The Eastwood Factor is an understatement
For a man’s career to span over 35 years and include 34 films is remarkable. What’s even more remarkable is how a born actor that was excellent in his craft shifted to directing so flawlessly and, in a sense, more successfully than his original intentions in Hollywood.
In this documentary, The Eastwood Factor, you’ll get to travel through some of the best moments of Eastwood’s career as he guides you through it on camera. He gives some pretty good insight about his roles in the films he starred in and his choice to shift to directing sometime towards the end of his acting career. One of the more fascinating stories that he tells is the decision to make Flags of our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima at the same time. He provides a great discussion on how they portrayed their lead antagonist in the second film and how different it was (and similar in some instances) to tell the Japanese side of things from such a massive, violent war.
What helps push this documentary along even better is the narration from Morgan Freeman. Freeman’s own insight into Eastwood’s films, especially with Unforgiven, absolutely drives the entire chronological revisit of Eastwood’s entire career at Warner Brothers.
As much as I love all the content and stories that Eastwood shares, and the footage that Warner Home Video provides, the one aspect of this entire documentary that makes me uneasy is the awkwardly placed pieces that just don’t belong. For example, there is a moment where Eastwood breaks off and goes to visit the WB costume department that holds all of his costumes from all his movies. As neat as it is to see it, the conversation between the young lady and Eastwood is awkward, but not as awkward as the placement of the piece in the overall documentary. There are a few moments here and there where stuff like this occurs. It just gets the documentary off its intended path, which becomes disruptive to the flow.
Anyway, that’s my only complaint.
