Last weekend, I stumbled home from seeing Ballast at New York’s Film Forum, stunned at its contemplative regard for human-sized people working out their human-sized problems. Gorgeous. Some great films leave you a staggering drunk; Ballast is one of those greats that leave you hobbled but stone sober, lucid, hearing through walls. So when I plopped down on my bunk that night, you can imagine how rattled I was to hear Dennis Quaid getting keelhauled by automobile across a strip mall. That’s what it sounded like, anyway. There were about fifteen minutes of squalling tires, shrieks, Mr. Quaid growling incomprehensible orders, glass shattering, curses in several languages, metallic sobbing/slapping/ripping noises.

The ruckus was coming from the next bed, from Salaam’s portable DVD player. He was half-awake, his leg dangling from the top bunk, head nodding then springing up at the more violent eruptions. I said, “Yo, Salaam, what’s that you watching, Innerspace?” Salaam perked up. “Nah. What the fuck is Innerspace?”

“Dennis Quaid shrinks down and goes inside Rick Moranis—no, Martin Short.”

“Goes inside—what? You be watching some weird shit, man. Nah, this is Vantage Point.”

“Oh, yeah, right.”

I remembered the trailer for Vantage Point, which was just like being keelhauled through Barcelona: The plot involves an assassination of the U.S. President at an outdoor gathering in that city, seen from several vantage points, including that of Secret Service pro Dennis Quaid. Quaid, Forest Whitaker and others in the international coffee cast go on a white-knuckle race against time to piece together the crime.  In the trailer, as in the film, the chaos—the keelhauling—starts early and rarely lets up.

I overhear it a lot at the house, emanating from thrillers-on-bootleg like Street Kings and Eagle Eye: a wall of sound. And I’m not talking Sigur Ros here. Isolated from the picture, many of these films sound like an undending cycle of shouts, rapes, baptisms, humiliations, bloody births, tortures, demented soliloquies and procedural jargon whispered in the stuttered breaths of a masturbator on the verge. These movies sound clammy and sweaty, anxious to get you to buy, like a Mid-Manhattan electronics dealer. These movies sound like they want in your panties and in your wallet, at once, or they will taser your nerves with ugly sounds until you submit. These movies also sound like they’re out to impress as much as molest. Shock and awe.

But, just as I don’t suppose there was much genuine awe in Baghdad on the morning of March 20, 2003, I doubt that too many mouths are hanging open at these films’ sense of spectacle. These movies are desperate to bring off a feeling of technological might and national will, but they sound like the aural equivalent of a short gym rat talking shit outside the club. These movies want to be paeans to the strength and resolve of our institutions, the genius of those who devise, attend to and even subvert them. The worst of these so far this year is The Dark Knight, a summer movie that lingers in the cellar of my memory next to spinal surgery and getting jumped in the street. Its “complexities” and “dark themes” threw many critics off the trail of its central thesis: Whatever dialectic struggle lawmen and criminals are locked in matters far less than the finesse and awesomeness on each side. The wonderful toys, and our heroes’/villains’ mastery of them, are the takeaway. These movies flatter the professional classes, protectors and captains of industry with the romance of their own stalwart super-competence. The rest of us are meant to bow and be grateful we have them around to keep this crazy world from falling in on our fragile little heads. Or so I hear.