Today’s soundtrack: we can be happy underground
Today at 12:22pm: receiving a fortuitous phone call: College booking!



People had a lot more patience in the 1970s, which is why The French Connection is mostly shots of Gene Hackman standing in doorways watching people. I watched it tonight. It’s a cop thriller but there’s only one car chase and one sustained gunfight, the rest is mostly sidewalk shots.

Which I didn’t mind watching at all, since it’s set in New York and much of the action takes place in two neighborhoods I’ve lived in. At one point the camera sweeps past Grand Street, where I often buy sandwiches; I was thrilled to see Italian Food Center still has the same sign they had over three decades ago.

It was also a thrill to see the New York I remember from childhood, with the yellow street signs and the blue license plates with yellow letters. If I remember correctly the yellow signs are also in the opening credits to The Odd Couple.

The city looks so good on grainy film. I recognized most of the locations and was happy to see they actually cared about continuity back then, there are no quick jumps from one neighborhood to the next. In the opening scene of Men in Black Wil Smith runs from Grand Central to the Guggenheim in ten seconds, like the fucking Flash. In Die Hard III the bad guy is supposed to be driving down FDR Drive, but they cut to shots of him on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. That shit drives me nuts, and if that’s a character flaw I’ll take it.

The fake blood when Hackman shoots people is hilarious--it’s bright red, almost orange. Like what you’d expect to see if you shot that pitcher-shaped Kool-Aid man.

Although the scenes are snowless, The French Connection was clearly shot in winter; there are telltale signs of bitch-ass-coldedness in New York that haven’t changed at all in 34 years. Like when you look out the window and see the exhaust of an idling car: when it’s super-cold and windy out, the exhaust fumes are a sharp white, and the wind snatches it away quickly so it looks like a silky rope being ripped out of the tailpipe.

The car chase was okay. Like the car chase in Bullitt (which is probably the worst movie I’ve seen this year), the thrill of it is not in the actual kinetics, but in the sounds of those glorious American V-8 engines. There is something about the sound of wasteful amounts of fossil fuels being burned through 350 cubic inches spread over eight cylinders that gets me amped up. When Gene Hackman stomps on the gas of that Pontiac it sounds like a Tyrannosaurus Rex clearing its throat.

Back when they shot the movie, I was living in a womb in Queens (which was small but rent-free). Several months later I’d quit being a fetus, I came out around the same time the movie did. 1971 and the city looked really good. It’s funny how the infrastructure was so dilipidated back then, but now that New York is all fixed-up and Disneyized, I feel it’s deteriorated in a much more profound way. We’ve lost more than our patience.