Q. Regarding your review of "The Girlfriend Experience": Prostitutes in movies are never used for what they provide in real life, which is sex. In movies, prostitutes are paid for anything and everything but the thing they actually provide. See: "Pretty Woman," "The Girlfriend Experience" and countless others. Eliot Spitzer or any other man never paid large amounts of money to talk to a woman.
I've just been watching "The Thief of Bagdad" (1940), which has probably the most influential special effects of all pre-CGI films. It's going into the Great Movies Collection, not for the effects, of course, but because it is a sublime entertainment on a level with "The Wizard of Oz" or the first "Star Wars." But there are few effects in "Star Wars" (1977) that were not invented for, experimented with, or perfected in "The Thief of Bagdad." And some of them had their genesis in Raoul Walsh's magnificent 1924 silent film of the same name starring Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.
Left: Rex Ingram, as the genie, towers over Sabu, as the thief, in "The Thief of Bagdad." The shot was made by combining real footage of Ingram, close to the camera, and Sabu, several hundred feet away.
Steven Spielberg celebrates his 50th birthday today. If he never directed another film, his place in movie history would be secure. It is likely that when all of the movies of the 20th century are seen at a great distance in the future - as if through the wrong end of a telescope - his best will be in the handful that endure and are remembered.
