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

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

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

I proudly championed Showgirls before, while and after it was hip to do so.

I think with #5, AW is inarticulately trying to point out that it's a mistake to read the praise for Showgirls purely in terms of it's "polemical value".

mind you, when people say it's camp i think they mean 'in a good way', right? not that this feels like a particularly pressing argument to be having in 2008.

haha i wz discussin w.dave q last night how the unisex locker-room scene is the only bit of starship troopers which is true to heinlein's original utopian political vision

= pressing is as pressing does, i guess

Eric, if I watch Showgirls will you watch I'm Not There?

Camp is not supposed to be consciously artful, hence AW is accusing hipsters of underappreciating Showgirls.

it is Ten Current Film Culture Fallacies -- tho i might have missed some recent 'showgirls in retrospect: it's no madame butterfly!' pieces.

Eric, if I watch Showgirls will you watch I'm Not There?

... No?

I guess I understand the Verhoeven part of that item but I don't see much camp in Cronenberg. unless he just means homoeroticism.

'i'm not there' is awes, eric.

yeah, how else can you keep your contempt for Haynes' academiciousness up to date?

(Eric hates music made w/ guitars except for Prince. weird.)

I don't have to listen to Love & Theft to keep my contempt for Dylan up to date.

And I prefer Prince's synth era greatly to his guitar era.

early cburg is fairly schlocky if that's the same as camp -- he cooled that out after naked lunch, by goin for flattened ballardian boringness mostly

i like em but i'm an idiot

I don't listen to Dylan's music hardly ever, it's not a prereq. How often do nrq and I agree?

That's what has me skeptical.

ooh i will add my vote to "i'm not there" fandom

(but i like dylan) (see "idiot" claim)

a Mark appearance!

i am busy pimpin my radioshow alfred:
"a bite of stars a slug of time and THOU" (key word in caps)

it also features mr tracer hand, dave q and (possibly) discussion of heinlein abt sex...

early cburg is fairly schlocky if that's the same as camp

I guess that's true .... I assumed he was talking about the more recent ones (HOV and Eastern Promises) but Showgirls is 90s so who knows

Eric hasn't listened to Disco Dylan, apparently.

Whatever you do, mark, don't say "cunt" -- it upsets Tracer.

The King of Comedy for Showgirls, then.

At the risk of killing a nice running joke, deal.

a lot of the post-mortems on 'i'm not there''s lack of b.o. have basically said it's for dylan fans only. i don't know if this is true because i liked it and i like dylan, but no-one claims of (visual) artist biopics that you have to be a fan to get it.

it's more knowing the intricacies of the dylanmyth i think than the songs

at least it seemed to me that might be a barrier if you weren't a little bit up on em

On which planet would I'm Not There have been a box office hit?

the boomers do rule this country, i'd have expected it to do all right

and there are some pretty big-name stars in it ... and far from heaven was up for oscars ....

I expected it to at least be an art-house hit but it came and went in abt 2 seconds

Did it go over well with boomers? I enthusiastically recommended it to my parents and they hated it so much that they didn't tell me they saw it until months later when I asked.

A "straightforward" Dylan pic starring, oh, Emile Hirsch? a la Walk the Line might've had a shot. But, as the Haynes movie conjectures, no one knows who Dylan is. (it's a yuk that Ledger is a star of a Dylan biopic within the film)

Far From Heaven was up for Oscars bcz the Academy ignored (or didn't register) the subtext and Brechtian agenda.

I meant, no one knows who Dylan is in the sense that everyone now knows Johnny Cash was a dark soul rescued from pills n booze by the love of Reese Witherspoon.

no one knows who Dylan is in the sense that everyone now knows that Ray Charles was black.

Far From Heaven was up for Oscars bcz the Academy ignored (or didn't register) the subtext and Brechtian agenda.

ha ha ha ha

armond white is a terrible human being

it's more knowing the intricacies of the dylanmyth i think than the songs

-- mark s, Thursday, April 24, 2008 7:32 PM (53 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

at least it seemed to me that might be a barrier if you weren't a little bit up on em

-- mark s, Thursday, April 24, 2008 7:35 PM (50 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

yea probably. i walked in telling my friends (also dylan fans) that i'm SO NOT a dylan fanboy and have NEVER HEARD anything he did post-'basement tapes' (whereas they have); but when we came out i was like "oh well that sort of relates to..." and they were all o_O. i guess this comes down to me being in denial about being a fanboy.

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.

-- banriquit, Thursday, April 24, 2008 5:33 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Link

chen kaige and zhang yimou were like the freakin' STEREOTYPICAL adored foreign film directors in the 90s!!! and ya they both make horrible movies now... for whatever it's worth

exactly

has anyone else seen "Manufacturing Dissent", a doc on Michael Moore.....it was pretty daming and didn't seem to be a right wing hack job or anything...

yeah muggins 'ere had to review it. a lot of it was pretty useless, some of it was true: none of the true stuff was new, though. the biggest scoop came from an article published in 'premiere' in 1990. the makers' USP is "it's not a right-wing hack job", but it also follows one of the RWHJs by doing the "LOLLL MICHAEL MOORE WON'T BE INTERVIEWED" tactic.

im not a big moore fan at all but the doc made me like him.

they do have a couple good points about 'roger and me' but nothing that justified a 90-minute-long theatrically released film.

chen kaige and zhang yimou ... and ya they both make horrible movies now...

Curse of the Golden Flower was a delightful sword-and-queue spectacle, I thought.

didn't see that one! "together" was pretty awful though. as were hero and house of flying daggers.

"The film also presents extended footage of the Al Smith annual memorial dinner from which Moore, in Fahrenheit 9/11, took a clip of President George W. Bush greeting the guests as the "haves and have-mores", insinuating that President Bush views the elite upper-class as his constituency, not the average American. The extended footage shows each speaker at the dinner poking fun at himself, including a clip of Al Gore joking that he invented the Internet. It is argued that the extended footage shows Moore to have taken the quote from President Bush out of context.[2]"

^^^^ thought this was made pretty obvious in Moore's movie?