You have provided absolutely no justification, beyond saying "It's neat to watch women's vaginas pulled inside out," for the viewing of these violent movies. Perfectly understandable, of course; it's the justification all the gore freaks use whenever anyone calls them on their pretensions. "How could you NOT like this?" they say.

It's a parallel to the way the rich and the powerful ruin this country. Why not lock your desperate illegal immigrants overnight in your superstore to make them clean it? Why not screw millions out of their retirement investments? Why not let all those people who are not your color drown in New Orleans? How could you NOT like this?

It's all based on disdain for anything but yourself and your own desires. It is the justification of spoiled children. Maybe that's the base problem of everything in America, 2007; we're all spoiled children, and the natural result is Eric Cartman with a box cutter slicing the throat of an airline stewardess as our feature film tonight.

If you are truly passionate about a field and care to see it improved, you know things like this. I'm better than Havrilesky (which isn't saying much) but there are many people who could beat me hands down.

Several years ago I listened to Harry Knowles of "Ain't It Cool News" at a convention. I didn't even ask a question. He was talking to other people at his autograph table and I eavesdropped. He showed knowledge of movies, foreign and domestic, that was both deep and wide; foreign films I'd never heard of and intricate details of schlock films. I concede that he might have bamboozled me on his knowledge, and his critical integrity is very tarnished. But from what I saw, he knew his stuff more thoroughly than many published critics, and he was smarter in person than he is in print.

The more you know about entertainment and its different forms, the more you can see parallels in it, how history may repeat itself, and how an individual work may be part of a bigger trend. In this case, the big, friendly, clean, intelligent Navy officer puts the best face on the American military at a time when it is a questionable career choice (to say the least). That happened in the 1950's with No Time For Sergeants, stuck between Korea and Vietnam, and with Gomer Pyle USMC, the only Marine who would ever think "frag a gook" was one of them modern dance steps for Saturday night.

And enough knowledge can save you from mistakes. For instance, when I first saw this Doctor McPoopdeck, I thought of the old Jackie Cooper series Hennesey, a program lost to TV history about a Navy MD - and arguably the first dramedy, which didn't have a laugh track and occasionally slipped into serious drama. But Dr. Hennessey was a lot smarter, working at the top of his intelligence all the time, and this Bachelor dude was too golly-gosh about everything. He wasn't a Hennesey, but I wish he would take Hennesey's place way down in the depths of the memory hole.

Movies and TV and comic books and novels and literature - it's all humanities. They are melding into one another. Which means you should know something about everything in the media.

When Disney was first promoting The Lion King, the studio tour guide called it "a modern retelling of Hamlet." Now, thanks to America's incompetent teachers, most people believe Hamlet is what you buy if you can't eat a full spiral-sliced ham, so Disney stopped making that comparison in public. But if you knew the comparison, it added depth when you saw it.

Some people hate this melting pot. Fans of anime hate that ordinary people are starting to watch it, thus making it less "special" and them less of an elite. But it's improved animation for both American and Japanese studios. In the same way, SciFi Channel's The Dresden Files has brought new attention to Jim Butcher's very satisfying detective/horror books.

And while no, Knowles didn't mention much about TV when I was in his presence, he does occasionally in his column. (I know you have to hold your nose to visit www.aintitcool.com, because of all the kiddie fights there, and because of the ever-present cronyism, but hidden among that you can occasionally find insight.) Not having contact with media outside your specialty can be limiting; it was annoying to see pro critics critiquing the X-Men movies and wondering who this Wolverine character is - when most people have known Logan since his introduction as an antagonist for The Hulk.

By the way, give up on Saturday Night Lights. It's impossible for the general public to like high school football players, the people who either beat them bloody in high school or tried to rape them. (And yes, I left it open as to which sex the players were raping and beating.) It's even worse that they're Texans, the children Bush left behind. All the characters on the show should go careening off a cliff, be killed, and wind up monsters in a cheap Tarantino film. At least then they'd be interesting.