Letters From the Issue of Thursday, September 28, 2006

Shameless and immature — but a great actor: I don't know Stephen Lemons' background, but certainly he must have won an Oscar for best comic in a slapstick flick (i.e., Animal House, Porky's, Waterboy). The level of his journalistic skills should be compared to special-ed classes.

He obviously feels personally threatened by Mr. Farrakhan and his growing influence over the masses of the people black and white, plus, now, the red man!

If you have a legitimate beef with Mr. Farrakhan, state it maturely, sir! If not, you are classified as a coward hiding behind immature name-calling with no solid basis in any wrong or lies told by Farrakhan.

You would write the same about Moses, Jesus or any man who came to a wicked nation with truth. You should be ashamed, but I know your arrogant, vain, prideful nature disallows you to even approach the thought.
Joseph Mann, Oakland, California

Small-time hood: Was that a medium or large Klan hood your writer was wearing when he wrote about Louis Farrakhan? You have a right to an opinion, but your sarcasm proves that we are still stuck in the '50s. Thank you for living in AmeriKKKa!
Derrick Keith, Phoenix

>Jet Lag

Martial artiste: After reading Luke Y. Thompson's review of Jet Li's last film ("Feckless," September 21), I wondered if I'd seen the same movie. I compared this review of Fearless to Thompson's review of the film Crank, which was about a hit man's final hours. Maybe a movie that never lets go of you, like Crank, is good for the action genre, but Jet Li's film followed his character from a youth to his death. I wonder if Thompson didn't like the film because it had subtitles.

Anyhow, maybe I'm a softie, because I enjoyed the slower farm sections for their scenery and story development. Also, Thompson's claim that the farm scene was a metaphor for life was entirely wrong. Another point about the review was that the character was lost in a river, not the sea. The metaphor the reviewer missed was during the last scenes of the movie, about his hometown and country being exploited for its services and resources. I'm not reading too much into that, because that had a message for me.
Jonathan Metzger, Phoenix