After realizing I’d seen a paltry amount of William Friedkin’s filmography (for the record, The Exorcist, Jade, like half of Blue Chips, and maybe Bug, I don’t really remember), I finally got around to watching The French Connection the other night. It was as good as its reputation, especially since I’ve gained an old age appreciation for car chases. It also sparked a discussion with my wife about how good we’d be on a stakeout.

I actually thought I’d do pretty well, as I’m nosy and I like staring out windows, but there’s a scene where Gene Hackman eats a slice of pizza on the street and at that moment, I realized I was out.

It takes at least 6 pills and an injection for me to have a slice of pizza, which is not an insurmountable task, but even after 40 years of taking pills and 10 years of injections, it’s still a pain in the ass. I have to consult a blood sugar graph before I eat, a process which has probably blown at least one fuse in the ol’ brain circuit, but luckily the missing fuses are all non-essential so far. Though my enjoyment of cheese went up about 200% when it became a food I don’t really need insulin for, so maybe I just blew a fuse in my cheese limiter.

To be fair, there was a point where I didn’t have or need the blood sugar graph, so if I think really hard, I can remember back to when I could have whatever snack whenever I wanted, but the 130 pound guy who used to carry a giant bottle of pills into any fast food restaurant within a 50 mile radius and eat until his stomach got stretch marks is buried somewhere in my now 180 pound frame.

I suppose that the act of getting older was going to curtail that one way or another, but one of the limited joys of cystic fibrosis was an unlimited diet and having to avoid snacks not because they’ll ruin my appetite but because I won’t be able to have any insulin with my dinner if I take some now is a truly bullshit way to live.

Plus I can’t just have street pizza like Gene Hackman.

Changing the Record

I ended up watching The French Connection because I saw a bunch of headlines about how the newly posted streaming version had a racial slur cut from it. I’m not sure exactly who made that decision—maybe Disney who currently owns the rights or perhaps it was made by Fox before they got there—but it’s funny that they cut an early slur but left at least two other slurs later in the film.

We should be in a world where the archival promise of the internet has reached it’s full potential, but we gave the keys to a bunch of corporations and they don’t give a shit about any of that.

I own a lot of movies on physical media, though I shouldn’t have to. I have no particular love for  blu-ray discs, to the point that my main way of watching them is by ripping them to a massive hard drive at full quality and streaming them from a server. I believe this is actually illegal, so if this ever shows up in court, I’m going to deny the hell out of it.

The thing is, the process of buying digital films doesn’t have to be bullshit, but it is, because someone feels like it makes the more money by licensing you a DRM ridden file instead of just letting you download the goddamn thing you want. But I understand that the golden age of movie ownership is over for most people, just as it is for music.

That doesn’t mean it’s good.

I’m not going to sit here and tell you I don’t enjoy streaming music, which puts a great chunk of recorded history right at your fingertips and lets me do stuff like listen to every Prince album in chronological order without taking out a personal loan. And while I think it’s obvious to anyone with any experience in the real world that this arrangement isn’t going to work out well for artists, occasionally the cracks show on the user side too.

I was listening to In Flames’ The Jester Race on Apple Music the other day. It’s an absolute masterpiece of melodic death metal that I’ve heard hundreds of times over the years. It’s one of those albums where every turn is hard coded into my brain. Which is why I found it so jarring when one of the songs was wrong on Apple Music.

Track 6, “Dead Eternity”, technically exists on the Apple Music version, but instead of the album track, it’s the (demo?) version from one of the re-releases of their earlier Subterranean ep. It’s still good, but it’s not as good as the album version and even has a different singer.

I know it sounds like that doesn’t matter much, but what if someone listens to The Jester Race for the first time and the version they listen to has one of it’s highest points sanded down? It’s such an unforced error. It’s not the first time I’ve run into something like this. It won’t be the last either. Because this stuff does not matter to whoever is counting the money. I get that. But that’s also why I’ve got a hard drive of ripped songs ready to go when someone figures out that getting rid of mid 90s metal albums will get them a hefty tax write off.

For the record, the most damaging error I found was about 5 years ago when pretty much every streaming service replaced the album version of Alice Cooper’s “Welcome to my Nightmare” with the shorter single version. The funniest one I saw was on the 2022 remaster of Coil’s The Ape of Naples, where the fourth song is shown as “Tripe Sun” in which one missing letter gives a meaning very different from the actual title “Triple Sun”.

Things I Like

It’s been a big week for me finally watching things people told me where really good. I can admit that I thought everyone was full of shit about Train to Busan, because nothing disappoints like a horror film that was reviewed at a festival, but 7 years later I stumbled across it on Shudder and I’ll be goddamned if it wasn’t a masterpiece. It’s able to increase tension in surprising and interesting ways while also not fumbling basic human emotions. Hell, I may even watch it again.