"The fireworks keep them distracted...."

Today we celebrate the birth of our nation* with a country-wide orgy of beachgoing, flame grilled meat and cold beer, which hopefully will not be from a can. Unpatriotic as this may sound, I, as a movie lover, am not interested in all that sand, salt water and sun, despite living just 10 minutes from Florida’s golden beaches.

No, I want to hide from the glare-producing death rays of summer's peak and take advantage of the time off from my day job to indulge in those patriotic pleasures that can only be delivered on celluloid. While the alcohol, of course, is still mandatory, I think there are more entertaining ways to fry my brains than the scorching rays of our home star – and at least two of them come from Roland Emerich and Dean Devlin.

The directing/producing duo’s films The Patriot and Independence Day are both slick, goopy, sentimentally jingoistic entertainments of the first order – bad movies for sure – but not entirely terrible ways to zap some gray matter on midsummer free day. If only they'd combined the two and had Mel Gibson fighting aliens during the American Revolution, we'd have the ultimate July 4th classic.

Of course, there’s always Bravo’s seemingly neverending marathon of The West Wing, which delivers the democratic (as well as the Democratic) process in short, punchy sound bites that are so sharp they almost get me to believe that the whole political process really Means Something. Hurrah for America (except those bad old Republicans)!

*Not The Birth of a Nation.