Actuakers One of my all time favorites.
Dirtylogy It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.
BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.
Quiet Muffin This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.
nomoons11 Every time I find a Matthau movie I've never seen I eagerly wait to find it on DVD or some way I can watch it. He usually carries the whole movie on his back but in this case, he was dead flat to say the least.This one was slow as marbles on a flat board. I mean the whole setup was painfully slow and missing parts that could have made this more interesting. They didn't delve too much into the dead cop's background, but just enough for you to wanna know more. What Cathy Lee Crosby's role in this is a mystery to me. She meant nuthin to it except she may have been a lesbian, or not. Could have been the dead cop's kinky girlfriend, or not.Bruce Dern turns this one into something watchable. He's usually the quirky smarta#* in most of his roles and he's no different in this one but his lines are far and away the best in this missed opportunity. It amazes me he never got bigger roles than he did. He's such a fun actor to watch. He was a gem in this one.
disdressed12 this is one movie i can't say i liked or disliked.it was all story,not much anything else,which isn't necessarily bad.it was mostly as slow as molasses flowing uphill in January,yet just interesting enough to keep watching.it was also pretty glum,in my opinion.of course the typical stereotypes of the era are here in full force.not a horrible movie by any standard,but not great by any standard either.it's one of those movies where i could take it or leave it.after it ended,i was pretty much indifferent o the whole thing.it wouldn't matter to me whether i saw it again or not.but maybe i'm being too hard on it.maybe it is what it was supposed to be,a simple crime drama.anyway,for me,The laughing Policeman is a 5/10
birck On the strength of Walter Matthau's ability with a character, the strong cast list, and the original Swedish crime novel-which was excellent-I watched the whole thing, unfortunately. As someone else on this forum noted, it works well for about the first 15-20 minutes, then decays into pointlessness. The main character's partner, played by Bruce Dern, is brought up short repeatedly when he makes wrong moves with witnesses, or says the wrong thing, so often that I expected an explosion. Which never came, and that thread finally went nowhere. A meeting with a group of Hell's Angels went nowhere, at least for the story. I could handle the dated costumes and social norms, but after an hour or so, it seemed as if that's all the film had to offer-a tour of SF's colorful corners in the Haight-Ashbury era, with a tacked-on murder mystery that came to no satisfying conclusion. It isn't necessary for every film-made-from-a-novel to stick exactly to the original, word-for-word, but the only good part of this film was that first 15-20 minutes, which is transported fairly closely from Stockholm, where the original was set, to San Francisco. Once the bus has crashed, and the dead engers have been identified, It goes rolling straight down Potrero Hill and into the Bay.
MrSubway1 Yes this is a slow moving police investigation. After the initial massacre on a SF city bus, that does a great job of pulling the audience in, the action slows considerably.The initial crime scene investigation is both authentic and pathetic. It is a glaring example of poor techniques that were employed by all police departments as recently as the 1980's. In this movie all the detectives were traipsing through the crime scene, smoking cigarettes and touching everything in sight.Though the autopsy scene is long and the actors playing the corpses couldn't quite stay still, the actual autopsy was painfully authentic. Also authentic was the medical care given to the only living bus enger. This was way before ET and ER and dare I say probably influenced both.The characters and the themes the detectives deal with mirror the change and turmoil that defined the 1970's. The seedy city that has been romanticized recently is well represented in this film: promiscuous gays, pimps and prostitutes, kinky sex all out in the public.Those things are the real strengths of the film. The murderer himself is a let down as is investigation that leads to him. A rich man kills a detective to prevent that detective from fingering him as the murderer of the rich man's wife. He kills everybody on the bus as cover. Oh please. If he is that ruthless and smart to do that, than he is not going to hold onto the gun, or get spooked by some detective who shows up with an old photo. The climactic scene on the bus, when the killer gets shot while trying to wipe out another detective on another city bus is so contrived as to be laughable (perhaps how they came up with the tile).Overall, enjoyable as a period piece and character study.
