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

lol

Especially when they serve paella.

kinda love heckling 'you're an embarrassing doorman!'

Especially when your table is practically next to the doorman.

MAYBE HE WAS YELLING AT THE DOORMAN!

You waste, you little doorman!

It's cool to yell at people in public and say whatever is on your mind, even if what is on your mind is insulting.

doesn't he do this every year?

I kind of hope every year White calls someone an embarrassing doorman

iirc he was the roastmaster of the NYFCC when he was chairman, and now he's like the apollo sandman

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-07MtbQjYWaI/UUksVK7ID-I/AAAAAAAAH1M/l-AQUQFgP-I/s1600/rhoda+carltondoorman.png

"Hello, this is Carlton, your embarrassing doorman . . ."

"Grudge Match is the most purely entertaining movie released during the Christmas season (American Hustle excepted), yet its strange lack of prestige reveals a change in contemporary film culture where Stallone and DeNiro–one-time pop totems–are now out of media favor."

He writes like there's a doorman sitting on his keys.

http://carpetbagger.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/new-york-critics-group-apologizes-to-mcqueen/?_r=0

"Disciplinary action" is being taken.

NYFCC promises "disciplinary action" xp

The New York Film Critics Circle has issued a formal apology for the behavior of at least one of its member critics at last night’s awards ceremony when director Steve McQueen accepted his prize for 12 Years A Slave. Our sister publication Variety identified the heckler as CityArts editor and well-known cantankerous contrarian critic Armond White, who, per Ramin Setoodeh’s report, said some remarkably inelegant foul-mouthed things to McQueen after the filmmaker was introduced in an impassioned speech by Harry Belafonte. The apology was issued to McQueen and the film’s distributor, Fox Searchlight, by NYCC chair Joshua Rothkopf.

http://www.deadline.com/2014/01/ny-film-critics-circle-apologizes-for-steve-mcqueen-heckling-latest-outburst-in-classless-oscar-campaign-season/

*googles "classless oscar campaign season" finds Armond White*

of course all critics awards are about the Oscars

fuck American film culture in the ear

Pretty sure that influencing the Oscars were the actual, for-real genesis of these critics' groups.

What are some good film cultures

Some where the state funds films, for starters.

Are there any states that fund film critics

Thumbsupistan

lol

this guy is a shitty writer and an asshole

he usta be good, honest. (I understand his Tupac book was good, too)

Some states have film-programs on state-run tv. So yeah.

i wish i could remember what reality show The Soup used to show a clip of with some horrible rich woman casting aspersions on her doorman and saying over and over "A DOORMAN! A DOOR. MAN."

morbs: is any of his older work available online?

don't think so

Amazing how White has managed to embody everything about Internet film criticism and commenters in real life.

Yeah, takes some chutzpah for a guy to complain the internet killed criticism when he reads so often like a comments troll.

so he totally denies having yelled or said anything?

But Mr. White, a member of the circle who has slammed “12 Years a Slave” as “torture porn,” said he never yelled anything, and was aghast at the way he was portrayed. “I was misquoted, lied about,” he said, reached by phone on Tuesday night. “I didn’t yell anything. I was talking among my friends at the table.”

“What I read on the Internet today is outrageous and I don’t know what that means,” he added.

He also said that he did not hear anyone yelling at the event, and that when he read that he had been cited as yelling out “garbage man” and “doorman,” it further made no sense: Mr. McQueen had just taken the stage and had not said a thing. “It’s a lie,” Mr. White said. “It’s not true and the lie gets repeated and repeated.”

What are some good film cultures

― polyphonic, Wednesday, 8 January 2014 00:16 (9 hours ago) Permalink

yogurt

Here we are: http://cityarts.info/2014/01/08/the-better-than-list-for-2013/

The We and the I> Short Term 12

Michel Gondry’s inventory of basic youth experience (a bildungsroman on wheels) cut through Destin Cretton’s patronizing, maudlin sociology. Gondry’s nearly miraculous feat, as good-natured as it was sensitive and inventive, may be the best film ever made about America by a non-American. A triumph of universality, plus the most profound, insightful, democratic title in years.

Man of Steel > Gravity

Zack Snyder’s powerful visionary re-imagining of the spiritual potential in comix trounces Alfonso Cuaron’s second-rate Kubrick-DePalma rip-off.

Pain & Gain > The Wolf of Wall Street

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.

Yossi > Blue is the Warmest Color

Eytan Fox updates Mann’s Death in Venice to L’chaim in Israel; his radiant view of gay humanity rejects Abdellatif Kechiche’s smutty girl-on-girl ode to lovelessness.

Caught in the Web> A Touch of Sin

Chen Kaige’s digital-era farce interwove love stories at cross-purposes with technology while Jia Zhangke smirkingly celebrated China’s moral decline.

The Grandmaster > The Great Gatsby

Wong Kar Wai investigates Chinese spiritual identity through an exquisite, romantic martial arts history but Baz Luhrmann’s latest mess got everything about sex, America, cinema (and F. Scott Fitzgerald) wrong.

Byzantium > Her

Neil Jordan’s ultimate pop-genre revue chose life, unleashing the power of femininity upon its restrictions in British literary and social tradition while Spike Jones dehumanized femininity–and love–as a po-mo joke.

Bullet to the Head > Mud

Walter Hill’s dynamic comeback further analyzed masculinity but in fresh New Millennium context while Jeff Nichols fell further back with ersatz corn-pone juvenilia, the year’s sorriest American movie.

American Hustle > August: Osage Country, The Place Beyond the Pines

David O. Russell’s acting class throwdown shows America to itself as a 70s costume party more exuberant and perceptive than dysfunctional clichés from derivative Broadway product and uninspired Sundance-indie formula made only to collect prizes.

42 > 12 Years a Slave, Lee Daniels’ The Butler

Brian Helgeland interlaced two sides (Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey) of America’s civil rights revolution, making the familiar intense, warm and radiant as Myth. Race-hustler Steve McQueen overplayed the guilt card and Lee Daniels mortgaged his pride in lieu of skill.

Our Nixon > Stories We Tell

Penny Lane’s remarkable act of documentary compassion (using home-movie proof that Watergate was the result of people as human as us) was deliberately misread as more character assassination while Sarah Polley egotistically exploited trite family history.

The Gardener > The Act of Killing

Moshen Makhamalbaf’s brilliant father-to-son survey of belief systems linked by Love contrasts Joshua Oppenheimer’s repugnant, fraudulent vaudeville about Indonesia’s death squads–smart-ass political porn.

You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet > Computer Chess

Alain Resnais’ continually astonishing, estheticized exploration of memory and emotion hits a new theatrical-cinema-dream peak that embarrasses Andrew Bujalski’s intentional (yet unintentionally crude) denial of cinema as an esthetic pleasure.

New Slaves > Inside Llewyn Davis

Kanye West’s one-man cinema revival (music video as drive-in movie) was attached to musical/cultural innovation while the Coen Brothers’ Dylanology retreated into hoary yuppie nostalgia. Punk vs. The Establishment.

Bad Grandpa > Nebraska

Same premise, different result. Jackass auteur Jeff Tremaine’s road movie found common, if derisive humanity while Alexander Payne merely derided unsophisticated Middle Americans on his road to Hatersville.

Camille Claudel 1915, Hannah Arendt, Byzantium, Mental, American Hustle > Blue Jasmine

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. The problem with contemporary film culture–in skirts.

Bad Grandpa > Nebraska

ok this is baller

And true.

"New Slaves > Inside Llewyn Davis" just sad, though - dude couldn't think up an actual movie to prefer?

did he see the new bieber doc?

Actually, pacing the last few years, this about half "right," half "wrong," and still 100 percent extraneous.

yeah it codifies an honorable impulse, forcing people to contrast and compare films one the industry itself prefers you wouldn't, into desperate contrarian shtick

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.

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)