Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 542 Editor's Choice: 79
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I hoped for much more
[Read the article: "Wanted"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]From some of the reviews and the clips, I expected this to be fun, exciting, new. It wasn't any of those.
Let's start with the look of this film, which mutes the whole enterprise without any purpose. Even Angelina Jolie doesn't gleam the way she usually does--and that's a crime. The storyline, whatever its origins, should have been something more than ludicrous and the screenwriters should have wrenched it away from the dumb "assassin weaver" plot line. What, 1000 years ago weavers in Moravia just up and decided the world was out of joint? Cursed spite that none but they could put it right. I expect fantasy in movies like this to be convincing--that's not a contradiction in terms. It was merely laughable, especially when the American textile industry has collapsed (maybe the Assassins Local 218 is in better shape).
McAvoy does have some good moments here, but they're lost in the silly welter of blood and whining--does he really have to be beaten up <1>that<1> many times in his training? And his boss is so cartoonish that she, too, is unbelievable. No one that brassy, gross and disgusting would have been left in charge of so many workers. She seemed designed for early teen boys to work off their anxiety about girls/their mothers.
And what's with the dim-witted script? Line after line made me wince. They spend all that money and the script sounded like a first draft. Maybe that's why Freeman seemed like he was doing a run-through, rather than a performance.
The much-vaunted special effects turned dull after being repeated too many times. The Matrix left me in a state of wonder; Wanted left me wondering when it would end.
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"But animals don't--"
[Read the article: We are family]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Over time I've been amused to see the barriers fall, one-by-one. Years ago it was firmly believed that animals didn't use tools and humans were defined as tool-maker, but we know that chimps and even birds do. Then the way we were different was language, but that's been proven a false distinction. Next was emotion and that was bogus from the start because Darwin had observed animal affect. Frans de Waal and others have shown now only that they do have emotion, but they have something we have guarded as extra-uniquely human: empathy.
The latest barrier to fall is personality, and it's not just dogs owners like me with more than one pet making their observations, its scientists discovering personality all the way down to some insect species. We know some animals dream, and they certainly can plan ahead projected outcomes, and are not unintelligent. Do they have consciousness and self-awareness? It's easy to say "No," but what would an animal's consciousness be like? Surely it would be different and might exist in ways that we can not yet determine or observe or design an experiment to test. A book like Gazzaniga's seem like one more finger in the dike. Why some scientists are obsessed with proving we're so different from animals is beyond me.
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St. Russert?
[Read the article: Who are you calling a "coot"? ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm grateful for these balanced comments on Russert. The rush to beatify him was disgraceful, and just as disgraceful was the angry bullying on progressive blogs where comments questioning his brilliance as a journalist and whether he truly deserved a national outpouring of grief were dubbed vitriolic and more. A common complaint: "How can you be so cruel to his family? Show some respect!" As if after his death, the Russert clan was monitoring the Internet to gauge how his death was being talked about. Had they done so, they needn't have worried. Time and again, his death was called "tragic" by the sentimental majority.
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Goring?
[Read the article: Rush Limbaugh was right]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's Goering or Göring.
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Forget outrage--is it funny?
[Read the article: Rush Limbaugh was right]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The same artist did a hilarious New Yorker cover of the President of Iran in a toilet stall having his foot tapped. This was after he had inveighed against gay people as demonic, or otherwise traduced and abused them in a speech. The humor was putting him in a vulnerable place--the toilet stall with his pants down--and having someone make a pass at him. He was thus doubly a fish out of water.
I've been studying the Obama cover and don't find it funny. It satirizes attitudes about Obama, but so what? Because it takes to the extreme rightwing fears about him and his wife, it has the feel of attempting to emulate Swift's "A Modest proposal" but that kind of nuanced reductio ad absurdum works better in prose, I think. Far more interesting and amusing would have been playing on Obama's image as an untraditional politician. I think the cartoonist took the easy way out here, and the cover isn't very imaginative.
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The Rude Pundit says it best
[Read the article: Rush Limbaugh was right]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"See, the Rude Pundit's problem with the whole Barack-as-Muslim and Michelle-as-Black-Panther plus burning flag and bin Laden's picture in the Oval Office isn't that it's particularly offensive. It's that it's just not very funny. It's not even enough to make you go, "Hmmm." You glance at it once and think, "Yeah, some people think that, don't they? That's a shame." And there the whole joke ends. There's no more levels to it. It's like an Upper East Side version of South Park, an elitist attempt at crude humor, like an ironic fart at a wine tasting."
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I finally get it!
[Read the article: Knowing me, knowing ABBA]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]They're "spiritual and sexual." "Innocent and sophisticated." Which must also mean that they're canny and naive, retro and forward-looking, imitative and sui generis, stunning and lethargic, ordinary and sublime. . . . They are all things to all people, the band of bands, the one and only, pop without end, amen.
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The squirrel challenge
[Read the article: I Like to Watch]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Early on in our days with a beautifully behaved but still spunky Westie, I asked his breeder:
"Is there anything that will stop him pulling so hard on a walk when he sees a squirrel?"
She said,"Yes."
"What is it?"
"No squirrels."