Clint Eastwood (born 1930) first became famous as an actor in the American TV cowboy series "
Rawhide" (1959-1966) and in various
spaghetti westerns. His violent police series "
Dirty Harry" established him as a popular anti-hero of violent crime movies.
His first turn at directing was for the psychological thriller, "
Play Misty for Me" (1971), in which he also starred. While the movie is not considered one of his greatest, it was highly praised and showed Eastwood's directing potential.
In recent years, Eastwood continues to act, but he gets the most attention for his movie directing. Several of the movies he directed have received the highest praise and awards. For the western movie "
Unforgiven" (1992), Eastwood both starred and directed. This movie won the Academy Award for
Best Picture and Eastwood received the award for
Best Director. This movie has recently been remade as a Japanese
jidaigeki.
Eastwood again won Academy Awards for
Best Picture and
Best Director with his boxing movie, "
Million Dollar Baby" (2004), in which he also starred. Other excellent and critically acclaimed movies directed by Clint Eastwood are "
The Bridges of Madison County" (1995), "
Mystic River" (2003), "
Flags of Our Fathers" (2006), "
Letters from Iwo Jima" (2006), "
Changeling" (2008), "
Gran Torino" (2008), and "
Invictus" (2009). A musical directed by Eastwood,
Jersey Boys (based on the Broadway musical), came out in 2014. A controversial Oscar nominated movie about the war in Iraq also came out in 2014, "
American Sniper" starring Bradley Cooper.
* Despite Eastwood's long acting career, he has never won an Academy Award for his acting, although he has been nominated twice (Unforgiven, 1992; Million Dollar Baby, 2004). He has been nominated for Best Director by the Academy Awards four times, winning twice.
* Eastwood was mayor of the town of Carmel, California, from 1986-1988.
* Eastwood is also an accomplished musician. He composed much of the music for the soundtracks to many of his movies.
* "Letters from Iwo Jma" (
硫黄島からの手紙, 2006), is almost entirely in Japanese. It shows the battle for a strategic island in the Pacific during World War II from the point of view of the Japanese. Another movie, "Flags of Our Fathers" (2006), shows the same battle from the point of view of the Americans.
Many of Eastwood's movies are available in our library.
[My personal thoughts and recollections about Clint Eastwood and his movies were supplemented with details, dates and numbers from
Wikipedia. - Kevin]
Clint Eastwood Biographies:
Wikipedia
IMDb
Biography.com
My Bag clip, from
'Million Dollar Baby' listening exercise for handout.
Links to trailers & clips from some of Clint Eastwood's movies:
Play Misty for Me (1971) - psychological thriller; trailer
Pale Rider (1985) - western; axe handle fight scene
Mystic River (2003) - drama; trailer
Million Dollar Baby (2004) - boxing drama; trailer; also
short boxing clip
Flags of Our Fathers (2006) - war; trailer
Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) - war; trailer; starring Ken Watanabe & Kazunari Ninomiya
Changeling (2008) - true historical drama; trailer; starring Angelina Jolie
Gran Torino (2008) - drama; trailer
Scene from
Gran Torino (2008)
Invictus (2009) - true drama; South African history; trailer; starring Morgan Freeman & Matt Damon
J. Edgar (2011) - true biopic of J. Edgar Hoover, former FBI director; starring DiCaprio; trailer
Jersey Boys (2014) - musical about the American band, The Four Seasons; trailer
American Sniper (2014) - war; starring Bradley Cooper; nominated for Best Picture.
Two versions of "Unforgiven" (Japanese version not directed by Clint Eastwood)
Unforgiven (1992) - western; directed by Clint Eastwood
Unforgiven [許されざる者] (2013) - jidaigeki; Japanese remake; directed by Lee Sang-il
Morgan Freeman has starred in 3 movies directed by Clint Eastwood, and they all appear in this list of
Top 10 Morgan Freeman Performances.
Watch one or more of the Clint Eastwood trailers or clips above and write a comment in the comment box below.
My students are 2nd, 3rd, and 4th year university English majors, mainly from the Culture stream (other streams being Literature, Education and Communication). TOEIC levels range from 220-550. The class is a year-long course that meets once a week for 90 minutes. We meet in a computer room with 70 PCs that have headphones and DVD drives. The projector and audio quality for this room are not ideal, so the class material is mainly presented online on a Blogger site (like this one) which makes the course a blended learning course. My typical procedure is to introduce the day's topic, then have students access the course blog site. I usually have students view some movie clips or trailers linked from my site, and then we do one or more listening activities as a class, several of which are presented here. I usually finish the class by having students write a comment in the comment box of the blog post for that day. All students must have a Google account to do this.
