Still, thanks for your visit, Scott, I’m always delighted to have a new reader!

I think you’ve converted me; I will now be a regular reader of your blog. Like you when you read the Weekly, I learn a lot when I come here. For example, today I’ve learned that SPEED RACER is “lowbrow culture” (because, I assume, it’s based on a cartoon), whereas MANON OF THE SPRING is, by contrast, “highbrow culture” (presumably because it’s based on a classic French novel and, you know, has those funny little words on the bottom of the screen).

Deduction: Anything based on a cartoon/comic book/old TV show isn’t worth taking (or writing about) seriously, whereas anything that comes from that rarefied world of “Literature” is automatically worthy of serious discussion, even if (like MANON OF THE SPRING in particular) it is a direly conventional, old-fashioned Masterpiece Theater-ish movie of the sort even my grandmother might have found tedious.

How is it, I wonder, that one of the most important and influential cinematic movements in the history of movies–the French New Wave–grew out of some young French hipsters’ love of American B-movies, pulp novels, comic books, etc., since, as I have learned here, none of those things are of any serious value.

Can you please tell me when it is exactly that you were arrested and given a life sentence by the thought police?

My apologies to you as well, Scott Foundas, and to esteemed author J. Hoberman as well, if my silly post about overly self-important reviews of lowbrow culture (it’s Speed Racer, not Manon of the Spring) struck a nerve.

As the editor of the film section at the L.A. Weekly, please accept my sincere apologies. You read a review in our pages that contained the names of some artists you’d never heard of before (God forbid), which clearly means they must not be worth knowing. Never mind that Kenny Scarf is a Hollywood local, or that Takashi Murakami was the subject of a Weekly cover story (and a retrospective at a major Los Angeles museum) a scant six months ago. Above all, never mind that all the art and design references cited by J. Hoberman in his SPEED RACER review are almost certainly intentional on the part of the Wachowski brothers, who are very smart guys and who filled their MATRIX movies with references to Jean Baudrillard and a host of other contemporary philosophers and thinkers. But perhaps you think that art is one thing and movies something else, which would really shoot to shit the Italian film thoretician Ricciotto Canudo’s famous idea of cinema as “the seventh art,” by which he meant the synthesis of architecture, sculpture, painting, music, dance, theater and literature.

Since “J. Hoberman” is another name with which you are clearly unfamiliar, allow me to add that he is the author of several acclaimed volumes of published criticism and has been the subject of several tributes on both coasts this year commemorating his 30th anniversary at The Village Voice (our sister paper in New York, where he is based). Among his many other credentials, he was among the first major critics to give serious attention to the work of David Lynch and George Romero, in his book MIDNIGHT MOVIES.

Since you further claim to have merely wanted to know whether SPEED RACER “was a good movie” or not, allow me to mention yet one more name that is surely alien to you–that of the great American film critic Manny Farber, who once told an interviewer, “The last thing I want to know is whether you liked [the movie] or not — the problems of writing are after that.” Of course, Mr. Farber was lucky enough to be writing at a time (the 1960s and ’70s) before letter grades and star ratings had reduced much film criticism to the level of consumer reporting, and before the internet came along to give a voice to the culturally illiterate.

Seems like the kind of guy that would have a Google Blog alert on his own name.

Enjoy reading “your” review HOBERMAN!