(National Review/The Corner) Clint is a brilliant actor,
and a superb director of other actors (and I don’t just mean a
quarter-century ago: In the last five years, he’s made eight films).
He’s also, as Mr Gavin observed, a terrific jazz improviser at the piano
— and, in film and music documentaries, an extremely articulate
interviewee. So I wouldn’t assume that the general tenor of his
performance wasn’t exactly as he intended. The hair was a clue: No
Hollywood icon goes out on stage like that unless he means to.
The intended recipient was not Mitt Romney, the convention
delegates, or even Republican voters, but rather wavering independents.
Clint was there to tell them it’s OK to find Obama, his ugly campaign
operation, and his increasingly shrill band of die-hard defenders
ridiculous. It’s OK to laugh at them.
I’m not sure he could have pulled that off if he’d delivered a slick
telepromptered pitch. As Mr. Hayward suggests, the hard lines packed
more of a punch for being delivered in the midst of a Bob Newhart
empty-chair shtick from the Dean Martin show circa 1968. Indeed, they
were some of the hardest lines of the convention and may well prove the
take-home (“We own this country . . . Politicians are employees of ours .
. . And when somebody does not do the job, we’ve got to let them go”),
but they seemed more effective for appearing to emerge extemporaneously
from the general shambles.
The curse of political operatives is that they make everything the
same. A guy smoothly reading platitudinous codswallop while rotating his
head from the left-hand teleprompter to the right-hand teleprompter
like clockwork as if he’s at Centre Court watching the world’s slowest
Wimbledon rally is a very reductive idea of “professionalism.” Even
politicians you’re well disposed to come across as slick bores in that
format. Which is by way of saying Clint is too sharp and too crafty not
to have known what he was doing...
Hollywood may be bashing Clint
Eastwood's performance at the GOP convention, but Rush Limbaugh said
Friday the reason is that he touched a nerve with leftist celebrities —
and with the president himself.
Pointing to the photo the Obama
camp tweeted after midnight showing the back of the president's head
above the office chair in the Oval Office, Mr. Limbaugh said that proves
the White House was worried. And he wondered whether it was Mr. Obama
himself.
"It must have gotten to him because he tweeted at 12:30," Mr. Limbaugh said Friday on his radio program.
He
also said the reason Hollywood types have panned the speech is because
they couldn't find anything to shoot at in Mitt Romney's acceptance
address, so they fired at whatever target they could find.
In his
appearance just before Mr. Romney's formal acceptance speech Thursday
night in Tampa, Mr. Eastwood held a mock conversation with the
president, represented by an empty chair.
Link:
Fires can't burn in the oxygen-free vacuum of space, but guns can shoot. Modern ammunition contains its own oxidizer, a chemical that will trigger the explosion of gunpowder, and thus the firing of a bullet, wherever you are in the universe. No atmospheric oxygen required.
The only difference between pulling the trigger on Earth and in space is the shape of the resulting smoke trail. In space, "it would be an expanding sphere of smoke from the tip of the barrel," said Peter Schultz an astronomer at Brown University who researches impact craters.
The possibility of gunfire in space allows for all kinds of absurd scenarios.
Imagine you're floating freely in the vacuum between galaxies — just you, your gun and a single bullet. You have two options. You either can spend all of eternity trying to figure out how you got there, or you can shoot the damn cosmos.
If you do the latter, Newton's third law dictates that the force exerted on the bullet will impart an equal and opposite force on the gun, and, because you're holding the gun, you. With very few intergalactic atoms against which to brace yourself, you'll start moving backward (not that you’d have any way of knowing). If the bullet leaves the gun barrel at 1,000 meters per second, you — because you're much more massive than it is — will head the other way at only a few centimeters per second.
Once shot, the bullet will keep going, quite literally, forever. "The bullet will never stop, because the universe is expanding faster than the bullet can catch up with any serious amount of mass" to slow it down, said Matija Cuk, an astronomer with joint appointments at Harvard University and the SETI Institute. (If the universe weren't expanding, then the one or two atoms per cubic centimeter encountered by the bullet in the near-vacuum of space would bring it to a standstill after 10 million light-years.)
Getting down to details, the universe expands at a rate of 73 kilometers per second per megaparsec (about 3 million light-years, or the average distance between galaxies). By Cuk's calculations, this means matter that is 40,000 to 50,000 light-years away from the bullet would move away from it at about the same speed at which it is travelling, and would thus be forever out of reach. In the entire future of the universe, the bullet will catch up only to atoms that are less than 40,000 or so light-years from the chamber of your gun.
Guns do actually get carried to space, though not quite to the void between galaxies. For decades, the standard survival pack for Russian cosmonauts has included a gun. Until recently, it wasn't just any gun, but "a deluxe all-in-one weapon with three barrels and a folding stock that doubles as a shovel and contains a swing-out machete," according to space historian James Oberg...
London (ANI): Legendary actor Clint Eastwood has revealed that he has no regrets about turning down the role of James Bond, as he believes the 007 agent should be played by a British actor.
Eastwood, 79, who had been approached by Bond bosses after Sean Connery quit the franchise, insists that he made the right decision, as he did not want the surperspy to be portrayed by an American.
“I thought James Bond should be British. I am of British descent but by that same token, I thought that it should be more of the culture there and also, it was not my thing,” the Daily Express quoted him as saying.
Bond has been played by British stars like Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton and Daniel Craig, with the only exceptions being Australian George Lazenby and Irish actor Pierce Brosnan.
By Geoff Boucher, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer June 1, 2008
ON a recent afternoon at the Warner Bros. lot, Clint Eastwood took a break from a long day in the editing bay and strolled over to a hushed screening room. There, his armed-and-dangerous past was waiting for him, and the filmmaker winced when he looked it in the eye.
"Who's that young fella?" he asked, a flicker of a smile crossing his famously craggy face. Up on the screen was Eastwood, circa 1971, staring down the barrel of a huge gun with an expression of cruel calmness. The role was, of course, Harry Callahan, the San Francisco cop with good aim and bad attitude, who opened fire in "Dirty Harry," a movie that ushered in the modern American cinema of vengeance. He kept reloading for four sequels over 17 years, amassing a body count that began in the Nixon era and lasted into the twilight of the Reagan years.
Eastwood, who turned 78 on Saturday, has become an American filmmaker of the highest order -- he first rode to fame as a rangy, amoral redux of John Wayne but, somehow, came back from the desert as a latter-day John Ford. With that career trajectory, it wouldn't be surprising if Eastwood turned his back on Callahan, whose darkly whispered one-liners (". . . You've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya, punk?" "Go ahead, make my day") were long ago drained of any real danger by stand-up comics, politicians and bumper stickers. It's easy to imagine Eastwood the auteur treating the character like a bad 1970s fashion choice.
Instead, Eastwood is reconnecting with the surly old gun nut. Warner Home Video on Tuesday will release a lavish new boxed set of all five "Dirty Harry" movies (the $75 DVD set includes 1973's "Magnum Force," 1976's "The Enforcer," 1983's "Sudden Impact" and 1988's "The Dead Pool") that comes with a faux police badge tucked inside an eel-skin pouch. There's also a letter to fans penned by Eastwood, who has been busy lately putting finishing touches on his latest directorial project, “Changeling,” and presenting it at the Cannes Film Festival (it hits U.S. theaters in November).
Sitting in the screening room at Warners, Eastwood explained that the role of Callahan was "a real turning point" for him -- and American popular culture. There's also a sentimental aura around the first film: It was directed by the late Don Siegel, Eastwood's mentor and friend, and brought the actor back to his hometown of San Francisco. He also knows that, for good or bad, in the minds of movie fans he will forever carry Callahan's .44 Magnum.
"People are disappointed when they walk up to me and ask to see the gun and I tell them that, well, I don't really carry guns," he said with a chuckle. Eastwood was wearing sneakers and the relaxed posture of someone with complete confidence -- he might scowl on-screen, but in person he is more like the serene character he played in "The Bridges of Madison County."
"All the movies you make, all these roles you take, and there are certain ones that people really hold on to. Harry is the one I hear about the most from the people on the street."
The actor already was a screen tough guy thanks to the spaghetti westerns he made with Sergio Leone and his role as a maverick cop in Siegel's "Coogan's Bluff." But something encoded in "Dirty Harry" set it apart and painted a target on it.
Andy Robinson, who played the Scorpio killer in "Dirty Harry," said the movie cut through because of its grim hero and bundled appeal. "It was police thriller, a cowboy western and a horror film, it was all of them yoked together," Robinson said. "And because of the times it was released in, it became the film that people argued about. Is it fascist? Is it ripe with irony? After that movie I was turned away at auditions for quite a while. A lot of people in Hollywood were angry."
Although Pauline Kael of the New Yorker praised the film's styling as "trim, brutal and exciting," she also called it "a remarkably single-minded attack on liberal values, with each prejudicial detail in place -- a kind of hard-hat 'The Fountainhead.' " Critic Roger Ebert wrote, "The movie's moral position is fascist. No doubt about it."
The reception was more enthusiastic on Main Street. The Warner Bros. franchise would gross $228 million in U.S. theatrical release -- big box office for the era -- and become a staple on TV and at video stores. "Clint should have been typecast forever," Robinson said. "But he is bigger than Dirty Harry, which is saying a lot."
Still, young men (and, now, older men) approach Eastwood and recite whole monologues from the movies or, even stranger, they grin and ask the graying actor to call them obscene names and threaten them. "In the early days, I would tell these young fellas, 'That's just a movie, pal.' After a while, I just gave it to them. It made everybody happy. Sometimes it even made me happy. Sometimes I even meant it. . . ."
The pendulum's swing
HOLLYWOOD was in a wild churn in the late 1960s. In "Easy Rider" and “Bonnie and Clyde,” the antiheroes were young, reckless and ready to break the laws of a hypocritical nation. The success of those films opened the door to a scruffy independent spirit that, politically, veered left. To many observers, "Dirty Harry" felt like a rebuttal. (It could have been worse -- "Dead Right" was an early title by screenwriters Harry Julian Fink, R.M. Fink and Dean Riesner.)
Siegel had been working in Hollywood since the 1930s (he put together the montage that opened "Casablanca") and by the 1960s had found a flair for tough-guy cinema with Lee Marvin in "The Killers," Steve McQueen in "Hell Is for Heroes" and Eastwood in "Coogan's Bluff." Siegel chose to open "Dirty Harry" with a reverential shot of a marble memorial listing all the San Francisco police officers who had been killed in the line of duty. No charming outlaws were being celebrated in this film.
"At the time in the press, there was a lot of attention to the rights of the accused, and that's not bad or wrong, but nobody thought too much about the rights of the public or the rights of the victim, that's not what the attention was on," Eastwood said. "All of a sudden here was a picture about the rights of all the victims, and I think it really resonated with people who were frustrated."
Eastwood has been a registered Republican since the 1950s but describes himself as a libertarian. He was appointed to an arts council by President Richard Nixon in the 1970s, elected mayor of Carmel in the 1980s and was appointed to the California parks commission (and then fired from it) by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. None of this, he says, has anything to do with Callahan.
"There was a lot made about the politics of the film, and what my politics were -- imagined and real. A lot of people thought I was a renegade. Everyone drew these things into it. Maybe they were there. Maybe they were reading stuff into it that wasn't there. It's a role. That's the fun of being an actor, being something you weren't."
People ask him to autograph rifles, but Eastwood is no Charlton Heston. A vegan, he was distressed to hear Hillary Rodham Clinton boast recently about bagging a bird. "I was thinking: 'The poor duck, what the hell did she do that for?' I don't go for hunting. I just don't like killing creatures. Unless they're trying to kill me. Then that would be fine."
Eastwood said that he has a deep respect for due process and Miranda rights. But he added that there's a benefit to feeding the fantasies of frustrated cops. "It's gotten me out of a lot of speeding tickets through the years."
A precedent set
INSPECTOR Harry Callahan's nickname isn't a reference to corruption -- it's a nod to Callahan's willingness to get his hands dirty, be it an illegal search or a bit of torture in times of duress. None of this is jolting now, not after "The Shield" and "NYPD Blue," "Training Day" and "L.A. Confidential" and video games in which Callahan, with his tie and jacket, would be the most judicious cop on the screen.
But it was "Dirty Harry" that propelled the American urban vengeance film as a genre. The "Death Wish" franchise followed, and Eastwood was offered the lead as a gentle architect pushed to violence by hate and grief. He turned it down -- his screen persona was too defined as a scarred warrior -- and suggested the professorial Gregory Peck. The part went instead to the glowering Charles Bronson. "Sometimes," Eastwood said, "this business isn't about doing the thing that makes sense."
The genre is still doing well. There's a steady parade of straight-to-DVD productions that mimic the blood splatter of "Dirty Harry," but there's more ambitious fare as well. Most recently, there was Neil Jordan's "The Brave One," with Jodie Foster, of all people, confronting street punks with righteous sneers and gun-muzzle flare. Nicolas Cage is set to star next year in a Werner Herzog remake of "Bad Lieutenant," a Dirty Harry cop taken to his most filthy extremes.
A lot of people imitate Eastwood's Dirty Harry -- his personal favorite is Jim Carrey, who also happened to have one of his early movie roles in "The Dead Pool" -- but hearing the man himself recite the "Feel lucky?" speech is quite thrilling. He remembers every word, even though he said the last time he watched the film was a decade ago on laser disc.
Even better is listening to Eastwood run through a mock pitch of "Dirty Harry VI": "Harry is retired. He's standing in a stream, fly-fishing. He gets tired of using the pole -- and BA-BOOM! Or Harry is retired and he chases bad guys with his walker? Maybe he owns a tavern. These guys come in and they won't pay their tab, so Harry reaches below the bar. Hey, guys, the next shot's on me . . ."
Still, Rambo, Rocky and Indiana Jones have all returned. "Yeah, people ask me all the time. I guess if there was a truly great script or something, but it's hard enough to find good scripts any time, let alone one you have to bend to make it fit some franchise. The movies that interest me now take me to new places."
