Me and you Barbarella! High noon. Time to settle this once and for all! As long as we're on movie posters today, above is a completely different type of femme fatale. The promo art, which we think is quite nice, is for the DVD release of CQ in Japan today in 2003. If you look closely at the right border of the art you can just make out the Japanese text. The movie was made by Roman Coppola, starred Jeremy Davies, Angela Lindvall, and Élodie Bouchez, and dealt with a struggling young director making a cheeseball sci-fi movie to pay the bills while working in his spare time on his beloved art film. That's Lindvall above as secret agent Dragonfly, a Barbarella-type space heroine, armed with vaguely organ-shaped retro-futuristic space gun. CQ premiered in 2002 and quickly achieved cult status, but writer-director Coppola has not had much opportunity to direct films since then, though he did helm a 2012 Bill Murray project called A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III. We haven't seen it, but we know it flopped pretty hard. We've talked about CQ before, so we won't reiterate except to say we loved it.
Seek and ye shall find. Some people don’t get Roman Coppola’s 2001 retro-cool directorial debut CQ, and their criticisms are vehement enough that we started to question whether the film is actually any good, but we just watched it again this morning and reconfirmed its greatness. It’s about an American in Paris in 1969 working as a film editor on a sci-fi adventure called Secret Agent: Dragonfly. When the director and his replacement both leave the production, the editor—played by Lost’s Jeremy Davies—is tapped to finish the picture. He soon begins to fall for Dragonfly, but are his feelings for the ass-kicking fictional character or the fresh-faced actress who portrays her? With echoes of Blow Up, La Dolce Vita, Barbarella and Diabolik, as well as a convincingly sixties soundtrack provided by the group Mellow, CQ is an enchanting little piece of cinematic escapism. The only flaw we can find in it is that Secret Agent: Dragonfly isn’t a real movie. We’d line up to see it. CQ premiered at the Cannes festival in May 2001, and opened in the U.S. today in 2002.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1939—Batman Debuts
In Detective Comics #27, DC Comics publishes its second major superhero, Batman, who becomes one of the most popular comic book characters of all time, and then a popular camp television series starring Adam West, and lastly a multi-million dollar movie franchise starring Michael Keaton, then George Clooney, and finally Christian Bale. 1953—Crick and Watson Publish DNA Results
British scientists James D Watson and Francis Crick publish an article detailing their discovery of the existence and structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, in Nature magazine. Their findings answer one of the oldest and most fundamental questions of biology, that of how living things reproduce themselves. 1967—First Space Program Casualty Occurs
Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov dies in Soyuz 1 when, during re-entry into Earth's atmosphere after more than ten successful orbits, the capsule's main parachute fails to deploy properly, and the backup chute becomes entangled in the first. The capsule's descent is slowed, but it still hits the ground at about 90 mph, at which point it bursts into flames. Komarov is the first human to die during a space mission. 1986—Otto Preminger Dies
Austro–Hungarian film director Otto Preminger, who directed such eternal classics as Laura, Anatomy of a Murder, Carmen Jones, The Man with the Golden Arm, and Stalag 17, and for his efforts earned a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame, dies in New York City, aged 80, from cancer and Alzheimer's disease. 1998—James Earl Ray Dies
The convicted assassin of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., petty criminal James Earl Ray, dies in prison of hepatitis aged 70, protesting his innocence as he had for decades. Members of the King family who supported Ray's fight to clear his name believed the U.S. Government had been involved in Dr. King's killing, but with Ray's death such questions became moot.
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