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

seventeen hours of my weekend have been devoted to editing, and yet i somehow manage to insert six typoes and three syntactical errors in a forty-word post. i need sleep. :(

unless you're going to argue that there are fewer than one or two great movies made a year, in which case you'd be arguing that there are fewer than 100 or 200 great films period, which i just don't think is true at all.

Unless I'm willing to argue that the Great Rate has slowed in recent years because the commercial (ie, anything that's exhibited for profit) narrative film is suffering from burnout/exhaustion/Everything's Been Sorta Done after a century. Which I might be! I think I could find 6-10 great films from every year in the '50s.

seventeen hours of my weekend have been devoted to editing, and yet i somehow manage to insert six typoes and three syntactical errors in a forty-word post. i need sleep. :(

-- remy bean, Sunday, January 20, 2008 11:13 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Link

He's started a new shitstorm!

Critical babble doesn’t talk about what matters, but it sustains Ten Current Film Culture Fallacies:

1)“The Three Amigos” Iñárritu, Cuarón and del Toro are Mexico’s greatest filmmakers while Julian Hernandez is ignored.

2) Gus Van Sant is the new Visconti when he’s really the new Fagin, a jailbait artful dodger.

3) Documentaries ought to be partisan rather than reportorial or observational.

4) Chicago, Moulin Rouge and Dreamgirls equal the great MGM musicals.

5) Paul Verhoeven’s social satire Showgirls was camp while Cronenberg’s campy melodramas are profound.

6) Brokeback Mountain was a breakthrough while all other gay-themed movies were ignored.

7) Todd Haynes’ academic dullness is anything but.

8) Dogma was a legitimate film movement.

9) Only non-pop Asian cinema from J-horror to Hou Hsiao Hsien counts, while Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou and Stephen Chow are rejected.

10) Mumblecore matters.

http://daily.greencine.com/archives/005869.html

he can't even stick to his formal conceit

Brokeback Mountain was a breakthrough while all other gay-themed movies were ignored.

Only non-pop Asian cinema from J-horror to Hou Hsiao Hsien counts, while Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou and Stephen Chow are rejected.

unless he's saying these statements are actually fallacies!

Gus Van Sant is the new Visconti when he’s really the new Fagin, a jailbait artful dodger.

is this just a gay-bashing thing? apart from them being gay, what links these two? GVT is kind of minimalist when he's allowed to be. but for visconti not so much with the minimalism.

3) Documentaries ought to be partisan rather than reportorial or observational.

how is this a fallacy? since when? and what does it even mean?

I don't even understand what he's saying in 9). Stephen Chow's been rejected? In what world?

4) Chicago, Moulin Rouge and Dreamgirls equal the great MGM musicals.

oscar voters != film culture

8) Dogma was a legitimate film movement.

ok this is a funny zing because dogme was probably the lamest film movement since the 'cinema du look', but to say it wasn't 'legitimate' begs some big questions.

He's mentally ill isn't he?

"Neil Jordan’s sensitive, imaginative The Brave One"

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Re Chow, he apparently means celebrated by critics to the extent Hou is. How he measures these thing I can't say.

It's Armondworld, and he just lives in it.

HE MEASURES IT WITH THE CELEBRA-METER!

it's pretty nit-picky stuff, not exacty the tablets of stone. if he done something like "1. long takes are interesting" (w/r/t taiwanese cinema) or "2. politics is better when done indirectly" (cf crit-jizz on TWBB; negative reaction to all the films directly about the war), then there'd be something at least to talk about. but "critics overpraise dreamgirls and mumblecore" is zzzzzzzzzz

god the brave one was the worst piece of shit ever, utterly inexcusable and vile

Typical critic slocki you are just missing the imagination in it.

Armond's right though about the NYT's ball-licking Ebert profile a couple of weekends ago.

So what? A stopped watch, etc.

Fagin, a jailbait artful dodger

this doesnt even make sense

fagin was not the artful dodger

also not jailbait

wtf is mumblecore

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f4/Mutual_appreciation.jpg

^^ really good movie

that looks horrible

i thought maybe it had something to do with casey affleck

Glenn Kenny to Armond White: "You think you're applying some form of moral rigor to your work, but the fact is that you're a bully and a hypocrite, and I don't want to know you." Comments ensue.

"Armond's deeply confused screed makes me glad I quit the Press so that I don't have to attempt to explain to people out of professional courtesy what point he thought he was trying to make," writes Matt Zoller Seitz in a comment at the House Next Door. "My admiration for Armond's originality and the impact of his 1980s and 90s writing on my own have been detailed at length here many times, so I won't rehash it again. Cutting to the chase: It has become increasingly and sadly clear in recent years that Armond's as much the establishment as AO Scott, in that he derives much of his impact from the institutional weight of a print publication and from the insulated status that this one-way model of communication affords." There's more.

I assumed Mumblecore was like Thumbsucker or Me You Everyone or whatever.

"My admiration for Armond's originality and the impact of his 1980s and 90s writing on my own have been detailed at length here many times"

Was Armond good once? I find that hard to believe.

dude, in that column he praised Bowsley Crowther!

*Bosley

i think armond white was pretty good when he wz mainly writin abt music in the late 80s -- or at least i thought so then

where's the kenny quote from, al

it's from the greencine link Morbs posted.

Points at which I actually agree with Armond: well, only 5 and 7 I guess. Damn, even I was hoping at least one more of those were true.

Kenny responding to commenters on his blog:

White's schtick is that only he has the perception, the judgment, and the moral vision to see through it all; this, in his mind, excuses his incivility...no, to hell with it, it's not incivility, it's simple snickering haughty mean-spiritedness. And I feel sorry (among other things) for anybody who insists on mistaking it for brilliant contrarianism.

The link

White's schtick is that only he has the perception, the judgment, and the moral vision to see through it all; this, in his mind, excuses his incivility...no, to hell with it, it's not incivility, it's simple snickering haughty mean-spiritedness. And I feel sorry (among other things) for anybody who insists on mistaking it for brilliant contrarianism.

i cant think of anyone on ilx like this

especially not on the primaries thread, no sir

wtf @ three amigos

also how is J-horror not pop cinema. or do I not understand what pop means

he's just creating fictional issues in order to make himself look better. if he was a hou hsiao hsien fan and a stephen chow basher he could more easily make the case that the latter is overpraised and the former is almost completely ignored, since chow gets nothing but love and hhh seems to get press from the film comment sect.

9) Only non-pop Asian cinema from J-horror to Hou Hsiao Hsien counts, while Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou and Stephen Chow are rejected.

i can't speak on chow, but chen kaige and zhang yimou were getting a lot of critical love back in the 80s and early 90s; they were far from rejected. iirc zhang has basically turned to doing massive epic films now like those two miramax overpaid for. yeah they've gone out of fashion, but that one 'hero' film just didn't have a lot going for it.

yes, Armond wrote well, regularly, in the '90s for sure.

just wait til November, max. (oh, i'm THE meanspirited one on ILX, am i?)

Points at which I actually agree with Armond: well, only 5 and 7 I guess.

I'm Not There, DVD May 6

5) Paul Verhoeven’s social satire Showgirls was camp while Cronenberg’s campy melodramas are profound.

pretty half-and-half on this.

the polemical value of boosting mid-90s verhoeven has just about run its course now.

I'm really glad I never think to use phrases like "polemical value."

oh BURN

actually i think the moore review has the ghost of a really strong idea in it -- getting at mm's (vast) flaws via godard's political reading of the edit -- but to make it fly AW'd have had to a. identify how "politics of the edit" operates (he does this a bit but not in a usable way), b. identify how "politics of the edit" manifests in critical writing, ie establish his own inability to be objective (by virtue of being a writer; by virtue of the need to make sentences and paragraphs from his thoughts and responses) and c. cut it away from his own moral jihad against "corruptin pop culture", which is kinda completely an irrelevance to the godardian argt

as it is i don't think AW understands godard any better than momus understands brecht