Trivial thoughts.

[uvula_fr_b4]

A couple of thoughts that aren't exactly "senses-shattering" (as many a blurb on a Marvel Comics cover in the 1960s and 1970s would have it) that occurred to me this weekend:

• After watching the second Dirty Harry movie, Magnum Force -- this is the one with (SPOILERS!) the execution squad on the police department being secretly run by the

Comments

[marlowe1]

Whenever I write Criminology papers, I mention Dirty Harry as a barometer for the Law and Order reaction to those damn liberal courts and their concern for "criminal rights" as opposed to victim rights.

Magnum Force seems to have been an attempt to de-politicize the franchise and go "See! Dirty Harry also goes after crazy cop vigilantes"

of course, it would take Alan Moore to point out that the whole superhero/vigilante trope is the most fascist thing ever and make it into a believable fiction. And then Zack Snyder missed the whole point.

Still, it's rare for these action movies to actually admit to the fact that they are biased. Red Dawn is about the only one that is openly rightwing.

[uvula_fr_b4]

After listening to about an hour of John Milius' commentary for Magnum Force -- he wrote the story, and co-wrote the screenplay with Michael Cimino (now there's a writing partnership made in heck...), and did an uncredited co-write on Dirty Harry -- I was somewhat surprised to hear him both defend the traffic cops/execution squad (led by a pre-Starsky and Hutch David Soul, with Robert Urich [Vega$; Spenser: For Hire], Tim Matheson [Animal House; The West Wing] and Kip Niven [who he??]) and refer to Hal Holbrook's Lt. Briggs as a "liberal," even though Briggs expresses dour approval for the first executions, within the first ten or fifteen minutes of the picture.

Of course, Milius also consistently and erroneously referred to Briggs as a captain, so I guess he couldn't be bothered to actually watch again the movie that he co-wrote before he recorded the commentary track for it.

Pretty funny that Milius thought that his script for Jeremiah Johnson got jacked; makes me wonder just what sort of disservice he thought that Sydney