Bird (1988)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Saxophone player Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker comes to New York in 1940 and is quickly noticed for his remarkable way of playing. He becomes a drug addict but his loving wife Chan tries to help him.
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What critics compared Bird to
This brightly lit film was shot by Jack N Green, a cinematographer noted for his mastery of chiaroscuro in such Clint Eastwood pictures as Unforgiven and Bird.
At one point, Brühl’s Lauda even implores Hemsworth’s Hunt to go to bed early for a change, reminding me of Clint Eastwood’s 1988 film Bird, in which the director tried to make a biopic about Charlie Parker but couldn’t help siding with Dizzy Gillespie when it came to all that tortured artist nonsense.
Aside from being one of the highlights of Eastwood's long career, this film unquestionably offers one of his top directing efforts, right up there with "Bird."
From time to time, I start to wonder if something else is Clint Eastwood's finest hour as a director - The Outlaw Josey Wales , Bird and Letters from Iwo Jima have all made a run for that title at some point in my estimation - and then I rewatch it, and it's always the same feeling of recognition, the "oh hell no, this is definitely the one" moment of remembering, yes, that's right, this is a fucking brilliant and basically flawless motion picture.
In a way, it finally made official what critics and fans had slowly come to realize over the last decade (and at least since his 1988 Bird): Clint Eastwood—legendary as both the iconic western drifter with no name and Dirty Harry—was one of America’s best directors.
If Clint Eastwood had not been a star, he would still figure as a major director, with important work in the Western, action and comedy genres, and unique films like " Bird " (1988), his biography of the saxophonist Charlie Parker, the love story "The Bridges of Madison County" (1995), and the wonderful " A Perfect World " (1993), which seems to be about a hunt for an escaped convict, but seems oddly distanced from the chase, and more concerned with the values and histories of the characters.
Mr. Eastwood doesn't play it safe as a director, but there are times in "Unforgiven," as in his jazz epic, "Bird," that the sheer scope of the narrative seems to overwhelm him.
He was known as a risk-taker behind the camera, having made such offbeat pictures as Bird and White Hunter Black Heart.
As a boxing movie, this is every bit as grim as The Set-Up (1949) and Fat City (1972), and as an underlit look at a seedy American subculture, set mainly in a few lairlike locations, it's as dark and doom ridden as the 1961 The Hustler (with which it paradoxically shares a 'Scope format) and Eastwood's own Bird (1988).
Films like "Bird," "Unforgiven" and "Mystic River" have demonstrated a filmmaking technique aligned with his acting technique - full of restraint and nuance.
Eastwood once made a movie about Charlie Parker (“Bird”), but this picture has the smoothly melancholic tones of Coleman Hawkins at his greatest.
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Directed by the legendary Clint Eastwood, the man behind such gems as "Unforgiven" and "Bird," comes "Mystic River," a potboiler of a thriller: Three boys' lives become forever altered when one of them is abducted and molested and then once again, twenty five years later, when one of their children is brutally murdered.
Eastwood clarifies his running thesis (White Hunter, Black Heart, Unforgiven , Bird) that man's only aspiration is to mythologize his basest instincts (to protect the women, to dominate the men)--base instincts that refuse to be honourable in any civilized context.
In films as varied as Tightrope, Bird and Unforgiven he simultaneously explores the unholy lure of violence while exposing its nauseating underbelly.
Although he can sometimes be an incredibly sloppy filmmaker when he is simply going through the motions (as duds like "The Rookie" and "Blood Work" demonstrate), he is even worse when he sets out to make Art; when that happens, the results-films such as "Bird" and the inexplicable "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil"- are dull, dark (literally and figuratively) exercises that plod along endlessly with all the verve of an especially draggy sermon.
The 1989 "Bird," about an American outsider who was also one of our greatest artists, and the 1995 "The Bridges of Madison County," about a tender extramarital affair, were both rich with possibilities for exploring the way the American sensibility supposedly encourages passionate exploration, only to put a lid on it when things get too hot.
"Breezy" flopped with critics and at the box office, and so did "Bird" (1988) and "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" (1996).