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Nobody drives me nuttier than Stephanie Zacharek. She's a very good writer and a tough critic, but her tastes are aggressively middlebrow. She enables her audience to placate themselves on inoffensive Lifetime TV-movies while avoiding anything that might make them upset or possibly challenge them even a little. It's not just that she's a wimp it's that she has nutured in an environment where wimpiness is venerated. I would feel a lot better if she was cynically sucking up to the Salon readership, maybe 75 percent of which are whiny politically correct pansies (i.e. the amount of letters attacking Keith Knight's "101 Things to do with a Dead Hippy"; sort of making the Salon readership the leftwing equivalent to those rednecks that wrote in defending Judge Ray Grimes). But no. She counts herself among their numbers and that is endlessly maddening.
Chalk up the Zakker's preference of World Trade Center over United 93 with her preference of Ray, The Fantastic Four, Casanova, Coach Carter, Ladder 49, and Mr. 3000 over Dogville, Batman Begins, The New World, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Birth as evidence that she is a wuss beyond all repair. My grandma has more edge.
Granted she did really like Sin City, Oldboy, and Unleashed suggesting to me that they were stylized enough to slide under her radar. The real pathetic thing is that she thinks that she's being bad in liking them.
