Spartans, popcorn and the inner teen

PATRICK GOLDSTEIN hit the nail right on the head when writing about the success and merits of the film “300” [“Call It a Grand, Vivid Spectacle -- Nothing More, Nothing Less,” March 20]. It’s a diverting, visually striking popcorn flick that has struck a chord with audiences, and the film critics who are finding a hidden political message in the film and are bemoaning its box-office success as a sign of the decline of the cinema are over-analyzing the whole “300” phenomenon.

Audiences simply find the movie entertaining. Isn’t that what a Hollywood action flick is supposed to do?

ROGER STOVER

West Hollywood

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WHILE I find Patrick Goldstein’s support of “300” a sweet defense of adolescence, it implies that movies exist for the inner teenage boy in supposedly all of us. Beginning with a kid’s thrill in reading comic books (I assume not Classic Comics), he ends with the claim that thrills are “what people have always gone to the movies for.”

Always? Well, I got an easy thrill from “The Thing” when I was a kid, but then I went to college and found out that there were movies for grown-ups. I also stopped liking roller-coasters.

There are “always” fine, affecting movies that aren’t thrilling. The little movies. Really!

DAVID EGGENSCHWILER

Los Angeles