Okay Punk, I like Dirty Harry

With the weekend coming up and my being out of town, I decided to buy a couple of movies to watch in my corporate apartment. As I went through the aisles at Best Buy, there was one movie collection that I just knew I had to have.

It was the complete collection of Dirty Harry on BluRay.

What else could a guy want?

I watched a little last night, and I've been trying to think just why I like the movie series so much. its obviously corny, cliched, tired, overdone, etc. Clint Eastwood is too much of a pretty boy to ever be the real Inspector Callahan. The bad guys are cardboard cutouts -- gee, the list of faults goes on and on.

I think I like the Dirty Harry series because it is really about how, while the world is getting very complex, we should never forget simple, earthy realities. Like murderers are bad guys. People who commit crimes against their neighbors deserve to pay -- and if the legal system doesn't handle it, there's something wrong with the legal system. We have a right to be outraged. An easy-to-understand legal system is better than a byzantine-like complexity of a monster we have now, simply because it garners more moral support from the people. (The "fruit of the poisoned tree" doctrine was mentioned several times, if I remember correctly)

There is a bit of sophistry and slick willie about taking complex things and over-simplifying them. I have no doubts that many of the people involved with the Dirty Harry movies probably snickered at the yokels they were dishing this stuff out to. But at the same time, there are heuristics and general truisms that we avoid at our peril. Let's face it: O.J. Simpson was guilty. And he got away with murder because he had a lot of money and good attorneys -- things that the average murderer doesn't have.

It's not right, and Dirty Harry reminds us that we have the right to be outraged, the right to protest and tell people to go to hell if we feel like it. An understandable legal system is inherently more moral than a non-understandable legal system that allows criminals to go free at the expense of a small number of false positives.

Plus -- who can forget the whole scene that starts with "I know what you're thinking...."

It's cinema gold.