interesting by far. Or maybe it's just my love of Voodoo ladies. Geoffrey Lewis' role is bizarre. Easily the strangest of the cast of characters, it goes really nowhere. And the "Fly" effects are pretty terrible. They were so bad that I thought maybe it was on purpose when we first see them. It's well-acted and strangely well-paced. For a two-and-a-half hour long movie as problematic, I'd expect this to drag a lot more. It's pretty interesting in the sense of I felt like I was trying to sort the movie out the whole way through, but by the end, realizing there was nothing to sort, I felt let down... and crabby.

It's a JAR, Cusack! You ain't never seen one of these before?