I can not get past man’s inhumanity anymore. However silly comedy isn’t appealing anymore either. I basically go with what works for that moment that coincides with my mood. I am like that with music, too.

Dark Swan simply blew me away. Outstanding. That was the last movie I saw.

Sad things without hope.

Anything where the innocent are abused, without justice forthcoming.

Anything that portrays humanity as beyond redemption

Nearly anything political.

In other words,almost anything dealing with reality. I watch stuff to be entertained and to escape reality. Whether it is science fiction, fantasy, violent action films,or whatever, the common thread is they have little to do with reality.

As for the specific show, Spartacus, it is not for everyone, Alice cringes and yuks when she watches it out of the corner of her eye. I tease her by telling her I get so stoked, I want to jump into the arena with them. That always gets a giggle.

For me it is so far fetched in it’s take on violence it almost attains the level of cartoon violence, where the dog that gets flattened by the steam roller reappears in the next scene. The only difference is the flattened don’t come back and there is “blood” involved.

As for the blood, which is Alice’s biggest objection, it so much over the top it loses it’s reality. Frequent and deliberate splashes of the blood onto the camera lens also contributes to the unreality.

In the end, it is nearly all bad guys who get violently dispatched, and that pleases me.

I watch Americas’ Funniest Home Videos alot more often now…on mute. Barely can stand people’s voices.

I am such a crab.

I suspect I miss a lot, consider the price worth it. I don’t consider movies to be particularly entertaining in the sense “Mr. Roberts” was, or challenging the way “Bridge Over the River Kwai” was, but just rather tedious or offensive.

I can find tedious and offensive just by rereading my old posts.

The Romans had a highly cultured and sophisticated civilization, comparable in every way (except technology) to our own. They also had highly evolved senses of personal, family and public honor and virtue. That they indulged in such horrors as the gladitorial games is as incomprehensible to us as the genocide of the Nazis. But we need to think about it and understand it, because I have no doubt we also indulge in activities just as self-destructive and pathological as theirs, but we are no more aware of our perversions than they were of theirs. I have no doubt that a thousand years from now people will look back at our time and wonder “But they were so advanced in some ways, how could they have done that.”

It is the purpose of art to teach us those things. The artist may not be able to guess what our metacrimes are, but they have a duty to remind us that we are really no different than our ancestors were, so we need to look harder to find them.

And in some cases, like war movies, portrayals of brutal, senseless and exaggerated violence should be mandatory; although perhaps “exaggerated” is not the right word to use here. It is hard to exaggerate the violence of a real war, any war. People (especially adolescent males) need to be indoctrinated into the idea that combat is not “cool”, exciting, glorious or patriotic. We need to able to fight when we have to, but it should always be the last resort, and we should never look forward to it, or see it as some grotesque expression of our courage. I know for a fact it takes more courage to declare yourself a certain outcast from society by refusing to fight than it does to docilely bear arms and allow others to send you off to war..