THAT WAS THE YEAR THAT WAS

Robert Hilburn’s Year in Review article last Sunday downplays Hootie & the Blowfish as “lightweight and unpretentious.” Apparently this disturbs him, as though the universal standard of good music is its capability to “threaten and unsettle” the listener.

Yet this same criterion doesn’t seem to apply to Hilburn’s own personal icon of mainstream pop, Bruce Springsteen, whose musical offerings neither threaten nor unsettle; just merely observations set to mediocre music that could be deduced by anybody who is halfway aware and has two brain cells to rub together.

As long as Hilburn continues to evaluate pop music (save Springsteen) in such absolutist terms, he will remain stuck not only within very narrow parameters of musical appreciation but in musical arrested adolescence as well.

N.A. TOMBLIN

Vista

*

Your Year in Review gave us many great insights into the year in entertainment, especially the position of The Times as liberal Hollywood’s de facto press agency. You do nothing to differentiate yourselves from what you accuse Bob Dole, William Bennett and Newt Gingrich of doing--political posturing. Why are charges from Dole dismissed out of hand as rhetoric while Oliver Stone’s much more powerful (and less provable) accusations about Nixon are not addressed?

You pictured a bug-eyed Dole supposedly censoring film, a club-wielding Bennett violently bashing a TV and a goofy-eyed Gingrich defacing classical art with paint. Why do you lie and distort these people’s positions?

J. BALLEW

Beverly Hills

*

As a fan of Bruce Springsteen and of U2, I once found it enjoyable to see Robert Hilburn rank their albums at the top of his lists at the end of every year (if they did release a record that year). Today, I think it is silly and predictable, something that you would expect in a rabid fan, not in a veteran music critic.

Hilburn’s predictability year after year is repugnant and insulting to the rest of your talented young music critics. As the lead pop music critic on your staff, he should stop making choices on who the artists are but instead give a chance to the new and emerging artists that are now changing music.

JIMMY C. DOUGHERTY

Anaheim

*

When “Free Willy 2: The Adventure Home,” which I directed, was released in July, your ex-critic Peter Rainer dismissively referred to the film as having the same “OK-ness” as the original. Last Sunday, Jane Horwitz attacked it again and then you put it in a category with other “underperformers.”

Maybe $70 million in worldwide box office and huge video sales amount to “underperforming,” but let me at least set the critical record straight. The Hollywood Reporter called “Free Willy 2” “a superbly well-crafted family film.” Daily Variety reported it to be a “swimmingly satisfying emotional yarn,” and the New York Times called it “the ideal family movie.” The list goes on across the country.

DWIGHT LITTLE

Santa Monica

*

Some notable omissions from Lewis Segal’s compilation: Lewitzky Dance Company at the Luckman Fine Arts Complex; Los Angeles Dance Theatre at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre; Rose Polsky & Dancers at the Luckman; and Tamica Washington’s performance in “Tasting Muddy Waters” at the Festival of Solo Dances at the Fountain Theatre.

MICHAEL MIZERANY

West Hollywood