"And I can't help but think about the recent failure Grindhouse which spent a fortune trying to reproduce the look of cheap, awkward genre films."

The budget for "Grindhouse" was $53 million, which is quite modest by today's standards -- that's about what they spend on the average romantic comedy. (By contrast "Spider-Man 3" cost a quarter of a billion.)

And what do we mean by "failure"? Box-office failure? Yes, it was. But as we all know that has nothing to do with how good a movie is.

Does it ever occur to anyone who argues that directors should cast by race (or at least try) that they're essentially arguing that James Earl Jones should never play Lear? Or that Pam Grier shouldn't have been cast in "Jackie Brown" (she's white in the book).

Good God, what is this -- the '90s?

"How is it that no one else seems to have noticed this?"

Because you're wrong. SM is *killed* in the last shot of "Death Proof." The title "The End" comes on, the screen cuts to black, then cuts back for one more shot during which Rosario Dawson puts her boot heel SQUISH into his head.

And, if you listen, while the girls are driving in the car in the second half, the radio is on and someone announces a song in memoriam of Jungle Julia.

"I'm not saying this to be pedantic,"

And it don't rain in Indianapolis in the summertime.

"However, as one of the many artists who worked to create that illusion,"

I can see clearly now.

"I feel it is important to not let small mistakes like this slide, as a movie reviewer should have a working knowledge of the technical and artistic issues involved in movie-making, and it diminishes the contribution of the artists and craftspeople involved at all levels. Otherwise, how can I take their opinion seriously?"

Yeah, and I'm sure you'd be writing if this were a positive review. And even if the critic had known Nighy was not on screen behind prosthetics, it wouldn't have affected her opinion of what she *experienced* watching it.

You can't boast about how hard you worked to create an illusion and then complain that someone was fooled into thinking it was close to the real thing.

Zacharek writes an intelligent review in which she states what anyone with any life experience past the age of 16 knows: that the most intelligent, focused people find themselves in situations they didn't plan for. And that the choice of whether or not to reproduce is too complex to break down along ideological lines (NOTE: not access to birth control or abortion, but personal choice) that will make anyone comfortable.

And then, in the long, proud tradition of blowhards who haven't seen what they're pronouncing on, along comes a -- you should pardon the expression -- reader to reduce the movie to ideological terms, the very terms that don't take into account the unpredictability of human behavior which the movie addresses.

Pay attention, folks. As this movie becomes a big hit, Anonymous here has articulated the exact kind of idiocry that we're going to be hearing about it.

Anonymous -- don't let the soapbox bump you in the ass when you fall off it.

"In our 21st-century version of the Hayes Code, today’s heroines are forbidden not only from having an abortion, but from even considering one."

Apparently, you haven't seen the movie. She does consider abortion. And the scenes where it's discussed parody the squeamishness the subject provokes, not just in the movies but in life. And part of why she rejects it, I think, is that people assume that's what she'll do -- and she's just pissed off at being told what to do.

"I guess that’s why the reasons for this nonsensical plot development “don’t need to be spelled out.” ... for a popular American movie in the year 2007 to pretend that it is not a choice but an imperative, that two people faced with an unplanned pregnancy and unready for parenthood do not even consider the option of abortion ... that is absurd."

It's only nonsensical if you feel there *is* an imperative here -- the imperative to have an abortion. You know, it's called pro-choice. And if you are truly pro-choice, you can't on the one hand condemn the Supreme Court for saying a woman may regret the decision to have an abortion, and then on the other assume women are so incapable of accepting the consequences of their decisions that they will regret having a baby. ,

I can't tell you how many women I've known in their '20s and early '30s who -- today, not forty or even twenty years ago -- get pregnant without meaning to and then have the baby. And I'm not talking about conservative or very religious women. I'm talking about independent, smart people. That may not be what I'd expect of them. But doesn't that just show how easily we fall back on stereotypes -- ie., only poor, uneducated women get pregnant and keep their babies? It's foolish to brand a movie as some sort of pro-life screed for acknowledging that people's behavior, especially when it comes to something this personal and fraught, conforms to our ideas of what they should do, whatever that is. Art can't function as art if a character is meant to be a social role model.