Just a Cop

Orin Boyd (Seagal) is a Detroit cop who doesn't follow rules. After he saved the Vice President by violating every order he received he is transferred to one of the worst precincts in the city. There he quickly encounters some corrupt cops selling heroin to drug dealers. The problem is, it's very difficult to tell who is the bad guy and who you can trust.

Cop in the Hood is fantastic. It is engrossing and exciting and real. Not just that it is non-fiction, but that so many issues Moskos talks about (motivation of beat cops, motivation of police departments, training, resources, the war on drugs) affects so much of our lives. These are our tax dollars, our cities and our citizens. I was pleased to learn that Moskos found little corruption in the Baltimore police department and distressed to learn about million dollar blocks, single city blocks where taxpayers spend one million dollars each year to incarcerate citiens who live there for various (usually drug) crimes. For that money, Moskos observes, we could have one full time cop stationed on that block 24 hours a day, including vacations and sick days. Would that cop make things safer on that block than the war on drugs? "It would be interesting to see," observes Moskos. If you like The Wire or are interested in cops or drugs, I cannot recommend this enough.

Magnum Force is the 1973 American sequel to the 1971 film Dirty Harry, starring Clint Eastwood as maverick cop Harry Callahan. Ted Post directed the second film in the Dirty Harry series. The screenplay was written by John Milius (who provided an uncredited rewrite for the original film) and Michael Cimino.

Alex Sternberg wakes up with a hangover and no memory of how she ended up in bed with a dead man. She flees, convinced that she has had another blackout and stabbed someone. Her only support, Turner, an ex cop and recovering alcoholic who is unsympathetic to her plight. She could believe that it is as simple as a violent act committed while drunk, except that the body keeps re-appearing.

A wonderfully offhand genesis (Welles adopting and adapting a shelved Paul Monash script for B-king Albert Zugsmith without ever reading the novel by Whit Masterson it was based on) marked this brief and unexpected return to Hollywood film-making for Welles. And the result more than justified the arrogance of the gesture. A sweaty thriller conundrum on character and corruption, justice and the law, worship and betrayal, it plays havoc with moral ambiguities as self-righteous Mexican cop Heston goes up against Welles' monumental Hank Quinlan, the old-time detective of vast and wearied experience who goes by instinct, gets it right, but fabricates evidence to make his case. Set in the backwater border hell-hole of Los Robles, inhabited almost solely by patented Wellesian grotesques, it's shot to resemble a nightscape from Kafka.

Sergeant Gerry Boyle, a salty village cop in Ireland, has a subversive sense of humor, a caustic wit, and an uncanny… knack for keeping people at arm's length. When a straitlaced FBI agent chasing an international drug-smuggling ring hits town, Boyle has no intention of letting the arrival disrupt his routine of hookers and wisecracks. Initially, he relishes offending and ridiculing the agent, but a murder and a series of peculiar events draw the reluctant sergeant into the investigation.

Magnum Force is the 1973 American sequel to the 1971 film Dirty Harry, starring Clint Eastwood as maverick cop Harry Callahan. Ted Post directed the second film in the Dirty Harry series. The screenplay was written by John Milius (who provided an uncredited rewrite for the original film) and Michael Cimino.