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The Good Shepherd (Widescreen Edition)
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List Price: $14.98
Special Price: $14.98
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Universal Studios
Starring: Alec Baldwin, Matt Damon, Robert De Niro, Keir Dullea, Michael Gambon
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Aspect Ratio: 2.40:1
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Binding: DVD
Brand: UNIVERSAL STUDIOS HOME ENTERTAIN.
EAN: 0025192867125
Format: AC-3
Label: Universal Studios
Manufacturer: Universal Studios
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: Universal Studios
Region Code: 1
Release Date: 2007-04-03
Running Time: 168
Studio: Universal Studios
Theatrical Release Date: 2006-12-22
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Editorial Reviews:
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Matt Damon Angelina Jolie and Robert De Niro star in this powerful thriller about the birth of the CIA. Edward Wilson (Damon) believes in America and will sacrifice everything he loves to protect it. But as one of the covert founders of the CIA Edward s youthful idealism is slowly eroded by his growing suspicion of the people around him. Everybody has secrets...but will Edward s destroy him? With an all-star cast including Alec Baldwin Billy Crudup William Hurt Timothy Hutton and John Turturro it s the gripping story David Ansen of Newsweek hails as "spellbinding."System Requirements:Runtime: 168 mins Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: MYSTERY/SUSPENSE Rating: R UPC: 025192867125 Manufacturer No: 61028671
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: For Sophisticated Tastes
Comment: This film will find a passionate audience among those looking for an intellectual, adult and intense experience.
Customer Rating:
Summary: I spy with my little eye - something beginning with `d' - for dull.
Comment: De Niro makes a surprising move here into spy territory - not modern Bourne type stuff (despite the presence of Matt Damon) but more like an American John Le Carre type story, in its understated events and emphasis on character. It's a noble endeavor, at times wonderfully shot - however, it is ultimately too flawed to succeed as entertainment.
The story revolves around the creation of the CIA, seen through the eyes of Edward Wilson (a composite of several real life characters). It plays as a character driven story showing what can make a man choose a life of permanent paranoia and secrecy, and the impact that has on his life. In this way the atmosphere around the time of the new Agency's genesis is portrayed rather than a strict blow by blow account of how it came to be. A superb and committed cast have been gathered, (including a blink and you'll miss it cameo from Joe Pesci), and there is a clear feeling of the proceedings oozing talent, from art direction and photography, through to actors and music.
However, there is something about the pacing that is not quite right - at 160 minutes, we should have some significant moments of drama to drive our interest on, but somehow we are left with a spy story of non-people and non-events... a spy movie without suspense. There's an interesting enough story arc for our main character, and the audience is asked to be intelligent enough to fill in some gaps - but the padding has turned what could have been an atmospheric and informative movie into something bloated and dull. This is no epic or definitive account.
Regular readers of mine will know I am no huge fan of rapid fire MTV style editing a la `Armageddon' and its ilk - but a movie still has to have some drive and entertainment value. That's missing here, despite the core having some very interesting things to say about the disease of loneliness and what it does to a man. Sad to say, no endorsement from me on this one, even though it has moments that really make me want to like it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Shepherd
Comment: Interesting, if disquieting, view of the kind of organization apparently necessary to a nation to stay afloat in today's world: Situation ethics; disposable loyalties; diverse and highly sophisticated technological tools; unswerving but troubling idealisms; personal costs to participants in anguish and guilt; incremental compromises of original principles; patriotic ruthlessness.... Our eventual realization that both our friends and our enemies have similar organizations, for similar reasons, creates in us, the viewers, a more-in-sadness-than-in-anger awareness that parallel organizations have probably always existed and, of necessity, probably always will. The film's dialogue is often muffled, oblique, and hard to understand---in keeping with its atmosphere of secrecy---but the viewer thereby tends to lose the detail thread of what's going on at the moment. A film to watch several times, but not one where the viewer ends up envying the participants' lives.
Customer Rating:
Summary: "I let a stranger into our house."
Comment: An excellent film, The Good Shepherd, brings to the screen the events and people that brought about the establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency.
The film follows the life and career of Edward Wilson as he plays his role in laying the foundation for one of the best intelligence agencies ever to be set up.
Matt Damon, Robert De Niro, Alec Baldwin, Angelina Jolie, Michael Gambon, and the rest of this AMAZING cast, have truly outdone themselves with their performances, which are outstanding to say the least! All the actors, without exceptions, give it their 100% and it really shows!
The acting, the setting, the plot, the dialogues, and the music are all wonderful and along with the mystery that accompanies this film will keep you on your toes throughout the entire 168 minutes.
In short, The Good Shepherd is a movie definitely worth watching as it will surely provide for an evening's entertainment.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Main character lacks authority
Comment: Don't even try to detect whether this movie is about the actual work of the spy or his unhappy family life. Something about the both. At the end of this thinly fictionalized account, one might even get persuaded that the work at the CIA is only for dweebs.
The beginning somehow resembles "The firm", where assiduous youngster ingrows into the closed society. But that's where the similarity ends. Edward Wilson (Damon) isn't Mitch McDeere. Despite his long hours spent in a library, nonchalance about women and inscrutable expression, Wilson simply can't be a raising star of the CIA, even if these vestiges have to testify that he has developed supreme analytical skills.
In fact, during the whole movie one can't stop asking, where does his authority come from? Even in those couple of episodes, when he instructs to execute the operations with a muffled voice from his home bureau, he appears to be a totally innocent bystander in a chaotic chain of events. Despite a group of famous actors, the main character of the film left me confused.
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