When Ted Bundy (you know, the guy who would kill women, decapitate them, bury them, then return to the graves to dig them up and have sex with their headless, rotting corpses) defended himself at his trial, there were groupies fawning over him in court like he was some kind of dream date. That's a lot to let sink in. Take your time.

That was in 1979. No doubt Oliver Stone was fascinated and turned his particular eye - pulling back curtains to reveal darker realities - to trying to capture the depravity of it all. NBK came out in 1994 and satirized/lampooned a culture in which people's pain is dismissed, and causes of their dysfunction are minimized, but when they lash out at a society that failed them, when they do despicable things, they are lionized, sensationalized and exploited.

It was a keen, sharp critique of the world we really do live in. If the image in the mirror is horrible, don't blame the mirror. This movie is but a mirror.

Sure, Tarantino (of whom I'm a big fan, but no human being is perfect and he's not above criticism) may have some reasons for disowning this interpretation of his story; fine, so remake it like Stephen King did with the made-for-TV mini-series to tell his The Shining story more closely to his vision.

But, to allow Tarantino's disdain for what this movie got wrong is to, sadly, overshadow all that this movie got right. Sadly, horribly, right.