Bah humblog
: The Washington Post’s Jennifer Frey reviews Polar Express and says, “To not adore it is to feel like a scrooge.”
Meet Scrooge:
In the NY Times, unknown critic Manohla Dargis tries to show off in a most obnoxious way about a children’s movie (my emphasis added):
It’s likely, I imagine, that most moviegoers will be more concerned by the eerie listlessness of those characters’ faces and the grim vision of Santa Claus’s North Pole compound, with interiors that look like a munitions factory and facades that seem conceived along the same oppressive lines as Coketown, the red-brick town of “machinery and tall chimneys” in Dickens’s “Hard Times.” Tots surely won’t recognize that Santa’s big entrance in front of the throngs of frenzied elves and awe-struck children directly evokes, however unconsciously, one of Hitler’s Nuremberg rally entrances in Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will.” But their parents may marvel that when Santa’s big red sack of toys is hoisted from factory floor to sleigh it resembles nothing so much as an airborne scrotum.
Oh, come on. I haven’t seen the movie; plan to. But this kind of look-at-me-I’m-wearing-a-thong writerly exhibitionism is just plain obnoxious. Has The Times no editors? Did no one read this and say, “Come on, you went a mile too far, try again”? Santa and Hitler? Santa and scrotoms? No one?
