Juror #2
A film that has been screwed over by its own distributor. It deserves so much praise.
Hello!
I hope your December has been off to a strong start. I’m going through the grind of final exams and trying to catch up with all the 2024 movies I have missed. If you guessed that I’m more stressed about the latter, then you would be correct.
I’m going to be releasing my top 5 worst films of the year on Dec. 30, and my top 10 films of the year on Dec. 31. I won’t be able to watch everything I want to, but I want to give my dear readers a beautiful list to look at. Don’t say I don’t do anything for you guys in this time of giving.
Anyway, here are my thoughts on a film that I truly was astounded by. Not the fact that it was beautifully made by a nonagenarian actor-director but how its own distributor, Warner Bros. Pictures, barely tried to put this bad boy in theaters. I’ll explain it down below.
We’re going to court. Here are some words on Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2.
Juror #2
Director: Clint Eastwood
A-
To start right off, I think it’s an absolute crime that Warner Bros. thought Juror #2 would be good streaming fodder. The fact that this didn’t get a wider release is such a shame. I get it may sound corny to some that there are movies that should be experienced in a theater, but Clint Eastwood’s latest work deserves this treatment. A legend of his stature and complexity should at least have that be given to him. It’s a sad state of affairs to think that Eastwood can’t even get a guaranteed theatrical release.
Musings on the entertainment industry aside, the 94-year old came out with an absolute heater. Juror #2 serves not just as a legal drama but a morality tale on the nature of our justice system. Eastwood, a known libertarian and a firm believer in kids getting off his damn lawn, doesn’t use the film to make a “political statement” in the way we understand that term. Rather, he looks to question what it means to be right and wrong, and how we determine that through the court of law that we have.
You can feel the forces at play as Justin realizes he is responsible for the death that is being deliberated in the murder trial he is a juror on. Juror #2 has moments that feel straight out of Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men. Only this time, Eastwood and screenwriter Jonathan Abrams create scenes where you can sense the ideas of “good” and “bad” combating each other. The film takes on a classical structure in both narrative and cinematography, but features a true postmodern view of how we perceive our own morals.
It’s unbelievable that a man like Eastwood is still making incredibly entertaining works midway through his ninth decade of being alive on this earth. But what I find more astonishing is that a man like Eastwood, who so easily could just be a grumpy old man stuck in his ways, remains fascinated with the quandaries and quagmires of our world today. I just hope if I live that long, I can still maintain that much interest in the problems society faces.
Summary: A juror, Justin (Nicholas Hoult), for a high-profile murder trial finds himself struggling with a serious moral dilemma that could influence the verdict and potentially convict or free the accused killer.
My Other Writings
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D
Red One Deserves Coal in Its Stocking This Christmas
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Do not watch this rotten eggnog of a movie this Christmas.
Conclave
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Outlet: The Daily Orange
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Bird
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B+
Andrea Arnold’s ‘Bird’ parses through life as it is in British slums
Outlet: The Daily Orange
Summary: Bailey (Nykiya Adams) lives with her single father, Bug (Barry Keoghan), in a squat in northern Kent. Bug doesn't have much time to devote to his children and Bailey, who is approaching puberty, seeks attention and adventure elsewhere before meeting the titular Bird (Franz Rogowski).