Uma save us

While most guys watched football this Thanksgiving, I devoured old samurai films. I just finished Yojimbo (The Bodyguard) and I'm ending with Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai . I'm not sure why I did this on the national day of thanks. Kill Bill was my favorite film of the year so far. Yet this glorification of film violence concerns me, especially during wartime. I look around and see many things going completely wrong and subconsciously I dream of fixing it. Most things don't change without a fight. All you have to do is watch a National Geographic special and you won't have to wait long before you see a tooth, fang, or claw. Maybe these films just remind us of that or maybe gratuitous violence is fun to watch in an escapist movie.
My town made the headlines this week. A sniper shooting motorists on a deserted stretch of highway I frequent. As I drove my mom and sister home, we got to the stretch of highway we had just seen on Headline News and CNN reports. We got goose bumps and , in a way, felt like uncomfortable targets. As we looked out into the woods, we suddenly became detectives looking for clues. That was a much healthier way to cope with the fact that 11 motorists had been shot at on this road recently. Although if I had my way, I wish Uma Thurman with a sword was sitting beside me. That would be totally cool.