Manohla Dargis

This is a review of a reviewer. She is the worst writer to ever work for The Times. She is not the worst reviewer. That title belongs to me. And possibly, an even worse reviewer than I, is Armand White of The New York Press.

I almost never look at bylines and it wasn't until I had to start re-reading certain movie reviews that I realized they were always written by this woman. Now, unfortunately, I look at the byline first, before I allow myself to read a critic's review in the Times.

Why? I wish I knew for sure. Newspaper writing is so much more different than prose writing, at least for me. I don't want to have to go back and start over and try to find "the point" of a newspaper article. For novel or short story writing I can accept experimentation, like this new novel, "C" or anything by Thomas Pynchon, Roland Barthes, James Joyce, etc. But a critique should be clear and it should be about the movie -- not about some point you want to make.

That, I think, is a huge problem in critical writing these days: the reviewer often talks back to the filmmaker instead of accepting what the filmmaker has done and then writing about whether or not he or she has achieved his or her purpose. The film is not supposed to be about the critic's slant on life, and Manohla Dargis has a way of injecting her particular take on life into a film which has no interest in her. Armand White does the same thing but he's a much more obvious idiot.

Her review, for example, of this year's "Dumb and Dumberer" which is called, "Due Date." At least a quarter of the review (the only part I read) is given over to one scene where Robert Downey punches an obnoxious kid in the stomach. Then she goes on to talk about "The Hangover" and other irrelevant and the primarily political reasons why you should not like the movie. That is not a review of the movie, it's an ad for sentimentalism. Hate the movie because its characters are bad "men." Only like movies where the characters behave like good neurotics that are ultimately lovable.

She's also a bad writer. And it's no surprise to me that she comes from Hollywood.