Hacker Cinema
Sudden Impact
1983 · Film · 117 min
Part of Dirty Harry Collection
Directed by Clint Eastwood
When a young rape victim takes justice into her own hands and becomes a serial killer, it's up to Dirty Harry Callahan, on suspension from the SFPD, to bring her to justice.
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2 comments on Hacker News
sigh
Let me guess: you were born in the 70s to 80s, and the 80s/90s were a formative time for you? That is because you don't remember all the shit that played in whatever golden time period you're imagining. You only remember the hits. You're not accurately remembering the broad distribution of what was on the radio and in theaters in the past, which also contained a lot of crap that you likely never would have wasted your money on. Terrible movies got dumped to TV specials or direct-to-video (today they get dumped to streaming platforms), so even if we filter to what was released in theaters, we're missing a lot of crap.
But how about we look at the top grossing films of 1983 [1], 30 years ago? Some of these hold up and are the classics you remember, like #1 Star Wars Return of the Jedi (still a franchise though), #2 Terms of Endearment, #4 Trading Places, #5 WarGames, #10 Risky Business, #11 National Lampoon's Vacation, #13 The Big Chill, #16 Scarface. Bonafide classics, no question there.
But go even a little down the list and you get middling sequels and formulaic franchise films: #6 Octopussy (formulaic Bond film, which was the Marvel of its time), #7 Sudden Impact (Dirty Harry sequel, not great), #8 Staying Alive (Saturday Night Fever sequel, not great), #12 Superman III (one of the worst Superman films of all time, but ahead of Superman IV), #14 Never Say Never Again (another Bond film, better than Octopussy, but still two in one year), #15 Jaws 3-D (one of the worst action films of all time), #20 Psycho II (another meh sequel).
And these are the top 20 movies ranked on how many people paid to see them in the theaters. There are hundreds of others that were regularly shown in theaters that I'm sure you can't recall. Some are classics now (Videodrome, Monty Python's Meaning of Life), but most are not.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/list/ls051080169/
The disingenuity lies in the lack of context.
The emergence of the NSA as America's secret police did not happen as an aberration but within the phenomenon of shrinking rights that I've noticed since my political awareness began in 1980 or so.
Since then, I have not seen any expansion of rights for anyone, except maybe for those living in the former Warsaw Pact and non-humans (e.g. pets) in the US.
I have however seen a relaxation of controls for groups such as law enforcement.
It may have started with the belief that "criminals have more rights than victims" that found expression in movies such as Sudden Impact. Such sympathetic arguments missed the point that the power of the state doesn't target victims.
Regardless of origin, law enforcement lobbied for - and usually got - exception after exception to the bill of rights until we reached the point where an actual trial hardly matters.
While the rights of suspects and law-abiding people shrank, the scope of the term "national security" grew, fueled by another belief - that the survival of the state mattered more than its' intended purpose - the protection of the lives and liberties of its' inhabitants.