Mulling over the spate of hate mail over Inception, I’m struck by something peculiar: For all the cries of elitism and critics being “out of touch,” I’m never bombarded by indignant e-mail for not praising great (and successful) comedies. These indignant fanboys, they really are pretentious little twats. Christopher Nolan’s work is freighted with highfalutin philosophical musings, which gives his admirers confidence to get on their high (though semi-literate and abusive) horses. But were I to dismiss, say, Step Brothers, which would have made my ten-best list last year had I seen it on time, there’d be nary a peep. What Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly, and the rest of the brilliant goofballs in that cast achieve in real time — often improvising madly, the camera running — is a true miracle. The same goes for Best in Show, an ensemble improvisatory landmark that ought to have been on my ten-best list the year it opened but wasn’t, because I was busy enthusing over higher-brow movies. My bad. I’m proud, though, to have put South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut and There’s Something About Mary at the top of my roster, as well as the Farrellys’ Shallow Hal. What’s funny about these Nolan-heads — who will form cyber lynch mobs over movies they haven’t seen — is that they’re cultural commissars. They’re no more open-minded than the fuddy-duddies who used to denounce genre fare like Hitchcock’s unheralded (in its day) Psycho and Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. And for all my manifold flaws, I was never so arrogant, even in my obnoxious youth, to write to someone to denounce his or her judgment of something I hadn’t yet read or seen. That falls under my definition of “tool.”