Many of them I once used, until someone pointed out the error of my ways. I heard the indie director Jim Jarmusch disparage the word "quirky" - a word used by every hack critic to describe any movie (like Jarmusch's) where characters exhibit any eccentricities - and vowed never to write it again. In deference to the late Pauline Kael, I regularly refer to what I watch as "movies," rarely as "film" and never as "cinema."

I avoid "Oscar-caliber" or "Oscar-worthy," because the Oscars are, historically, not the most accurate guide of the best movies or filmmakers. (Hitchcock never got an Oscar, Martin Scorsese still hasn't, but Eminem has. Go figure.) And I am trying to wean myself from high-sounding but essentially empty words like "wonderful" and "magnificent" - though I know this cuts down my chances of being quoted in movie ads.

But there are two words I strenuously avoid - and I have my friend Scott Renshaw, the movie critic at City Weekly, to thank: "Overrated" and "underrated."

Each word defines something about which there is a consensus, favorable or not, with which the writer disagrees. Actually, "disagrees" is too mild a world. Saying "overrated" or "underrated" is, as Renshaw once opined to me, saying something akin to "I'm right - and you all are wrong, wrong, wrong."

A prime example of this arrogance came in last Sunday's New York Times, in an essay by film critic A.O. Scott bearing the headline "The Most Overrated Movie of the Year."

The movie earning Scott's scorn was "Sideways," director Alexander Payne's wry comedy about two midlife buddies on a wine-country tour. "Sideways" topped the Golden Globe nominations, is a front-runner for the Oscars and has been placed on (at last count of the Web site Movie City News) 115 critics' Top 10 lists.

But Scott doesn't stop at saying "the critical praise is out of proportion to the quality of the film," or pointing out that no movie could live up to the expectations heaped on "Sideways" by all those critics. No, he plays armchair psychologist on his fellow critics by saying we who liked "Sideways" are seeing ourselves in it.

Miles, the wine snob and failed novelist portrayed by Paul Giamatti, is "by temperament if not by profession, a critic," Scott wrote. Comparing Miles to his hedonist pal Jack (Thomas Haden Church), Scott continued, reveals "the difference between a sensibility that subjects every experience to judgment and analysis and a personality happy to accept whatever the moment offers."

Further, Scott wrote, "a good many critics see themselves, and it is only natural that we should love what we see." In other words, the "Sideways"-loving critics - and I had the movie at No. 3 for 2004, higher than any other fictional film (documentaries took the top two spots) - see themselves as judgmental schlubs who, in spite of deep moral failings, get to have sex with Virginia Madsen.

It may be worth pointing out that some of those 115 critics are not schlubby middle-aged men. Lisa Schwartzbaum at Entertainment Weekly, Claudia Puig at USA Today and the AP's Christy Lemire all ranked "Sideways" as the year's best movie, and Scott's Times colleague Manohla Dargis (one of the sharpest critics we have, in my humble opinion) had it at No. 3.

Scott's analysis is, to me, insultingly reductive of this movie and his fellow critics. (We are so changing the secret handshake - that'll show him.) Most movie critics I know love their jobs, love movies and consider critiquing movies as their way to share that love with readers. They also love their families and probably would not have sex with Virginia Madsen even if she offered.

That said, I respect A.O. Scott for voicing a contrary opinion. That's another reason I dislike "overrated" and "underrated," because the words perpetuate the coarseness of CNN's soon-to-be-defunct "Crossfire" and similar cable-TV shoutfests - arenas where having an opinion isn't as important as shooting down the other person's opinion. What's wrong, as Movie City News' editor Dave Poland wrote this week on his blog, with saying simply "I disagree"?

---

Got a question about the movies? Send it to movie critic Sean P. Means: The Salt Lake Tribune, 143 S. Main St., second floor, Salt Lake City, UT 84111, or e-mail at movies@sltrib.com.