another maniacal Armond White review, this time "Fahrenheit 9/11"

honestly

wrestling heel, rather. sorry so typo.

"on his road to Hatersville"

You should read more film criticism if you think Armond White's reviews are as good as it gets.

you should reread my post if you think i said that

There are tons of film reviewers more entertaining than he is, if that's what you're into, which fine.

Anyway, list is his least controversial out of his Better Than lists, which I think I remember saying about last year's as well. He's losing his "touch".

The Gardener is terrific.

it's pretty hysterical that after making false dichotomies the premise of all his reviews for years, he's finally just straight up using the ">" sign like people ranking stuff on twitter.

just lolz at him feeling the need to put down Computer Chess with You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet (both films I really liked)

Binoche, Sukowa, Arterton, Adams, Lawrence, Collette gave a year of revelatory female performances through inspired auteurs, all ignored for Cate Blanchett’s dreadful, facetious embodiment of another foul Woody Allen conceit.

tired of everyone ignoring amy adams and jennifer lawrence

The problem with contemporary film culture–in skirts.

Michael Bay satirizes American ambition in imagery so bright and exhilarating it exposes the core of spiritual dislocation and rot that Scorsese turns into another self-pleased, overlong gangster epic.

don't know why I'm thinking hard about this but: isn't this the difference between symptom and diagnosis? the "core" of spiritual dislocation is exposed only by bright and exhilarating imagery? dngi

Want a pair of his glasses that magically turn gold into shit and vice versa.

Meanwhile, on twitter, GK is kvetching and Whit Stillman is coming down in Armond's corner. This is some kind of sad nerd flame war overload.

(says the man who follows both and is reading the tweets)

hmmmm

Armond White is the Kanye of Film Criticism

White may have deficiencies as a film critic proper. His knowledge of the medium’s history is often confused and scattershot; his contrarianism (itself a valid function in the whole broader apparatus of cultural taste-formation) often treads precariously close to straight-up trolling. But White’s coarseness, and the attempted egoism of his mocking of McQueen, are not among his flaws. Rudeness is precisely the point. White is denying (or trying to deny) this continued process of guilt-assuaging and artful feel-goodery. Like Kanye West, Armond White essentially stages (in grand, performative sweeps) the return of this repressed material in a way that film like 12 Years A Slave never could. He knows that it is difficult for certain people to reconcile his identity as a black, gay, right-wing Christian. And that's why he puts his personality across so forcefully. That anyone regards him as a problem is the problem.

http://www.nowtoronto.com/movies/story.cfm?content=196100

Like Kanye West, Armond White essentially stages (in grand, performative sweeps) the return of this repressed material in a way that film like 12 Years A Slave never could.

https://i.chzbgr.com/maxW500/6292689408/h6B05F03D/

"Rudeness as Grand Perfomative Sweep" by Armond White
copyright 2014
University of Chicago Press

god forbid we just call someone a dick when they act like a dick

reading Semley's tweets about it are enough, not clicking on that and enabling "random thing is the Kanye of whatever" as something for 2014

Pain & Gain > The Wolf of Wall Street

I'd co-sign with this. I really hate the way he (and other critics) use the hyphenate "porn" to deride movies, it's almost always lazy and inaccurate.

(In reference to his nonsensical Act of Killing slam.)

murgatroid otm

Semley is so magnificently far off the mark on this one.

not clicking on that and enabling "random thing is the Kanye of whatever" as something for 2014

Ditto. Of course, I could just be saying that because I was called the Drake of 2014 ILX film threads.

i mean, the argument just feels so perfect as a combination of trolling an argument about a troll + i need some content, quick

the fallout from this could be hilarious. i think this guy's insane, really. if not as much of a creep as jeffrey wells or np thompson.

though honestly I can't shake my fist too hard at his trolling because honestly i still find his reviews more worthwhile than like 90% of the stuff out there. Presenting your pr-dismissing, idiosyncratic take like a wresting heel doesn't make it LESS entertaining.

i actually kind of agree with this -- any given piece of his is always going to be more entertaining than peter travers. what's frustrating about him is that he clearly has some talent (clever phrasemaker, knowledge of film history) that he's pissing away. an armond white who backed up his contrarian opinions with actual arguments could actually be a really good critic.

My problem with White is his prose, which has deteriorated over the years.

I read an old SPIN review of his of a Morrissey album and it was zippier and less ponderous and less crippled by a need to construct strawmen than anything written in the last 10 years.

I read an old SPIN review of his of a Morrissey album

haha whaaaat

here's a, uh, Feargal Sharkey review: http://books.google.com/books?id=xdLsQBjl0-IC&pg=PA41&dq=spin+morrissey+armond&hl=en&sa=X&ei=tbDNUrP8E4eOkAfTuYCwAg&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=spin%20morrissey%20armond&f=false

The book that compiles some of his earlier stuff is titled The Resistance.

If memory serves, his reviews of Erotica and janet. are fantastic.

David Denby says Armond's ruining it for Movie Critics everywhere

oh that is rich

Movie critics enjoy a position of privilege virtually unknown to the rest of American society: they can say what they want and write as nastily as they want, as frequently as they want (the Internet is an extraordinary goad to fiery eloquence), and no one will punish them for it.

lolwut

He apparently knows no female movie critics.

An intelligent man who enjoys upsetting what he takes to be liberal complacencies about culture, White, an African-American, has spent many merry hours cutting up the films (for instance) of Spike Lee

this sentence can be defined "privilege and good manners"

whatever the worst version of white ppl could imagine is i'd still take it over denby. kinda agree he's going soft maybe, like maybe he got sick of being dismissed as contrarian i don't know. alot of that list seems like gimmes and even the vaguely challopsy ones aren't really so much (like i can easily imagine pain and gain is better than wolf of wall street neverminding the gulf in quality between the source materials). this might just be a reflection of no real consensus good movies this year (he's hardly the first person to have problems w/ 12 years a slave or think of it as torture porn).

I mean, when his stunting for Man of Steel is the only thing I can really get het up over, it's an off year for the Better Than list.

yeah, it's hard to take when Armond's otm (altho he's apparently against wuv! too re Her, right)

http://blogs.indiewire.com/criticwire/new-york-film-critics-circle-to-vote-on-armond-whites-expulsion

Why does this matter? The issue of intra-group decorum, while vital to the Circle itself, is not of especial importance to outsiders. Nor does it matter because it makes critics as a whole look bad, as David Denby argued on the New Yorker's website. It matters because of pieces like John Semley's "Armond White is the Kanye of Film Criticism," and because of people who've left comments, on this blog and elsewhere, saying things like, "But 12 Years a Slave *is* white liberal bullshit."

No one does more to further the idea of White as a bold contrarian than White himself, aka "the strongest voice that exists in contemporary criticism." But bold contrarians don't yell out public comments and then pretend they didn't, which is the very opposite of speaking truth to power. Notwithstanding its rhetorical lapses, White's review of 12 Years a Slave made a fitfully powerful case against the film, but yelling "Fuck you!" as its director accepts an award is not criticism. It's cowardice.

white is essentially a one-person war between these two modes of film crit, an academic who's stuck himself firmly in the thumbsup/thumbsdown community that he hates so much -- and he could be so happy if he just knew how to give up the big show! i support pop-academic film crit that exists in part for political subtext and occasionally makes ridiculous statements, i hate rottentomatoes, it's just so hard to fully support white because he's so wrong all the time. he hardly watches movies anymore, if he ever did, doesn't seem to fully grasp what actually happened in anything he watches, writes as if he's slept through most of everything he sees. also has certain ridiculous abstract standards and buzzwords that he's formed into some halfway moral code that can be applied to any film for any reason he chooses. i wish there was a version of him around who actually did the work.

the first graf of that indiewire story -- ugh. I know it's tongue in cheek but

Pain & Gain > The Wolf of Wall Street

Haven't seen WoWS yet, but P&G is one of my favorite movies of last year.

From slashfilm interview:

The internet is full of some of the same people who simply exist to defame me. It seems to be their only purpose in life. This is an important part of the lies that are being spread right now, because they’re being spread by people who simply want to hate on Armond. It happens that these are people, many of them so-called film critics, they just don’t have the ability and they probably don’t even have the interest of ever debating a film with me, probably because they can’t. And so, out of that weakness, out of that envy, out of that fear, they decide to make ad hominem attacks against me and say that I’m a bad guy, that I’m rude to people, and they talk against me personally because they can never ever match me intellectually, and will never engage me in a debate. I’m all about the discussion of film as you well know, and these so-called colleagues of mine never are because they’re incapable of it. And so they take the weak way out by hating on me, and hating on me to the extent that they lie about me and they repeat these lies in the media.

Decrying the sorry state of journalism and writing yet using "hate on"

http://www.slashfilm.com/armond-white-denies-heckling-steve-mcqueen-nyfcc-awards/

using "hate on" in the third person, no less

Decrying the sorry state of filmcrit yet his idea of engagement is to heckle filmmakers.

i wish there was a version of him around who actually did the work.

so otm.

certifiably insane