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

and i thought he'd fallen off

It’s time now to assert Paul W.S. Anderson’s status as one of contemporary cinema’s most thrilling talents. He deserves a clarifying comparison to the fraudulent, annoyingly monickered Paul Thomas Anderson whose film The Master opened the same week as Resident Evil 5.

http://cityarts.info/2012/09/17/battle-of-the-andersons/

this guy is a national treasure, tbh

It’s inevitable that Paul Thomas Anderson’s artistic ambitions should be unavoidably juxtaposed to Paul W.S, Anderson’s artistic success.

this guy

Follow Armond White on Twitter at 3xchair

Tags: armond white, hugo, Martin Scorsese, Milla Jovovich, Paul Thomas Anderson, Paul W.S. Anderson, Richard Brooks, Sam Peckinpah, stanley kubrick, steven spielberg

He's hardly the only one aboard the PWSA > PTA crazy caboose, among cinephiles I know.

really?

even if that opinion is not unique to Armond, the clumsy construction of that sentence is a bit of a marvel.

" . . . inevitable . . . unavoidably juxtaposed . . ."

--Armond White, City Arts

(Not that I wouldn't pay a dollar to see a Resident Evil movie announced as Best Picture at the Oscars.)

Yeah, PWSA has quite a bit of critical caché these days amongst a certain set.

I doubt any of them would write a review like Armond's though.

lol Phil

I mean whatever his ideas and his idiosyncrasies, he may be a worse WRITER than, like, Harry Knowles.

"PWSA is a master. PTA is a masturbator." -- Armond White, City Arts

Unrelated (or maybe not), but I'd always known Armond's contrarianism extended to politics but I never figured that he was an out and out Republican until he was tweeting support for Romney during the RNC.

link? I don't think supporting one of the country's 2 major political parties qualifies as "contrarian." Mindless, perhaps.

Was gonna quote the Ann Romney one, but just scroll through his recent tweets:

https://mobile.twitter.com/3xchair#!/3xchair

Supporting one of the country's two major parties isn't contrarian in and of itself, but supporting the republicans is a good way to piss off the kinds of people who love Paul Thomas Anderson films, I suppose. I just figured his occasional Obama bashing was less partisan and more just trying to be provocative. It's not like he doesn't have a history of that.

a good way to piss off the kinds of people who love Paul Thomas Anderson films

really? how about ppl who love Coen Bros films, like Mitt Romney?

I dislike Paul Thomas Anderson films – guess that's why I'm non-affiliated?

Hell, I don't care either way. I'm not even an American, though if pressed id certainly rather see you guys with a genial quasi intellectual as president than the Mormon Mr. Burns. Was just saying that the kinds of ppl who regularly read the film reviews in NYC alt.weeklies and care about movies like The Master are gonna tend to be liberal more often than not, and that armond knows which buttons to push.

Didn't know Romney was a fan of the Coens. Ok, then.

There's very little in his writing before he lost it to indicate that he would be a Romney supporter. So if he is, then yes, contrarianism has officially become his life support.

Xpost, ok make that "the kinds of ppl who" blah blah blah are going to generally be of a liberal or highly politically skeptical leaning.

Romney's favorite movie is O Brother Where Art Thou. I can totally see why he would love it/identify with it

Ryan (left) and Romney at the stump yesterday.

http://a1.ec-images.myspacecdn.com/images01/35/ecd9c3c71fe8ecea8814ea6685fa566a/l.jpg

It’s a secularist epic for audiences of the vampire age who don’t believe in religion anyway–there’s no possibility of rebirth or conversion, just suspicions of torture as Dodd manipulates Quell to follow orders and reveal his pain.

as bad as a writer i think armond white is, i'm always curious to see the terrible films he champions bc it's like a fun game for me to see if i can possibly enjoy the movie through his POV even for a moment. in this way he performs the vital function of helping me to enjoy adam sandler.

He seems incapable of enjoying anything unless it's able to serve as a proxy for his disdain of other critics, filmmakers, and straw people of the viewing public.

He has the weird sort of junk populism, embracing ultra-commercial things that the ticket-buying public should but doesn't always (at least to his satisfaction) lap up.

i think his schtick could be really interesting and provocative but maybe he's not quite smart enough to pull it off.

i dunno, he liked Film Socialisme and Transformers

xp

The only Paul WS Anderson film I've seen is Mortal Kombat, so the idea that THAT GUY could make a movie better than The Master is pretty absurd to me.

Like, I'd rather watch PSH or Leaf Phoenix read from the phone book than watch another Kombat-esque thing.

PTA sucks and I don-t understand / care for the RE5 thing but I def want his wacky film crit goggles

have wanted to sit down and catch up with paul w.s. anderson's filmography for quite some time. i've never seen mortal kombat, but he made event horizon, which i love dearly, and the resident evil films are kind of fun. otoh, death race and AvP are horrible. armond wants to position him as this generation's john carpenter, but from what i've seen, he just isn't in that league.

based on event horizon alone, though, i prefer him to p.t. anderson.

Yeah I should watch Event Horizon.

xp to Morbs: Well it's just one facet of his persona. He sort of has a similar treatment to Art House, waving the flag for certain strains in totality against whatever over-smart Indie fare that actually hits.

Basically it's all about stances, so it's not surprising he's a Republican.

I don't think he's a Republican. Mostly just a South Park Republican.

"the now overrated Hurt Locker" remains his defining moment

^^^

lol the confused anger he must have felt at critical acclaim raining down on a film he championed and thought everyone else would ignore.

Yah, he actually trusts public opinion being wrong more than he trusts his own taste. Not that I blame him.

armond white's entire relationship with other critics is basically

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qa9LNPwZIGA

I don't get the cult status of Event Horizon.

It starts well.

I just remember some friends in high school who loved it insisting I watch it with them and me being like "so...when does it get good?"

Were you also in high school?

I saw it in high school and thought it was a mess.

yup. (xpost)

It might just be me, but I rarely agree with anything I thought in high school anymore.

Yah, he actually trusts public opinion critical consensus being wrong more than he trusts his own taste. Not that I blame him.

that would be an interesting thread - aesthetic/artistic choices from high school you still agree with xp

Critical consensus is often drivel, but, like the modern GOP, White has built his career on aggrievement: somebody's always wrong, somebody always deserves a scalping.

I don't agree with a lot of what I thought in high school (American Beauty, it seems, isn't that good after all), but I didn't like PWSA's Soldier at the time and I'm not really chomping at the bit to reassess that.