I fully agree. I can't understand someone taking an 8 year old to Indiana Jones. Nightmares for days. That's ridiculous.

Now I might not want to explain the plot to an 8 year old girl, but she'll love the spectacle.

I can't understand why someone would take an 8yo to an Indiana Jones movie. I saw the original when I was 8, and the melting Nazi faces haunted me for months.

"Crystal Skull" is PG-13. Presumably for gore and violence. Abba karyoke and a glossed-over checkered past seem far more appropriate for an 8yo, IMHO.

Hey Everyone, I just read the phrase "this gay-ass film"...

Everyone in this town ( I live, for most of every year, in the few blocks between the politically-correct, parrot-fever hothouse of the Duke English Department and the less-than-entirely-politcally-correct "Duke Lacrosse" scandal-house) has gotten so self-consciously NICE that I haven't heard the phrase "gay-ass" (as in "your gay-ass dog" or "that gay-ass film") in years and years.....even gay men seem scared to use it anymore...(atleast when they're with straight, "nice" people)

I'm so glad to find that someone's got the balls to type it.

I (and, surprisingly enough, also my reasonably handsome, very rich, 6'1", devoted French doctor boyfriend)am queer as a box of birds.

and I miss the phrase "gay-ass". I neverliked it when folks mis-applied it, but it DID serve a useful purpose for long while there....

thank you, whoever wrote that....

---david terry

www.davidterryart.com

In one of the trailers, where you get to see the "natives" say "Mamma Mia," I swear to god that the guy sticking his head over that wall at the very front looks like Steve-O...

Now, if that were really true, then I might have been inclined to watch the film just to see Steve-O do some stupid Jackass-style stunt...but even Steve-O wouldn't have been that idiotic...

"I can only add that several weeks ago, when my son took his 8 year old niece, my granddaughter, to the latest Indian Jones movie, they showed the trailer for "Mamma Mia!", which caused Zara to proclaim that she absolutely HAD to see it. Uncle Marc quickly quashed that, as well he should have."

I hope the mother slapped the daylights out of Uncle Marc. He wouldn't have to take her. What a vicious turkey.

Knowing 8 year olds, I'll be Uncle Marc THINKS he quashed that. She'll ask someone else to take her.

Because, at a glance to me, it's a story about a child finding out that her mom used to be a slut, and now she, her ex-whore mom, and her 3 dupes "merrily" get to bog us down for the next 2 hours in a dancing/singing-festival of a movie as we anxiously (*YAWN*) wait to see which of these 3 is the lucky father. On a beautiful Greek Isle no less, wearing beautiful, colorful clothes...PULEEZZZE!!!

It's times like this that I truly value the woman I'm married to. Because rather than wanting to drag me to go see this gay-ass film, her initial comment when seeing the trailers for this mess was "Isn't it true that people in Greece don't bathe very often? What's wrong with this picture?"

Someone just wrote: "..Someone who hates film wouldn't be so passionately moved when presented with a crappy film, surely...."

My first response is "Maybe so, maybe not". But, then, for various reasons (one of them being that I've usually, by mid-morning, read at least two or three publications that are rather more "solid" than Salon.com...and I'm gathering that Ms. Zacharek does the same), I'm also inclined to consider that Ms. Zacherek's reviews seem, also for varous reasons, calculatedly reactionary-----which is to say that (as with a lot of the writing at Salon these days) I can almost hear the careerist wheels spinning.....

If Ms. Zacharek LIKED the movie (or any of the movies she's disparaged in the past year or so)?...well, she'd be lost in a chorus of approving voices. So, how will she distinguish herself and be, if nothing else, the recognizable writer who gave a ROTTEN REVIEW?...

That's easy....just be the person who writes well (she usually does), but hated the movie. If nothing else, "Rotten Tomatatoes" and amazon.com (once the DVD's available) will boldly (in terms of typeface) feature her NAME and "SALON.COM" (!!!!!)

and, thus, are the careers (usually sufficently lucrative, if utterly predictable) of professional contrarians and curmudgeons made.........Kingsley Amis and Evelyn Waugh and Dorthy Parker were doing this sixty or seventy years ago......

Waugh, Like Zacharek, was also a master of the affectedly-wistful, but still stinging "Oh...I just don't know...I was so EXCITED when I heard about someone was doing/making/writing it...but the movie/book/play just left me feeling...oh?, like SOMETHING was missing.... you know? It's just so ODD, after all I'd expected!...."

The main "thing" is to GET YOUR NAME OUT THERE....

Zacharek does this very well, asnd my third impulse is to say "More power to you!" Rent does need to be paid.

Still, I read this review and was reminded of her review of "Sweeney Todd". I'm no remarkable fan or connisseur of Sondheim or, for that matter, musicals in general, but I read her review and wondered why she didn't recuse herself....since she obviously did't like Sondheim to-begin-with or musicals (or, as should have been embarassing for her after reading the letters, KNOW much about them either).

I read this reveiw and thought that pretty-much everything she disliked about the movie could be applied to the musical (if not, then she didn't make that sufficiently clear). In short, my impression was that she'd dislike seeing the musical....so why would she want to review the movie of the musical, unless she wanted to have her name at the top of the "Rotten Tomatoes" list of supposedly influential critics (albeit those who hated the thing)?

Oh well, I'm sure she'll stay in work. There are various ways of jump-starting a career as a critic, and she seems to have settled on one of most time-proven ones.

Sincerely,

David Terry

www.davidterryart.com