Night Moves

Gene Hackman was a hell of an everyman back in the day. As private eye Harry Moseby, he's smart sure, but not as smart as he thinks he is, and there's this palpable underlying vulnerability that in no way interferes with his ability to play the tough guy.

This movie is great, and so fucking BLEAK! Seriously, the last few minutes are just a gut punch of greed and futility and betrayal.

And The Wire cribbed that great line about the football game from this movie. Shame on you, Prezbo. Makes sense though, I think this is one of the first portrayals of the private eye that peels aside the trappings and style, and shows what's underneath someone with that sort of drive. I mean, you probably don't devote your life to hunting down other people's secrets, and see the truth as something that can be meticulously assembled from unearthed clues, strictly for good and noble reasons. Most likely it's because you're trying to work through (or avoid working through) your own stuff. Twenty-five years later, we got ourselves McNulty.

Plus, hats off to the ladies. As much as I looove the film noir genre, half the time the femme fatale and the good woman the anti-hero wants to want are just so black and white with no nuance between the two. This time around, each of them has a bit of good and evil to them. It's so awesome and rare to see a love triangle onscreen where I don't know from moment one which one I'm supposed to want the protagonist to choose.

Damn this is a good one. Yay for the 70s!

On the jukebox, John Lennon: I Found Out and Mother. The first is a bit obvious for a private eye thing, but I love this song. The second, well, I may have been a little too influenced by the essay I read after seeing this movie that goes into all these Freudian overtones that are supposedly present in the behavior of Harry Moseby who grew up parentless and abandoned. Some of them are there for certain, but I get a little suspicious of overdissection. Anyway the uncomprehending despair in this song kind of sums up a lot of what you see on his face in the last few minutes.

Grooveshark won't find it, so I can't make my pretty little widget to put here, but:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTkc1aKAVYY&ob=av2e
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGYX4e4JfG4&feature=related