Word: criticize
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...painter and a movie critic, Manny, who died at 91 last week, was the enemy of the ornate, the long-winded, the self-important. His collages asserted the artistic value of small things in boxes; his writing championed the cramped brilliance of little men in tight spots - in the B movies he loved and, through his writing, helped raise from forgotten to fashionable, from gargoyles to saints. At the same time he sniped at critics' darlings like Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles. (Citizen Kane was "exciting but hammy.") Above all, he urged the moviegoer's attention away from plot...
...visited us at Film Comment in the 70s, our office was in the American Bible Building; he remarked that he had worked on the building's construction.) Carpentry may have influenced his later collages and their element of compartmentalizing in squares. It also supplemented Manny's work as a critic - though, he professed to Ollman, he never acquired practical expertise: "I can't fix anything...
...five-month stretch in 1949-50, Manny was employed as Time's Cinema critic. After The Nation and The New Republic, a Time stint meant a sharp raise in pay (he was hired at an annual salary of $8,500, a hefty sum back then) but a likely loss in status among the intellectuals whose favor he craved. He may have thought his work for the magazine was beneath his standard; Negative Space includes no Time reviews. I had guessed that the gig was painful, that editors rewrote his copy into Time-speak, with its backward-running sentences, space-saving...
...lunch Manny had in 1977 with Film Comment's associate editor Brooks Riley and me, Manny allowed that, yes, he might be thought of as one of the 10 best film critics... Always competitive, and this time underestimating his worth. (A quick list of nine others, without overthinking it, but just going by the gut feeling of folks whose writing makes me jealous: Ferguson, Agee, Robert Warshow, Sarris, Kael, Richard T. Jameson, J. Hoberman - the best weekly film critic today, and the one who drank deepest at the Farber font - and, of the new guys, Ed Gonzalez, and honorary adoptive...
...artists." This was just around the time he was segueing from large abstract paintings to his overview collages. I've seen Manny's paintings, but only as reproduced in a catalogue. And I'm no art historian. So I called upon the expertise of Richard Lacayo, Time's art critic and, not incidentally, a serious film connoisseur. Richard e-mails me that Manny "frequently did these bird's-eye views (I call them table tops) in which the whole canvas is filled with figures, houses, objects, photographs, all seen from above, and frequently (not always) connected by train track that...