Flames of Osteoporosis

"There are enough detonators here to blow up half of Algiers!"-- an ethnic bit player.

Frank Riva is at best an insipid police drama, such that some captions and sequences were left to my tinnitus encroached deafness to do what it could with five years of French lab, but Delon is a clever bastard, gnawing away at Watergate era paranoia despite a fairly tepid story of shared generational guilt that lives on past the Nixon years.

Alain may not have worked with Gene, but as I suspected, he came up the same time as Hackman did, and in Lost Command, he inhabits the same aloof persona as in Riva, the man in the middle, neither a proponent for European hegemony, nor the freedom fighter, becomes imperiled but escapes, much like Edmund Dantes. Hence, Riva needs to be examined against two of Hackman's signature performances, Popeye Doyle in The French Connection and Harry Caul in The Conversation.

Riva is a kind of double take against the worst perceived threat to liberalism in American history. Every twist in Riva is about the underside of justice-- that justice itself draws the blood of the righteous, that no process isn't rife with corruption, and is doomed to repeat itself. The Loggias are fossils, much like GF 1 and 2 are museum films, but those fossils leave their imprint, not only on Maxime, but on Riva's unrealized daughter and the child she carries, a baby passed around like so many croissants to dip in the coffee bowl-- we'll pick this up after I do some sweating. I need to drop off the rent and go food shopping, and manage my fear. I told Trudy Richardson I was done with Presby, with compliance that deliberately attacks my dignity, and I meant it, but I am scared I am going to get myself killed. Forcing my own eviction leaves me prey to human predators who aren't going to care if they rape me or what.