Who cares what Manohla Dargis says?
Lately, my sister and I have been dumbstruck by the movie reviews written by Manhola Dargis. It’s The New York Times, damn it, and we want to at least think that her reviews mean something. Well, I am here to tell you that Manohla Dargis has proven time and time again that she is not to be listened to. Her recent love letter to Bill Condon for Twilight: Breaking Dawn was just about the final straw, until today when I read her unnecessarily bitchy review of My Week With Marilyn. Like fruit, movie reviewers ripen then spoil with time. And like horses need to need to be put out to pasture. After all, who is to say her opinion is ANY more valid then… let’s say… MINE!
The last time I felt this way about a movie reviewer was in 1999 when the New York Daily News reviewer at the time trashed Girl, Interrupted. They spewed such venom that I was compelled to write the writer questioning whythey had such a personal vendetta against the film. Come to find out that their sibling had been sent off to a looney bin at about the age of Winona Ryder‘s character and surely this was way too personal a film for the reviewer to review. It was absolutely a good film as is My Week With Marilyn. Manohla’s review makes me wonder what is up her butt in regards to Marilyn Monroe? Something has pissed her off and it must go deeper than the tits they gave Michelle Williams. “The costumes hug her tight, but wrongly round out her breasts, which should thrust like rockets ready for liftoff.” Excuse me for not noticing. But that can’t be it. Perhaps she is jealous of Michelle’s career trajectory, as is Katie Homes. Dargis throws Eddie Redmayne under the bus right off the bat for being “all smiles and little depth” as the lead character Colin Clark. Well, his character is a voyeur of his own life, which in this case was a once in a lifetime moment where he was catapulted from a gofer on a set with the world’s greatest actors to becoming the resident confident. Couple that with being the object of Marilyn’s desire, Clark was in awe AND frozen in his unusual circumstance. What did you want him to do… act like some brooding, self-indulgent, neurotic tortured soul? Have you ever been remotely near that dynamic? Or has your whole life been one of watching from the shadows and pontificating on things that float your own particular boat?
Manohla Dargis loved the movie Bad Teacher with Cameron Diaz. Need I say more? That has to be one of the worst movies of the year, yet, to Manohla, she compares Diaz to the bouncy, screw-ball comedy actresses of the Golden Age of Hollywood, which is not only sacrilege, but simply not true. Cameron wishes she had a tenth of their vim and verve. Actually most of our actress today wish they had the brilliance of the actresses of that time. So why even try to compare them? The bottom line is, don’t listen to Manohla Dargis. And for that matter, any reviewer. No one really said it better than Manohla Dargis herself in a Twitter feud with other “movie reviewer types”. An Annne Thompson Tweeted “Film criticism is a dying art” and to that Ms. Dargis responded via Twitter, “Film criticism is a dying art? Did you write that with a straight face?” I would say definitely.
Dargis is an idiot. She writes for the Times (so no surprises) for which her casual and often overt racism and homophobia are condoned-because she's nothing more than a mass media whore.
She's a clear shill if you look at her record. Fawning over Twilight, Avatar, J. Edgar…when there's big money at play she's suddenly not the intellectual she poses as. When there's not…well you can see how vitriolic she can be to truly indie films. Her old bosses at the LA Times didn't turn on her by publicly calling her a gleeful "movie killer" for nothing. She's full of it. But that's the critics job–to counterfeit certainty in place of their absolute ignorance of what moviemaking is. They have to be arrogant to bully their opinions out at us under the auspices of genuine authority, but sometimes–and often, often in the case of Dargis–their ignorance comes shining forth in all its ugly light.
I agree with Alice above – She is obviously a shill for the major's and perhaps takes payoffs to write these reviews. How else to explain why she would viciously attack Paul Schrader's The Canyons and on the same page applaud a piece of absolute corporate garbage like Two Guns????
Manhola Dargis is an atrocious film critic. Her writing is incoherent, she offers barely any insight or interesting comments of a film. He reviews ramble on but, by the time you've finished reading you have no clear idea whether it is worth seeing or not and she also manages to give the entire plot away as well, the sign of a truly terrible writer. I wish she would retire because she really horrendous.