Adding to the pain and anger was the irony that Lennon had only recently emerged from several years of withdrawal to produce a new album, “Double Fantasy,” the initial track of which was titled “(Just Like) Starting Over.” The record contained a number of superlative songs, such as “Woman,” “Watching the Wheels” and “Beautiful Boy.” Lennon was still involved in a media blitz on its behalf when he was shot by Mark David Chapman at the entrance to New York’s Dakota Building at 1 W. 72nd St., where he was living with his wife, Yoko Ono, and their son, Sean.

Friday is the 20th anniversary of Lennon’s death. I asked a number of people to recall their memories of the event. Not all are Lennon fans, but their recollections reveal the significance of the former Beatle’s death as one of those mental milestones by which we measure our lives.

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Robert Altman, film director

“Nashville” was sort of a harbinger of it. When John Lennon got assassinated, I got a call from a reporter at the Washington Post, and he asked, “Do you feel responsible for this?” I said, “How do you mean?” He said, “Well because in your film ‘Nashville’ you did an assassination of a celebrity.” I told him, “That’s what the film is all about — do you feel responsible for not heeding my warning?”

Lucianne Goldberg, syndicated talk show host and publisher of lucianne.com

I live a few blocks from the Dakota on the Upper West Side. I first heard that John Lennon had been shot while I was sitting in a taxi. It was on the radio. The taxi was less than a block from the Dakota at the time. My first thought was, “Why would anyone want to kill John Lennon? He’s just a West Side househusband.” Yoko, I could have understood — her music was awful. But John, then, was just the druggie Beatle who sat around a West Side pediatrician’s office with his baby son and could be seen pushing a stroller in the park or schlumping out of the deli at West 72nd Street and Columbus Avenue. I can remember being more curious about who could have wanted to shoot him.

On the way back across town a couple of hours later, the people were lined up in the dark on both sides of West 72nd Street. They all had candles and were trying to sing “Give Peace a Chance.” I thought that was an odd thing to sing at a murder scene. I rolled down the window and smelled a lot of pot in the air. I wondered what in the world was going to happen to his kid.

Larry Flynt, publisher, Larry Flynt Publications Inc.

I was in Los Angeles, and I was shocked in the same way that I was when John Kennedy got shot. I thought, “Here’s a young man who has made such a substantial contribution to our culture, and he has been taken from us in such a senseless way.” I was pretty much numb to respond beyond that.

Catherine Zeta-Jones, actress

I was 11 years old. I was actually in London, in a musical, and I remember all the grown-up people in the cast running through the corridors, shouting, “John Lennon’s dead.” It’s funny because our apartment in New York is two buildings away from the Dakota Building and right opposite Strawberry Fields. It always chills me when I see tourists pointing their cameras up to Yoko’s apartment or photographing the gate.

Michael and I actually went there the other day for a dinner party. We were waiting for the elevator to go up to our friend’s apartment, and Michael said, “Right here.” He was standing at the elevator once, going up to see a friend, and John Lennon walked out. He said, “I know you,” in his Liverpudlian accent, and they had a quick conversation. That was the last time Michael saw him. It’s kind of eerie when you live so close. I’ve met Yoko a few times. But it always gives me a chill when I see people photographing the Dakota — it makes my stomach turn a bit.

Michael Douglas, actor

I was one block away, where my apartment was. And I was actually there at the scene soon after the tragedy. I was right there. That actually was what motivated me to begin my work in handgun control — that incident.

Lydia Lunch, writer and spoken-word artist

Look, I’m lucky if I remember what I did last week, much less 20 years ago. But the murder of John Lennon defined a turning point in American history. No longer could we deny our monomania with celebrities, our ghoulish fascination with their life and the haunting, harassing and stalking of them unto and even beyond death. Everyone becomes more popular postmortem. More heroic. Mythical. Dead men always sell more records, more newspapers. How typically American that some sicko would take it upon himself to wipe out the messenger whose mantra was “Imagine” and “Give Peace a Chance.” We were forced to finally evaluate, because of his death, how truly radical Lennon was.

Roger Ebert, film critic

At the time the news was reported, I was on the air with the 10 p.m. Monday night newscast on Channel 5 in Chicago. We finished the newscast at 10:29 p.m., and then were startled to hear the voice of the station’s booth announcer reading the Associated Press bulletin. The show’s producer had made a judgment call that there was not time to get the bulletin to the news studio before the show ended.

I felt as if a chapter of history had been closed. I drove over to the Sun-Times and wrote a column for Tuesday’s paper. The vigil had begun in Central Park.

T. Coraghessan Boyle, novelist

I was in Los Angeles and I was writing my novel “Water Music.” And since I had been a witness — not an eyewitness but a witness — to many such traumatic events of the, let’s say, 12 years that preceded that, it didn’t rock me too much. It almost seemed expected in some way.

What’s his legacy? He is a pure rocker, absolutely the pure rocker, whose gut-wrenching vocals on songs like “Money” are still ringing in my head and helped form my own appreciation of rock ‘n’ roll and my own vocal style — him to a degree, but also people like Van Morrison and Muddy Waters and all sorts of great singers. But he was one of them. Many people will say as a composer he’s most important, but for me it’s just those gut-wrenching vocals he could do.

Cary Tennis, copy chief, Salon

I was living in a tent in rural Virginia, helping my mom build a house. My mom was living in a tent, too, a bigger tent. I had had a dream the night before of Yoko Ono yelling at John, “Oh, no! Oh, no!” You know, Yoko Oh No. Then I was riding on the back of a truck with a bunch of lumber and I was listening to the radio in the afternoon and the radio said that John Lennon had been shot. And then I remarked on my dream to my mother and we agreed it was an exceedingly curious dream.

Isaac Hayes, songwriter/musician

I was at the house of a friend of mine, Perlie Biles in Atlanta, when we heard the news on the radio of John Lennon’s death. What a waste. What a loss. You know, he lives through his music. That’s the good thing.

King Kaufman, associate managing editor, Salon

The day before John Lennon got shot, I got arrested. I was sitting in the back of a car in the parking lot of a mall in Brea, Calif., smoking marijuana with two buddies before a midnight movie showing of … I forget what. So we spent several hours of Sunday morning getting processed at the local police station and waiting for our bitterly disappointed parents to come pick us up.

On Monday, as I served the first day of my grounded-for-LIFE! sentence, Lennon was killed. My friend Stacy Flanders called me up and said, “Kind of a shitter of a week so far, huh?”

Tuesday I got called out of class by the newspaper advisor, who was really the cheerleader advisor (this was post-Prop. 13 California), who wanted me to write a tearful essay about the tragic loss of John Lennon. I did write some dumb thing, but only after having spent most of the day goofing around in the library with Ellen, who a few years later wrote me that in her job as a London call girl she’d had sex with Moammar Gadhafi.

But that’s another story.

Karen Finley, performance artist and author

I was crossing the Bay Bridge leaving San Francisco, going to Oakland, as I heard the news on the radio. I was just approaching the bridge. All I thought was that tragedy affects everyone. And in time it does affect everyone. Several years later, as a waitress, I would wait on Yoko with her dark glasses and serve her espresso. All I thought of was that both Jackie Kennedy and Yoko Ono wore dark black glasses after the death of our heroes.

Mamie Van Doren, actress and blond bombshell

I was in Florida, and I was working on a musical comedy called “Making Whoopee.” I was staying at a hotel, and I turned the TV on and saw that Lennon had been killed. I remember I left the hotel and went to a place to eat by myself. It was very cold out, and very depressing. It made me very sad.

China Forbes, lead singer, Pink Martini

I don’t remember where I was when John Lennon was shot. My sister tells me I was “in the living room with Dad.” Since I was only 10 years old, it didn’t have the effect on me that it had years later when I realized how tragic it was that he wasn’t around anymore. Before his death, I remember dancing around our apartment with my sister, blasting my dad’s LPs in the living room and acting out various characters in the songs on “Sgt. Pepper’s”: Lucy, Rita, Mr. Kite, the Hendersons. When “Double Fantasy” came out, we were mostly obsessed with Yoko’s unusual singing style. But I really didn’t feel the impact of what had happened on Dec. 8, 1980, until I grew up with all the great footage and all of his great songs. And now I feel gypped.

Geddy Lee, singer/bassist, Rush

I was at Morin Heights, a recording studio an hour north of Montreal, working on the song “Witch Hunt” for the “Moving Pictures” album the night he was shot. It was a very heavy moment, I recall.

I think we were all just stunned. I remember constantly going back and forth, from working to the TV, to try to get some news. If I remember the environment, looking around the room, my memory just shows me a lot of pale faces staring at the tube.

Bob Guccione Jr., editor and publisher, “Gear,” and former editor and publisher, “Spin”

I was in New York with my then (now someone else’s) wife. We had just had dinner and saw the news report on TV. We had been near the Dakota that night and I had walked past it the evening before, I think. We lived on East 67th Street then, just the other side of Central Park.

I was stunned by the news, but unmoved per se. It was simply a big news story — I didn’t know the man. I felt in the disconnected way one does at recognizing the name and life of a victim, but no more emotion than that. I loved the Beatles — and therefore, abstractly, Lennon’s contribution to my entertainment and cultural nourishment. But I’ve always thought that the people who get emotionally upset, even disturbed, at the death of someone they never knew are a little emotionally lacking. I mean, what happens to them when someone they knew, who knew them, dies?

Lennon didn’t belong to the people (and neither did Princess Di or JFK Jr.) — his work did. And it’s still available for purchase.

My second reaction, which I insightfully imparted to my wife, was, “Well, that settles the issue of a Beatles reunion.” Lennon never wanted it anyway.

Adam Parfrey, publisher, Feral House

Around that time Darby Crash, the lead singer of the Germs, died, and that was much more important to me than John Lennon’s death. But when Lennon died, I was visiting my brother in L.A., and we were having a laugh about it with Michael Collins because people were boohoo-hoo-ing it so much.

Philip Kaufman, film director

I was in the basement of a house in St. Helena, Calif., in the wine country, watching television with a writer friend of mine named Bo Goldman, who won a couple of Oscars, for “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Melvin and Howard.” I can remember it coming over the TV, and Bo and I were sitting there drinking a bottle of wine.

It was shocking and terrifying. I remember both Kennedy assassinations. I remember Martin Luther King’s. As with all of them, you felt this terror and outrage.

Virginia Vitzthum, columnist, Salon Sex

I was a sophomore in college, and it was the first public murder that mattered to me. I’d spent my adolescence buying Beatles and Dylan instead of Eagles and Frampton, wishing I’d been born 10 years earlier. Lennon’s early death wrinkled time even more: New Yorkers John and Yoko moved suddenly into the history books with the Fab Four.

About 15 girls gathered in my dorm room that night. I played “I’m So Tired” and “Rain” and “I’m Only Sleeping” and “Cry Baby Cry” and “Strawberry Fields” — all full of Lennon’s dissatisfied intelligence and pain and desire for obliteration. The death wish in those songs gave a jagged comfort that night; to hear him sing “Oh Yoko” or “In My Life” or “Twist and Shout” would have been unbearable.

John Rechy, novelist

I was in L.A. when it happened, and I was, of course, appalled. I had never been a fan of the Beatles or of John Lennon particularly. But I was an admirer of what he stood for, if not of his music. It just seemed to be one more atrocity in a string of such atrocities sweeping the country, as with the killings of the Kennedys or of Martin Luther King, where individuals of a liberal orientation were assassinated.

Jeff Stark, associate editor, Salon Arts & Entertainment

I don’t remember a thing. I was 8, and in terms of music, my parents considered Neil Diamond more important than John Lennon. We were probably listening to “The Jazz Singer” soundtrack at the time.

I can remember exactly when Kurt Cobain died, and that hurt, but I was really more angry at him than upset. I can’t imagine how unjust, how unfairly ironic, it must have been to see Lennon go. There’s really no comparison. I’d like to think that I was fortunate to be spared the hurt in 1980, but Lennon’s music — and Lennon — has meant even more to me than sad Cobain.

At the same time, Cobain was real, and I got to watch him breathe and sweat and flail. He knew people I knew; he was a guy. Lennon has always been a ghost, just another person whose work grabbed onto me from out of the past, like Mark Rothko or Shakespeare.

I guess when you get older you learn that people die and that it’s almost always unfair. And there are things that you wish you’d seen or said or even been around to witness. There wasn’t enough time and there never is. But it feels weird to have shared eight years on the same earth with someone whom I admire so much and feel absolutely no connection to — to have been essentially unaware that he even existed. I know he too was human, but he might as well not have been.

Linda Hamilton, actress

I was in New York. I sort of grew up in this funny musical family who was out of touch with the rest of the world, on classical music. But I remember how huge it was for everybody around me; it was a citywide phenomenon. It sort of felt like somebody had draped a dark cloth over the entire city for days on end, like a tinge darker.

Dr. Susan Block, author and sex therapist

I’d just left New Haven, Conn., and moved to San Francisco to go to grad school part time and try to be a hippie full time. Folks kept telling me I was a decade too late, but I didn’t believe them. I was living in a big beautiful Victorian house on Masonic Avenue near Haight Street, trying to restart the revolution with a bunch of other hippie wannabes.

We were having one of our big organic dinners when one of the members of the house came running downstairs, saying he’d just heard from a friend back East that John Lennon had been killed. At first, we didn’t believe it. We thought it was just another Beatles rumor, like Paul being dead. Then we turned on the TV, and it was all over the news. We cried and hugged and put “The White Album” on the record player. I felt numb. I realized that maybe those folks were right: John was dead, Reagan was president, the ’80s were underway and it was too late to restart the revolution — that revolution anyway.

Benicio Del Toro, actor

I know exactly where I was. It was 1980, right? I was in Puerto Rico. My brother was a big fan of the Beatles, and I was too. That album “Double Fantasy” had just come out, with Yoko Ono. I heard in school. My brother came up to me and he said, “They killed John Lennon.” I remember I cried.

Anthony York, associate editor, Salon News

I can’t pretend I knew who John Lennon was in 1980, being 6 years old as I was, but I do have a vivid memory from the period of his assassination. It was Election Day 1980. I remember my baby sitter, Tom, pulling up to the house in his Renault Le Car and dragging me off with him to his polling place, in a coffee shop at Pepperdine University. He plopped me in front of the Kiss pinball machine as he raced into line to cast his vote for Ronald Reagan.

I still remember the sounds of ELO’s “Don’t Bring Me Down” cranking from the speakers of that university coffee shop, the wild flapping of flippers and buzzing of bells from the pinball table that lit up under my watchful eye and frenetic fingers. And 20 years later, these things taken together make sense: Reagan’s triumphant sweep to office riding a crest of religious conservatism, the abnormal falsetto melody lines of ELO’s cocaine synth-pop shaking the glass top of the pinball table before me, the haunting vision of an airbrushed Gene Simmons glaring back from on high, makeup caked on, lizard tongue extended. The violent static electricity of that moment could only have been revolutionary fervor. Lennon was just among the casualties of the ancien régime. And I stood like a statue, moving only my fingers, barely breathing, a 6-year-old sponge in the hills of Malibu, Calif.

Sharon Mitchell, founder, Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation, health watchdog of the adult-film industry

I remember distinctly where I was at the time of John Lennon’s death. I was in a limousine, stuck in traffic on Central Park West about two blocks from the Dakota Building. I was with the band that I was currently in, called Neon Leon and the Bondage Babies, and I cried a deep sorrowful cry — the kind that junkies seldom get to feel but at that moment I felt.

F. Murray Abraham, actor

I was in Morocco with two of my fellow actors — Denholm Elliot was one and Tony Vogel was the other — and Tony said, “You Americans — that couldn’t happen anywhere but America, that they would kill someone like Lennon.” I remember it distinctly. I told him to drop dead. “Do you really believe there aren’t crazy people in England?”

Andrew Leonard, editor, Salon Technology and Business

I was a freshman at the University of Michigan, and I was hanging out in the room across the hall, watching “Monday Night Football.” To hear Howard Cosell announce Lennon’s death was a true introduction to the surreal.

I had been weaned on the Beatles by a father who helped organize antiwar demonstrations and a mother who had me out on street corners selling McGovern for President buttons in 1972. In high school, my long hair and glasses made me look, said my friends, like a dead ringer for Lennon. I was a walking cliché that night — like a million other college students, I retreated to my own room, got stoned and played “Imagine” about 100 times.

It was quite the bummer. But you know, for my daughter Tiana’s third birthday, I made her a tape of Beatles tunes. She’s now 6 and she has most of the songs on the tape memorized. And I’ve heard her singing along with John on “I Should Have Known Better”: “So I should have realized a lot of things before/If this is love you’ve got to give me more/give me more, hey hey hey, give me more.” And when I hear that same note of Lennon-esque gleeful exaltation crack in her voice on that last “more,” I know Lennon’s not really dead, and never will be.

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Compiled with the assistance of Eric Layton, Jeremy Rosenberg, Brent Simon and Chris Colin.

3. “Gwyneth Paltrow saved my life on 9/11″ story of the day: Wait, really? I could almost forgive Paltrow for her multitude of sins if she acted heroically on Sept. 11. So let’s check it out:

“Clarke, then a 24-year-old account manager at Baseline Financial Services, was on her way to work shortly before 9 a.m. and about to jaywalk across the street to catch the 1/9 train in Tribeca when the Oscar winner abruptly cut her off in her silver Mercedes.”

Oh wait, so Paltrow almost ran over a woman, inadvertently making her late for work at the World Trade Center? Man, and here the firefighters got to take all the credit. 

4. Narrowly averted train wreck of the day: Disney has split with Jerry Bruckheimer on “The Lone Ranger” movie, apparently because the director’s insistence on adding werewolves and “Indian spirits like Obi-Wan Kenobi” to the plot was getting too expensive.

5. Must read of the day: Roger Ebert’s new memoir, of which he’s posted the first several pages on his blog. It begins, “I was born inside the movie of my life,” which might be the best opening line since that Dickens book people are always quoting when they want to reference a good opening line.

First, there was the “What about ME?” response: Both Lily Allen and The Rock celebrated their birthdays yesterday and didn’t want that fact to get overshadowed in all the hubbub.

On the complete opposite side of the spectrum, there were the thoughtful responses from men like Rob Lowe, Roger Ebert, and — not joking — MC Hammer:

 Some people bordered on the brink between knee-jerk response and good taste, like Jim Carrey, Judd Apatow and a somewhat restrained tweet from Charlie Sheen:

 Other celebs used the time to start a death certificate conspiracy club, like Johnny Weir:

 … or just sidestep the issue completely with a pithy remark, like Aziz Ansari:

But by far the award for the weirdest response goes to Steve Martin, whose reaction to America catching the #1 most wanted man in the world was to make a completely bizarre joke about drugs and flying body parts:

Too soon? We doubt this joke would have been funny even if we gave it a year.

I don’t claim the review makes its case with perfect clarity, and I didn’t expect many people to agree completely. Being forcefully told that you’re full of crap goes with the job description, especially in an inherently subjective endeavor like movie criticism. I was gratified that a lot of people read the review, and e-mailed or Tweeted it onward — and was somewhere between flattered and startled that Roger Ebert posted a lengthy takedown of my review on his Chicago Sun-Times blog. Like almost everyone in this insular field, I venerate Roger as a passionate movie lover, a generous spirit, and an old-school journalist who has made the transition to new media and now pretty much owns the joint.

I thought Roger’s response was worth a response of my own, partly because I think he’s misreading or misinterpreting me, but mostly because I think the cultural gulf between our understandings of “Secretariat” offers a fascinating opportunity to talk about all kinds of stuff film critics don’t generally discuss: the nature and meaning of propaganda, the ideology (or lack thereof) of Hollywood movies, the role of religion in public discourse and maybe the gap between idealism and cynicism when considering movies, or the world. (Actually, activists and commentators on the right are way ahead of us: They talk about this stuff all the time, and have compelled Hollywood to understand that there’s enormous demand for a movie like “Secretariat.”)

UPDATE: I also posted this to Roger’s blog, where he has responded. Scroll to the bottom of the page to read that.

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Well, gee. Thanks, Roger. (I think.)

I’m not eager to get into a public dispute with you over a Disney movie that you found “straightforward” and “lovingly crafted” and I found weird, fake and inexplicably disturbing, which may be all this boils down to. The world isn’t likely to care much, and will render its verdict without our help.

I appreciate that you opened and closed this piece with some kind words, and I have great respect for you as a man and a critic. That said, I think the only place where we agree here is when you say, “O’Hehir’s reading [of 'Secretariat'] is wildly eccentric.” I’ll cop to that happily — my review of the film was willfully hyperbolic, even outrageous, in hopes of getting people to look at a formulaic Disney sports movie through fresh eyes. I know I don’t have to explain the function or uses of hyperbole to you, since it’s a technique you often employ (here and elsewhere). My hyperbole in the “Secretariat” review was supposed to be funny, and also to provoke a response. I appear to have succeeded brilliantly with the second part! The results on “funny” are more mixed.

Now, clearly I could have written a more “normal” review, in which I said something like: “Secretariat” was kind of fun to watch, but it bugged me. It presents a prettied-up, phony-baloney vision of America in the early ’70s, in a transparent effort to appeal to the “family-values” crowd who ate up “The Blind Side” — people who want a comforting and unchallenging movie without any sex or swearing. There’s nothing wrong with that as a way to make a buck, but this example is ultra-tame, scrubbed clean of any genuine conflict or drama, and I pretty much think it’s crap.

Now, I gather you would have disagreed with that, and pretty sharply, but I very much doubt you’d have bothered writing several thousand words ripping me apart. Now perhaps you see the genius of my plan!

Seriously, that is what I think — and pretty much what I said, albeit in somewhat stronger language. In your haste to take me down, I think you frequently read my gag lines as being deadly serious, mix or conflate different aspects of my argument (e.g., I don’t say or think anything about the horse being evil, or representing evil), and confuse events in real life with what we see in the film.

Now then: I do indeed compare “Secretariat” to “master-race propaganda almost worthy of Leni Riefenstahl,” a deliberately outrageous claim that, I suspect, pissed you off right at the outset. Let me elaborate a little. In my view, the most effective propaganda movies are not the ones about dudes with guns that espouse militarism, or the Soviet boy-meets-tractor films, or the Nazi cartoons about Jews. Those are too obvious. The most effective kind of propaganda depicts normal life, or rather an idealized vision of normal life, one that (as one of my readers put it) “makes a particular worldview seem natural, right and appealing.” Viewed that way, of course, a very large proportion of Hollywood movies could be considered propaganda, which is a subject for another time. (The shoe may fit.)

Of course it’s offensive to compare a contemporary filmmaker to Riefenstahl — although she was unquestionably a great director — but I never said or suggested that Randall Wallace had consciously or deliberately created a film whose primary purpose was ideological. It’s more like the ideology of reassurance and comfort and gorgeous images — what I refer to as the “fantasia of American whiteness and power,” which is, yes, going kind of far — is so built into this kind of movie you can’t get it out. I do, however, see Wallace’s desire to appeal to Christian audiences and a never-enumerated set of “middle-American values” as politically coded, at least to some degree. (Or rather, it’s coded if you want it to be; of course he’s happy with secular left-wing types watching the movie too.)

You believe, or suggest, that I damn the film for not noticing Vietnam or Watergate, but that isn’t quite right. As I think I make clear, I was struck by the oddness of the film’s idealized, “Ozzie and Harriet” portrait of American life, which feels more like the ’50s, being set in one of the most tumultuous periods of American history. That’s a suggestive fact, an element of the overall picture, not an indictment. You indulge in some hyperbole of your own in suggesting that I accuse Penny Chenery (the movie character? the real person? I am not sure) of being an evil right-winger, when I never say, and do not know, anything about her politics. Watch out for the “O’Hehirian Riefenstahlian TeaPartyite” clique, though –we’re on the rise!

I could go on, and I guess I will just a little: I never say or suggest that anyone considered the Triple Crown victories “as a demonstration of white superiority.” (I honestly don’t believe you don’t get the “Nietzschean Überhorse” joke. Secretariat was a product of eugenics if any living creature ever was.) You suggest that I attack Randall Wallace for his religious faith, but I do not, and you cite nothing to support this. You say that I see “a repository of Christianity (of the wrong sort, presumably)” in the film, when I say clearly that religion plays almost no role in the story. On the other hand, it’s simply a fact that Disney is marketing the film to Christian conservatives, and neither of us is required to have an opinion about it. And I’m not sure what you mean when you say you refuse to allow me to define the film as “Tea Party-friendly.” Is Sarah Palin not allowed to like it?

On the film’s racial issues: You suggest that I am demeaning the real-life Eddie Sweat, Secretariat’s groom. I say nothing about Eddie Sweat. I am discussing a fictional character, the only black person ever seen in the film, who is presented as subordinate, unreflective, constantly cheerful and uniquely well equipped to communicate with an animal. Could there be such a person? Of course. But in the context of my perception of the film’s total universe, this feels like an unwholesome and old-fashioned stereotype (for which there is a borderline-offensive name I will not use).

Similarly, I have a tough time believing you don’t get what I’m trying to say about the Pancho Martin character. Those who reported on the Triple Crown at the time have said that the real Pancho Martin was neither talkative nor boastful, and had no particular adversarial relationship with Penny Chenery. That stuff we saw in the movie did not happen. But the filmmakers have taken the one faintly “ethnic” or non-American character in the movie, and made him thoroughly despicable. What was that? An accident? An aesthetic choice? Or a lazy and coded shortcut?

For me, all in all, “Secretariat” adds up to something that looks pretty but tastes pretty bad, and apparently I expressed that view with a degree of force you found “insane.” Frankly, I wish you had avoided those kinds of epithets, and focused more on areas where we may have real differences of philosophical or political or aesthetic opinion and interpretation to discuss. I’m inclined to believe that you understood my argument well enough — better than you claim to, at least — but that it pissed you off so much you just didn’t want to deal with it. But that’s only a theory, and I assure you that my faith in Roger Ebert remains. Generally speaking.

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UPDATE: Ebert’s response, just posted on his Sun-Times blog, is typically concise and gracious, and comes with a zinger or two:

Thanks for responding. I understand your points, and have had similar thoughts of my own about some films. But you’re correct: I didn’t read it as satire, maybe because I’ve been softened up by so many similar Armond White reviews that he (apparently) writes seriously.

We can agree perhaps on one thing: Your review helps us define what Rotten Tomatoes considers “positive.”

The idea for the book came after a 2008 blog post he wrote about rice cookers prompted hundreds of comments, with many readers including their favorite recipes. “I think I was somewhat frustrated by not being able to eat and I wanted to live vicariously,” the 68-year-old said during an interview at his Chicago home, his laptop computer speaking his typed answers.

The book includes many of those comments, as well as more than two dozen recipes for dishes such as chili, risotto, jambalaya and oatmeal — Ebert’s favorite. He took a witty and funny tone when writing it; he says he didn’t want it to sound too specialized or difficult.

“The basic recipe is: throw everything in the pot and slam on the lid,” said Ebert, who has battled cancer in his thyroid and salivary gland over the last eight years. He now uses a feeding tube for nourishment. His book, “The Pot and How to Use It. The Mystery and Romance of the Rice Cooker,” will be released Sept. 21.

During his recovery, Ebert turned to social media such as Twitter and his blog, cultivating a tremendous following. And increasingly he’s reached out to mainstream media to tell his story. In February, for example, he talked to Esquire magazine about missing his former late movie review show co-shot Gene Siskel, who died in 1999 from complications following surgery to remove a growth from his brain.

And in March, Ebert appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” During the appearance, he made his Oscar predictions using a computer voice patterned after his own.

Ebert fell in love with the rice cooker after receiving one as a present for his 1992 wedding. The Chicago Sun-Times critic says he even took the rice cooker with him to the Sundance Film Festival, where he would cook with it during his busy movie-viewing schedule.

“We used to take the rice cooker almost everywhere we went,” his wife, Chaz Ebert, said.

Ebert urges his readers to improvise with the recipes and ingredients, saying there are no rules. He also says it is easy to adapt recipes not written for the rice cooker. Someone could go a week using the rice cooker three meals a day, he said.

And how do you learn to use a rice cooker?

“With experience you develop a sixth sense,” he said.

But writing a cookbook when you can’t eat?

It isn’t as sad as one might imagine that he is unable to eat or drink, he wrote in a blog post earlier this year. Rather, he misses the loss of dining with friends and family, rather than the loss of the food itself.

“The food and drink I can do without easily,” Ebert wrote. “The jokes, gossip, laughs, arguments and shared memories I miss.”

And his memory for flavor hasn’t faded. He wrote he has vivid memories of “an entire meal at Steak ‘n Shake, bite by bite” and for the “taste and texture of cheap candy.”

Anna Thomas, author of the cookbook “The Vegetarian Epicure,” wrote an introduction to Ebert’s book. She calls Ebert, who won a Pulitzer in 1975 for his newspaper film criticism, “a Renaissance man” who combines elements of standup comedy and memoir.

“Cooking, for him, I think in the last few years has become a very selfless act,” Thomas said. “This really tells you about Roger. He doesn’t stop living, doing things or being interested in things or having a good time because in a way something changes. But Roger does not get discouraged. He has such a zest for life.”

That zest is reflected in the book’s many small quips: “Grind it fresh in a mortar and pestle,” he writes about cooking with flax seeds. “You don’t have a mortar and pestle? People these days want everything done for them. Do like the Indians did and grind it with the end of a stick in the depression of a boulder.”

Thomas said she sees Ebert enjoying the social aspect of food, the kitchen and cooking.

“It’s something that he has always loved, so it’s not for him that if ‘I can’t taste it and eat it and swallow it then I’m not interested,’” she said. “For Roger, it’s very much his family, his friends and the people around him. He’s there’s for it. He loves it.”

Ebert even says in his book that he wrote it “simply to establish that I enjoy cooking.” Chaz Ebert says though her husband doesn’t cook as much as he used to, he still spends time in the kitchen. She said he chops apples into thin slices for her.

“I think it’s more of an art form for you and the kitchen is such a relaxing place for you,” she told Ebert.

Ebert explains it more simply saying the reason he cooks: “Satisfaction.”

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Online:

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/