Big Iron

Big Mandalorian Iron
Kirt Connor
As Foxifier says - Awesome Work

In case you aren't familiar with the original, here it is.


BIG IRON MARTY ROBBINS
Ian Anderson
Don't think the tune was ever used in any of Clint's movies, but the essence of the story certainly fits.

Update June 2022 replaced the video at the top. Somehow the wrong video got there. I don't know how it happened. It's very weird. Anyway, the wrong video was this one, which is another parody of another old Marty Robbins tune.

El Mando
Kirt Connor

Cry Macho

CRY MACHO – Official Trailer
Warner Bros. Pictures

Clint's getting old. I only watched this movie out of respect. It's slow to the point of tedium. The writing is gastly and the horse scenes were feeble. There are a couple of villains who pop up a couple of times, but they are just annoying, as is the kid. The one bright spot is Marta, the widow who runs the cantina in some tiny little village.

Sisters of War

Sisters of War | Telemovie | 8.35pm Sunday 14th November, ABC1
Sisters of War is a right horror story. It follows a small group of Australian women trapped by the Japanese Army on the island of Rabaul (near New Guinea) during WW2. Just in case you had any doubt's about how awful war can be, this movie shows it to you in excruciating detail. And it's not just the physical difficulties (like torture), but the mental strain of knowing horrible things are happening and there is nothing you can do about it. And then there's not knowing what is going to happen, or if the information you are given is correct or meant to deceive you. No wonder people bitch about war. Of course you could eliminate all this mental anguish by getting yourself killed, but there is no guarantee that your death would be quick or painless. So unless you have got a sure way out, you don't even want to consider it. However, if you decide to stick it out, and you survive (always a dubious proposition) without too much brain damage, you should be well equipped to deal with the kind of everyday bullshit makes the evening news cycle, i.e. turn it off.

Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino

Picture Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino taking his WW2 battle rifle and telling those kids to get off of his lawn.

P.S. We have a picture of the Gran Torino because when I first wrote about this movie eleven years ago I couldn't find a decent picture of the car, and even now this is the only one of the movie car I could find.

P.P.S. According to my post about the New Guinea rescue operation, we never attacked Rabaul. I'm going to reconcile that with this story by saying even a little scouting mission could easily result in significant damage. I mean, here we are sending our headstrong boys, mounted on fire breathing dragons, to go take a look at the enemy, and hey, if you happen to see any 'targets of opportunity', give 'em a lickin'. Now a clot of white clothed nurses might not be the most likely looking target, but coming in at 300 knots and 300 feet of altitude, it might be a little difficult to positively identify an enemy target.

What a Good Idea

Requiescat in Peonies

I tend to come up with big ideas that require such a large commitment of resources that I have no hope of ever implementing them, which saves me a lot of work. I come up with the idea, and if I am feeling energetic, I will write it down and dump it on the world and then I am done with it. If somebody out there happens across it, and they like it, and then also happen to have the requisite resources to implement it, well, cowabunga, go for it dude, or dudette. As Clint Eastwood said, a man has to know his limitations, and I think I have pretty good understanding of mine.

P.S. Requiescat is "a wish or prayer for the repose of a dead person". I mention this because a) I didn't know, and b) last night I used the word retinue which is "a group of advisers, assistants, or others accompanying an important person". Posse in modern parlance. This caused some consternation because it evidently is not as well known as I thought.

The Mule

THE MULE - Official Trailer
Clint Eastwood is getting old. There's not much to the story. Guy grows flowers, alienates his family, goes broke, gets a gig hauling drugs for the cartel, makes some money, redeems himself a bit. The best part was just watching Clint. I've been watching him forever and now he is getting old. He is really starting to look like my father before he died. On HBO.

Very Punny

Via Dad's Deadpool Blog

P.S. This prompted me to see how many Clint related posts I had made. Turns out there are a bunch, so I added the 'Clint Eastwood' label.

In a Valley of Violence

In a Valley of Violence Movie CLIP - Get Away From My Dog (2016) - Ethan Hawke Movie
Another movie about a mining town that has gone bust. Not too great but not too bad. Quite the variety of characters, quickly sketched. Our hero is likely a deserter from the Indian wars. The local villain is an idiot. John Travolta is the very perceptive sheriff.

The move opens with a scene, and then we get the title and a bunch of credits with simple images in orange and black. The credits drag on for far too long. Very annoying. Put the title up at the beginning and be done with it.

Our hero eventually is forced, naturally, into cleaning out this nest of vipers, but every time he has one of them in his clutches, he waffles. If you subscribe to the Clint Eastwood school of revenge, you don't wait, when it's time to shoot, you shoot, don't talk. But maybe if your head is a little confused you might hesitate. Fortunately, someone else's 16 year old abandoned wife (!?!) knows when to shoot.

Heroes

Magnum Force (10/10) Movie CLIP - A Man's Got to Know His Limitations (1973) HD
This phrase came up at lunch today, which got me to wondering who has replaced Clint as our All American tough guy? There are Arnold (age 69) and Bruce (61), but they're nearly as old as Clint (86), and then there's Nicolas Cage (52), but he has made too many movies to be categorized as a tough guy. Now there's Vin Diesel (49), Jason Statham (49) and Clive Owen (52), but Jason and Clive are Brits. Vin? I dunno. I liked the Riddick movies and Babylon A.D., but the Fast & Furious movies were just chickenshit. Is he ever gonna be in a movie as great as any of Clint's? I suspect not, but not because he isn't as good as Clint, but because society has moved the goalposts that are used to judge a movie. Fast & Furious sells tickets ($3.9 billion worth), so that's what Hollywood makes.

Ira Hayes

Johnny Cash...The Ballad of Ira Hayes
Johnny Cash recorded this song in 1964, long before Clint Eastwood made his movies about Iwo Jima. I don't remember it, but then music, while endorsed as a cultural good by my parents, was not a big part of our lives.
    It's very weird how artists can make a statement in an extremely popular show, but it gets over-ridden, ignored, shouted down and trampled by the chatter boxes that provide much of our political discourse.

Prompted by a story on Timeline. Wikipedia article about Ira.

Blackphone

Stu is talking about how happy German Chancellor - Dr. Angela Merkel is with the USA and the NSA's behavior. John (UK) leaves a comment with a link to Blackphone. Ooooo! Cool! A black phone! It will go great with my Black AMEX Card and my black Ninja Assassin outfit! I gotta get one! So I pull up the link and this is what I see.

Can you read that? I can't. Well, I suppose I could if I worked at it. I don't know if it's my antique display device or their poor font choice or some combination thereof, but it's really bad. It's even worse than Google's anti-machine font. 
    I copied and pasted it here so you and I can read it.

The Vision

Giving power back to the user

Blackphone is the world's first smartphone which prioritizes the user's privacy and control, without any hooks to carriers or vendors. It comes preinstalled with all the tools you need to move throughout the world, conduct business, and stay in touch, while shielding you from prying eyes.
It's the trustworthy precaution any connected worker should take, whether you're talking to your family or exchanging notes on your latest merger & acquisition.

I will venture no opinion on whether their phone will work as advertised or not, but I will say that if you don't want the feds listening to your conversations, the simplest solution is to not make any phone calls. 

P.S. the .ch extension on Blackphone's URL tells me they are in Switzerland, or at least they want us to think they have some connection with Switzerland, like maybe they like chocolate, or cows, or old Clint Eastwood movies.

Quote of the Day

There is a simple reason for all the effort that goes into portraying World War II as "not such a bad thing after all." The state ultimately cements its hold over society by promising to repel the barbarians who always seem to be about to storm the gates of civilization. And if we believe this, we will eagerly surrender liberty and treasure to the state's officers in return for safety. And in case we wonder if the barbarians really are plotting to storm the gates, the state can point to recent episodes when indeed they did, and when the state protected us from them. Thus, the function of the "World War II as the last good war" line is to keep the people from asking uncomfortable questions about the legitimacy of Leviathan. - from The Consequences of World War II by Sheldon Richman, November 1991

I was thinking about money and how we talk about billionaires now the way I imagine people talked about millionaires back in the 1920's. Shoot, even when I was kid in the 50's and 60's, a million dollars was still an impressive amount of money. Now it just means well off.

Anyway, I got to wondering about how much WWII cost all told. I mean there was that line about how you start talking about "a billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you are talking about real money". And then there was that scene in Clint Eastwood's movie about Iwo Jima where they are talking about selling war bonds and they need to raise so many billions of dollars or the war effort will collapse, and this is near the end of the war. How many billions had gone before? The same article quoted above says WWII cost the US $350 billion, and that was then. Add in inflation and you could call it $5 trillion in today's money.

Blitz with Jason Statham

Psycho Killer Blitz

On one hand there's nothing special about this movie. It has all the typical things that a movie about cops looking for a crazed serial killer have. On the other hand the detail was excellent. Jason is appropriately menacing, the snitch is really sleazy, and the killer is a real whack job, kind of reminds me of Scorpio from Dirty Harry.

The cops (or the writer) made a couple of errors. The first one is when the whack job is apprehended with a bag full of money that the newspaper had just paid to the snitch, which whack job took after he killed the snitch. Cops couldn't hold him (they never can, the first time), but they didn't snap to the bag of money. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. On the other hand, the movie makers went to a lot of trouble to show us the bag of money, before, during and after. Were they going to use it for a different plot twist, in case they changed their minds?

The other error was in searching whack jobs apartment. They turn the place upside down and find nothing. Minutes later whack job shows up and pulls his bag full of incriminating evidence out of some storage space. That's what happens when you put someone like Jason in charge of the search.

There were a bunch of really good characters here. Paddy Considine as the new, queer (can I say queer, or do I have to say gay?), head of the cop shop. Jason, reprising Clint Eastwood's view in Magnum Force, doesn't give a shit. Zawe Ashton as a cop who used to work in narcotics where she was a "cop playing a junkie", but now she is a "junkie playing a cop". Ned Dennehy as the really sleazy snitch. He's so good at being bad that you are afraid that you will get something on you just by watching him.

Naturally we have the scene where our hero has to be restrained from beating the tar out of whack job when the arrest him. It really pissed me off, I really wanted Jason to knock the stuffing out of him, but oh, no, we can't have that, have to follow the rules you know. But we get our satisfaction in the end when our two heroes, queer and macho, serve justice a shortcut. Just have to remember that you can't use these methods on every nitwit bumbler who crosses your path.

Are you feeling lucky, punk?

Well, are you? If you are, then go ahead and buy that brand new whiz-bang whoser-what-sit. We have gotten very good at making things, and making things that work reliably for a very long time. However, occasionally one of your whiz-bang whoser-what-sits will break, and when you try to fix it you will find that the repair bill will be more than a new one will cost.

This was brought home to me the last couple of days by a conversation with my neighbors, who have the first refrigerator they bought (some 20 years) ago in their garage and it is still running. However, the high fashion one in their kitchen is the third one they have bought because they don't last more than five years.

And by a conversation with my friend Jack, who replaced his mom's dishwasher because the five cent plastic motor shaft extension broke and you can't just buy that part, you have to buy the whole $300+ motor, which was more than a new dishwasher cost.

So, are you feeling lucky? If you are lucky, that new whiz-bang whoser-what-sit may work fine for the next zillion years. If not, you may be buying a new one every six weeks.



Prompted by a post from Dustbury.

Kelly's Heroes & The Tiger Tank

Watching Kelly's Heroes tonight (Clint Eastwood, Telly Savalas, Donald Sutherland, 1970) and they have a run in with a Tiger Tank. I remember the sequence well:

• the only way to defeat a Tiger was to shoot it directly in the rear end,
• our heros find themselves directly behind the Tiger,
• the Tiger is in a narrow street and cannot turn around,
• nor can it turn it's turret because it is blocked by a wall on one side and a tree on another.

In my memory, it was from a black and white episode of Combat, and it was a very dire situation. Funny how the memory plays tricks like that.

YouTube clip here.

Slowest Movies In The World

Claudia Cardinale & Henry Fonda

We watched Down By Law yesterday evening and Once Upon A Time In The West tonight. Boy, they were slow. The Sergio Leone (made famous by Clint Eastwood's spaghetti Westerns) Western, with all the great actors was two and a half hours long. Lots of long, slow-moving scenes punctuated with gunfire. And then we have Claudia Cardinale's bosom. That was a pleasant diversion. Henry Fonda (1905-1982) plays a bad guy.


Down By Law was shot in black and white and is some sort of art house film. It's got Tom Waits in it, for Pete sake. He and another guy get set up and end up in jail with Roberto Benigni of Life Is Beautiful fame. Time drags for them and for us. The only break is the "I scream for ice cream" scene. It is pretty good.

Eventually though Roberto figures a way out and the three of them escape. After days (weeks? months?) lost in the swamp they stumble upon a road, and eventually, a roadside cafe. Roberto goes inside to check it out and leaves the other two stumble bums outside. He's supposed to give them the all clear, but he doesn't. Eventually (again!) our two stumble bums go to find out what's happened to their Italian buddy. What's happened is that he has fallen in love with the lovely, single, Italian proprietoress of this fine institution, and forgotten all about them.

Pink Cadillac

My wife and I watched Pink Cadillac with Clint Eastwood & Bernadette Peters this evening. It's basically a mash-up of the Dukes of Hazard and Every Which Way But Loose. Not a particularly good movie, but entertaining.

Clint was 59 when he made this movie in 1989. He turned 80 last Monday, Memorial Day. Fifty-nine years old and still playing tough guys. That's pretty good. Seems like half the obituaries I read these days are for people who are younger than I am. I remember seeing Clint moving an automobile engine across his yard in the opening of one his movies. That was pretty impressive. Reminds me of the time I picked my Triumph motorcycle off the ground. Ug, me tough guy. Of course that was 35 years ago and I was working construction then.

Someone in the movie says something about a pink Cadillac being a man's car, but in my mind that just doesn't jibe. To me pink Cadillacs mean Mary Kay Cosmetics. There's the song Pink Cadillac by Bruce Springsteen, that I really like, but it's not his car, it belongs to his girl, and he's ridin' in the back.

While I'm looking for a decent video of the song, I came across this one. It doesn't go all the way to the end, but I think it's pretty funny.

Update December 2010: WARNING! DANGER WILL ROBINSON! This video has been blocked by SONY. Bah.

I found another video of a car driving game with the Pink Cadillac song. It isn't funny, but it is entertaining, in car chase kind of way. This version of the song is by someone other than Bruce, I don't know who. The video is by Vf5rules1. I am making a note of this because I have no record of who created the one that was blocked, and I don't expect YouTube to tell me. Not on their list of things to do, you know.

Update August 2015: Last video also vanished, so I rooted around and found this one. The sound is poor and weak, and the video isn't very entertaining, but we do have a virtual pink Cadillac driving around town. They manage not to run into anything for most of the video.


Pink Cadillac

Changeling

My wife & I watched "Changeling" a couple of weeks ago. Really creepy. More so because it was a true story. Stars Angeline Jolie. I didn't recognize her. The voluptuous vixen disappeared completely into her role. Directed by Clint Eastwood. As usual, the DVD included a couple of "special features". Usually these things are just garbage, but this time one of them was pretty good. They do a little background on how the movie came to be. Guy is throwing out the old archives at City Hall and comes across some stuff from the 1920's that is just unbelievable.

Babylon A.D. - Vin Diesel

My brain must have slipped a gear yesterday afternoon: I offered to go grocery shopping with my wife. Madness. As a reward for my suffering I rented a Sci-Fi video that I had noticed at the store the other day. Vin Diesel may not be the greatest actor, but he suits me: he knows when to keep his mouth shut. Kind of like Clint that way.

The movie is supposed to be set in the future, but it really doesn't look too much different from today: perpetual low intensity conflicts, gangs, random violence. When they get to the end of the movie they pull in some stuff that is way out there, but hey, we've already seen the basic story, so if they want to tag this stuff on to the end, that's fine.

There are a couple of things that were pretty well done. One was the high-speed train across Siberia. On the outside it is reminiscent of the French TGV and the armored Soviet trains from a James Bond movie. On the inside it is like any train in a third world country: cramped, dirty, farm animals, cooking, etc. One scene has the train crossing a bridge that has been built over what I imagine is a nuclear bomb crater. No explanation given. Just the way things are.

Another was the refugees scrambling to get aboard an old Soviet nuclear submarine that has just surfaced through the ice. There was a little more artistic license taken here. (I am pretty sure) there is only one manhole in the top of the conning tower, so it doesn't make much sense to drape a net over the side so lots of people can clamber up. You can still only get one at a time down the hatch. But who knows? Maybe people can go down quicker than they can climb up, so the net would actually work by keeping the inbound queue full.

There was a scene of Vin skinning, butchering, cooking and eating a rabbit. I thought that was a fine scene. They didn't go in for a lot of gore, but you got the idea. There was also a shot of a dead dog hanging from something. Once again, no explanation, just part of the scenery.

I won't say anything about the car and helicopter except that it was a clever play on words. I don't think there was a single car chase, though there was a clever shot of a tiny taxi crossing three lanes of busy traffic, but that was just normal taxi operation.

Then we had the snowmobiles zooming across the frozen wastes while trying to avoid destruction by automated drones. Funny thing about automated weapons. If you become a target within their design parameters, you're done for. But if you fall outside the design parameters, machines are just stupid and easy to avoid. Determining just where those limits are is the most dangerous part of the job. In this film, the hero performs some heroic stunts (naturally) of incredible timing and luck and manages to destroy the lethal drones. The stunts are kind of fun to watch, but they are basically unbelievable. If the machines were really that deadly, the hero would be dead. If the machines are stupid, he wouldn't have had any trouble with them and there would have been no need for heroic acrobatics. But, hey, it's a movie, what do you want?

The last thing we had was person specific missiles. We had these a few years ago in another movie starring Tom Selleck, and they were bullets, not missiles. But the same idea. It is programmed to seek out a specific individual. You can point it any which way and it will fly around till it locates the target and then home in on them. Back then it was a little fanciful. Now it is a little more believable.

There is also the big fist fight, and the big gun fight. The gun fight looked like what you might expect from a bunch of punks. Not very professional. But hey, lots of bullets and lots of bodies. I guess that's the effect they wanted, and that's what they got.

Michelle Yeoh acquitted herself admirably in the fight scenes. She was taking the bad guys out left, right and center.

The DVD had two versions of the movie, one on each side. One side was the theatrical release, the other had the unrated version. I Googled a bit to try and determine which one I should watch. I found some quibbling over details, the unrated version is longer, and one person who said the unrated version is better, so I went with the unrated version.

Clint Eastwood's "Gran Torino"

Thanks to my wife, we went to movies last night. Being a cheapsake and disliking crowds I tend to overlook new releases. They'll be available on DVD in six months and we can watch it for cheap. So we waffled for a bit, but she finally decided we should go, and I'm glad we did.

What a great film! Clint plays the curmudgeon to a T. Reminded us of my father. A lot. Not the swearing, or the racial epithets, but the whole attitude, the expressions on his face, the grunts and the growls. And boy is he (Clint) old, a lot like my father was. For dealing with some unpleasant issues, it was a surprisingly light hearted movie, with any number of howlingly funny bits. And then there's the fairy tale ending, well a sort of fairy tale. Great movie, but then I've always liked Clint.

In the film, Clint's character is a Polack, and as he bears some resemblence to my father, who was Polish, I wonder if maybe Clint is also Polish.

There was one thing that was notable for it's absence, and that was the predictable retort when someone tells Walt (Clint) that he should quit smoking. It happened a couple of times, and both times I expected Walt to reply, something to the effect, that he was so old that quitting now wouldn't make any difference. But he didn't say anything. I guess that goes with the curmudgeon aspect of his character. He had this exchange so many times there was no point in even acknowledging the comment.

Can you believe this is the best picture I could find of the car? I could only find one picture of the car from the movie, but this picture had Angeline Jolie standing in front of it! Waaaa? She wasn't even in the movie. Movie people are so stupid. I found one other picture of a green Gran Torino, and the background in this one was just trash. Found lots of pictures of the red and white one from "Starsky & Hutch".

Update December 2016 replaced missing image.

Kaboom!

A friend of mine is thinking about selling a 454 Taurus revolver. It's an impressive weapon:

• four pounds of stainless steel,
• a ported barrel to minimize muzzle rise,
• double latch on the cylinder, and
• it holds only five rounds, not six, because the walls of the chambers needed to be thicker to handle the extra pressure of the 454 Casull round.

However, it has this gawd awful "Raging Bull" logo emblazoned on the side of the barrel. Actually I don't know whether it is having a big logo or the fact that the logo says "Raging Bull" that crosses me. Taurus is Latin for bull, so if you don't know anything about the movie, the words make a certain amount of sense. However, the movie was a crock, never mind that it won a bunch of awards. It was about a guy (Jake LaMotta) who was a real jerk. Okay, so Robert DeNiro did a good job of portraying this jerk. I was thoroughly sick of it half way through.

Since we are talking about big guns and movies, we have to mention Clint Eastwood ("Dirty Harry") and his 44 Magnum revolver, "the most powerful handgun in the world". I really enjoyed the "Dirty Harry" movies, even if they didn't win any snooty awards. Well, the 454 is a more powerful gun, but I don't think it was available when the "Dirty Harry" movies were made.

But back to the gun. This big logo, and the fact that ammo costs about a dollar a round has a certain negative impact on this thousand dollar revolver's value on the used market.

I spent a little time thinking about what it would take to remove that logo. I am sure it could be done, but it would take a certain amount of skill to make it look like it was never there. i.e., you would need to match the finish on the rest of the gun. I imagine a skilled gunsmith could do it, but it would be a tricky bit of work to make it look right without having to refinish the whole gun.

Taurus is a Brazilian company and has been through some changes in the fifty years they have been around.

Update March 2016 replace missing picture.