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

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)

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.