Now that Christmas shopping season is in full effect, it’s time for your Flavorwire editors to swing into public service mode. Yes, yes, all the lists and links and commentary are fun, we know you’re saying, but where are the shopping tips? What do I get my movie-obsessed cousin Donovan? Do I have to actually communicate with him to find out what he wants? Those phone calls always last twice as long as I want them to, and his breathing patterns are disturbing! Fear no more, gentle reader, for after the jump, you’ll find a collection of films and books guaranteed to warm the hearts of your film fan relatives on Christmas morning, which they’ll enjoy to the fullest before fleeing the premises to catch the 1:20 matinee of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Check them out and add your own after the jump! Read More »

David Denby is a film critic for the New Yorker; he’s also the author of the recently published book Snark, an important essay which traces the evolution of snark from ancient Athens to Gossip Girl, loosely defining it in its ideal form as so: “Two girls are sitting in a high-school cafeteria putting down a third, who’s sitting on the other side of the room. What’s peculiar about this event is that the girl on the other side of the room is their best friend. In that scenario, snark is abusive or sarcastic speech that operates like poisoned arrows within a closed space. Its intention is to offer solidarity between two or more parties and to exclude someone from the same group.”

In this same scenario we imagine that Denby would be the head of the judiciary society. Not because it looks good on his transcript, but because it’s the right thing to do and he doesn’t care what the cool kids think of him. It’s important to have people like that around. It keeps us honest.

While his argument is not without flaws (as Sarah Weinman notes here), we ripped through the extremely yellow book in a single evening and we haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since — especially when we’re sitting at the keyboard. And without a few holes to pick at, where would the interesting conversation start? (Generating a discussion about style, Denby explains, was his goal in writing Snark.)

Our own conversation with the writer after the jump.

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