[.ca] The Good Shepherd (Full Screen)

\o2.5\c--Cheese-la-Weez What Happen Here?:
As curious as I was about this movie it had me dazed. The 'Good Shepherd' always struck me symbol for Christianity. Shepherds look after their flocks so the sheep can be killed and eaten. What's good about that? Fortunately, sheep don't have the intelligence to be paranoid. With Bourne Identity movies under his belt, Matt Damon has a good pedigree to play spy movies. Is this one a killer or dead on arrival? With a budget of $85m, we've got Oscar-winning actors, writers, cinematographers, and more stars than flocks by night ever get to see. Pet project of actor-turning-director, Robert De Niro, "The Good Shepherd" tells a story of the CIA from its early days, weighing in at just under three hours. The scene before the opening credits is the one which the whole movie revolves around once that's miss you won't get it. This is a shame, because it's a tantalisingly mysterious and artistically shot. This movie is told from Damon's point of view, its scope is epic, and covering the years from 1939 before the CIA was even a speck in President Truman's eye, to 1961 and the Bay of Pigs. We see the founding years, the London Blitz, post-war reconstruction in Berlin, and increasingly intricate machinations as the Cold War gathers pace. Angelina Jolie doesn't feature in much of the movie, but when she does, she' get into character very well. It's enough to make you wish she would put down her excellent humanitarian work long enough to take on more of the challenging parts for which is so eminently capable. Robert de Niro (got to love him), in the director's chair, is sadly the weakest link. Although he handles it professionally, almost magisterially, he lacks the experience to slowly build momentum, convey gradual moral decay, or make this the Godfather standard-bearer of CIA films. He's done a fine job - just bitten off a bit more than he can chew. What he deserves credit for is attempting a classic depiction of one of the world's most important institutions and pulling it off with considerable dignity; if not quite the artistic flourish that he would have aspired to, given that his mentors are people like Francis Ford Coppola (who is the executive producer). With sufficient dedication, it is easy to imagine De Niro pulling off an Oscar for direction in a future film: his grasp is very broad, and all it needs is a little tweaking.

SMART:
This movie is smart, interesting, and at times thrilling. All actor give good performances and Robert DeNiro is and ecxelent director. This should have gotten a best picture nomination the the Oscars.

butchered truth:
How truthful is this film... no one will ever know. How can anyone know anything about a company (CIA) that (supposedly) deals with lies... again, no one will ever know. Important issues are presented here: imperialism, espionage, loyalty, betrayal... This film was certainly worth watching, for Matt Damon's performance (as Edward Wilson) especially. He and *he alone* carries the film on his shoulders. A surprise: De Niro shows a better talent as a director than an actor. Angelina Jolie, as Wilson's wife, overacts way too much and her character is not credible because not well developed. Tammy Blanchard (who plays Laura) definitely has more talent than Jolie. The melodramatic dialogue didn't help the movie, however well directed it may have been. Recommendation to watch _The Good Shepherd_: Pay attention to the dates, as it is rather easy to get lost in the second act, where Russian spies and the Bay of Pigs invasion are mentioned. Better editing and script-writing would have made the film shorter (close to 3 hours!), as many of those details were not needed to understand what was going on. Certainly worth watching, but be prepared to endure three hours of film.

The Good Shepherd is indeed good -- but far from great:
Ambitious, star-studded, and lengthy, The Good Shepherd purports to give us a sense of how the CIA operated during the Cold War and how it affected those who devoted themselves to the cause. So it is that, via a series of flashbacks, we meet an intelligent young Yale student named Edward Wilson (Matt Damon), watch as he is recruited into the service of American intelligence, joins the O.S.S. during WWII, helps found the nascent CIA in the 1950s, and goes about doing the thankless, extremely difficult job of keeping America safe through foreign crises, particularly those involving Castro's Cuba in the 1960s. It's not an expose on the CIA -- which it actually deals with quite even-handedly, especially in today's day and age -- as it principally focuses on the personal story of this one individual and what might be called his dehumanization at the hands of his sometimes sinister career. Unfortunately, there is a major (but not fatal) flaw at the very heart of the film. Obviously, a man in Edward Wilson's position must be a cold and calculating man, but his characterization ventures far beyond stoic into the realms of the robotic. Even the personal glimpses intended to get us past the emotional wall that defines him lack insight and feeling. We see through his eyes, but we never really get a sense of his inward self. I also had a problem seeing Wilson as the experienced, upper level CIA man he became because no effort seemed to go in to making Matt Damon appear any older as his character aged; he looks the same in the 1960s as he did in 1939. Come on, put a few grey hairs in there or something; it takes more than a fedora to make me believe he's a quarter of a century older. Damon just never looks the part of an older Edward Wilson, and that really impacted -- and not in a good way -- my perspective of the entire movie. Additionally, even though this is not a factual account of CIA history, the film's attempt to deflect any blame from John F. Kennedy for refusing to grant air support to the otherwise sitting ducks storming the beaches at the Bay of Pigs really rubbed me the wrong way. I think it helps to have some knowledge of the historical and political background of events touched upon in this movie, especially the dark stain that is the Bay of Pigs fiasco. That is really the lynchpin of the film's story, as one of the reasons for the failure slowly causes Wilson's personal and private lives to collide and truly test his mettle -- with more than a little help from the helping hands of a formidable KGB intelligence officer. What should be an excruciatingly painful decision dredges up virtually no emotion in the man, however -- although the same can't be said of Wilson's sometimes boisterous wife (Angelina Jolie). The ending doesn't pack much of a punch either, further pointing out the film's quite obvious deficiencies in character development. Personally, I found the movie pretty interesting throughout, but that was largely because of my interest in intelligence operations and Cold War history. If you could care less about those subjects, you probably won't enjoy the movie at all because it simply fails to forge any kind of emotional bond between you and the characters.

Matt Damon Carries the Film:
Some reviewers have commented that most of the characters were methodical and boring but in the world of spies I believe that these are the characters that survive.Matt Damon carries this movie and he is in almost every scene. He is cold and calculating and a perfectionist but not a cruel man.His hobby is building ships in a bottle .His methodical and observant personality saves him from being compromised by the Russians who value him greatly. De niro has succeded in making a low key movie very interesting but he fails at organizing the scenes in a logical order .The film jumps forward and backwards in time I had to watch the movie twice before I fully understood what was happening. Despite its flaws and its confusing moments it is a long but never dull film.