Kingdom of Odds and Ends

I have finished Kingdom and Heaven (a while ago actually) so let me give you my final thoughts on the movie.

I wish movies would quit making some bishop or cardinal out to be a schmuck in a robe. Seriously, I understand that all you Hollywood types think religious people are all hypocrites, so just let it go. I hope you feel proud of yourselves for hitting an easy target.

Aside from that, the movie actually made a fantastic statement regarding Jerusalem and all the people who have died over the "holy" land.

Our hero stays in character the whole time...his character being a blacksmith who knows military strategy, but he never wavers from his convictions, which lead him to assualt a massively larger force in order to allow the common folk to escape. He takes his vows seriously, and is willing to die for people he doesn't even know, only because he promised to protect them.

Movies about honor usually get high marks from me, there are only so many anti-heroes I can stand......

Which leads us to "V for Vendetta." I liked it, but if we had replaced a masked freak with a Muslim it would have been banned because the main character is nothing more than a terrorist. The soundtrack should have been "Rage Against the Machine," it was so anti-government.

But....as I was driving down the street the other day, I saw cameras above the intersection, supposedly to catch people running red lights. We are told that if we are law-abiding citizens we should have no issues with being recorded, and yet.....

This leads to the big question. How many people getting killed by terrorists in this country each year are we willing to accept in order to keep our freedoms? I don't know the answer, but what is our freedom truly worth?

Brave men and women died for our freedom over the course of this nation's history, are efforts to keep everyone safe taking away those freedoms? Should we try to keep everyone safe, yet allow people their freedoms and realize that a certain amount of people will die each year due to us being free?

I don't want to live in a perpetual state of lockdown in order to avoid all risk to my life. People were willing to die so that OTHERS can enjoy freedom, can we really do any less?

Dearth of Stuff

I've been very busy at work, so busy that the normal irritants of life didn't drive me to write, rather it drove me to drink......

4 cases of Diet Dr. Pepper later I feel human again.

Last time I wrote a post regarding how I had nothing to write about, a whole flood of things came to me, so maybe that is what will happen, hopefully I will be able to insert gruesome pictures of dead people back into my blog as well.

I'm watching "Kingdom of Heaven" right now, in stages. It is a long movie and lends itself well to being watched over the course of a few days. I'm liking it right now. I believe many critics panned it, or just were not all that excited about it, but I am a sucker for movies about honorable people, trying to do what is right amidst moral decay, when even the "good guys" tell you that you will regret not "doing a little evil for the greater good."

I am especially a sucker for these movies when they are set in medieval times when the men acting knightly and honorably are actual Knights, with horses and stuff.

Anyway, I don't know if the ending flops, but so far it is worth it, for the political intrigue alone.