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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. I try not to think too hard about how I want to build my life around talking about other people's creations and not mine. 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 a few TV shows ("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," and "Look Who's Stalking," for starters), 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. I guess I was made to be a film critic.

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April 6, 2006

I Am Jack's Complete Lack Of Surprise

By Dan Carlson

I got home from work after 9 p.m., but decided to catch the last 40 minutes of "Lost" anyway, since the show has long since regressed past the point where you need to actually watch every minute of an episode to get the full effect of the story. And within 30 seconds, I sadly called the Dave-centered revelation, since I've seen Fight Club and A Beautiful Mind and the "Normal Again" episode, not to mention that it was pretty much the most natural twist you could want.

The first season of "Lost" was extremely well-plotted. A friend of mine recently nailed it when she said that throughout the first season's arc, each individual episode was driven by a journey: Somebody was always going across the island to get a radio or a briefcase or dynamite from a pirate ship or whatever. But this season, everyone just seems to be sitting around, not doing much.

Plus, it's beyond disappointing that there are only four episodes left and it looks as of now that the Henry Gale thing will be bigger than it should have been. Henry should be the doorway to the finale, not the destination.

P.S. It would have been funnier if Hurley had recognized Libby because she was a porn star. At least that would have been different from the truth, which turned out to be pretty predictable. And she's definitely chasing him for the money.


"Do you know what I do when I feel I'm about to lose it a little? I buy a lamp."

"Well, lady, you must have one well-lit apartment, because you turned a corner somewhere."

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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

"I hope I strike a blow for chubby bald men everywhere. I hope they rise like an army."
Paul Giamatti, quoted in the Los Angeles Times, 12/14/04

"Let others praise ancient times, I am glad I was born in these."
— Ovid

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the wisdom

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.
— G.K. Chesterton

We were, for the briefest of moments, something greater than the sum of our uncertain parts; we were youth itself, in all its painful glory and sharp joy.
— Me, Fall 2003

There is a time in the lives of most writers when they are vulnerable, when the vivid dreams and ambitions of childhood seem to pale in the harsh sunlight of what we call the real world. In short, there's a time when things can go either way.
— Stephen King

Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.
Ask the Dust, John Fante