Director: Clint Eastwood
I wasn't sure whether I was going to write this film up for this blog - I watched it mostly as a goof, and had I watched it alone, I would have probably turned it off halfway through.
The Eiger Sanction is about shadowy government organizations, assassins, and mountain climbing. Clint Eastwood plays an assassin/mountain climber turned art history professor who has to go back into both assassinating and mountain climbing for one last job. I'm not making this plot up. This sounds amazing on paper, but on film it's an absurdly talky film, with characters endlessly droning exposition while making non-funny quips. Occasionally the movie veers into offenses against homosexuals and non-white races. The film is also lit terribly - I get the sense that Eastwood was aiming for the awesome lighting in Dirty Harry, but really it makes parts of the film incomprehensible. The mountain climbing scenes were clearly an ordeal to shoot, but they don't manage to capture the tension that I imagine the director wanted.
I only mention this film here to note the anti-recency bias that tends to exist among cultural critics, including myself. There's a lot of great films in the past, but there's also a lot of terrible ones, too. Time has largely forgotten the terrible ones, so I tend not to see them.
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