Clint Eastwood

My acting hero is Clint Eastwood, you know, gruff, no-nonsense, all-american, minimalist, masculine actor. But that's not why I like him, the reason I like him because in the 80s for a brief but fruitful period, he played really extravagant and flamboyant yuppies, one film after the other.

I was watching a film from that period, called I think Polycarbonate Orgy, and it really got into the whole Wall Street yuppie lifestyle in New York of the time, and it had Clint Eastwood and he was playing squash with I think Charlie Sheen, who was playing a slightly less flamboyant yuppie.

These days of course squash rackets are wireless… but in the 80s you had to plug them into the mains, so Clint and Charlie were playing with power cords coming out of them, and they were playing squash and it was ridiculous and they just kept tangling up with each other and the cables, but that was part of the whole squash racketball in New York yuppies in the 80s thing it was part of the lifestyle. There was another scene where Charlie sheen showed off all the wire marks on his thigh to a high class prostitute, it was considered a mark of success to be covered in red wire marks of entanglement. In fact on any given weekday in Midtown you'd even see stock brokers on their lunch break rubbing power cords against their skin to give them that really successful apres squash look.

There's another scene that really did capture the zeit-geist of the era, a scene where Clint Eastwood is standing with his chest puffed out, -much like Christiano Ronaldo before a free kick- over a bathtub filled with £1000 per gram puuur truffle jelly and Clint says. "I've got money in my pocket, I've got coke in my veins, I guess you can call me a real Yuppie Charlie" And then he dipped his elbows into the jelly and then started running really flamboyant laps around his penthouse apartment and flapping his elbows saying "I guess you can call me a real Yuppie Charlie, a reeeal yuppie"

But Charlie he has no idea what was going on because he's off his face on coke and trying to have sex with 2 opposite sides of his fridge at the same time. It was an amazing part of his career.

Then of course later in the 80s, just before the gulf war Saddam Hussein… wanted to produce, direct and co-write for his own private pleasure a James Bond film. And I'm not sure if it was something to do with the censorship in Iraq but Saddam Hussein thought Clint Eastwood was the current James Bond of that time. Clint, being the artist that he is said yes, although I don't think he really had a choice.

It was a very fresh take on the Bond genre, it really pushed the boundaries of Bond films, there was one very astonishing scene where Clint Eastwood as James Bond impales a villain crotch first onto an operational wind turbine and that blew my mind, to have such a strong environmental message in a James Bond film in the 80s was really unprecedented.

There was one thing I couldn't quite wrap my head around in that film which was James Bond constantly kept offering lip balm to everyone in the film, over and over again, lip balm, lip balm, lip balm, chap stick, tin, tub. He'd drop fist sized chunks of the stuff in his Martini before drinking it, I guess the Hussein regime just didn't like dry lips.

But the film climaxed with a very dense scene with Clint Eastwood, with a Bond woman, he stood there, naked, much like David Beckham before a free kick, and he said "I've got my penis in a woman, its shaken not stirred, I guess you can call me a real Bond, Jaaaaames Bond" and then he started flapping his elbows throughout the gunfight screaming "A REEEEAL JAMES BOND".

Please check the films out, Polycarbonate Orgy and A License to Dispense Vaseline.