With the advent of comment-posting technology, people don’t send me angry e-mails as often as they used to. Now they can just batter their flippers against the keyboard and post their ignorance directly to the site for all the world to see!
Luckily, a few old-fashioned souls still appreciate the warmth of a personal, private e-mail. For example, here is this one, from someone who hated the “Eragon” movie and for some reason thought I was the director of it:
Your a panzey!!!!!!!YOUR THE WORST DIRECTOR EVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I never thought a person can skrew up a movie that bad.
Why would someone read my very negative review of “Eragon” and conclude that I, Eric D. Snider, was also the director of “Eragon”? I mean, because he or she is stupid, obviously, but there must be more to it than that.
This next e-mail actually was intended for me personally. It comes from someone named Seth, at e-mail address godowar@aol.com. I’m including his address because when I responded to his concerns, he never replied, and I thought maybe we’d have better luck if some of you e-mailed him.
I don’t know what, specifically, Seth had read on my site, but it caused him to say this:
I stumbled upon this website and I can only wonder, why should anyone care what you think? Why name a website after yourself when nobody knows who you are? [What do you mean nobody knows who I am?! I directed “Eragon” for crying out loud!] And why rate movies when you’re not a person with any sort of knowledge about the industry? This really confounds me. You could ask why I’m taking the time to write this, but this email will take me maybe a minute of my time, whereas you spend your whole life fiddling away with a website thats not even getting you babes (I’m guessing from the LDS singles link at the bottom of your page, here). If I were you, I’d go do something useful for mankind rather than making snipes about popular culture that nobody is going to read.
Obviously, I wrote something that made Seth very, very angry, and he lashed out at me in retaliation. But what could it have been? Which movie review did he disagree with? Which column did he find unfunny? Did I ever write a column called “The Mother of Seth, at godowar@aol.com, Is a Flatulent Whore”? No! No, I did not! So why all the hate, Seth? Why?
(By the way, Seth nearly answers all of his own questions. Obviously I’m getting SOMETHING out of this, or I wouldn’t be doing it. Maybe that “LDS singles” link is a paid link, and that’s part of what I get out of being a writer, i.e., money. Think these things through, Seth! Think!)
Finally, several years ago I watched the 1990 “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” film and wrote a review of it. I believe it was part of a friendly competition we were having at Hollywood B****slap where we would watch bad films and see whose reviews were the most entertaining. Some people have recently discovered this review, deep in the archives here at EricDSnider.com, and have posted dissenting opinions about it. And then a hardy soul named Jeff sent me an e-mail directly:
If you new anything about the TMNT, [which I do not; he says that like it’s a bad thing] you would know that Splinter was a human before he turned into a rat and he is the one that taught the turtles English. As for the comment about April being average at best, that’s way off. Taking into consideration the style at the time, April was a babe. How can you possibly search for non-realistic flaws in a movie aimed at children. For one, it’s a movie, and two, if it was realistic then it wouldn’t make much sense to have big ass turtles and a rat walking around, would it? Lighten up and appreciate the TMNT for what they were: A great franchise that stands above the rest.
Jeff makes the claim that Splinter the rat was a human first. Now, I couldn’t know for sure without re-watching the movie (which I have no intention of doing), but I could swear I remember the rat and the turtles cavorting in the same radioactive material. Is Jeff saying the rat was a human before THAT? And if that’s the case, did the movie ever tell us that? Again, these are questions for someone who has seen the movie more than once, and I will never qualify for that category.
As for TMNT being “a great franchise that stands above the rest,” I can only guess at what Jeff means by that. Does he mean TMNT is better than ANY other series of movies, or just that’s it better than any other series of comic-book-based movies? He’s obviously wrong either way, of course — I think even the stupidest movie fan will tell you that the “X-Men,” “Spider-Man,” and “Superman” films are better than TMNT — but I’m curious just how wrong he is.
I guess I could e-mail him back and ask him, but it wouldn’t work. The angry-letter people never reply when I ask them for clarification.
P.S. If any of you hear back from Seth at godowar@aol.com, let me know what he says!
