Shopping for punctuation marks

If I were going out to restock punctuation marks, I would buy a pound of periods and the same of commas. More endashes and colons than are probably good for me. A small bag of ellipses if I'm writing a speech, but not if I'm writing for print. Wouldn't take an exclamation mark even as a free sample. The economy pack of quotation marks, apostrophes and hyphens. Ambivalent about semicolons. And then we come to the little pairs of parentheses. Never buy them, as a rule. Got little to no use for them. I figure, if you can't say something right out in the open, then why mention it at all? But then, in this morning's New York Times, there was this:

Since its release in December, James Cameron's science-fiction epic has broken box office records and grabbed two Golden Globe awards for best director and best dramatic motion picture. But it has also found itself under fire from a growing list of interest groups, schools of thought and entire nations that have protested its message (as they see it), its morals (as they interpret them) and its philosophy (assuming it has one).

That's mighty fine use of the parenthesis, right there. A body probably ought to have a few around, just in case an opportunity like this comes along. Okay, I'd take three pair. Probably a total waste.