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

gregory solman recently curated a clint eastwood festival here in l.a.

http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/MSNBC/Components/Photo/_new/120831-eastwood-hmed-8a.photoblog600.jpg

Imagine how precise and authentic Hill would have made Killing Them Softly or There Will Be Blood.–films that are inconceivable without Last Man Standing or The Long Riders.

???

Hill is the father of modern adepts Neveldine-Taylor and John Moore and Paul W.S. Anderson. They all know how to make movies be kinetic and moral. The torture of Christian Slater scene feels Godardian, as if it were an instantaneous critique of very confused Zero Dark Thirty as well as the puerile Reservoir Dogs.

the solman/white piece (and there's plenty online to suggest solman isn't an alias) http://cityarts.info/2013/02/01/number-one-with-a-bullet/

In formal terms Nolan, Tarantino, Soderbergh, Dominik, even Kathryn Bigelow are pikers compared to Walter Hill. Put the Scott Brothers (the late Tony, the aesthetically dead Ridley in this category, too).

That shit is cold blooded even with the typo

the man has deep deep issues

Let's keep a running tally of how many movies he compares unfavorably to Bullet in the Head this year. I say we'll hit 30 by Labor Day.

http://cityarts.info/2013/02/06/at-cinemas-crossroads/

Few things hurt more than seeing Armond White championing a director I also like.

i could swear he used to be relatively lucid and refreshing--maybe 10-12 years ago--but im afraid to go back and check.

no one tell Armond that Walter Hill is actually quite highly rated

Gus V'an Sant's Pooperganda. Read now. cityarts.info/2013/02/06/fri…
6:58pm - 6 Feb 13

Read some of his new reviews for the first time in a while today. When did he fall out of love with Spielberg?

when other people fell back in love with him probably

his tempered reaction to Lincoln can likely be laid at Kushner's feet.

And Obama's (worshipers).

i kind of like the idea of armond white -- this grumpy contrarian, perpetually convinced of his righteousness whose aesthetic sensibility just couldn't be more out of touch with mainstream critics -- but he is just such a godawful writer that i can't bring myself to enjoy his reviews.

with the rise of "vulgar auterism" he's going to have to look harder to be contrarian.

i'm sorry, but i don't know precisely what you mean by "vulgar auteurism". that phrase just makes me think of spring breakers, which is amazing. but i guess you are talking about a new trend in film criticism that is more focused on the pov of the director/advocates for more distinctive directorial visions in cinema? if so, which critics do you think emblematize this trend? this seems interesting, as i've always been sort of a partisan auteur cinema.

It really means the kind of so-called trash action directors that are getting a lot of critical love in some circles such as Paul W.S. Anderson, John Hyams, Neveldine/Taylor, Tony Scott, Michael Bay (perhaps to a lesser extent in some areas but still). Armond has been touting these guys for years but it's got traction now with blogging folk like Ignatiy Vishnivetsky et al.

Some people include Michael Mann, but that's just wrong imo.

interesting. thanks for the definition. i've always felt that agressively populist film criticism -- championing michael bay or whatever -- is really uninteresting, and even reactionary, unlike populist music criticism -- like chuck eddy -- which feels democratizing to me, perhaps because pop music has never had as much of a stranglehold over the music scene as hollywood studios have had over American cinema. maybe that could be its own thread topic.

sorry, that was a bit tangental. i think armond white will always feel somewhat contrarian, mostly because his tone is just out of control. who else could hate toy story 3 *that* much, like seriously?

I wouldn't put it as "aggressively populist"

oh great, the fucking P-word didn't get enough of a workout during last week's eulogies.

I wouldn't listen to that piss Chuck Eddy likes if you paid me.

i'm really curious to know if there's a single person in the world who gives a shit abt morbs' opinion on music

liek there just isn't an alotted space in my brain for that

the music vs movie rockist thing is something i've considered before, i don't really know what to think of it

i suppose snobbery in film and anti-rockism in music are both attacking the middlebrow from different sides of the middlebrow

but the line between highbrow and middlebrow is much more vague in music than it is in film and the line between lowbrow and middlebrow is much more vague in film than it is in music

brow brow brow it's almost 6am time to stop

i just reread the fahrenheit review in the op and man it's a marvel of measured critical observation compared to recent armond. i don't remember my single 2004 viewing of the movie well enough to know if this excerpt is fair and there's a very questionable "as well as" in the first graf pointing the way forward to the current swisscheese condition of armond's prose but i thought this was a worthwhile point:

Moore very deliberately mixes tv drama and movie clips into his rhetorical hodge-podge (referencing Bonanza, Dragnet and song clips by REM). These tropes probably made Tarantino delirious. Fahrenheit seizes upon the mess of postmodern capitalist pop only to misread how pop trivia malnourishes the moral lives of audiences—those who are then sent off to war, as well as Beltway politicians and Wall Street bankers who have the privilege to dismiss pop as escapism.

That's what Godard meant about distinguishing text and image. In Moore's doc style, images have only superficial, convenient meaning and no historical resonance—unlike Peter Davis' 1974 Vietnam doc Hearts and Minds, which used Hollywood clips (Bataan) to show the ideological indoctrination of pop culture. Davis suggested that a generation was fooled into romanticizing war and xenophobia. That was part of how Vietnam protestors understood their experience. Moore, being culturally ignorant, stands on shaky ground when he ridicules GIs who listen to pop on bombing missions, never respecting their cultural conditioning or examining their sense of patriotism.

shove it, zachylon, i don't anyone to give a shit about what i think except me

don't want anyone

Really? Always took you for a populist.

lol. i feel ebert's populism is different because from what i (baselessly) imagined the vulgar auteurists might be like, because he didn't have a grudge against art cinema, although he did have one against academia and film theory. so ebert's embrace of hollywood didn't come at the expense of the european scene, or something; to him it was all good and he didn't really make a distinction between auteur films and those produced more impersonally, by studios. in any case, i don't think anyone ever put stock in ebert's opinions. he was famous and beloved because he was an entertaining, likable writer; people didn't read him for searching analysis.

also morbs: i've always enjoyed posts on ilx when i was a lurker and i've surmised that he actually writes film criticism. can you tell me what your byline/actual name is so i can track down your reviews? if you need to remain anonymoys, that's cool.

u could start w/ the one that prompted an addled director to call me a "hedge funder"

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/detachment/6098

thanks.

I don't think Roger had a grudge against academia or film theory (Bordwell was a big fan, though obv there's tension between him and academia), he just wasn't trained in it. His job was to review films for a mass audience, something his peers in alt-weeklys or Armond here aren't all that bothered with. Not all critics have the same goals, after all.

Armond likes to find larger political implications in what everyone else would call trash a la the melting of the Eiffel Tower as some sort of post-9/11 metaphor in G.I. Joe, and also the complexities of race in Norbit, but he too often descends into absurd bouts of contrarianism (his year end list of "this is better than..." is pretty abhorrent and damaging, I think, to critical evaluation). Vulgar Auterism isn't necessarily interested in contrarianism, but rather finding new forms of artistic expression in "populist" digital forms. I think they too often ignore fundamental filmmaking aspects like, say, a script (the lastest Resident Evil had some amazing and interesting visuals and compositions, but the writing was still shit...otoh Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning is fantastic despite some ropey acting).

hm, who is an example of a vulgar auteur critic? i feel like maybe i am one, sometimes, because i loved TRON legacy in part *because* the plot felt so light and weightless, allowing the amazing sounds and visuals to come to the fore. it would have been a worse movie, i think, and less like a videogame, if it was more complex. in terms of ebert's anti-academia bias i am mostly thinking of this article. about 1/3 of the way into it, the author of the piece claims to have interviewed ebert, and quotes him as saying that film theory is a "cruel hoax for students, essentially the equivalent of a New Age cult." i know he is bros with bordwell but bordwell is a film historian, and his writing is, from what i understand, pretty different from semiotic, lacanian, etc. approaches to film analysis.

i should qualify my defense of TRON by saying that, in general, i find the hollywood studio system depressing, but i still try to evaluate its products on their own terms and not according to a set of criteria designed to apply to different types of films.

Well I would hope anyone would approach it that way.

As far as those that subscribe to vulgar auterist, aside from Vishnevetsky, I'd say Jamie Christley and *maybe* Calum Marsh over at Slant, a number of people at Spectrum Culture, and other people dotted around. Young'un Peter Labuza gave a lecture on it at Columbia last week.

interesting, thanks.

some links:

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/resident-evil-retribution/6508

http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/notebook-reviews-john-hyams-universal-soldier-day-of-reckoning

Wasn't vulgar auteurism a part of auteurism right from the start? Edgar G. Ulmer and Robert Aldrich and Sam Fuller rather than William Wyler and Fred Zinnemann?

Yes, to an extent, and that's part of my skepticism. I sometimes feel new generations want to find something to champion that isn't in line with the prevailing taste (so maybe it is a smidge of contrarianism, though I don't think it's as forthright as Armond's).

I like Jaime and Calum's writing a lot (and I think Jaime is higher on Jerry Lewis -- the linchpin of vulgar auteurism? -- than I am).

shove it, zachylon, i don't anyone to give a shit about what i think except me

― Pope Rusty I (Dr Morbius), Saturday, April 13, 2013 8:39 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol i didn't even mean it *like that* but ok

meh alright

I mean, I wouldn't go to Morbs' DJ night and he wouldn't go to mine and I think we're both fine with that.

i wish i had a DJ night.

AW's take on F911 actually seems mostly OTM, hard to remember a time when ppl actually took moore seriously, but citing 'kevin costner in jfk' as an appeal to authority is an all-time lol.

oh lord

http://cityarts.info/2013/05/01/spielbergs-shortcoming/

For the past seven months I’ve personally been fielding questions about why I didn’t like the movie Lincoln. Going through the unpleasant effort of explaining the film’s basic inaccuracy and unfairness to people who were prepared to love and defend it simply because it was customized to their political sentiments, made my explanation all the more frustrating. (When die-hard Spielberg scoffers praised Lincoln, I knew their commendations had nothing to do with esthetics or history, only with the film’s slanted politics and strenuously forced contemporary parallel to Obama’s lame-duck presidency.)

he sounds like a Soviet press agent from 1981.