Sydney Pollack, the movie director, died of cancer on Monday at 73. Pollack directed many good movies including "Out of Africa," Jeremiah Johnson," and "Three Days of the Condor"; however, the movie I will remember is "The Way We Were." It's one of my favorite movies. How can a conservative Republican like me like a movie with Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand about a girl who was a member of the communist party? It's hard to say! Maybe I enjoyed watching Streisand's characters political passion! Streisand can sing and the song "The Way we Were" ranks up there with "People." If she would only "shut up and sing." When my wife to be and I were first dating while I was in law school, she came up to visit me at the University of Oregon in Eugene for a football weekend and after the game we went to see a "sneak preview" at the Oakway Mall Cinema. They didn't advertise what the sneak preview was and we paid our money and went into the theater and had a seat. We were with another couple and one of them went to the snack bar and found out the name of the movie and came back and told us it "was the new Barbra Streisand movie" which I had read about in Newsweek the week before. The movie, the song, were wonderful and I went down and bought the record album the next week. A few weeks later I took my folks in North Bend to see it again. I love the movie and have it on DVD. In watching the movie on DVD, with the commentary track on, Sydney Pollack talks about how he downplayed the political aspect of the movie and highlighted the love story against the protest of Streisand. Thanks, Sydney.
