injury, I think it was irresponsible of director William Friedkin to begin filming a year after the assassination of Harvey Milk. To be fair, however, homosexuality was a subject that most people (never mind Hollywood) was inexcusably ignorant of as late as the 1970s. Cruising tried to do the best it could with the obviously slim knowledge it had on the subject. That’s why the film’s most sympathetic portrayal of a gay man (Al Pacino’s friendly neighbor) is, at best, a stereotype. For its more dire depiction of gays, the film was at least sensible enough to stress that they are not representative of the gay community as a whole but of a small faction. Looking past the sensitivity issues (and for some, I acknowledge, this may be impossible to do) you find a tense and often exciting police thriller. Even in the scripting there are some ambiguities and too many things left unexplained that don’t work to the film’s advantage, but it shouldn’t have taken Al Pacino starring in 88 Minutes to make us realize how good Cruising is by comparison.
Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983): This one got a bad rap before it even hit the theaters. One group of naysayers took offense at the tampering with an old TV favorite, Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone series. This is understandable and hardly surprising. Then, the tragic death of actor Vic Morrow and two children during production cast a pall over the whole production and some started asking, “was the movie worth it?” Of course not! No movie, no matter how good, is worth human lives! Judging by that yardstick, no movie will ever measure up. The death of Morrow and the children was a tragedy and the result of gross negligence and disregard for safety on behalf of the crew and