or, as adam would call her, "the dargz

I have mixed feelings about Manohla Dargis. OK, OK, twist my arm why don't you-- I hate her. I hate her background in art cinema, I hate how she comes from Los Angeles, I hate how she doesn't have a wikipedia entry so I can't find more to hate about her.

One of my favorite games to play is "guess which Times critic wrote this review;" with A.O. Scott and Stephen Holden it can be a toss-up, but Manohla is a cinch, largely because her reviews make so little sense. As my friend Jordan pointed out a few weeks ago, her reviews can be fun to read because they make you believe she's actually insane. She tends to focus on minute details of films-- Santa's sack resembling testicles?-- or digress into something only marginally related, like the brilliant but unnecessary mini-review she gave of 1978's "Superman" within her actual review of "Superman Returns."

It's not that I don't respect her as a critic, and her lunacy can often lead way to intentionalof comedy, as when she states up-front in today's review of "Lady in the Water" that M. Night Shyamalan has "lost his creative marbles...[and] Shyamalan's marbles are bigger than those most people." This is just a few paragraphs before she calls him a "Chatty Cathy."

It was this review that set me off, however, and got me to what I really hate about Dargis. She actually liked "Lady in the Water," even though she seems to be alone in that one, and gives props to the film's use of myth and fairy tale as part of this self-proclaimed "bedtime story." What gets her goat, however, is not Shyamalan's arrogance or the plot's incoherence, but that Shyamalan "appears insistent on clinging to myths, particularly about innocence and faith, that serve the myth of his own genius." About Bryce Dallas Howard's water nymph/narf Story, she writes "she’s one of those juiceless virginal fantasies who inspire pure thoughts, noble deeds and stifled yawns. Disney’s Little Mermaid comes off like a tramp by comparison, which suggests that Mr. Shyamalan needs to add a fairy-tale revisionist like Angela Carter to his bedtime reading."

And that's what really makes me hate Manohla. There's very little in filmmaking that's sacred-- one man's flawless crane shot is another woman's bloated budget-drainer-- but when you take on which myths can and cannot be used, you're messing with what makes film worth it to begin with. All art forms deal with myth and legend in some way or another, from the Last Supper to every production of Hamlet that works in references to the war in Iraq. There's no telling which myths are relevant or not, or who should revise them and break down the old stereotypes; there's room to play with mythmaking and room for revision, but if you're going to make a good old-fashioned fairy tale, your heroine can be as virginal and juiceless (as an aside: yuck) as you please.

I haven't seen "Lady in the Water," and I have no idea how it actually deals with the classic fairy tale. If Manohla thinks it works, though, then it works; as "Hoodwinked" showed us a few months ago, revision doesn't always work so well either. Manohla Dargis will probably continue to both infuriate me and make me laugh for a while now, but if she keeps picking on the bones of cinema like that, well, I guess I have no choice but to take her job. Obviously.