I vaguely remember watching Shamus as a kid, but like Prime Cut I somehow blanked out the best parts. I remembered one scene where he finds the body of his friend (Burt’s friends in the seventies had it rough – remember Cartetaker and the light bulb bomb in Mean Machine?), but that was about it. How could I forget he slept on a pool table, picked girls up with lines like, “Do you fool around?” and kicked so much ass.

I should qualify that he kicks a lot of ass for the first half of the movie – it goes off the rails towards the end which is a real shame. There’s a great running chase sequence early on that these days would swap realism for some nifty parkour, but instead we get Burt doing all of his own stunt work as he leaps and mostly falls off things. Great stuff.

This leapt out at me too:

I still find it jarring when the Twin Towers make an appearance in a movie, but this small glimpse in particular had me pausing the movie and checking Wikipedia to see how old the towers would have been when this movie was being made. The film was released in ‘73 and has a copyright of ‘72 while Wikipedia has this shot of them going up in ‘70. It’s interesting that the bands of yellow that adorned the construction are still partially in place in the screengrab. I need to make some time to watch Man on Wire I suppose…

When I was a kid the idea of actually going to New York was about as likely as nipping to Moon Base Alpha, but now I’m a frequent visitor (just to the former, alas) it still comes into focus for me through the movies I grew up with rather than the experiences I have there. That said, hanging out with fire fighters at 2am in an honest to god New York fire station probably trumps repeated viewings of Mean Streets.

Private detectives were a bit of a mainstay for me as a kid too. I was talking about the benefits of working freelance just the other day and it struck me that I have almost the same lifestyle as Jim Rockford because of it. I meet interesting people all the time, saunter into bars anytime I damn well like and also make do with off-the-rack, low-budget, slightly tacky clothing.

People try to kill me a lot less, but I tend to see this as an advantage.

There’s a lot of talk on Twitter about rock stars – something that has never sat easy with me as most rock stars are total cunts. What I’m slowly discovering is that we’re a loosely connected group of gumshoes and that suits me fine. I’d rather be a (private) dick than a cunt any day of the week.

One of the TV things I may get to breathe some life into in ‘09 is a police procedural thing. I’m suddenly thinking it makes a lot more sense to make it a P.I. kinda deal…