The French Connection

THE FRENCH CONNECTION! WOW! THE FUCKING FRENCH CONNECTION! That movie is so fucking great. What a fucking movie. I love that fucking movie. It's such a human movie, it's about people in all their ordinariness. To watch cops watch criminals do errands! To watch them eat and fall asleep! To watch them follow dead ends! I mean really though, what a fucking movie. And the ending! the reduced sentences, suspended sentences, misdemeanors, so honest and wonderful. To watch people huff as they run, stagger and lean with exhaustion. To have bad hunches! USELESS HUNCHES! What a wonderful thing to pay homage to, the useless hunch. And so many other things that I can't even mention without just listing and so rehashing the absolutely beautiful humanness of everything in that fucking thing. Gene hackman HEY. God what a lot of good things. fucking see that movie my god go see it. It does for cops what Unforgiven does for westerns. What a special thing.

I mean, the movie is really disrespectful to its audience. how dare it be so digressive, so half explained. there are a lot of hifalutin movies that have references that you know you don't know, that present you with symbols and chortle when you fail to get it. but this is a different breed of inconsideration altogether, one where you're simply confused, caught in a flurry of chaos that is perhaps just LIFE as much as any studied assemblage of poetic signifiers. even better is that the references there are are often lower class, the hat in the back window, for example. how wonderful to be set loose and to not understand, therein lies the infinity of lived life. how wonderful to not have a goddamn establishing shot and a close up for everything that might be of interest. how wonderful for people to mumble.

i watched it with my dad and sometimes i wonder who he is. when we were walking back i was behaving extremely excitedly and he was very laconic, i got him to laugh once. is my dad old? is that it, is he just really old? it's weird to feel something so utterly and have felt it right next to one's own dad, one's own genetic material, and to not get back that nudge of recognition. am i just super young, irreproducibly young? what a queer, lonely sense of uniqueness that gives you.


how many sweaters does a person need to still be fabulous? i want to have a minimal amount of stuff, but i am also committed to not being as predictable as a peasant. these are serious issues.