Dog Day Afternoon

I hang out with a bunch of folks a lot younger than me.
AND a bunch of folks who haven't studied film like I have.

That said:

It's been a long time since I've seen a lot of my favorites, and you know, sometimes your favorites do not remain so because you've outgrown them. Sometimes your favorites remain so because you understand them in a different, more mature way.

My girl hadn't ever seen "Dog Day Afternoon" until tonight. We'd talked about it - and a hundred other films that either she or I hadn't seen - but this one kept coming up. So we stopped by THE EDGE and picked it up after a long walk in Brooklyn Heights along the promenade and a screening of "Factotum."

(Big Bukowski fan, don't even get me started...)

"DDA" is fucking amazing. I've seen it 2,3,4 times, but as an adult living in the neighborhood where it was filmed and the borough where it took place, it blew me away. Yet, again.

Pacino was nominated, but lost to Nicholson for "Cuckoo's Nest" - same year that "Jaws" was released, one of my favorite films of all time. Think about that - a film based on a counter-culture Ken Kesey classic swept the awards and beat out a film about a bisexual man robbing a bank to pay for his "wife's" sex change operation. This was 1975.

Hollywood was different then. It didn't SUCK.

I love Jack in "Cuckoo's Nest," but at this point, I'd retroactively give it to Al. And take back Milos Foreman's best director award and give it to Spielberg for "Jaws" so that he wouldn't have to make all the crap he made after that.

There must have been a lot of really smart, disappointed people on that night.

Sigh ~

Ms. Haze, in my gifted-to-her, brown leather jumpsuit shorts kinda thing...