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Dan Carlson
Houston, Texas

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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May 16, 2008

Review: The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian

By Dan Carlson

Click here for the review.

On a related note, I completely understand and accept that filmic adaptations of books will never tell the whole story; they can only be as canonical as possible. Still, watching Caspian and Susan flirt was a bit disappointing, as was their kiss at the end, since Caspian doesn't love Susan but instead winds up marrying the daughter of Ramandu the retired star, whom he meets while journeying through and past the Lone Islands. It's kind of the whole reason he turns back from the eastern end of the world. But whatever.

On an unrelated note, I have now written more than 150 film reviews for Pajiba, and that's not even counting Guides or essays on Pajiba Blockbusters or Underappreciated Gems.

Comments: 3

raych

Caspian KISSES Susan? Susan? Stuffy, boring, becomes-too-old-for-Narnia-Susan?

This isn't just leaving things out of a story so that it's short enough for film. This is bastardy. I'm choking on my own impotent rage.

May 17, 2008 8:43 AM

Drew

Congrats all on all the Pajiba-ing. I enjoy your work.

May 19, 2008 7:39 PM

Amy K

THANK YOU! I saw that kiss in the trailer and was completely PO'd at their injecting romance into a place where it had absolutely no place. I even complained about it to one of my co-workers.

May 25, 2008 9:18 PM

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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."
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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.
— 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