First look–Clint Eastwood, retired from acting, returns for a baseball movie

A bit of a theme this past week here at borg.com was big-time action hero mega-stars and their choice of roles in their later years. We first discussed Arnold Schwarzenegger and compared him to John Wayne and Clint Eastwood in light if his new film The Last Stand. Then we compared Arnold with Sylvester Stallone in light of his new film Bullet to the Head. Unless you’re a believer in the future of film with old movie stars as in Connie Willis’s award-winning novel Remake, we won’t be seeing any “new” John Wayne movies anytime soon. So now we return to Clint Eastwood, in light of his September 2012 release, Trouble with the Curve.

Although the fictional Trouble with the Curve is about a famous baseball scout at the end of his career, it’s hard to say whether this will be anything like the ultimate baseball scouting movie, last year’s Moneyball. The inclusion of Amy Adams character as Eastwood’s character’s daughter, and an apparent possible relationship between her and the baseball target played by Justin Timberlake, makes this a look a lot more romance in a baseball setting than a typical baseball flick. That said, with baseball movies there is no typical baseball flick.

And this one seems pretty sappy, unless the trailer is totally mischaracterizing this “dad dumps daughter/daughter tries to get daddy back” plotline. And heaping on the sap is the Phillip Phillips song “Home.” This is bad timing for that song if you’re this writer. I ~~had to sit through~~ watched the song performed live at this year’s All Star baseball game, and then we were inundated with it as one of the U.S. Olympic team’s theme songs during NBC’s coverage, over and over and over. Now it’s that drippy song permeating through this trailer. It’s a nice song. But enough already.

The interesting tidbit about this movie is that Clint Eastwood retired from acting after his successful film Gran Torino. Yet something about this one caused him to return to starring roles. Maybe because he had never been in a baseball movie? Hopefully we’ll be surprised and this one will compare to past baseball movies that gave a little tug to the emotions, like Field of Dreams and The Natural, and even Moneyball.

Here is the trailer for the film: