Here's a quote from film critic David Denby, writing recently in The New Yorker about the movie Zero Dark Thirty: "The raid begins with beautiful shots of Black Hawk helicopters taking off at night, silhouetted against a few brilliant lights. The journey across the mountains from the base in Afghanistan to western Pakistan is conducted in darkness and quiet, like a sacred ritual. The SEALs are older and beefier than you expect -- bigmen in their late thirties who nonetheless move smoothly, as if their legs were on finely calibrated springs." Aestheticizing violence -- especially mechanized, contemporary, violence in this way makes me quite uncomfortable. I suppose Hollywood might next do a movie about the 'Batman' movie-theater kills and we might be told how the gunman silhouetted against the light from the screen in front of the room made for a striking visual. A bit later, Denby is calling the movie "an example of radical realism [with] its myster...