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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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October 31, 2007

Ain't No Party Like A Scranton Party, 'Cause A Scranton Party Gets Really Self-Aware A Few Years In

By Dan Carlson

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This week's edition of Remotely Controlled in the Willamette Week is all about "The Office." Eat it up. Also, it was written as a bullet-point column, like my take on "Pushing Daisies," but for some reasons the bullets aren't showing up online. That's why the flow between the paragraphs is a little choppy; it's meant to be, only without the bullets, it's impossible to know this. Anyway, that's the story.

Click here for the column.

Comments: 3

Great column. Exactly how I was feeling about the hour long episodes. I also noticed that since Jim and Pam have gotten together, they've sort of teamed up to snicker at the rest of the office as if to say "god damn, we're so much more attractive and charming and qualified than these people"

You're for sure right. I was so relieved to see Michael win one, it was getting really depressing.

Joey

You know what I would've like to have seen before Jim and Pam getting together was Demitri Martin as Jim's nemesis. He's young, and good looking and funny in the same way. Like what if Demitri had been at Pam's art show?

I feel like Jim is a wuss (how many times has he been backed down by different guys on the show) and he has no competition for the cool guy.

Maybe that would knock some of his smugness down. Or another Amy Adams or Rashida.

But maybe that's what would happen in a small office setting. Maybe they would get cocky?

I just spent more time writing about the Office than I've spent doing reading for my Evidence class.

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The Lines

The Quotes

"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