My Ear Is Sore: Charlton Heston.... Rest In Peace!

So Charlton Heston passed away the other night. I know in his later years he became a bit of a lightning rod for controversy, what with his rather obsessive NRA campaigns and his thoughts on gun control (or more specifically, why there shouldn't be any) and I know he wasn't the most politically correct man of the last century. That said, he was pretty boss in his own right and you've got to respect the guy for, no pun intended, sticking to his guns (okay I lied, that was on purpose) right until the end.

While a lot of folks will remember him as a bit of a fascist, I prefer to remember him as Robert Neville. I like my Heston clad in an ascot and sipping J&B or maybe some Cutty Sark while playing chess with a bust of Ceaser stopping only to deal with atomic vampires or to seduce a sweet young soul sister. The success of I Am Legend will probably only help to bury Heston's memory but The Omega Man, as dated and (now) corny as it seems holds its own as a pretty bad-ass film. Even more than Planet of the Apes or The Ten Commandments or Soylent Green, The Omega Man is, to me, the definitive Heston picture. If it doens't represent who he really was it at least represents who I want to think he really was and I only hope that I'm in my late forties (like he was when he made the picture) that I'm cool enough to drive around in a convertible, talk to myself, and take down the bad buys with a machine gun without so much as a second thought.