I've had my current wireless phone for longer than the terms of my original contract, and this seems to make some data mining computers nervous. My phone company has got their call centers alerted to the problem, and every week or so some hillbilly is calling me up with a new scheme to get me to agree to a new contract: a new phone, additional plan minutes, free "texting", discount merchandise. I feel like I have power over them now. I wonder if a new contract could entice them into sending over a few hookers with a bottle of champagne. These companies need to try harder to compete for my business.

For some reason The People Who Want Me to Want Things wanted me to want to watch Syriana: they coated it in candy and made it shiny, gave it new-car smell, clipped out a theater trailer full of explosions and intrigue. But more! I was to learn how "morally ambivalent" the Middle East situation really is, how complex and difficult the remaining choices; this film was going to capture it all and make me understand. Here you go, lad: the Red Pill. Finally!

It was important to Them that I swallow this pill -- of a movie; the movie is a pill, see -- because otherwise I wouldn't have learned the Real Truth beneath all that showroom glitz, underlying the explosions and the intrigue: the Real Truth that the Middle East situation is actually quite simple, that the choices are morally clear, and that the only actual problem there is the standard one: greed, corruption, and America. It was really a matter of public duty to get me and everyone to see it.

And now how educated I have become! How enhanced my breadth of understanding! I never would have expected that boardroom full of greedy, amoral oil executives. How splendidly powerful they all looked wearing their politician tool belts! Who would have guessed that corrupt politicians could be involved with the oil industry? Fascinating! And that some Arab princes are Good Princes while others are Bad Princes? It turns out that the difference between them is their willingness to sell oil to American companies. Now I get it! And don't forget the poor and downtrodden Arab oil workers who lose their jobs and therefore have no choice at all but to blow themselves up in the name of Islam. Some might call them terrorists, but we learn it's all because they've been corrupted by a corrupted sect of Islam. Who would have imagined that?

I was so enthralled by these unprecedented revelations that I barely even noticed all the exciting action: one guy dives into a swimming pool; another guy drives really fast; a third guy plays cricket; and the explosions! There were like three explosions. Or maybe two; I lost count because I became breathless. And who could even keep pace with all the multi-layered complexities: the movie was very clever in not revealing basic information about what was happening, so it was really suspenseful trying to guess who everybody was and what they were doing. Several characters and plot points even seemed to have no purpose whatsoever, but I'm sure that's my fault; I should see the movie again to find out what was actually going on.

I'm so happy I was given this chance to swallow the Red Pill and really learn about the oil industry and the Middle East. I wish I could somehow *pay* the creators of this movie for such captivating enlightenment and entertainment. But I suppose they'll have to settle for this little review: 3 whole stars out of 10! And my sincerest gratitude.

Meanwhile, says the Scottsman, it's been discovered that Josef Stalin, Iron Man of the Soviet Empire, directed scientists to cross-breed men with apes in an effort to produce super ape-man warriors "insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat". Unfortunately, and in confluence with some simultaneous time-travel experiments, these efforts only resulted in producing... Josef Stalin. That's right, Josef Stalin. Ape-man.

When I was studying literature the lit teachers usually tended to prefer "open" texts, books that allowed a lot of latitude in interpretation or provided enough material to support virtually any kind of reading, because they a) allowed for more classroom discussion, and b) provided a ready platform for whatever sort of bullshit the instructor wanted to spout off about. Movie critics, who are to real journalists like the retarded sibling kept locked in the tool-shed, tend to favor similar types of movie, especially the ones who think highly of their own intellectual gifts, flush with fancy qualifications for reviewing other people's products. They like films that are not semantically explicit because they consider it an invitation to *cooperate* in creating what the film might finally become. Often they disagree with one another and so more or less fail to convince anyone; but sometimes they agree.

David Cronenberg's _A History of Violence_ (HOV) is an example of such an "open film"; not to the extent of an average Fellini or Lynch extravaganza, but to an extent that doesn't scare off audiences. It is -- at the bare minimum -- about a man who has to defend himself and his family from a group of mobsters determined to kill him. This man, call him Protag, may or may not have been a mobster himself years ago, but now lives in a quiet town running a diner. And it's a film about which many critics seem to agree; and the way they've gone about augmenting it, supplying it with the meaning it doesn't itself deliver, is by tossing it up high onto a soapbox. They find in it "a sobering reflection on our culture's attitude toward violence" (Washington Post), feel it "show[s] we secretly crave what we publicly condemn, and how we even make peace with it" (Rolling Stone), maintain that it is somehow an indictment of America's (or humanity's) supposed predilection for violence. We -- the audience currently in need of understanding what we've watched -- are supposed to derive from HOV that everyone (or at least every American) has some latent and roiling wellspring of violence ready to erupt at a moment's notice.

"For what this film is concerned with more than anything is the pernicious, corrosive effects of violence," says Kenneth Turan of the LA Times, "the way its pervasive taint is as hard to rub off as blood is to wash out. Each act of mayhem in the film, however seemingly justified, simply begets yet another one, until it starts to seem axiomatic that once you let violence into your life it will never leave you alone, never allow anything to be the same. The question is, once you've taken someone's life, can you ever be a whole person again?"

Which might be an interesting movie, whichever movie Turan is talking about, but it's certainly not HOV. The violence in HOV has a natural conclusion and a specific origin; there was never a matter of "letting it in": it was there before the film began, simply waiting for the opportunity to surface. The violence in HOV isn't "cultural" or "endemic" -- it's necessitated by the contrivances of the film's plot. It's not "seemingly justified", it *is* justified. Airy-headed critics like Turan seem to believe Protag had some other option available to him, as if maybe a persuasive argument or running away would have somehow changed the mobsters' minds about killing him. The film is supposed to shockingly remind us that our culture favors violence as resolution to difficult problems. Well, yes -- if several armed mobsters are going to shoot me, I'm all in favor of shooting them first. What's so shocking about that?

Turan and similar critics plainly want to use this film for their own agenda. They want to preach about how *wrong* it is (always!) to resort to violence. They want us to know without actually stating it that invading Iraq was *wrong*, that killing terrorists is *wrong*, that violence committed against our enemies will only beget more violence against us. That's the subtext of some of these reviews.

But maybe the subtext has its own subtext; maybe the widespread critical fervor to rationalize this film in certain specific ways is explainable without resorting to political agenda. Perhaps these critics, who seem to live in carefully manicured mental estates where Kum-Ba-Yah is the national anthem, are shocked that they found themselves rooting for Protag, for feeling that the universe was right when the bad guys got what they deserved in the manner they deserved it, that Justice actually might be administered through the barrel of a shotgun. Perhaps they are disturbed by evidence that maybe -- in certain circumstances -- their view of the world and certainty regarding moral behavior may be wrong. That violence is sometimes the only alternative.

In either case, reading these reviews, I can't help feeling as if I've encountered a culture of critics who are so disturbed by the uglier faces of reality that a necessity to commit acts of violence shocks them, and turns them antagonistic. As if somehow -- despite the myriad lessons of history and current events -- somehow despite having lived at least a couple dozen years by now, *somehow* they didn't already know this. Wow. Sorry kids. Luckily it's just a movie though, right?

Or else they're just being political like their siblings, the real journalists.