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Dan Carlson
Los Angeles, California

I'm a twentysomething white male with ambitions to be a professional film critic and generally spend my days getting paid to watch movies and write about it. A compulsive reader and stubborn cineaste, I take an often contrary stance to my more fundamentalist peers and upbringing by celebrating the pursuit of the good, and the Good, in life, love, art and film. If you watched enough episodes of certain TV shows — for starters, "The Hungry and the Hunted," "The Cut Man Cometh," "The Body," "The Zeppo," "Waiting in the Wings," "Out of Gas," "April Is the Cruelest Month," "20 Hours in America," "Colonial Day," "An Echolls Family Christmas," "Look Who's Stalking," "The Garage Door," "Charlie Gets Crippled," "Wind Sprints," and "Corner Boys" — you would understand me completely, and you'd also realize that much of my worldview and philosophical insights are heavily influenced by fictional works/programs, and many of the good things I've said in my life are just a regurgitation of someone else's imaginings, or at any rate a heartfelt attempt to interpret them. I guess I was made to be a film critic.

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« Review: The Libertine |Main| Tony Takes A Leak »

March 11, 2006

Saturday Clip Show

By Dan Carlson

Because I'm too lazy to be creative.

• There's a real-life Simpsons intro over at YouTube. A rare show of cultural awareness from the folks at Fox, but it's too little, too late: Between the untimely deaths of Arrested Development and Firefly, you guys are dead to me.

• NBC, on the other hand, has forced YouTube to remove the copies of its SNL digital shorts, especially the pioneeing "Lazy Sunday," which wasn't that great to begin with, but had the fortune to come along after several consecutive years of Saturday Night Live sucking pretty bad. YouTube saved SNL this season, and NBC doesn't quite seem to understand that.

• A San Antonio judge quoted Billy Madison in his decision. I was kind of hoping the plaintiff would respond with, "A simple 'no' would have done just fine."

• I dare you to try and escape the crimson room.

• Mr. T visits the Fishers.

• I'll admit that this trailer gets me excited, because let's face it, the four original Superman movies were steaming bowls of elephant crap. Giant, poisonous, Margot-Kidder-love-poem-voice-over pieces of crap. Crap crap crap. No one ever mentioned that after Christopher Reeve's accident, which I guess makes sense, since he probably had other stuff on his mind, but come on. Those movies were awful. This series has nowhere to go but up.

• Conversely, the latest trailer for X-Men isn't as good as the teaser, and I'm more than a little wary about the film, especially since it's being directed by uber-hack Brett Ratner, who's on cinematic par with Renny Harlin. It's too bad Bryan Singer jumped ship; who better to channel the latent themes of sexual discrimination than an actual gay director? Ratner, on the other hand, is a tool. Thanks a pantload for Rush Hour, Brett. Enjoy ruining X-Men.

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"The critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising."
— Pauline Kael

"Film lovers are sick people."
— Francois Truffaut

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Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?

O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.
— Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe

Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.
— John Stuart Mill

We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.
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