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Licensed To Kill

1997, Movie, NR, 80 mins

Licensed To Kill: Review

LICENSED TO KILL
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A highly personal documentary by Arthur Dong, who, having once been the victim of gay-bashers, interviews a series of men convicted of deadly hate crimes. The killers come from Arkansas, Illinois, New York, Texas and Minnesota; they're a Benetton ad of murderers, black and white, remorseful and unrepentant, handsome and unattractive, well-educated and pig-ignorant. Most are fairly glib and frighteningly well-versed in the cliched rhetoric of popular psychology: "I gotta let it go," says Corey Burley of the memory of shooting a gay man in a Dallas park. "Maybe some good come of it," opines Donald Aldrich, noting that his offense helped prompt new hate-crime legislation. The explanations they offer for their heinous actions are a laundry list of the usual excuses: Criminal opportunism, self-loathing, the legacy of child abuse, peer pressure, mob mentality, drugs, unfocused adolescent aggression, hate-mongering by conservative religious demagogues, alcohol and AIDS hysteria loom large in their tales of bloody violence. The sound recording is occasionally dodgy and the film preaches to the converted, but it's a powerful testament to the price of intolerance. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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