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February 08, 2009 12:00am

CLINT Eastwood continues to make our day with a magnum load of creativity.

Fresh off the back of Gran Torino, which Eastwood directed as well as starred in, and not that long since Million Dollar Baby, Mystic River and his epic mirror-image war films Flags Of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima, comes the moody master class Changeling.

And, in a rare move, Eastwood has chosen a woman as his lone campaigner against the system.

Angelina Jolie's single mother, Christine Collins, as with boxer Maggie Fitzgerald in Million Dollar Baby, won't lie down as she battles corrupt cops, shonky psychiatric doctors and city hall.

All she wants to know is what happened to her eight-year-old, Walter?

His screenplay and Eastwood's direction keep this riveting real-life thriller humming with tension, laced - and be warned - with outbursts of shocking violence.

Jolie, that strange, other-worldly, uber-lipped presence, is reduced to flesh and blood here - a mother who longs to see her son again. Our hearts open up to her suffering.

And while Malkovich is his usual reliable self, the stand out is Harner, as a snide, crafty, greasy, horrid little serial killer who preys on children.
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http://www.ilfordrecorder...2009%2009%3A29%3A00%3A627

THE multi Oscar-nominated THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON (12A) is adapted from the 1920s story by F Scott Fitzgerald about a man who is born in his 80s and ages backwards.

It follows his life in New Orleans from the end of World War One to the 21st century - the people he meets, the places he visits, the loves he finds and loses.

Brad Pitt, increasingly garnering plaudits for films like Twelve Monkeys, Legends of the Fall, Babel and The Assassination of Jesse James…, stars in the title role and has been nominated for the Best Actor gong. Cate Blanchett, Julia Ormond and Tilda Swinton also feature.

Director David Fincher says: "Benjamin is like a cue ball and all the people he collides with leave marks on him. That's what a life is - a collection of these dents and scratches. They are what make him who he is and not anyone else."

And Pitt adds: "I like this idea of dents. People make an impact and leave some kind of an impression.

"There's something very poetic and accepting about that. It doesn't mean you roll over. It doesn't mean you don't fight for what you want. It means you accept the inevitabilities of life. People come and go. People leave, whether by choice or by death. People leave as you yourself will someday leave - it's the inevitable. How you deal with this becomes the question.

http://stgeorge.yourguide...s-the-thread/1426884.aspx

In Clint Eastwood's Changeling, the Los Angeles Police Department puts on a pretence of clearing up crime rather than actually achieving it.

Set in 1928, Changeling, rated MA, is based on the horrific true story of a mother whose nine-year-old son Walter goes off to school and doesn't return.

****Angelina Jolie has gained a well-deserved Academy Award nomination for best actress for her terrific portrayal of the distraught mother, Christine Collins, who waits for news of her son.********

Eventually, the LAPD announce that the boy has been found on the other side of the US.

The mother knows and so does the audience that he is not her missing son, even though the boy, and the police, insist he is.

When she complains, the police chief has her branded as an unfit mother and sent to a mental asylum.

Only a local activist, played by John Malkovich, seems willing to believe her.

Meanwhile one honest hard-working cop finds evidence of a serial killer.

Why, you may wonder, did the second boy say he was her son? See the film!

http://entertainment.time...t/film/article5652250.ece
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Is it time to kill the chick flick?
Hollywood thinks that all women care about is weddings and shopping Can anything stop the inane decline of the chick flick?
Isla Fisher
Kevin Maher

Simone de Beauvoir famously announced that "One is not born a woman, but becomes one," in her 1949 treatise The Second Sex. She might have added: "But it takes Hollywood to turn one into an hysterical fashion-mongering man-craving anorexic caricature." For, increasingly, the modern Hollywood women's picture or so-called chick flick has become home to the worst kind of regressive pre-feminist stereotype and misogynistic cliché.

Movies such as the recent Anne Hathaway/Kate Hudson catfight Bride Wars or the forthcoming Confessions of a Shopaholic are aimed exclusively at women, and yet feature female characters who are variously neurotic, idiotic, label-obsessed, weight-obsessed, man-obsessed or weddingobsessed, and often all at the same time. In Confessions of a Shopaholic, for instance, the gifted comedic actress Isla Fisher plays Rebecca Bloomwood, a wannabe Manhattan fashionista who lives only for designer clothes and will happily fight to the death for a pair of sale-price Gucci boots.

Rebecca wears pink and leaves the important stuff such as thinking, to her patronising male colleagues: at a job interview she hilariously confuses the word "fish" with "fiscal". The boys, to a man, find her adorable, even though her greatest achievement involves matching a black Saint Laurent coat with a purple dress.

Other incoming chick flicks will hardly give the women's movement much cause for celebration. Films such as He's Just Not That Into You (Jennifer Aniston and Drew Barrymore lead a cast of women desperate for commitment from their men), All About Steve (Sandra Bullock plays a semi-stalker who chases her one-night stand across the country in the hope that he'll marry her) and The Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (the title says enough) all point to a version of womanhood that at best is mired in cliché and at worst in hateful caricature.