Wow, what a bad movie, as a movie. I love the whole idea though…
SON: If we had the brains to live in the country… we wouldn’t be here for the reason we are today. [To visit his sister, who went crazy after being gang raped and had to go live with the nuns.]
We’d be going into the city to work …Mom and Carol would be safe at home waiting for us.
FATHER: Nothing to do but cut and run.
SON: What else?
FATHER: What about the old American social custom of self-defence? If the police don’t defend us, maybe we ought to do it ourselves.
SON: We’re not pioneers anymore, Dad.
FATHER: What are we, Jack?
SON: What do you mean?
FATHER: I mean, if we’re not pioneers, what have we become? What do you call people… who, when faced with a condition of fear… do nothing about it? They just run and hide.
SON: Civilised?
FATHER: No.
I love how every five minutes, the inspector calls 60+ cops into the squad room to update them on the investigation of the “vigilante murders.”
Wow, maybe Hollywood-New York pre-Guiliani would’ve had fewer muggings (remember those?) if all those cops had been walking the beat instead!
(Or maybe they’d just being handing out chickenshit tickets. So scratch that…)
Great snippet of dialogue — man and woman at an Upper West side cocktail party, mid-movie:
MAN: The guy’s a racist. He kills more blacks than whites.
WOMAN: More blacks are muggers. You want to up the proportion of white muggers to have racial equality?
Note that if they remake Death Wish today, the Man’s line will stay in the shooting script, but the woman’s lines will be cut.
We used to be able to talk about things we aren’t allowed to talk about now.
Doesn’t that frighten and anger you?
Probably not enough.
What about this (which is not fiction or a summary of a Philip Roth novel a la The Human Stain, but an event hat just happened) — insert your own “teachable moment” joke!
This very month at the University of Connecticut, an anthropology professor teaching a class on the cultural significance of “the N-word” showed clips of Chris Rock and Richard Pryor using “the N-word”.
Shortly thereafter the professor was reported for, er, using “the N-word”.
The prof is white.
The student who reported him is the “Multicultural and Diversity Senator” on the student council, a member of the Black Students’ Association and an activist who wants to “instigate unity on campus”.
And let’s face it, the easiest way to “unity” is to “instigate” it, isn’t it?
So the hapless professor is now being forced to take “diversity training”, because nothing says “diversity” like mandatory “unity”.
And to think American students have run up a trillion dollars in college debt for the privilege of being “taught” by the kind of pansies who agree to submit to “diversity training” for commiting the crime of using “the N-word” in a class about the cultural significance of “the N-word”.
