While I am not a wannabe law enforcement agent or an individual who blindly condones their more outrageous excesses – corruption, racial profiling, accidental shootings, etcetera – I do find great pleasure in certain fictitious sleuths who have gained eternal notoriety in the annals of literature, TV, and film over the course of recent memory.
If you do not understand how or why I find enjoyment in following their pursuits, then I highly recommend picking any one of the following five detectives to examine in closer detail through the body of work that has given them their due reputation.
5. The Bad Lieutenant
I am well aware that this the name of the gritty crime flick from Abel Ferrara circa 1992, but the individual I am referring to is the depraved anti-hero portrayed so poignantly by Harvey Keitel in the above motion picture. With next to no interest in actually solving any real crime in the heyday of David Dinkins, the Lieutenant (how Keitel is actually credited, there is no other name for his character in the entire movie) gallivants around the sordid city ingesting large amounts coke, freebasing in Spanish Harlem, jerking off on the bridge & tunnel crowd, and making ill-advised bets against the Darryl Strawberry led LA Dodgers of 1991. This is Ferrara’s greatest character ever, hands down.
4. Jimmy McNulty
The Wire was such a seminal series in regards to so many different topics due to the unparallel character development that took place over the course of five seasons. Apart from possibly Omar, Homicide Detective Jimmy McNulty is the most original personalities to emerge from this classic series. Possessing any uncanny knack for true police work, despite his raging alcoholism/satyriasis, Jimmy McNulty constantly plays a fine mediating influence between pathological street thugs and hustlers, and career-driven stat flunkies in the oft-reviled Baltimore Police Department in The Wire. He is the glue that holds the whole thing together.
Although football (soccer) has yet to reach mainstream prominence in the US, I still feel compelled to write about the beautiful game on this website to hopefully broaden the horizons of some of our more ‘internationally challenged’ readers out there in Scribeland.
Hence this week’s Five Spot is about the five best, in my humble opinion of course, football (soccer) strikers in the world. For those who aren’t aware of what a striker is or does, it is roughly, one of the attacking forwards who generally plays ahead of everybody else on the field.
While I know that many of our readers will be wondering why we decided to run a Five Spot on this topic, all they have to do is ask themselves one simple question: when have you seen James Woods in a movie where he did not make you aspire to greater anti-social behavior?
If you said ‘The Way We Were,’ then you need to calm the fuck down, as we all make unfortunate decisions when we are young. Regardless of his inherently misguided conservative beliefs, James Woods is one of the greatest character actors of his generation to ever grace the silver screen.
I don’t know quite what it is that makes his acting so effective. The bulging eyes perhaps? Or his wiry junkie frame? Most likely it is the pathological rage, which he channels into each and every character he portrays. Whatever it is, James Woods is street legal. Even if you robbed senior citizens for their medication and Social Security money, you would still never be as gutter as this prolific asshole.
For those of you who don’t celebrate James’ catalogue like I do, here are five of his finest roles that should catch you up to speed with the rest of us James Woods aficionados.
5. Once Upon A Time In America, 1984:
In this flick, James Woods’ portrayal as Max, a Prohibition-era, Jewish bootlegger in the Lower East Side is arguably his finest. Starring alongside Robert DeNiro in famed Italian director Sergio Leone’s last motion picture, the original edit of this film is one of the greatest movies ever made. However, I can’t give any details of the plot here without spoiling the entire movie, but if you haven’t seen this epic yet, then you need to put this at the top of your Netflix queue immediately.
While Heineken and Guinness have held the distinction of being Europe’s most famous beers for decades, this does not necessarily mean that they are the finest. This continent is renowned for its cuisine and wine, yet it also produces many of the finest lagers, stouts, and ales served the world over.
Although an exercise in subjective opinion, here are Scribe Culture’s top five favorite European beers:
5.Zywiec
Originally a brewery founded by ruling members of the Hapsburg Empire during the pinnacle of their empire in the mid-nineteenth century, ?ywiec was nationalized by the communist Polish government following WWII. Although Poles received the short end of the stick, ideologically speaking, during the Cold War, at least they had subsidized beer such as this to drink away the pain.
Organized criminal organizations have always played a pre-eminent role in domestic and foreign cinema for over seventy years. From Howard Hawks’ groundbreaking gangster archetype Scarface in 1932, to the recent release Gomorrah, films have perennial showcased various societies and their accompanying criminal underclass to differing effects. With few exceptions between, these organizations function and flourish in almost every corner of this planet.
With that said, there is an abundance of international films dealing with this often taboo subject matter through their particular vantage point. While most westerners are familiar with the more celebrated representations of this genre such as The Godfather Trilogy, Snatch, and City of God, there is a plethora of other less notorious, yet highly distinguished movies depicting organized crime in its many guises. This week’s Five Spot dishes out five organized crime flicks from around the world that warrant greater attention from the masses.
By CLS 
By CLS
