With the whiners and haters making Hollywood Elsewhere such a pleasant place to be in recent days, I thought I’d share a letter from a longtime reader named Alexandro Aldrete, who lives in Monterrey, Mexico. Sometimes it helps to consider the perspective of someone outside the country — someone with different cultural references and whatnot — to see things in a fresh light. (And I’m not saying he’s right or wrong or anything in between.)

“The reason I’m writing is because the comments situation has gotten to a point where it’s frankly pathetic,” Aldrete begins. “You must have the most consistent group of whiners on the internet. There’s nothing you can say without receiving dozens of useless posts about how outraged they are by what you say.

“The last one about Easter Sunday is particularly funny in the self-righteous indignation that everyone felt because of what you said about American families watching The Passion of the Christ on DVD. How you are a bigot, an asshole and so on.

“You totally got it right about the director of Porky’s too. It’s refreshing to read some honesty from time to time. I don’t always agree with you (The Aviator sucked? Wedding Crashers was a truly pleasant experience?) but I enjoy it nevertheless. Your site was frankly more fun when you had the ocassional reader response. Now it’s like you’re the evil teacher in the teenage-girls-with- emotional-issues classroom. Everyone is oh so sensitive and melodramatic about everything.

“I hardly read any of those comments anymore because they depress me. Your readership needs a sense of humor. And when you have people that feel that you must be stopped for saying that Eddie Murphy has been a money-grubbing whore, that twenty-something girls at Starbucks laughing out loud can be a pain in the ass, and that the numbers show in a very cold non-judgmental way that the majority of the American movie going public (and worldwide movie going public for that matter) has low, low, low fucking taste (at this point I don’t think that’s even debatable)…well, those persons need a little less self importance.”