Dan Mancini

Ego is the greatest obstacle to writing good film criticism.

Writers are, by and large, an egocentric and insecure lot. I should know. The entire craft is built on a sometimes wonderful but often noxious mix of narcissism and self-doubt. Given that fact, the biggest rookie mistake a film critic can make is using review space to make oneself look smart or funny instead of actually providing an intelligent analysis of the work one is supposed to be reviewing. Sadly, many high-profile professional critics who ought to know better than to make rookie mistakes fall into this trap as well. When I first began writing film criticism almost eight years ago, I was definitely guilty of the sort of cringe-inducing preening that, for many, has made “critic” only slightly less offensive than, say, “pedophile” or “nazi.”

And then, just a few months into my new gig, I encountered Snow Dogs, a blissfully stupid Disney live action movie that was a prime mover in Cuba Gooding Jr.’s incredibly effective campaign to disgrace the Academy Awards after they inexplicably awarded him a gold statue for screaming “Show me the money!” into a cell phone.

Yes, I actually watched this. For 90 minutes.

Snow Dogs nearly sent me into a frenzy of arch, acerbic critical self-love. It was the epitome of everything loathsome about children’s entertainment. The story was a nonsensical jumble of focus-group pap that touched on parent-child psychology, tepid romance, the wackiness of anthropomorphized dogs, and, unbelievably, racial relations. Also, Cuba Gooding Jr. was Cuba Gooding Jr. — for the entire movie. The flick had the pungent stink of Disney execs cynically trying to separate little kids from their allowances. It was as if they couldn’t be bothered to even try to make a good movie. What was the point? Kids don’t recognize good movies from bad anyway. Stupid kids.

I was ready to savage the film — and I mean savage it — until I listened to the audio commentary by director Brian Levant. The man wasn’t cynical in the least. He was earnest. Earnest. Levant, it seemed, loves making family movies…especially family movies with canines (he also directed Beethoven and, more recently, Scooby Doo! The Mystery Begins). He doesn’t labor under the delusion that he’s making Citizen Kane. He’s perfectly content churning out forgettable fluff that makes little kids happy for a brief moment. Call me a softy, but how could I savage a guy like that? This gave me an epiphany: Real human beings make movies. Tearing apart their work (however crass or incompetent) in a mean-spirited way in order to make oneself look smart or witty is the act of a heel.

I still gave Snow Dogs a negative review. You can read it here (please keep in mind that I wrote it a long time ago; I’ve gotten better, I swear). I still pointed out its shortcomings. That’s my job. The fact that Levant seems to be a nice guy doesn’t make his movie any good. And, believe me, it is not good. But Snow Dogs marked the point at which I realized that my task as a critic is to explain why a sucky movie sucks, not to use a thousand words trying to make myself look awesome (and in the process more than likely make myself look like a complete tool). A good critic can be critical without being an a-hole. Unfortunately, there too few good critics out there.

(For the record, none of what I just wrote means that any movie made by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer should be spared an ounce of venom from every film critic currently drawing breath. There is always an exception that proves the rule. In this case, Friedberg and Seltzer are that exception.)

I’m out.

The following infographic was produced from data collected in a survey of 150 million American men.

(Click image to see full size.)

If you’ve been around this site at all, you can’t help but have noticed that last night I initiated a major overhaul of its layout. Gone is the busy Premium News template from Woo Themes, replaced with Felipe Lavin’s Sartori-ii theme, which emphasizes typography and clean design.

What initiated the change (besides the fact that Premium News was annoyingly slow to load)? My iPhone. I have the WPTouch mobile display plug-in installed on this blog. The site looks like this when accessed from my iPhone:

Spiffy!

At some point, I realized that I liked the iPhone display a lot more than the full-on browser version of the site. That led to a surprising epiphany: The iPhone has completely changed the way I think about web aesthetics. It’s given me a taste for minimalism and easy, intuitive navigation. It’s made me realize that there’s a better way to present content, a way that makes life easier for the end-user.

And so I completely redesigned the site, transforming it into something sleek and minimalist that more closely matches the WPTouch user experience. Instead of cluttering up aesthetically pleasing negative space, sidebar content like my blogroll, archive links, RSS feed to my DVD Verdict reviews, and categories links are now at the bottom of the page.

Best of all, Sartori-ii’s unostentatious presentation is ideal for making content, not presentation, the star of the show. And I’m all about content.

In related news, I’ve finally started building out the professional aspects of this site. The About link up top now leads to a biographical blurb as well as a child page that contains my resume. Professional writing samples will be coming soon.

Peace out.

Author J.D. Salinger died on January 27 at the ripe old age of 91. Once upon a time, I thought that The Catcher in the Rye was the greatest thing since sliced bread. And then I grew up. It appears that Salinger never did. Sad. His entire life amounted to an adolescent gesture, full of angst, unyielding narcissism, and ginned up melodrama but signifying very little.

After the enormous success of Catcher, he lived for decades in seclusion, writing but refusing to publish, wishing that we all would quit reading his novel and forget that he ever existed. Salinger was the living embodiment of his maladjusted, misanthropic teenage hero Holden Caulfield. He remained that way through adulthood, middle, and old age. To him, we were, to use Caulfield’s word, phonies. He even shared Caulfield’s penchant (not so weird in a teen as it is in a grown man) of idealizing young, waifish girls.

Salinger’s deep connection to his literary creation is pitiable. What’s worse, the psychological similarities between Salinger and Caulfield diminish the novel somehow. Knowing that Salinger didn’t view Caulfield’s idealism as naïve even as he treated the fictional boy’s emotional state as valid cheapens The Catcher in the Rye for me as a work of art because the author is only half as clever as he appears to be when you first read the book — and twice as pathetic.  Salinger apparently wrote the book the same way that teens read it — as though it is a work of staggering profundity, speaking truth to power. It’s difficult for most people over the age of 25 to take such a thing seriously. (Yes, Caulfield is one of literature’s most famous unreliable narrators, but the inconsistencies in his story don’t undermine Salinger’s essentially earnest approach to the boy’s emotional state and personal convictions.)

What The Catcher in the Rye continues to be is one of the finest examples of a distinctive, sustained first person narrative voice. It is a clinic in an author climbing inside a character’s head and staying there, unwaveringly, across the entire length of a novel. Salinger’s five decades of living as a recluse may explain how we was able to pull off this literary feat: In many ways he was the character. (For the record, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an even more impressive example of a novel-length first person narrative, not only because no one had done anything quite like it before Twain, but also because Huck wasn’t merely a Twain doppelgänger — he was a full-blown literary creation.)

I think it was Ernest Hemingway who once observed that most writers obsess over the psychological landscape of one period in their lives, writing about it over and over again. As they age, moving farther away from that formative period, they grow less and less authentic and vibrant as writers. Perhaps now that Salinger is dead, we’ll get a glimpse of the books and stories he worked on during all those years of isolation, and the sheer genius of it will make everything I’ve written here crass and uncharitable. I hope so. But I suspect that we’d discover works that were mired in a dull and increasingly artificial adolescence. Coming from a man in his 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, the work would read like the rantings of a loon.

We’ll probably never know one way or the other. If the executors of his estate honor his wishes, I bet we’ll never see anything of what he wrote during his self-imposed literary exile.

In any event: Here’s to you, Mr. Salinger. I may have soured on you later in life, but once upon a time you were the man. You may have been batshit crazy, but I’ll say this: You were no phony.

I’m currently working on a review for DVD Verdict of a production of King Lear starring Orson Welles and directed by Peter Brook that aired on the CBS program Omnibus in October of 1953.

King Lear.

On CBS.

In primetime.

Can you imagine?

Today we get Survivor: Heroes vs. Villains, three CSI shows, two NCIS shows, and Big Brother. Call me crazy, but I think Western Civilization may be moving in the wrong direction.

Based on the photograph below, it appears that Roger Sterling from the Sterling Cooper advertising agency has been named to President Obama’s cabinet, probably as Secretary of Manliness. The entire country should be drenched in Scotch and smelling of sex and cigarette smoke shortly.

In the picture, Sterling appears to be turning away in disgust as the president bows to a woman who isn’t Christina Hendricks. That, or he’s waiting for his “girl” to bring him the martini he ordered. Either way, America already feels more awesome.

The 1970s was the last truly great decade to be a kid (sorry, children of the ’80s, but it’s true). We were basically expected to be ninjas: Being seen but not heard was okay; being not seen and not heard was ideal. Parents were busy growing sideburns, learning to disco dance, attending EST meetings, swinging, and waiting in line to buy gasoline. Kids were the least of their worries.

Left to our own devices, we watched cartoon roadrunners drop anvils on cartoon coyotes’ heads (uncensored). We ate Sugar Pops and Sugar Smacks for breakfast because adults hadn’t invented ADD yet and “sugar” wasn’t a profanity. We rode in cars without child safety seats because automobiles were made out of steel and adults only wore lap-belts so no one considered us special enough to require five-point harnesses. We rode Big Wheels and bicycles without helmets or knee pads. We played full contact football in backyards, wearing only T-shirts and shorts. We didn’t require play dates. We were skinny, usually filthy, and we climbed trees.

Our toys were designed to entertain, but were also capable of maiming and killing us because, apparently, toy manufacturers weren’t all that good at thinking things through and parents (again, see above) were too busy hating Nixon and then Ford and then Carter to think much about the destructive potential of our playthings. Also, I’m pretty sure that society only wanted the strongest and most wily of us to survive.

What follows is a list of the deadliest toys of the ’70s. Look upon them, ye whippersnappers, and despair. Read the rest of this entry »

Absolutely nothing happens in this video except that my 18-month-old daughter walks around in her 4-year-old brother’s shoes — on the wrong feet (because even the smartest little kid isn’t all that bright when you get down to it). Mostly, I just wanted to see what an iPhone 3GS video looked like uploaded to YouTube and then embedded on this page.

She’s darn cute, though, ain’t she?

Last night, President Obama delivered his first State of the Union address. If you missed it, the following graphic condenses the speech and presents its essential content in the purest form possible for easy intellectual digestion.

I just saved an hour of your life. You’re welcome.

Dear Apple,

While everyone (myself included) compares your newly announced iPad to an oversized iPod Touch and cracks wise about its lame name, I have to admit that a sleek, easy to use tablet is an attractive alternative to a laptop. But here’s the rub: I’m not the sort of gadget geek who wants or needs to own both a laptop and a tablet. What’s the point? And when the time comes for me to grab a new piece of hardware, you need to address a few things if you want me to make the leap from a Windows-based laptop to an iPad. Read the rest of this entry »