We got in a couple of old Gene Hackman movies this weekend I'd never seen. The French Connection and Mississippi Burning.
I liked The French Connection pretty well, until the end. The movie definitely comes from a different time, when the pacing, story-telling, just everything, was very different in film. Once a movie like that has gone on long enough to get immersed in the style of the time, it settles into an enjoyable story. Just that the end was very abrupt, and also not satisfying. Really didn't stick the landing, for me.
Mississippi Burning was very good, and had Willam Dafoe, who I like, and also a young Michael Rooker and a young Pruitt Taylor Vince. That movie, like the The French Connection, was unfortunately also based on a true story. It came out in about 1989 or so, and I read that in 2005 there was new evidence that came to light and one of the ringleaders who planned everything but was either never implicated or never convicted (I forget which) confessed and was sentenced to a long term. He just died in 2018, presumably in prison, I guess. About the film itself, it definitely had the 80's-movie vibe, but that is a lot closer to what modern films feel like than the 1971 French Connection movie.
