Eastwood, Eastwood, Eastwood...

Since I've been on a bit of an Eastwood bender as of late, I've been looking to add more of his films to my collection, so I poked around online, looking for sales, release dates and upcoming special editions. I wanted to snag In the Line of Fire... until I got a gander at the reissued DVD cover for it.

Apparently someone in the design department let one of the interns handle this one because it's hideous. And I'm not just talking about the stupid floating heads-style design, the way the white stars and stripes make the type difficult to read, or the weird airbrushed glow around everything. I can even live with John Malkovich's head looking like it's on the verge of exploding, Scanners-style.

What does give me a super-sized case of the willies is Eastwood's face. I don't know what happened here, but it appears that his eyes were plucked out by crows (and he's mighty pissed about it), an alien symbiont is living inside of him or someone sent him to the taxidermist. In any case, don't stare at that cover for too long if you value your humanity.

On the upside, this four-film set of Eastwood movies is coming out, featuring The Beguiled, Coogan's Bluff, The Eiger Sanction and Play Misty for Me. It's a great deal, with some of his best work in it. And under $20 CND.

And then there's spike.com's list of 10 Awesome Things You Didn't Know About Clint Eastwood, which does contain a few surprises, and includes his failed attempt to become a pop-country star back in the day.

Curiousity piqued, I poked around a bit and found that eMusic has a Clint Eastwood album, which you can hear samples of here (and download if you're an eMusic member, of course). I snagged it and, while it's a perfectly competent collection of old timey country classics, the man is better with a camera than a microphone, as the croaky end credit title song in Gran Torino attests to.

Lastly, there's also this hilarious video where someone has made a trailer out of footage from Gran Torino, for The Growler, which distills Eastwood down to his essence. They could easy make a sequel called The Squinter, naturally.

-Dave Alexander