Arthur Penn's "Night Moves" (1975) is one of the great movies of the '70s. As a detective picture about a private eye with flawed vision -- in this case, a small-time independent dick and former football player named Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman), who'd like to think he's Sam Spade -- it would make a great double bill with "Chinatown," released the previous year. Yesterday, when the news came of French director Eric Rohmer's death, a lot of people who apparently hadn't even seen "Night Moves" (or, perhaps, a Rohmer movie) were freely quoting Moseby's famous wisecrack in pieces about Rohmer without providing any context for it:

"I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kind of like watching paint dry."

It wasn't long before it even became a Twitter meme: #nightmoves. (See examples below, after jump.)

What some (not all) of the quoters didn't seem to realize or remember is that Harry's remark, as scripted by Alan Sharp, is a brittle homophobic jab at a gay friend of his wife's. (Watch the clip above.) Ellen (Susan Clark) invites Harry to join her and Charles (Ben Archibek -- that's him at the end of the clip) for a movie: Eric Rohmer's classic "My Night at Maud's" (1970), about an engaged man (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who spends a long, memorable night in conversation with a divorcee (Françoise Fabian). Moseby is asserting his macho credentials, and ends the scene by teasing Charles about going bowling again sometime. "You seem to get some weird kind of satisfaction from this sort of thing, don't you?" Charles replies. Later that night, Harry drives by the theater as the movie is letting out and sees something indicating that his wife may be having an affair.

Continue reading →

Cannes, France – It requires a certain amount of cinematic gear-shifting to jump from film to film here at the Cannes Film Fes¬tival. During the last few days, for example, I’ve seen Federico Fellini’s bizarre new study of feminism, Bertrand Tavernier’s thoughtful portrait of a young schoolteacher in Lyon, a Canadian thriller named “Double Negative,” and the British punk rock heroes, the Sex Pistols, in “The Great Rock and Roll Swindle.”

Continue reading →