Serving animals in HOBBIT film

[William Cloud Hicklin]

The common folk that you so harshly describe are the same people who keep society functioning by going to work each day, paying their taxes, raising their families and providing goods for our pantries.

And Michelangelo's work at St Peter's and the Sistine Chapel was made possible, ultimately, by the tithes of millions of illiterate peasants. Does that mean he was working to please them? Of course not.

I am in my late 50's and have been following film closely for some 45 years now and have never seen anything like that before. I wonder if you appreciate the rarity of that convergence?

Perhaps you've forgotten Lawrence of Arabia? Ben-Hur? The Sound of Music? Dr Zhivago? All much better films- and all of them, incidentally, very heavily altered from their sources. Again, I don't argue with the need for adaptation- but adaptation must be sensitive to the spirit of the original. Reading Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, it's clear that Lean, while altering or fabricating virtually every incident, "got" Lawrence and understood what he was all about. Not so PJ.

Anyway, you're trying to argue a point by claiming that 1 + 0 + 0 is three. It's just one. The opinions of film critics are worth paying attention to, even as a basis for disagreement; but box-office figures as a measure of quality are worthless. Meaningless. Zero. The same, I'm afraid, goes for the Oscars. Do you have any idea how Oscar voting works? How most voters have never seen the films they're voting on? How often ballots are delegated to personal assistants or other lackeys? How so many members of the Academy are not "professionals" in any sense beyond the obvious one that they get paid to work on movies; which does not in itself qualify them as experts in cinematic art (or, in many cases, to tie their own shoes). This is an election in which Anna Nicole Smith was qualified to vote.

As evidence in support of which I offer Exhibit A, just another such convergence within the last decade: Titanic. An eleven-Oscar, boffo box-office turd.