“If you didn’t suffer from emotions, from feelings, you’d be as powerful as we are.”

  For those of you in the dark, it’s now common practice for any restrictive government action, whether censorship of pornography or increased authority for removing a minor from the home, to justify child protection.

But when the situation is reversed, when children are “monsters”…what do we as a society do? Do we violate the most inviolate tenet in our culture by destroying what we cherish?

Seeing Johnny Cool is next to impossible because the film has never been made available on video and there is no DVD release. A curious time capsule and very unusual film treatment for the early 1960’s, the movie is reportedly “enjoyable”—especially, it’s said, when today's standards for rating a film is taken into account. An offbeat melodrama, it's a rough and brutal movie, and shocking for 1963:

HARRY S TRUMAN  

U.S. President ( in office: 1945-1953) in a radio address to delegates in 1945 at the opening session of the United Nations conference in San Francisco said:

“We must build a new world, a far better world—one in which the eternal dignity of man is respected.”

On 22 November 1963

at 12:30 PM

President John F. Kennedy was

Assassinated in Dallas, Texas 

The Warren Commission issued the official report: Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating the president.

This conclusion by definition made Oswald the greatest sharpshooter in the 233-year history of the United States Marine Corps. That record still stands after more than 45 years. No one before or since has been able to match his performance.

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TUCKER: THE MAN AND HIS DREAM (1988) directed by Francis Ford Coppola stars Jeff Bridges and recounts the attempts of Preston Tucker (a man on the cusp of the future with endless enthusiasm) to manufacture and market his Tucker ’48. A safe and reliable family automobile, the post-World War II model sedan offered innovative and revolutionary technologies of disc brakes, seat belts, fuel-injected engine, padded dashboard, front windshield that ejects upon severe collision, all instruments within the diameter of the steering wheel, and a padded dashboard with aerodynamic styling—radical concepts for the 1940s.

The Justice League of America is the team of superheroes published since 1960 by DC Comics. A live-action motion picture version of the comic was in the works during 2008 before being shelved. The word “America” possibly would have been dropped to make the movie more palatable abroad, an important consideration for Warner Bros., the studio developing the film.

Marvel Studios had been facing a similar dilemma with Captain America until the Obama administration arrived on the scene. Problems of American hypocrisy over the course of the past seven years have entangled fictional superheroes in the difficulties of real life. The United States under President George W. Bush legalized torture, refused to address the commission of war crimes (Is the taking of innocent life ever justified?) in Iraq and Afghanistan, and massive human rights abuses both at home and abroad.

Western movies since 1903 have defined the iconographical horizon of the American cinematic landscape. It’s those movies, the ones tough to let go of, that have made my list of the Top 10 and, frankly, it's an arbitrary number because I’m not about to list fifty movies here, but the ones that filmmakers have crafted into an idiosyncratic, ironic reversal of the stock Hollywood convention.

Listed here by no particular ranking, but shown chronologically according to the year of their release, is the Top 10 Western Movies of All Time:

 Claudia Cardinale

Elected to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame posthumously in 1987, Marvin Gaye in the last year of his life commanded “center stage” and held it with force but without effort; and with his death, Gaye’s legend was born, as interest in his life reawakened anew.

Criminal warlords along the tribal belt of Pakistan is giving material support and protection to what remains of al-Qaeda.

Hidden in the harsh reality of Pakistan’s Northwest Province Territory (NPT) near the Afghan border, where border security is nonexistent, al-Qaeda's goals remain murky with no specific plan to continue the “war” of erasing the American presence in the Middle East by coercion while imposing its vision of Islam on the world. There is no evidence of a coherent strategy, or capability of regrouping after September 11, 2001—yet Osama bin Laden, his lieutenant, Ayman Zawahiri remain at the top of the list of terrorist threats against the United States with “the central front in the war on terror” situated precariously along Pakistan's western frontier.

In the Diyala Province of northeast Baghdad an influential parochial group practices Salafism, a restrictive form of Islam that severely rejects modernity, where grocers are prohibited from placing tomatoes—the specter of femininity—in proximity to cucumbers. And there’s absolutely no display of bananas, whatsoever.

Such is the parallel universe to which we flee in going to the movies, suspending our collective disbelief almost as easily as believing that what we see on screen is real. Any relationship between reality and its cinematic Doppelgänger gets muddled in no small way, that's true. But whatever fuels our entertainment drives Hollywood and forces audiences to confront their lust...not for sex but for violence.