I partially agree with the fiendish Wayne La Pierre in one respect: I am personally sick to death of movies that revel in style-violence. Or, put another way, of filmmakers (like Django Unchained director Quentin Tarantino) who delight in decorative blood, bullets and death for what is essentially decoration sake or the momentary surge of a cheap popcorn “guy high”.

Violence obviously can’t be excluded from any realistic impression or distillation of life on this planet, but there’s a difference between honesty and “wheee!” presentations of “ecstatic” cruelty and savagery. If you’ve witnessed real-life violence you know what it feels like (i.e., chilling, godawful), and if you understand this you know that movies almost never go there.

I say this having fully enjoyed great violent gun battles in dozens of great films. They’re too numerous to count but the downtown L.A. shootout in Heat, the shootout out in that small El Paso hotel in The Getaway, the climactic gun battle in The Wild Bunch, and Tony Montana‘s final moments of life in Scarface are at the top of the list. I could name 100 such favorites. But I hate violence that feels glib, cruel in an indulged-auteurist sense, cynical and festishy. I especially hate films that wallow in this while claiming at the same time that they’re against social evils like slavery.