Word: cigar
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Clint Eastwood has always been an old man. Even in the '60s, as the gunslinger in Sergio Leone westerns, Eastwood had the squinty eyes, sour mouth and weary walk of a soldier who had been in too many wars. The six-day stubble hid countless psychic scars; the cigar butt stuck between his teeth suggested a world gone up in smoke; the poncho he wore could have been a shroud. As Dirty Harry and a passel of creepy cowboys, Eastwood carried himself with the slow, wily grace of the living dead. Idealism had been blasted out of him -- only...
...dizzy conventions of the action genre. At first they do so, smartly. A wounded cop mutters, "Two days to retirement," and promptly dies. And Arnold's version of Hamlet is even funnier than Mel Gibson's. "To be, or not to be," he says, lighting his trademark cigar stub. "Not to be." And Elsinore goes boom! But after a while, as the facetious film references (to everything from E.T. to The Seventh Seal pile up, Hero turns into the industry's all-time costliest inside joke. Watching it is as enervating as being on a real movie...
...refresh all our memories, let's recall that the whole RJR fiasco got started when a hard-drinking, cigar-smoking, foul-mouthed Canadian expatriate named F. Ross Johnson, who for some inexplicable reason found himself running the 19th largest industrial company in the U.S., decided to take the food and tobacco colossus private in a leveraged buyout...
HEINRICH SCHLIEMANN'S "DISCOVERY" 120 YEARS ago of mythic Troy has always gone into the close-but-no-cigar category. Excavating on Turkey's Aegean coast, the amateur German archaeologist unearthed some ancient ruins and declared them to be all that was left of the Troy celebrated in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. But the remains always seemed, even to Schliemann, a bit puny for so outsize a legend...
...Breughellina excess. After two hours of this, the DJ decides the hell with R&B, and switches to Madonna. Downstairs, 'poonsters lecture some musicians about the castle's hidden walls and secret tunnels. Meanwhile, in the library, a drop-dead gorgeous Blues Sister reclines on a couch and smokes cigars with two Hollywood Producers. "I love a good cigar," she says with an insouciantly arched eyebrow. I must be trapped in the Clue boardgame. Someone is sure to turn up dead in the billiard room, soon, next to a candlestick. The DJ switches to Frank Sinatra...