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The Movie:
There are few people in Hollywood who can be counted on to deliver consistently and choose strong material. While Clint Eastwood isn't without a few minor missteps in his career, looking over the last few decades reveals a career with multiple award-winning performances, memorable characters and commerical successes. At 71, Eastwood has still been going strong over the past several years, with "True Crime"(which was unfortunately overlooked) and "Space Cowboys", which caught on well with audiences.
"Out of the Shadows" is a documentary directed by Bruce Ricker (music consultant on Eastwood's "Bridges of Madison County") and narrated by Morgan Freeman. At 87 minutes, the feature really does do as best it can at trying to cover a massive career, but of course, isn't able to go into much further detail about specific films. Rather, the documentary is able to mix a focus on specific films ("Beguiled", "Dirty Harry", "Unforgiven") with insightful interviews from both actors (Gene Hackman, James Garder, Meryl Streep and others), directors (Martin Scorsese) and others.
While "Out of the Shadows" is interesting, I think it's certainly not an "ultimate" look at Eastwood's career. Many of the interviews are interesting and occasionally insightful, but it's all rather straight-forward and a little interview-heavy; there's not that much footage of Eastwood at work as a director or actor. Also, there's little or nothing about Eastwood's two most recent pictures.
Eastwood remains one of the great actors of our time; while "Out of the Shadows" provides a respectable look at an amazing career, hopefully another documentary filmmaker will offer a richer and more in-depth look at the actor's marvelous years of work.
The DVD
VIDEO: "Out of the Shadows" is a mixture of both interviews and clips of films and, as such, it's presented in a mixture of aspect ratios. Overall, the picture quality remained quite good, as even the older clips remained sharp and clean.
SOUND: The audio is Dolby 2.0 and remains simple throughout the entire documentary, as the interview clips simply offer the dialogue of the participants and the film clips presented vary in quality, depending on the age.
MENUS:: Basic and non-animated menus with images of Eastwood.
EXTRAS:: Nothing.
Final Thoughts: Not a complete or ultimate look at Eastwood's outstanding career, "Out of the Shadows" still does offer a moderately interesting amount of information and some insightful interviews. A somewhat mixed review, Eastwood fans might want to consider it if they can find a very good price.
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