Jesse Ventura = Steven segal.
John Paul = Clint Eastwood (listen to him talk!)

Akira Kurosawa

Alfred Hitchcock

Steven Spielberg

Sergio Leone

Francis Ford Coppola

Orson Welles.

Clint Eastwood is a fantastic Director and while he made the greatest western of all time he does not have a prolific number of hits.

1. Welles
2. Coppola
3. Spielberg
4. Scorsese
5. Kubrick

Honorable Mention:

David Fincher
Brad Bird / Pixar team
Clint Eastwood
Quentin Tarantino

Top 13?

1 Kubrick
2 Lynch
3 Gilliam (pre Brothers Grimm)
4 Tarentino
5 Coens
6 Spielberg
7 PTA
8 Richard Linklater
9 Ridley Scott
10 Clint Eastwood
11 Segio Leone
12 Michel Gondry
13 Todd Solondz

I'm going to make my list more difficult (or maybe easier, depending on your point of view) by limiting myself to current, contemporary, living persons. This removes obvious picks like Kubrick, Welles, Kurosawa and Hitchcock who would otherwise be at the top. Here's my list, in no particular order:

1) The Coens - plural I know, but you can't have one without the other. These brothers have produced masterpieces in every genre they've attempted. Crime, drama, comedy, mobsters, whatever. Always entertaining and very deserving of their recent Oscar.
2) Paul Thomas Anderson. A not terribly prolific director, but a thoughtful one. One of the few whose movies you must attend in the theatre simply because HE made it!
3) Wes Anderson- You can count on Wes for taking you to a place you've never been before, and no matter how fucked up your family may seem to you, the families portrayed in a Wes Anderson film are more disturbed and dysfunctional. Not to say that they're not loving and well-intentioned, just misguided.
4) Clint Eastwood- He has become a master of his craft. Few others will take the time to luxuriate in a scene like Eastwood. His long cuts and deliberate pacing show a respect for the intelligence and attention span of his audience.
5) Martin Scorsese- of all the great Directors born in the new Golden Age of Hollywood in the 1970s, only Scorsese remains at the top of his game. Others such as Spielberg, Lucas (ugh), Coppola, Friedkin etcetera have left their best work in the distant past.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Sylvestor Stallone, Bruce Willis, Ahhnold, movies' to 'Clint Eastwood, Sylvestor Stallone, Bruce Willis, Ahhnold, movies' - edited by oxdottir

Anything with Clint Eastwood = Automatic Upvote

At the end of the piece, the narrator quotes Judge Alex Kozinski of the Federal 9th Circuit Appellate Court. I've included the extended version of that quote here. His opinions on the "right of publicity" are best summed up in his White v. Samsung Electronics Dissent. The entire opinion is worth reading, but the critical summary is found in the first section which reads:

"Saddam Hussein wants to keep advertisers from using his picture in unflattering contexts. Clint Eastwood doesn't want tabloids to write about him. Rudolf Valentino's heirs want to control his film biography. The Girl Scouts don't want their image soiled by association with certain activities. George Lucas wants to keep Strategic Defense Initiative fans from calling it "Star Wars." Pepsico doesn't want singers to use the word "Pepsi" in their songs. Guy Lombardo wants an exclusive property right to ads that show big bands playing on New Year's Eve. Uri Geller thinks he should be paid for ads showing psychics bending metal through telekinesis. Paul Prudhomme, that household name, thinks the same about ads featuring corpulent bearded chefs. And scads of copyright holders see purple when their creations are made fun of.

Something very dangerous is going on here. Private property, including intellectual property, is essential to our way of life. It provides an incentive for investment and innovation; it stimulates the flourishing of our culture; it protects the moral entitlements of people to the fruits of their labors. But reducing too much to private property can be bad medicine. Private land, for instance, is far more useful if separated from other private land by public streets, roads and highways. Public parks, utility rights-of-way and sewers reduce the amount of land in private hands, but vastly enhance the value of the property that remains.

So too it is with intellectual property. Overprotecting intellectual property is as harmful as underprotecting it. Creativity is impossible without a rich public domain. Nothing today, likely nothing since we tamed fire, is genuinely new: Culture, like science and technology, grows by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before. Overprotection stifles the very creative forces it's supposed to nurture.

The panel's opinion is a classic case of overprotection. Concerned about what it sees as a wrong done to Vanna White, the panel majority erects a property right of remarkable and dangerous breadth: Under the majority's opinion, it's now a tort for advertisers to remind the public of a celebrity. Not to use a celebrity's name, voice, signature or likeness; not to imply the celebrity endorses a product; but simply to evoke the celebrity's image in the public's mind. This Orwellian notion withdraws far more from the public domain than prudence and common sense allow. It conflicts with the Copyright Act and the Copyright Clause. It raises serious First Amendment problems. It's bad law, and it deserves a long, hard second look."

-- Judge Alex Kozinski

It seems redundant for me to even mention how much he shamed Gere in this film. An established Hollywood star on screen with a kid picked out from thousands of auditions and the kid absolutely steals the show. Granted it's Gere, so it's not that difficult but still, hell of an introduction. For scene stealing it's up there with Kelly's Heroes (Don Sutherland shaming Clint Eastwood) and Line of Fire (John Malkovich shaming Eastwood again), although they win out because they steal the film from a damn good actor, not Richard "look down, hand on forehead, shake head gently, pick up $15m cheque"* Gere.

* Okay, you got me, that's not really his middle name. His real middle name is Tiffany. Yes, Tiffany. Really. Really!

Should be in Ball-Flexin', though it is a toss-up. Is this a dupe of http://www.videosift.com/video/Clint-Eastwood-as-Dirty-Harry-Do-you-feel-lucky-scene?


See also
http://www.videosift.com/video/Werner-Herzog-Hates-the-Artsy-Fartsy-Stuff

This is the best opening credit sequence I've ever seen. The film is very long and slow, but worth it. Bronson is very credible as Clint Eastwood as the (Mexican) Man With No Name. And Henry Fonda is the coldest villain ever.

peretz pt 1:

Bush loves the extreme hypothetical of torturing Osama bin Laden as he is on the brink of nuking NYC. We all know that this a comic book fantasy and we love this fantasy in the same way we love it when Jack Bauer tortures the bad guys on 24 or Clint Eastwood shoots people in the face in Dirty Harry. It is pure good triumphing over unalloyed degenerate evil. In this limited hypothetical, I do believe that you can find torture to be moral in a purely utilitarian sense if only because it prevents more harm than it creates.

However, I would still want this behavior to be illegal. I want to live in a society where torture is considered aberrant and disgusting. Would you or I break this law in the bin Laden hypothetical? Absolutely. And then our behavior would be transparent, analyzed by a jury of our peers if necessary, and we would never be convicted (just like thieves weren't charged and convicted during Hurricane Katrina). Would you or I break the law if some Pakistani guy told us that the schlubby brown-skinned guy on the corner was aiming nukes at New York? Maybe we would be more deliberate and careful in our actions and investigate the matter further before we started waterboarding people.