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Irrelevant to everything that follows (well, kind of; see third paragraph below): Fellow BOP-er Josh Spiegel’s recent column on The French Connection informed me that the formerly ubiquitous Gene Hackman has starred in no feature films since 2004. I am galled by my lack of knowledge concerning this and more than a little sad. Hasty research reveals he has written two novels since then and announced in 2008 that he considers himself retired from acting. I feel like puking and crying simultaneously. How did I not notice this absence? How did I lose track of Gene Hackman for six years!?

To fill this Hackman vacuum, please do rent/buy/stream Night Moves, one of the best of the spate of mid-to-late-1970s American films where a political thriller and/or detective story serves as allegory for the malaise and rot of a nation. Hackman is at his anti-heroic Everyman best. It’s sardonically funny, brutally violent, and features an ending that will dazzle your eyes and break your heart. Kind of like how mine is at the moment.

Relevant to some of what follows: This will be my last Chapter Two for a stretch. I consider this more of a summer hiatus than a Sleater-Kinney “indefinite” hiatus, but time will tell. The whys and wherefores? Simply put, I am running on fumes, as many parents of infants can be from time to time. I feel like there are hours in the days for only so much.

What does this list include? Well, there’s my day job (8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday); working out (during my lunch hour, as I have reached the age where slower metabolism decrees that the gut is more easily obtained than shed); making dinner for me and my girlfriend (tonight I tackled a recipe that Rachael Ray prepares for Donald Trump - Steak Pizzaiola Burger); and, oh yeah, spending time with my son. Attempting to carve out time chunks for movie viewing and column writing doesn’t seem to be in the cards at the moment. And would I really want to attempt this if the result would be feeling resentment towards my son for doing what six-month-olds do? I can’t dignify my hypothetical query with a response. I will simply proceed with the regularly scheduled programming.

In my very first column, I admitted that there were a lot of films I had seen only once. I offered it up sheepishly then as I do now. My excuse (which is a fair one, but still . . .) is that I was more concerned with seeing as many films as possible in my younger years and trusting my judgment from that singular experience. The great ones, as with the worst ones seemed easy enough to spot and all the ones in-between - from flawed masterpieces to heroic failures - would just have to kick around my head until I got around to a second viewing, which might never happen.

And yet, as someone who finds it impossible to take notes that might actually help jog my memory in a post-viewing assessment, I too often relied on an initial feeling that - facts be damned - may have been swayed by the particulars of my state of mind that day, the circumstances of the viewing, or the buzz (both current and historical) surrounding said film. Certainly, every critic (indeed everyone who holds forth an opinion on any work of art) is subject to outside forces having a say in their initial (as well as subsequent) critiques. It’s an unspoken but universal truth that need never be acknowledged until, well, you come clean and admit that your opinion has changed.

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