Oh, yeah, just saw that a couple weeks ago when it came around for its…uh…48th?..anniversary. It’s odd to me in that it’s such an intimate film on the one hand but on the other, I would highly recommend seeing it in a theater, because it requires a lot of concentration.
You’re right it doesn’t technically fit but it has a very real-time feel. Days and night are obviously passing but Harry’s in an unending fever dream of paranoia where everything flows together.
I think it’s a funny idea for a “date” movie, and kudos to my gal for having come up with the idea and securing tickets and all that.
Why is it “funny”? Well, you mention it requiring concentration.
But, on what is one concentrating?
Sort of a time contraction, a capsule of, as you say, Hackman’s descent into what is, as I suggested, really a small dumb show, a play within a play, i.e., “The Conversation,” which now becomes a time dilation.
A small event turned inside out into an ever-shrinking psychic headspace.
I don’t know if it’s prime Coppola, or just prime moviemaking, but that’s what I recall since seeing it last…maybe a year or so ago.
And there is something there for everybody. For the jazz head, there’s the notion that within the form of thirty-two bars a novel can unfold.
The 1998 Canadian end-of-the-world movie, LAST NIGHT, written, directed and starring Don McKellar and co-starring Sandra Oh (with director David Cronenberg in a small part). The movie, showing people in a city waiting out the last six hours before the world ends is heartbreaking, funny, and soul-affirming in such a mad way that you can’t help but fall in love with it and I deeply recommend it.
The single funniest and most enjoyably biting Satire of Post-War Americanization, Consumerism & Automation ever made, encompassing a few inventive and eleborate setpieces that take place over a single day. Following his Monsieur Hulot and a few other key characters casually weaving their way through the grey boxy hellscape.
Still as hilarious and impactful as ever.