Because of the headline, I began reading expecting to be completely outraged but I found myself quickly losing sympathy for Mr. Kurth. He completely lost me when he demanded that the crew radio to JFK to see if his laptop was at the gate. Is this hubris? Temporary dementia? An enormous sense of entitlement?

Reading through the letters, I find that one camp says he got what he deserves. Another camp says that the first camp are witch hunters, representative of the worst in our nature. But the second camp fails to offer an alternative way of treating such a passenger. Surely he deserved some form of punishment for his behavior. I do believe he deserved jail time. This does not mean I believe he deserved to be raped or abused. These are two separate issues and there is room for dialogue about them. If anything, the essay opens up opportunities to discuss law enforcement in the post 9/11 era, and the state of the prison system.

I had an acquaintance that spent a few days in a Los Angeles County jail because of unpaid tickets. It was a miserable experience and he came away from it with these words of wisdom for me: "always pay your fucking tickets, Man..."

No shit.

I was very saddened while reading through reader's letters about O'Hehir's Bergman article to find so many people dismissing an artist's work, usually based on one viewing of one film and accusing his admirers of being pretentious. (Note to the guy who wrote comparing "Cries and Whispers" to a women in prison movie: the distributor of "Cries and Whispers" in the U.S. was Roger Corman, who probably directed the chicks in prison flick.)

So, before anybody calls me an art-snob I will declare up front that I am a filmmaker and the movie I have just made is a horror movie with blood and gore and squishy sounds and girls with big tits that scream.

And La Notte and Persona are in my top ten.

It's difficult to compare these two men, of such different temperaments and talents. They both approached their work with intellectual rigor, an unflinching look at their characters and an uncanny ability to create vital images. If you try to describe their best films you fail, something essential is lost because they touch areas of the human experience that only film can reach.

Persona gets under my skin, into my dreams.

La Notte hits me in the gut. And with every passing year of my marriage, its truths are like lemon in my eyes. To accuse Antonioni of being cold and emotionless you have to never have seen the end of this movie, where the wife reads a love letter and the husband asks who wrote it, only to be told that it was he, before he lost his soul.

Who was the greater artist? Who gives a shit?

And Antonioni's reputation rests on only seven films? Tarkovsky only made seven films. Kubrick made thirteen. Orson Welles' reputation rests on one film (two if you count Touch of Evil.)

La Notte? Persona? Any one of those films is a career. It's a fucking life.

These were filmmakers who understood that the matter of film is time.

Wen Ho Lee

Remember this?

http://archive.salon.com/news/feature/2000/09/21/nyt/