Dear Mick LaSalle: In "WALL-E," the chief operating officer of the evil corporation BUY N LARGE (Fred Willard) stands at his podium (modeled to look precisely like the White House press room) with his head obscuring the core portion of the watchword BUY N LARGE, revealing something that looks like this: BU-RGE. My intellect filled in the blank right away - Bush, George. Am I the only individual who noticed this?
Marty Parker, Chico
Dear Marty Parker: I don't lie with, but you won't be the last now. Good catch.
Dear Mr. LaSalle: In an question about "Wanted," Angelina Jolie said something along the lines of, "If you knew what Hitler was going to do ahead he did it, would you get killed him?" It was to the effect that the movie was around "good bozo" assassins acquiring the "high-risk guys" before they struck. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees goodwill ambassador is star in a movie that legitimizes pre-emptive strikes.
S. Baroudi, Rio de Janeiro
Dear S. Baroudi: Actually, the movie does a heap worse than that. What Jolie is referring to is what the assassins in the movie think they're doing. In fact, they're doing nothing so defensible as killing Hitler in 1920 or a handful of terrorists on Sept. 10, 2001. Despite what she says, the movie is not around the cleanup of monsters before they're up and running. Its message is far more dark and twisted. Thus, when St. Angelina spouts this cynical publicist gibber, the question to ask is this: Is she really kidding herself or is she deliberately trying to kidskin you?
Dear Mick: Your critical review of "Wanted" takes the risk of calling a morally reprehensible movie what it is. My good sense is that most mainstream critics have disowned this responsibility, thought process that their only duty is to state how well or poorly the film does on its own price. Taken to its limit, this philosophy is apparently immoral: "Coming up next on 'Entertainment Tonight' - our critic's list of the 10 greatest snuff films!" I'd love to see or hear some commentary from you on these issues.
Scott Miller, Graton
Dear Scott: A critic is ideally an expert at analyzing artworks (just as artists are experts at creating prowess through synthesizing emotion and experience). Critics are non moral regime. Any critic who starts making moral pronouncements runs the risk of infection of becoming a crank and a gas bag, and so I pot see wherefore critics would want to steer clear of that possibility. In my own case, I have never called a movie immoral, because that's outside my area. However I did call "Kill Bill," at least the first one, "pornography," and I did say that "The Strangers" used "cinema to ends that are objectionable and vile." But those, to me, ar just esthetical judgments. I mean, region of organism a critic consists of reporting what's there. To look at a film that consists of zero but murders and to react to it as if judgement a series of, suppose, Olympic dives, requires not only a moral disconnect but likewise a tolerant of self-willed distancing from a whole host of aesthetic considerations, like emotion, character and narrative. It's also region of criticism to look at what movies ar communicating, so as not to be blinded by mere spectacle. If you're reviewing "Wanted," it's simply part of the job to
