Letters to the Editor
SB
Published Letters: 423 Editor's Choice: 19
-
12 Monkeys, as reviewed by Salon
[Read the article: Beyond the Multiplex]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]O'Hehir, what the hell is your problem?
Pinhead.
I beg to differ with your worthless opinion, I thought 12 Monkeys was pretty worthwhile.
Anyway, the Salon reviews:
#1: http://www.salon.com/05/reviews/monkey.html
Terry Gilliam's dazzling "12 Monkeys" brings a tragic sensibility to the growing genre of apocalyptic thrillers.
By SCOTT ROSENBERG
In Terry Gilliam's bracingly grim new "12 Monkeys," the present looks like the future, the future looks like the past, and the past looks truly dreadful. "12 Monkeys" is a time-travel yarn, so this kind of circular paradox comes natural to it.
The present, our present, is represented chiefly by tile-walled mental wards and burned-out inner-city squats. The past appears as a brief glimpse of the mustard-gas-ridden trenches of the First World War. And in the plague-wracked future, technology has devolved into an antiquated mess of reel-to-reel tape recorders and clockwork mechanisms painted a Royal Typewriter black. Everybody lives underground; to venture on the surface requires a Saran-wrap "body condom."
We know by now to expect both visual daring and moral heft from Gilliam, who made "Brazil" and "The Fisher King." What's remarkable about "12 Monkeys" is that, despite its decade-hopping abandon, the film makes a chilling kind of narrative sense. To Gilliam's quiver of attributes this new movie adds a quality that's on the endangered list in today's Hollywood: coherence.
(etc)
#2: http://dir.salon.com/story/ent/masterpiece/2002/08/19/12_monkeys/index.html
Combining time-travel thriller and experimental film, Terry Gilliam's 1995 oddball classic steals a tale of doomed love and cruel fate from Hitchcock -- then pays back the debt.
By Virginia Vitzthum
August 19, 2002 | Alchemy seemed unlikely. A Bruce Willis action flick based on a French film made of still photos. A serious rumination on love and fate by the guy who, a few years earlier, had made "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen," one of the memorable bombs of Hollywood history. A time-travel thriller that dares to compare itself to Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo." But this 1995 holiday-season release finds a profound poignancy in its sci-fi premise and actually pays back its debt to Hitchcock in a scene so layered it spins a new twist into his bottomless spiral of a movie.
That scene falls toward the end of "12 Monkeys," which is, like "Vertigo," a love story between a damaged detective and a dead beauty. Willis' James Cole, sent from the 2030s, hides out with his psychiatrist, kidnap victim and lover, Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe), in a theater where "Vertigo" is showing. It's late 1996; a viral plague will kill her and 5 billion others in a few weeks. On-screen, Kim Novak's first incarnation explains her bogus "past life" to Jimmy Stewart, pointing to the dated rings in the trunk of a fallen redwood. "I was born here, here I died."
(etc)
-
Yeeesh...
[Read the article: Sullivan's travels]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Sullivan, you're a goddamn fool. Pulling your head (most of the way) out of your ass doesn't let you off the hook.
I'd elaborate, but that ground's been covered.
-
Pain
[Read the article: The ones who weren't]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"I know my pain is nothing to that of people who are infertile....."
And the pain of those who are infertile is, in turn, nothing compared to the pain of the entire world as it chokes to death on the filth of six billion people!
Is the idea to produce as many humans as possible before we all go off that cliff together? Am I missing something?
Is there somehow NOT a connection between individual people replacing themselves with two or three offspring and the general strip mining of the earth that is taking place?
You think I'm kidding about this Apocalypse stuff? Ozone hole, anyone? Ocean dead zones? Ice caps, glaciers? Extinctions?
We humans have (HAD, I'm afraid) a brief window of time when we could DECIDE how many kids to have rather than having the grim reaper make the choice, as it has been throughout most of history. (I'm afraid that window has closed and the human population question will be settled by nature.) It's a hard, sad, mature decision to have to make; babies are cute and can be used to fill an emptiness that's hard to deal with otherwise.
But -we have to decide to have far fewer children or the decision WILL be made for us! Every day that goes by with that lesson unlearned makes the future that much grimmer.
Joyce M, be happy for the 3 kids you have, that's PLENTY, and mourn and LET GO of the ones who weren't meant to be. They wouldn't have done much for that emptiness you feel any more than the men in your life did.
-
Reactionaries
[Read the article: Are we not rats?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It would be nice if those reactionary, 'conservative', anti-environmentalist, adolescent brats would be quiet and let the adults discuss the matter rationally. If they could shut up AND listen, they might even learn something.
-
Cuspidate??
[Read the article: Class act]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Cuspidate? What, did you just get a new thesaurus or something?
Sheesh.