Hey there, Movie Fans! I went to the movies this weekend, like all of you, to see the Dark Knight. And like all of you, I knew that if I arrived less than an hour before the show started, I wouldn't be able to sit anywhere at all. So I enjoyed the always wonderful "Regal First Look," where advertisers let you know that since they have a captive audience, they're going to play all of their advertisements really loudly and for an incredibly long time. I saw a couple advertisements for a new show and I think that we should talk about it, because quite frankly, it's kinda creepy.

The show is called The Cleaner. It's a new show from A&E and it looks like its views on right and wrong are completely moronic. Now, you may be saying, "Jake! You've never seen this show. How do you know it's stupid?" And I'll tell you. As some of you may have noticed, I haven't posted for a while. It's not because I'm a lazy bastard. It's because I was spending all that time taking a correspondence course in horrible television, and now I'm golden forever.

Let's go over really quickly what The Cleaner is about, just so that we'll all be on the same page. The Cleaner is about a group of former drug addicts who kidnap current drug addicts and through a combination of keeping them in secluded locations and speaking to them from a few inches away from their faces, help them get off drugs. Wowey! I hope they come to MY next birthday party. I never quite feel like a celebration is a celebration without a group of righteous fascists judging me and all my friends for enjoying various forms of substance abuse.

The great thing about seeing The Cleaner previews in the Regal First Look forced audience watching thingie is that you get to see all these interviews from the cast members talking about how great the show is and what a wonderful concept it is. Seeing Benjamin Bratt tell us how he really feels like the show is about hope and how it's going to help people get to somewhere new in their lives is just beautiful.But that was only the start of my wonderful fascismo day. See, after I enjoyed the Regal First Look, I got to watch The Dark Knight itself, and if anyone had any doubt about whether Alan Moore and Frank Miller's seminal works about fascism and superheroes had any effect on the current views of the characters, this should sweep them away. I won't give away just how it goes, but keep a look out for FISA on the list of thanks for the movie, and you'll understand.

Now, I wasn't terribly thrilled with the movie. I didn't think it was bad or anything, I just also didn't think it was great. I'm not here to give a review of it, but I'm smart so you should just trust me. But sometimes when I'm not a huge fan of a movie and everyone else is, I like to go online, find a couple mediocre reviews of it and feel like I'm not alone in the world. And then I made a mistake. I looked at the comments on the reviews. Stream after stream of fanboys making violent proclamations of the reviewer's idiocy, blanket statements about their ability to correctly do their jobs and whether or not they'd seen the movie. And after spending just a few minutes on the infinitely democratic internet, where everyone gets their say, I finally understood fascism.

Surely, in a world of high technology and instantaneous communication, we'd be learning, striving, bettering ourselves. But no, we'd rather talk about how a random guy doing his job is "gay" for not sharing our opinion. Fucking democracy...I challenge you to read any thread on a negative review for a summer blockbuster and tell me that we don't need a fascist dictatorship to keep us in line. Heil, Batman!