A Critical Coming Out Party for Alarm’s Favorite Film-Reviewing Debutante

After a brief appearance over at his buddy Tony’s regular haunt, David Edelstein settles down in his glossy new digs and instantly makes the place recognizably his own. After nine plus years as the internet film world’s most consistently amusing and insightful jabberjaw at Slate, he’s back to ink and dead trees in the luscious New York Magazine.

His first review, which scours the muddled mediocrity of Albert Brooks’ new film Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, is characteristically trim, witty and thoughtful. I haven’t seen the film (and it looks too only be playing out in hill country, er, Maryland, and, as a proud resident of the Commonwealth, there’s little chance of me hauling off to anti-Wal-Mart land for this film), but that hardly matters: Edelstein isn’t just a remarkably solid arbiter of the good, bad, and awesomely bad in Hollywood, he’s also a breezily brilliant wordsmith. A few scrumptious tidbits from his sparkling, glamorous New York debut:

Brooks is a pioneer in the cinema du squirm, an artist who tracks his romantic illusions—and neurotic delusions—so obsessively that he becomes his own White Whale.

These days, Brooks wants to humiliate himself before anyone else can, and he’s making a fetish of it, devoting so much energy to demonstrating what a loser and a fool he is that he sucks up all the oxygen onscreen.

The character of “Brooks” is clearly meant to represent the solipsistic Ugly American, but the way the writer-director handles the Indians (and a few Pakistanis, in the course of a furtive border crossing) gives no indication that he explored the culture himself.