Garotos do Coro

I was a cop with about 10 years on the street when I read Wambaugh's book, and figured the movie would be terrible. I thought Altman and his crew caught both the flavor of the book and of life on the mean streets of LA dead on.

Maybe you had to have been there. I was a great Hill Street fan (still am), but it was sanitized for TV, and much less like the real thing because of needing to maintain a plot line. Life ain't like that, and neither was The Choir Boys.

Cop humor is hard to fathom for outsiders. Cops are, in fact, a minority group anthropologically, meeting all the same criteria. Life out there doesn't go from A to B to C. It's chaotic. So was the movie, a little. Good job of catching the feeling.

It seems like we're supposed to hate this one but I loved it, I'm sorry but there you go.

Maybe it was because it came out at the time when punk had just happened. To me the book & the movie were such a break from the usual stereotypical pro-authority nonsense we were being regularly served up at the time (and sadly we seem to have gotten back to these days).

Naturally the book was, by far, the better experience (a genuine 'laugh out loud' read to be highly recommended) but nevertheless I found both hilarious and a long overdue reality check on the forelock tugging blind belief in benevolent and always virtuous 'authority' (something which applies well outsides of the confines of any Police unit too).

I think it's a real pity we seem to have lost that very healthy irreverence & scepticism and are today saddled with way too much haughty hard-faced tedium and an expectation that we blindly trust authority figures.

...that truly excellent novels shouldn't be made into movies. Actually, Joseph Wambaugh (the author of _The Choirboys_ had several bad experiences with Hollywood directors mangling his work (The New Centurion, The Blue Knight), to the extent that he blasted the film biz in his scathing _Glitter Dome_.

In defense of director Robert Aldrich, Wambaugh's humor must be nearly impossible to convey through acting, but by the same token, it doesn't even appear that a good effort was made in this film, which seems to attempt to capitalize on a few lurid episodes of the novel that, when woven into the overall story, do much to characterize rarely-seen sides of police life, but when portrayed sheerly for shock value, kick this film squarely into "B" movie territory. It's a shame, since some decent acting performances (such as Louis Gossett Jr's) are evident, but they founder in this effort.

Overall: instead of renting the movie, buy the paperback. Infinitely more entertaining.

This is a movie searching for an audience. Best bet would be the "National Lampoon" crowd. Essentially "The Choirboys" has no plot, and really is nothing more than a series of mostly tasteless skits strung together with the very thin thread of policemen pulling numerous pranks. Nevertheless, some of the nonsense is very funny. You also have a terrific cast pulling off this stuff. To say that the film is different than the usual buddy cop movies would be a real understatement. Think "Animal House" without the fraternity, but with cops behaving badly. Definitely not an endorsement for political correctness, but a throwback to a time when one didn't have to weigh every word for fear of offending someone. - MERK

This is not a bad adaptation of Wambaughs book until the end. For some reason someone decided the movie needed an up-beat ending and blew the black ending of the book.