Apparently, human beings had been rising in stature in the back of my mind, so Netflix and my subconscious joined forces to give mankind their comeuppance. My wife and I had not been watching many movies of late, what with the Pig Roast, vacation in Canada, and Bigfoot starting grad school. We finally got around to watching movies again in early September, and my faith in mankind fell with every frame.

The first film we watched, the Pianist, is beautiful, violent, ugly, and ghastly. Adrienne Brody's portrayal of a Polish Jew desperately surviving in Nazi controlled Poland earned him an Oscar. I did not see the performances of the other men from that year, but I doubt they came close to Brody. Jesus, he played every damn emotion possible, and did so beautifully.

(The movie Netflix sent us, however, had the most inconvenient skips in DVD movie history. Half-way through the film, just as Brody became almost the only character in the film, the skips invaded. God Damn! He walks up to a door - SKIP! Then, after some attempted cleaning, he walks over to a window - FREEZE! Bastards messed up my whole evening.

By and by, we managed to get the gist of the middle of the second half of the film, and the end played out reasonably well. We asked them to send us a clean version, and I plan on watching it soon.)

The other movie we've watched is "The Killing Fields", which is about the violent rule of the Khmer Rouge' in Cambodia during the late 1970's. A New York Times writer, Sydney Shanberg (played by Sam Waterston) and a fellow Cambodian reporter named Dith Pran are separated during the country's upheaval, forcing Pran to find his way out alive on his own. The actor who played Pran, Dr. Haing S Ngor, lived nearly the same life as the character, and was easily as good, if not better, than Brody.

As much as I enjoyed the acting on an aesthetic level, all that pleasure was lost on account of the profound cruelty of both the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge. Each man survived to tell his tale, but not because of either of them being particularly clever as much as they were lucky. The violence of each regime was random - men, women and children were killed indiscriminately. Their survival amazing is amazing because both men kept their composure long enough to save their own lives.

But for every man in those stories who represents the best of humanity, hundreds of other men stood silent in the face of escalating violence, or participated in the violence themselves. Those men and women represent the despicable core of humanity that permeates the stories of every civilization. As impressed as I am with human scientific progress at times, I marvel at what little that means when it can do nothing to change the nature of humans.

It's a shame when such thoughts come when one is snuggling on the couch with his lovely wife.