Sunday, February 23, 2020

Richard Jewell (2019)

Based on the true story of the security guard who found a bomb at the 1996 Olympics, this movie is good. The huge cast, led by Paul Walter Hauser as the hapless Jewell, Kathy Bates as his mother (Oscar-nominated for that role), and Sam Rockwell as a sympathetic lawyer, has got it going on.

Clint Eastwood (turning 90 this year!) directs from a script by Billy Ray, which is based the 2019 book by Kent Alexander and Kevin Salwen The Suspect: An Olympic Bombing, the FBI, the Media, and Richard Jewell, the Man Caught in the Middle, which is in turn based on a 1997 Vanity Fair article by Marie Brenner.

You won't see the five rings of the Olympics, since the International Olympic Committee wouldn't permit the use, but Atlanta's Centennial Olympic Park was the location of the incident and the filming.

With Eastwood being a major jazz fan, it's no surprise that he chose Cuban jazz trumpeter and Obama Presidential Medal of Freedom honoree Arturo Sandoval to write the soundtrack. I am surprised, however, that the score cannot be found online for our pleasure. There's a short list of songs on imdb.

Hauser was last blogged for BlacKKKlansman, Bates for On the Basis of Sex, Rockwell for Jojo Rabbit, Eastwood for Sully, and Ray for Captain Phillips.

Rotten Tomatoes' critics didn't like it very much, averaging a cool 76%, but its audiences are coming in strong at 96. We saw it the 3rd of January and it's supposed to begin streaming March 3, 2020.

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