The writer, acknowledging his "tribal" slant, is shocked that someone made a film suggesting that lives could be saved by undermining republican terrorism, but happily accepts Liam Neeson's tired role as a former Ulster volunteer who killed a Catholic who, Rosa Parks fashion, refused to give up his job to a Protestant.

Really, now. Other posters have dealt with this, so I just want to say that it would be helpful if you responded to what I actually said, rather than what you believe I may have meant.

I most certainly am not shocked that someone would make a movie about McGartland. I only wish it weren't such a maladroit, clumsily ideological film. As I think I made clear, the failings of Fifty Dead Men Walking are first and foremost dramatic and only secondarily political -- and there only in the sense that Kari Skogland (who as far as I know has never lived in Ireland) makes only a half-hearted effort to convey the complexity of the situation. I mean, from the film it appears that Special Branch was a selfless, honorable organization whose only goal was to save lives and end the conflict. Please! You don't have to be a Republican or a Catholic or Irish to find that ridiculous.

Five Minutes of Heaven is a better film, but the tribal-religious orientation of the characters have nothing to do with that. You could tell exactly the same story if Neeson were playing an ex-IRA shooter and Nesbitt a Protestant kid. Just to reiterate, they told the story that way because Alistair and Joe (as tiresome as you may find them) actually exist and cooperated with the screenwriter, not to score ideological points with one side or the other.

Your Rosa Parks remark is just random, mean-spirited sniping. We learn almost nothing about the man Alistair kills; he's just a guy who gets shot on his living-room sofa. I realize that it can be difficult to deal with how poorly Americans understand the Irish conflict, and if I helped you ventilate some of that anger, fine.

I'd be curious to hear, btw, what films about Northern Ireland have stuck with people the most. There are the biggies like In the Name of the Father and Some Mother's Son and Bloody Sunday, of course, although I haven't revisited any of those since they were first released.

Neither of these new films, btw, is in the same ballpark as Steve McQueen's amazing Bobby Sands movie "Hunger," which has the remarkable quality of striking Republican sympathizers as a pro-British film and British sympathizers as a pro-IRA film. Of course it's neither one. It's too specific and granular to provide a big-picture view of the conflict, if that's even a desirable or achievable goal. But it's still the best NI film since the greatest of all, which IMHO is Alan Clarke's 1989 Elephant (now available on US DVD along with "The Firm," Clarke's football-hooligan movie with Gary Oldman).

You know, most of that stuff you're eager to discuss is in the film -- pretty much all of it, actually. Yes, Ulrike Meinhof was a serious and respected journalist. It was almost as weird as if, I don't know, Christiane Amanpour suddenly went underground. Do you deny that she became a sex symbol, or that her attractiveness played a role in her celebrity?

Yes, my tone is flippant. Yes, I focus on the sex-drugs-rock 'n' roll aspect of the RAF. (Again, do you deny that that existed, especially when it comes to Andreas Baader, with all his James Dean affectations?) I also made clear that the Baader-Meinhof folks based their insanity on a legitimate and reasonable critique of the West German state.

I can understand that you were looking for something different. But in all honesty, my job here is not to deliver a lengthy, well-reasoned, on-one-hand, on-the-other-hand thumbsucker essay about the Baader-Meinhof gang. As you say, basic info about who they were and what they did is easily findable on the Internet (I linked to it, in fact). I'm trying to get a large, popular audience interested in a movie it might find worthwhile, but whose setting and topic may seem abstruse or remote to many Americans.

I should have said all that, but you said it better. Absolutely right. It's the junk made by 11-year-olds in China that actually matters, economically speaking.

And, @Jonathan, yes to Warlock, yes to the New Mutants, absolutely. Honestly I had moved on from Doc Strange by age 11, but I sure do remember him fondly.