It’s a sad day in Hollywood as Director/Producer/Actor Sydney Pollack has lost his battle with cancer. He was 73. First diagnosed nine months ago, Pollack died Monday night surrounded by friends and family.

Having lost my own dad to cancer in 2005, I am very sympathetic to the plight of his family and friends. My heart goes out to them all as these loses are never easy, no matter how “prepared” you might think you are for it. God bless you all and may he guide and comfort you in the days ahead.

Sydney Pollack first caught my attention after watching “Three Days Of the Condor” starring Robert Redford, Cliff Robertson and Faye Dunaway. Originally released in 1975, I first watched with baited breath in 1980 as a wide-eyed 10 year old. While I admit that first viewing left me with many a question, I have since re-watched this fine film many times and have come to truly appreciate the level of story telling this film possesses. Two years later, Sydney blew us all out of the water with a little film called Tootsie.

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As amazing as it may sound, we have the technology to drive our existing cars on water. I first heard of this some 4 to 6 years ago while watching a Discovery channel documentary on cars and the future of cars. I learned many interesting facts about the future of cars…cars that drive themselves, cars that will be able to mend themselves when dented or even change color on command, but by far the one thing I learned that day, that really stuck with me was the fact that there was a man in our own country who had learned to burn water for fuel.

Jimmy Klein was the real deal. I watched engrossed as this man took what looked like an ordinary blow torch and cut or burned several objects of varying size and materials, with far less effort than a traditional acetylene torch would entail. It was like he had trapped the sun at the tip of his torch and even more amazing was that the torch remained cool to the touch even while burning through a think slab of metal or iron. It wasn’t long after he made this amazing discovery that he applied the same principle to his car.

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Yeah, thats right. Fuck Billy Ray Cyrus too. If you think there is ever a good reason, big or small, to take semi nude pictures of a 15 year old girl for the express purpose of disseminating them to the public at large….FUCK YOU TOO. From where I’m sitting, taking semi nude pictures or any pictures that in any way induce sexual imagery of a 15 year old is totally reprehensible. Bunch of fuck sticks.

What else is Annie Leibowitz willing to do in the name of “art”? Amazing to me that some guy invokes the name of God and Jesus and he is a “freak”. Watch out for that sicko, but Ms. Leibowitz says, “hey today ‘art’ means getting a 15 yr. old naked in front of the camera”…and she is a ‘genius’.

Funny, because when my neighbor tried something similar sometime ago, they didn’t call him a ‘genius’. Nope they had a few other choice words for him…like ‘molester’, ‘child abuser’, ’sick fucking animal’ and my personal favorite…”fucking dead man’.

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It took me a while to come around. Not that I walked away from my first Cloverfield viewing disappointed or even unhappy, but something about it was a little ‘ehhh’ for me that first time. I loved a lot about it but something about it wasn’t quite right.

A couple of weeks later I managed to find a cam version of the film online, so I downloaded it and was surprised to see that I enjoyed it a bit more the second time. Which is saying a lot considering, it was only a cam version. The third time I found myself watching it, I knew I was hooked. Why?

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The man was nothing short of legend. Best known for having played heroic roles, such as Moses in The Ten Commandments, Colonel George Taylor in Planet of the Apes and Judah Ben-Hur in Ben-Hur, he will also be remembered for being one of a handful of Hollywood actors to speak out openly against racism and was an active supporter of the civil rights movement. During the civil rights march held in Washington, D.C. in 1963, he accompanied Martin Luther King Jr.

That he was still unafraid of controversy as he grew older was evident in his memorable 2000 NRA convention speech, where he raised a rifle over his head and declared that the Bill Clinton administration would take away his Second Amendment rights “from my cold, dead hands.”. Michael Moore would later try to take selfish, advantage of Heston’s NRA affiliation by ambushing Charlton in an interview for his 2002 film Bowling For Columbine.

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