Since I, along with others, am making an MJ personal playlist these days...

I need to include these two songs - "I'll Be There," from the Jackson 5's 1970 album, and "They Don't Care About Us," from MJ's 1995 Best-Of CD, "History."

And on a similarly important note, my loving roommate lovingly fixed my blog, which is now here -

queuetips.wordpress.com

Cops -- A Dog Day Afternoon

In the movie world, cops are the forsaken kings. They are both guardians and perpetrators of the unsavory sides of humanity, and, nicely for us, the films in which they appear tend to be the more expressive of the cultural atmospheres in which they were made. We should be thankful for that because, without those wonderful moods and settings that are created in most cop dramas, the films would be sorely one-dimensional, and our recollections of the past four decades would be way too paranoid.

In the 1970s American cops in film were transgressors of the status quo, and often they were sunken into the moral quicksand that made up crime and law in their cities.

Television in the 70s, being on the post-Cold War helium, was not the time for cop shows as much as it was the time for spy shows, but Peter Falk's impressionable Columbo during that decade paved the road for the 80s and later, when cop dramas started to pick up steam with a sense of materialism and a goofy kick of humor. CHiPs and Miami Vice are shining emblems of a time when cops were offspring of our own renamed post-radical cultures, when things seemed mysteriously safer on a surface level. At least until a homemade videotape of Rodney King's arrest emerged and appeared on local Southern California news and then on CNN in the spring of 1991. We saw a different impression of the police in that video, and it shocked us in ways that couldn't be put away or toned down.

So we arrive at cops in television in the early 1990s. Stephen Cannel gave us Michael Chiklis as The Commish, an amiable teddy bear of a police chief in New York State trying to smile his way into a New York City commissioner job. These episodes are available on Hulu now, and are worthy of a watch here or there for what they remind us about television's turn from the staged situation, where reality is constantly suspended, to sharp verisimilitude. The Commish, situated just before this turn, influenced current shows like Andy Breckman's enjoyable Monk, which only slips out of interest once or twice per episode, amazingly managing to keep a hold on us with its silly takes on plot and character, much of the credit going to Tony Shalhoub himself in the title role.

David Chase's The Wire, an irresistibly engaging show that aired on HBO between 2002 and 2008 has been critiqued, followed and appreciated in many blogs and newspapers, such as the series of blogs Jeffrey Goldberg and David Plotz did for Slate and The Washington Post: http://tinyurl.com/2lx327

There is a lot to say about the senses of community in the police force and in the Baltimore street world of The Wire, both of which intersect a very few number of times. When they do intersect, it is manufactured and necessary. Bubbles, a junkie acting as a source to the detectives, or Officer McNulty (troubled, unsatisfied, Irish) meeting with a dealer and understanding in a quiet moment what it is that has got the young soldier into trouble, are careful and believable instances of two worlds connecting.

This discussion can bring us nicely to films where the cops and the perpetrators exist in similarly the same fashion, negotiating law and rules in order to find ways to connect. A Dog Day Afternoon (1975) [http://tinyurl.com/l3tjlw] is a fantastic film for any big city to show on a big sheet in the park after the sun goes down. Al Pachino's energy, almost bizarre in its ability to regenerate and regrow out of nowhere, as the film's star bank robber, holds up a bank in Brooklyn for the purpose of buying a much-needed sex change operation for the love of his life. Chris Sarandon, as this love, is unhinged by the cops' presence in his space after a hostage situation begins, and it is here that he walks a tight line between the 70s-period stereotypes about queerness that Martin Scorsese highlights for us in Mean Streets (1973) [http://tinyurl.com/my2wgk], and a character who is genuinely thrown out of whack by the presence of a group of police. Sidney Lumet's direction makes this a venerable tight-rope act. Pacino's own claim to fame in the film, a single uncut scene in which he goes from raging at cops to calming his manner for a phone call with his lover, is a gem in a fine work.

Top 50 WWII Films

This is an interesting list to put together because it's a list that only an individual of the unshakable variety would ever choose to make. 50 seems like a lot, but it's also just a fraction of the WWII films out there. So many of them are so very bad and one can stand for 100 of the Hollywood studio productions that gave us plenty of Ronald Reagan and John Wayne films in the '40s. They are watchable only in the best of moods and with respect for where they originally were presented to audiences. It's news to me that Tarantino is a great lover of the genre. Fair enough.

There are some fantastic films on this list.

http://www.timeout.com/film/features/show-feature/8366/

A Prelude

Summertime is a time, recession or no recession, to get too hot, drink beer and watch movies. I don't see why anyone should really have to apologize for doing any of those things with regard to also needing to do a full day's worth of reasonable work. In the summer sometimes real work comes out to half a day, sometimes even less than that. And in that time, these movies make the fact that one is not working or producing something meaningful of their own, irrelevant. Because movies are great. And watching them makes you feel great. And that is why this blog is born on a summer day in early August. I just don't want to go more than 24 hours without languishing with a film.

I will post some items that I find interesting or wonderful or horrendous. I will suggest good movies to keep on your Netflix queue, right above that whale documentary you've been meaning to watch and sandwiched under National Treasure. Both of which should be watched, by the way. I will also maintain a project in which I review films that are connected with a bit of thematic string, films that can be pointed to in time and place as a moment of film history and that played a part in a culture. It may have broadened that culture, or it may have simply magnified it. Either way films are parts of the personalities, literature, politics and philosophy of our world, and in this way they are crucial to our history in the last century.