Worst and Best

Today I saw both the worst and best movies of my Netflix career.

The best: Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. The best because I love this film and coming into work and having it pop into your lap....well, it would sort of be like going to a bar and having Emmanuelle Chriqui (Sloan from Entourage) hit on me.

The worst: December. I had just watched Stand by Me the other day and frankly, was willing to watch Will Wheaton in just about anything. December turned that all around. It was worse than Stand by Me is good. The movie is about 4 prep school kids talking about whether to go fight in WWII the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed. Not a terrible premise, just terribly executed. Not one joke. Everyone yells at each other the whole time. It makes one wonder what kind of life the director must have lived where he thinks people communicate by shouting real dumb things at one another for 1.5 hours like "People die in war!" and "Why don't you want to serve your country?" And other stuff like that.... "My dad was a hero and I'll never be like HIM!"

Eeewwww.

Then I saw a documentary called Black and Blue: The Legends of the Hip Hop Cop. Here is an example of what not to do in a documentary. The worst thing one can do when making a documentary is to try to expose some sort of evil. You can't do it. If there is something hidden or evil, no one is going to open themselves up to the camera. What's worse, is this documentary tries to expose something that really does not seem like a big deal.

In a reaction to the violence associated with hip hop duels (Biggy and Tupac, etc) and concerts, the NYPD started collecting information on hip hop artists with criminal records. A cop who knew a lot about hip hop become the resident expert on who was hating on who, etc, as a means to try to prevent violence from happening. His nickname was the Hip Hop Cop. Anyhow, he put together a binder of information about rappers and their entourage with criminal records and shared it with other officers and the Miami PD who was worried about some incident happening at an upcoming concert.

Clearly, the documentary filmmakers thought of this as a crime and a violation of these rappers civil liberties. They interviewed rappers, the ACLU, Al Sharpten, and a host of guilty-conscioused white people about the evils of profiling and having this binder.

But the irony is that the same people who chastised the binder were the ones most upset that the police can't solve hip hip crimes, especially the Biggy and Tupac murders. So I'm sitting there watching thinking - wait, so do you want the police to be collecting intelligence or not? Because I presume the intelligence would be helpful in both preventing and catching criminals. I suppose the question is whether you think it's an infringement on civil liberties. But the binder was more or less public knowledge, and the documentary filmmakers showed it to rappers who were getting a kick out looking themselves up.

Luckily I didn't need to watch the whole movie because of technical problems, but of particular annoyance to me was the ACLU guy who was totally bullying the cop by shoving angry questions at this cop.

PS - Being pointed out the lyrics of some of these songs, obviously everyone knows about Fuck the Police and Cop Killer, but there was another song called I Shot Rudi in reference to Rudy G and so the cops arrested one of the rappers because he had an outstanding warrant. The ACLU guy said "So you arrested the guy for rapping." The cop said, "No, we arrested him because he had an outstanding warrant." "But you wouldn't have arrested him if he didn't rap about killing the mayor." "Probably not." Well, no shit. Welcome to the real world, you terd.

Anyhow, I fail to see how Imus and Michael Richards speech can be considered more hateful than rappers threatening to kill cops and mayors in lyrics. In fact, it's pretty clear that rap lyrics are considerably worse. Yet the Al Sharptens and other grief mongers want free speech for one group and to throw the book at the other group. Don't see how you can explain that rationally.