Foggy and gray this early Saturday on California’s north coast, and the beat goes on.

In the ugly mists of current events — odd, violent and bad — flooding a weekend/news cycle-dump, I was awash this morning with a fresh, pleasantly-nice, tingly sensation (way-rare nowadays) upon discovery today is the birthday of one my all-time, way-heavy-duty romantic inspirations, Sophia Loren.
She’s 80!

After seeing ‘El Cid‘ when in the eighth-grade (1961), I wanted so desperately to marry Sophia Loren — and our age difference wouldn’t matter.  I was 14, she was only 29.
My science teacher, however, after I told her my intentions, replied in the nicest way possible, that I was an idiot.
Life is a dream, at least in the movies.

(Illustration found here).

Most of Loren’s movies I’ve seen have come off the TV — a handful only in theaters.
Maybe the last in which she was really good, and a total star, was ‘Arabesque‘ (1966), which I saw in a movie house as a high school senior.
And I could identify with the hero — a nerd, Gregory Peck, via the right set of circumstances, could indeed have a hot chick, Loren, fall in love with him — maybe marriage with me wasn’t all that idiotic.
A good detail/review of the movie can be found at Black Hole Reviews.
Unfortunately, she seemed to fade from consciousness during the 1970s, making some shitty movies like ‘The Cassandra Crossing,” and ‘Brass Target,’ and performed nearly sporadically from there on.

And as it turned out, ‘El Cid,’ actually sucked, too. After viewing it just a few years ago on DVD, the film doesn’t stand the test of time, and Charlton Heston is/was a turd.
This from a 1993 review in the Washington Post:

Of course, it helps that Sophia Loren looks marvelous, radiating old-fashioned, albeit unconventional, glamour.
As for Heston, he never comes across as a particularly ferocious fighter, but he brings that familiar heroic countenance to yet another heroic role.
Three decades down the line, “El Cid” seems more dated than some of its contemporaries.
It’s overly long and it’s overly melodramatic, but it’s also a perfect example of the kind of film they just don’t make anymore, because they can’t.

And the same for those who graced those films — despite all the looks and talent in movies nowadays, they don’t carry the awesome quality of someone like Sophia Loren — not by a long, tracking shot.