The Lunch Movie

From Tuesday, April 17, 2008
Produced & Directed by Clint Eastwood, starring Clint, Freddie Jones, Ronald Lacey and Nigel Hawthorne, featuring a score by Maurice Jarre.

The Soviet Union redesigns their MIG-25 fighter jet into the MIG-31 Firefox. Among the advances: it flies 6 times the speed of sound, it’s invisible to radar, and it has a thought-controlled weapon system. The West grows nervous. What to do? Steal the prototype while it’s still in the testing phase! Now all we need is a pilot who can think in Russian! Someone get Clint on the horn!

FIREFOX not only came out during the Thatcher-n-Reagan vs. Brezhnev pinnacle of the Cold War, it was also released in the summer of 1982. 1982, as any proper nerd will tell you, is The Greatest Year In The History Of Nerd Cinema. FIREFOX holds is own among Clint movies, Cold War thrillers, and all the other fun that came out that year: E.T., Rocky 3, Star Trek 2: The Wrath Of Khan, Blade Runner, John Carpenter’s The Thing, The Dark Crystal, Creepshow, First Blood, Conan The Barbarian and Poltergeist — to name a few.

It’ll finish Friday.
Love, Jim

AFTER THOUGHT from 4.20.10
To miss FIREFOX is to miss the simplicity of The Cold War. Regardless of which side of the Iron Curtain you were on, you knew who “your” good guys were and who “their” bad guys were. We had this snappy little pass-time called “espionage” that was widely accepted as a nasty business in which sometimes a few spies would kill or be killed. To their governments, they were preserving a way of life, but to regular people they prevented far greater destruction via full-scale war.

I have read some comments on IMDB message boards-n-such where viewers were surprised by how quickly Mitchell Gant (Eastwood) signs onto his mission. Note to those folks: FIREFOX pre-dates Syd Field and every other false-hopes-to-starving-artists screenwriting tricks of the trade book you may have read. Once upon a time it was not necessary for a character to spend the entire first act twiddling their thumbs and filling us in on their happy home life until (inciting incident!) SOMETHING happens to wreck it (I’m lookin’ at you, Governator in COMMANDO).

FIREFOX is a cold-war espionage thriller. This type of film has not yet been granted the scholarly benefits that film noir has enjoyed for two generations, nor that grindhouse exploitation fun currently wallows in, but wait — their day will come. When it does, prepare to re-watch FIREFOX alongside THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR, GORKY PARK, TELEFON and a lot of other movies you’re either too young to have heard of or too old to realize were worth remembering back when you saw them. Either way, they will be as cool a gift as rediscovering noir with Richard Widmark or blaxploitation with Pam Grier. Trust me.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 20th, 2010 at 4:08 am and is filed under THE LUNCH MOVIE CHRONICLES: The original e-mail announcements that were sent through our office the evening before we rolled a Lunch Movie. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.