David Denby | The New York Observer

Shunting of the Snark

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 14:02:17 -0500

Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal, andIt’s Ruining Our ConversationBy David DenbySimon & Schuster, 128 pages, $15.95

If David Denby—New Yorker movie critic, occasional cultural commentator, erstwhile online pornography addict—hoped to inoculate himself against snark by parsing it for over 100 pages, well … oh, boy.

This isn’t intended meanly or personally or to ruin “our” conversation (whoever “we” might be—Americans? The quivering media elite?), but Mr. Denby’s efforts feel slight and second-rate when compared with those...

Denby, Scott Agree: Subway Pick-Up Scene in Milk is Hot; James Franco is Angelic

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 13:18:10 -0500

Critics are falling all over themselves to laud Gus Van Sant's Milk. Some seem to love one scene in particular:

A.O. Scott, The New York Times:

One of the first scenes in 'Milk' is of a pick-up in a New York subway station. It’s 1970, and an insurance executive in a suit and tie catches sight of a beautiful, scruffy younger man — the phrase 'angel-headed hipster' comes to mind — and banters with him...

Flashback Friday: Gael Greene, Dismissed Insatiable Critic for New York, Was Once Pitchwoman for Magazine

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 13:15:29 -0500

On the eve of Thanksgiving, The New York Times' Glenn Collins sat down with Gael Greene, New York Magazine's dismissed "Insatiable Critic."

Mr. Collins called Ms. Greene, "The priestess of radicchio, beurre blanc and arugula," but also noted that the critic had "become an attenuating natural resource at New York since giving up her weekly chief reviewer’s role eight years ago."

It wasn't always so. Ms. Greene was once so closely associated...

Details Discovers Masturbation

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 12:31:01 -0400

Add another trend piece to the ever-growing 'Internet Porn Addiction Ruins Relationships' canon. This month, Details' Em & Lo offer Jerking Off Is the New Infidelity (subhed: "Is your secret habit causing your marriage to slip through your fingers?"), in which we learn that, "While some guys store everyday images and encounters to fuel their imaginations, many go straight for the porn."

Sadly, the article was released too prematurely (tee-hee) to include this month's...

A Taste of Cindy

Fri, 04 Aug 2006 07:45:47 -0400

Introducing an occasional scorecard for New York's most dynamic gossip columnist. Today's Post gives Cindy Adams a much-deserved page-one teaser: "WTC: Why I hate this lousy movie." Inside, on page 14, Cindy--self-nominated as "New York's watchdog" (motion seconded! And carried!)--touches all the critical bases: * Filmgoing experience? "Slow-moving and formulaic." * Commercial prospects? Oliver Stone's "handlers are moving him around with a tweezer. Must be, like on that actual day itself, they, too, can smell death." *...

Read Their Lips: Six Months on the Mouth of American Movies With David Denby

Fri, 06 Jan 2006 03:48:00 -0500

"The slender Irish actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers (from "Bend It Like Beckham") has widely spaced blue eyes, slightly flaring nostrils, and a flattened upper lip—he can look pensive or brutally calculating at will.
[...]
"Scarlett Johansson wears her blond hair up, which brings out the oval shape of her face and the soft beauty of her features, and she, too, has an unusual upper lip, curved and fleshy, and a low, smoky voice." - GAME PLAYING, by...

Your 19th Nervous Breakdown, Or: We're Starting to Miss Elizabeth Wurtzel

Sun, 08 Feb 2004 19:00:00 -0500

Read all about it! New York's comfortably employed, middle-aged writers start trend of publishing queasy, painful-to-read, subtextually hostile " way too much information" scenes from their own lives. Younger writers who read this prose are reported to spend subsequent days in blue funk, fearing that their own lives will turn out the same way.

Katha Pollitt's tale of Web-stalking her ex-"lover's" girlfriend ( The New Yorker , an ongoing series) David Denby's chronicle of being...

N.Y. Intellectuals Persecuted, Sued In Gloomy Winter

Sun, 25 Jan 2004 19:00:00 -0500

DENBY: 'IT'S DISASTROUS'

Surreal Season of Discontent As Highbrows Take Hit This winter has been even gloomier than usual for the city's intellectual class. Let's start with the travails of the rising generation: the almost comically grim saga of the 27 Lingua Franca freelancers who are being sued for money they were paid after the journal of academic life folded in 2001. On Friday, Jan. 16, they got a morsel of good news-if the...

What Made Mr. Denby Write Nutty Snatch Of Fin de Siècle?

Sun, 11 Jan 2004 19:00:00 -0500

American Sucker , by David Denby. Little, Brown, 337 pages, $24.95. Now that the shell shock has worn off and we're unhappily accustomed to the nonstop barrage of first-person testimony-autobiography these days being the default mode for anybody who feels the itch to write-the appearance of yet another disappointing memoir only triggers a knee-jerk urge to blame the genre. Isn't it time to impose a ban? Or at least quality controls: No spilling...