Robert Emmett Murphy, Jr.

  "Qualified Immunity" is being hotly debated. I'm here to tell you there is nothing to debate. Anyone who wants Cops stripped it have no idea what they are talking about. The Blue-haters will tell you it was invented in 1967. No, it existed for generations before that. It was affirmed by SCOTUS in '67. Blue-haters will always bring up George Floyd. QI doesn't apply to criminal charges (so not Floyd's death), or even all civil cases. Moreover, it applies to all public servants, not just cops. It protects public servants from some personal law suits, but not all of them. If you sue a cop over a UoF, the Police Department takes the brunt of the suit, and shields the cop from court costs and/or penalties unless the plaintiff shows that the cop (in in other contexts, any public official) violated "clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known." It DOES NOT protect the official who was "plainly ...

  Fringe (TV series 2008–2013) I’m going to break a cardinal rule of reviews/essays like this, I’m going to start with a spoiler: The Observers are behind everything. I think I will be forgiven, because in the end, I’ve spoiled nothing. Looking back at the full run of this marvelous series, and trying to unravel its hydra-like narrative, I keep imagining how the producers were stymied by having to, again and again, rewrite their five-year-plan. I further have the hubris to think I have gleaned what the original, jettisoned, plan was -- You see, by the time it’s over, defying the shows internal logic, the series explicitly states the Observers are NOT behind everything. Well, I say bullshit. Everything is the Observers fault. But I’m getting ahead of myself. First... With the exception of the British cult hit “Sapphire and Steel,” (first aired in 1979) there has never been a Science Fiction TV program that so aggressively tackled broken causalities than this one; and with the except...

  World's Greatest Dad (2009) Writer/director Bobcat Goldthwait’s “World's Greatest Dad” is a fine heir to 1988's black comedy “Heathers,” as both films assault our desperate yearning to mythologize the dead and both concern our society's flailing absurdism when faced with our powerless to avert tragedy; both put suicide victims (who in both film’s plots didn’t actually commit suicide) on unrealistic pedestals to assuage our guilt for never being good to people in general while they actually lived. They are over-the-top, acerbic takes on the first section of Leo Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” (novella 1886) making the case that our rituals of grief don’t work, they distance us from sincere emotion and corrupt us by breeding dishonesty; but unlike Tolstory these two films don’t lay the blame on the route-ness of our ritualism, the fault in our society is truly the fault with ourselves. For the most part “Heathers” and “World's Greatest Dad” dislike the people w...

  100 best Science Fiction films Popular Mechanics list #85. Starman (1984)   A remarkable thing about Director John Carpenter is that he is so enthusiastically derivative, yet so highly original, in the same gesture. Almost all his films are about the films he loves, and this was especially notable in his first three features: “Dark Star” (1974), which maybe the only film ever to successfully pokes holes in the pomposities of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968). “Assault on Precinct Thirteen” (1976) which moved Harold Hawks’ “Rio Bravo” (1959) from Old West to contemporary Los Angeles. His break-through film, “Halloween” (1978), in no way hides the fact that it was an uncredited remake of “Black Christmas” (1974), yet somehow proved to be one of the most distinctive, and itself imitated, Horror movies ever made.   Then comes this one.   “Starman” came on the heels of Director Steven Spielberg’s, “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial” (1982), and ...