The 15:17 to Paris (2018)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
On Aug. 21, 2015, the world watches in stunned silence as the media reports a thwarted terrorist attack on a train that's bound for Paris -- an attempt prevented by three young Americans traveling together through Europe. The heroic and courageous actions of Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos and Spencer Stone help to save the lives of more than 500 passengers on board.
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Besides an American flag, there are posters for Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket , and the Second World War-era Pacific Theatre epic Letters from Iwo Jima .
In a matter of minutes later when one of the mothers talks to her son, Eastwood makes a point to leer upon a Full Metal Jacket poster on his wall, the iconic “born to kill” helmet on full display.
Unfortunately, he's already chubbed out to where he physically resembles Vincent D'Onofrio's private in Full Metal Jacket, so he whips himself into shape and emerges as formidably soldier-like.
As a kid, Stone has a Full Metal Jacket poster on one wallthough that Kubrick film isn't exactly a love letter to the military.
And on the wall of his bedroom hangs a poster of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987).
No parece que el pequeño Spencer entienda bien a bien los horrores de la guerra (aunque en su cuarto tiene un póster de Full Metal Jacket ), y nadie a su alrededor lo va a contradecir: ni su madre a la que parece de lo más natural que su hijo juegue con pistolas que no precisamente disparan agua, ni tampoco sus maestros quienes al contrario, le alimentan su interés por todo lo militar, pensando que se trata de una afición por la historia más que por las armas.
Someone should mail Eastwood a copy of The Florida Project (2017) if he’s forgotten how real kids act and play.
Those multitudinous stereotypes of proto-Communist proles, all desperately in need of government assistance, seem spawned by the sentiments in socialist Michael Harrington’s 1962 book The Other America , which eventuated in last year’s insolent, bleeding-heart movie The Florida Project .
Sean Baker recently did something similar in his 2017 film, The Florida Project, mixing amateur actors with blatantly artificial elements (the film’s ending) in order to use artifice to deliver the film’s message.
Like Eastwood's controversial hit American Sniper (2014), The 15:17 to Paris is an all-American hero tale built around seemingly ordinary citizens stepping up at the moment they're most needed.
Eastwood doesn’t lay on the pro-military messages too heavily here, the way he did in American Sniper, but The 15:17 to Paris does, at times, feel like a toe-in-the-water attempt by the filmmaker at a faith-based drama, which isn’t inherently a bad thing.
Because of the creative decision to cast the real men in the roles of themselves, I could easily slip into snark or reference back to the fake-baby situation Clint Eastwood used in American Sniper.
Even Eastwood's last military romp, 2014's American Sniper , cast Navy SEAL Kevin Lacz as himself, playing opposite Bradley Cooper's Chris Kyle.
Clint Eastwood rose to superstardom playing rugged loners who adhered to hard moral codes and boasted itchy trigger fingers, but as a director, he’s spent the past four decades—in films as varied as Play Misty for Me , Unforgiven , Million Dollar Baby, Gran Torino and American Sniper —investigating that iconic persona, and its relationship to issues of violence, valor and heroism.
One can only hope that Eastwood’s trajectory of transforming his cinema into a simulacrum of true stories keeps unraveling into his own Synecdoche, New York, wherein he inserts himself as his next hero du jour.