>“The secret of the bad review is that you can get a lot of pleasure out of it,” A.O. Scott tells me, chatting via phone in late December. “It is a kind of a do

>“The secret of the bad review is that you can get a lot of pleasure out of it,” A.O. Scott tells me, chatting via phone in late December. “It is a kind of a dopamine rush. First of all, editors—especially editors at The New York Times—love it. They love bad reviews. And they’re fun to do because they give you access to a lot of writerly tools that are fun to use. You can be funny. You can be clever. What you’re doing is, you’re demonstrating your superiority to a thing that you’re writing about.” This is my least favorite thing about negative reviews - writers start to really "feel their oats." It almost always goes way too far. Reminds me of the occasions back in my creative writing program when a fellow student would start using "he/she proceeded to..." a bit too liberally in their writing. Calm down and tell the story. It's also getting a rise from your readers on the misfortune of someone else (in the case of a movie, many hundreds of people), which, as A.O. Scott says, can go straight to the writer's head. >But “you can get too hooked on that feeling” of writing slam after slam, he warns. “They’re definitely more fun. But positive reviews—where you can make a case for something that you really feel enthusiastic about, and still write as well as you can—that’s a lot harder, and a lot more valuable.” Agree all the way through, here. Saying "it's bad" is easy, and then you go ahead and play with all the turns of phrase you've been thinking about in the shower every morning. It just feels, I dunno, unnecessary, or maybe even a moment of weakness - as if the new programmer on our team did one bad PR too many and I really just let off on them. Makes me feel good, maybe? But in doing so I've lifted my restraint, abandoned my values, let the floodgates out to the detriment of someone else. I guess critics will exist no matter what, but it really doesn't jive with my philosophy of "be good to eachother."