The invention of the internet has elevated snarky reviewing to a level I personally think it does not deserve.

In fact, I don't think I ever even heard the word 'snarky' until I'd been online for awhile.

Basically, a 'snarky' post is a critical, mocking diatribe against someone else's creative work or against a public person. Snark implies a certain degree of low wit: Just savaging someone you dislike does not constitute snarkiness, that would be 'trolling' or even the start of a 'flame war'.

No, snark is a commodity that is almost unique to reviewers. It combines condescension, zingy one-liner insults, and smarmy collusion with the reader to create and maintain a kind of totally unjustified internet superiority complex. People who snark usually don't create anything but snark. They can be witty, but it's a totally narcissistic wit that comes at some genuine artist's expense.

Snark is making fun of D-list entertainers like Carrot Top and Pauly Shore and Paula Abdul just because you can. (Never mind that you're doing this from your room in your mother's basement whilst mainlining cheetos and gaming on your cell phone.) Ok, so Pauly Shore is not Mozart. But he creates something besides insults. He puts himself out there in a way that snarky net reviewers do not.

Snark is also when the New York Times reviews a Godzilla flick or summer slasher movie as if Bergman has fallen down on his game, sarcastically panning what everybody already knows was never meant to be anything other than an excuse to eat heavily buttered popcorn in the dark. As a person who will go see ANY movie with monsters or aliens in it, no matter how bad, this a special pet peeve of mine.

Come on NYT. Pick on movies your own size.

Snark is when you just cannot leave a snappy put-down unsaid, no matter how little it adds to the discussion of the work at hand, when you have to elevate your private self at a public person's expense, when you have nothing to say that sheds light on what was good or bad or mediocre about the work itself and why.

I'll be upfront here: I don't like snark. At all.

In fact, I rarely review books or movies that I hate. An exception might be when I'm talking about a certain issue and I think a movie or book is contributing to a misperception or a degradation of an art form. I might mention a work that I don't like in those instances, in passing.

In general though, when something impresses me enough to write a review about it, it usually has impressed me in a good way. I've liked it a lot, or liked something about it a lot.

I won't promise never to write a negative review here. I admit, for instance, to being virulently anti-Disney, and will probably eventually share why I feel that way. That column won't be pretty.

But for the most part, I believe that artists and writers deserve applause and recognition for what they are doing right as much as they deserve criticism for what they are doing wrong. This idea that criticism has to be negative to be good criticism is just not true.

Yes, many of the best movie and literary critics (Pauline Kael and Dorothy Parker, are two examples that spring to mind) had sharp tongues and occasionally poison pens. But few of the critics carving up movies on the net these days even know who Dorothy Parker was.

Dorothy Parker they ain't. (OK, that was a little bit snarky.)

So this column, for better or worse, will be a mostly snark-free zone.

I don't live with my mom. I'm terrible at video games. I love movies and books anyway. 

If you do too, I hope you'll check back often.