18-06-2013, 10:52 PM
Magda Hassan Wrote:I watched The French Connection today. Nihlistic. Yes. But then that whole part of the sub-culture is. All shades of grey. No white hats and black hats. I don't know if it was just my copy or if it was made that way but I quite liked the colour it was done in. Muted, washed out and dull like. Not crisp and bright and shiny at all. It spoke well.
The French Connection is nihilstic.
It has the colour of the grimy streets, where everyone's hustling for something, and everything is for sale.
From the opening bars of discordant metallic music against black screen, everything is dangerous, flawed, compromised.
The only elegance is Frog One, Fernando Rey, gliding through hotel lobbies, even giving Popeye Doyle the slip on the subway of his own town.
Frog One, elegance and charm personified, is a big time heroin dealer, the French Connection.
The movie is anti-heroic. The little guys die brutally. Frog One escapes. Doyle shoots and kills a cop. Again. And then shrugs his shoulders and resumes the pursuit.
He is still obsessed.
He knows the war is meaningless and can never be won, but he loves the action of the chase, the thrill of busting flesh.
"It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted...."
"Proverbs for Paranoids 4: You hide, They seek."
"They are in Love. Fuck the War."
Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
"Ccollanan Pachacamac ricuy auccacunac yahuarniy hichascancuta."
The last words of the last Inka, Tupac Amaru, led to the gallows by men of god & dogs of war
"Proverbs for Paranoids 4: You hide, They seek."
"They are in Love. Fuck the War."
Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
"Ccollanan Pachacamac ricuy auccacunac yahuarniy hichascancuta."
The last words of the last Inka, Tupac Amaru, led to the gallows by men of god & dogs of war