"But a big part of their entire story, and as Ms. Pearl has said herself, if the importance of understanding transcending all of our racial, cultural and national borders."

Well, meanteeth, you're doing a hell of a job showing you're understanding of transcending borders when you complain about the casting of Jolie.

By all means, let's have accuracy in casting. Let's get a real psycho to play Travis Bickle instead of De Niro. That's a slight to the mentally unbalanced.

And James Earl Jones as Lear? Never!

Accuracy? Are you so foolish you haven't yet learned the movies are make believe?

"But the difference here is that I'm not going to go see the film."

You're bitching about the job she'd done without even seeing it?

You at least have been civil.

As for the other people in this thread, dissing Mariane Pearl for choosing Jolie, saying Daniel Pearl was a Jew who should have known better, I think you're the foulest scum on the planet.

To anonymous ...

What you've just implied is slander -- ie., that the fix was in, that the critic praised it because it advertised. By that mentality, every positive review in a newspaper is biased. Are you so fucking stupid you don't understand the editorial side works without knowledge of the advertising side? Apparently.

Meanteeth -- I know exactly what you're talking about. It's not about any actor's ability. It's that poisonous mixture of p.c., feelings of victimization, and inability to understand how art works that decides the question here is *not* ability but how closely the actor represents the race of who he or she is playing. And, as I said, apply that to almost any other factor besides race and the idiocy of the approach becomes clear. It also shuts nonwhite actors out of roles they might play. As I've noted, James Earl Jones would never play Lear; Denzel Washington would never get a chance at Julius Caesar. Hell, Pam Grier couldn't have played Jackie Brown since she's white in the book. Your admission that you won't see the film is not just consistent with your approach, it basically demonstrates how arrogant and intellectually bankrupt it is: raise a ruckus rather than see if the actor in question has done a good job. Put the actor's race before his or her ability to do good work. This, quite rightly, used to be called racism. That you have the intellectual odiousness to raise it in the name of inclusiveness doesn't make it any less so.

And thanks to the recent poster. As a leftist, I agree that the reactions here show just how degraded left rhetoric has become. We have a movie about a woman who resisted vengeance when it would have been so easy -- politically and in every other way -- to trumpet it. Essentially a woman who resisted the worst aspects of what Bush has stirred up. And what happens? She is the object of personal smears accusing her of profiting from her husband's murder. And her dead husband is smeared with viciously anti-Semitic rhetoric, ie, there are some places Jews belong and some places they don't. With leftists like this, we don't need right wingers.

You're *not* using this yardstick to make your pathetic points?

It didn't do business. It must be bad.

By that measure, Evan Almighty is the best movie around.

Jesus fucking Christ! Anyone who'd use box office to prove a movie's quality clearly doesn't have the intellectual capacity to make any argument. You should probably be kept in a cage and fed pellets through the fucking bars.

should Joan Walsh have to apologize for quoting hate speech in the midst of a debate?

I can understand that she wouldn't want to use "fag" or "faggot." But she wasn't using it; she was pointing out that Coulter had used it. And when you shy away from saying exactly what a bigot said, you whitewash them. Walsh didn't. She needn't apologize.

How would the GOP's constant bleating about civility play had the big three anchors, and CNN, gone on and said, "Today Vice President told Senator Patrick Leahy to "go fuck yourself"? It upholds neither standards of civility nor journalism when adults are treated as if they need to be protected from what public figures, particularly elected ones, say *in public*.

when it comes to the Indians he got killed filming Fitzcarraldo.

It always amuses me how this tough it out attitude attaches to heat. Anyone writing about living through the winter without heating would be regarded as clearly insane. But the fact is heat kills more people every year than all other natural disasters combined -- cold, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods. It's nonsense to ignore that. The Memphis writer got it exactly right. Heat kills. Even in the dead of winter, there are not days when it's dangerous to breathe the air. Yet we persist in the idiot notion that the only people who complain about the heat are pampered pantywaists.

over 800, not 8,000, that died in Chicago in '95.

Which is appalling enough, ample evidence of the deadliness of heat. As is the more than 10,000 that died in France a few years back.

And still, we get the "American obsession" idiocy, the letters boasting of the writers' ability to suck it up and adapt, the accusation that those who can't are weaklings, or eco-enemies getting what they deserve from their consumerculture habitation, or the ones who think, Gosh, darn it, it's just too cold.

If you can do without, more power to you, and if you're writing, as Broudy did, of a personal choice, that's fine.

But everyone who argues AC is unnecessary, an example of our softened, greedy culture, make your argument to the families of the people who died. Make it to heart patients, ashmatics, the elderly. That's what's at stake here, not nostalgia for the summers of your youth, but the lives of those whose youth is gone.