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

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?

house of flying daggers had some awesome scenes but there wasn't much of a story, and what story did exist just seemed like an excuse for him to stage that shit.

fairly sure the "manufacturing dissent" guy is a lefty -- mm is by no means unreservedly loved on the far left (alex cockburn has called him a brownshirt irrc)

michael moore tends to perform no service other than preaching to the choir and pissing off the right

xp: how many good genre movies don't have much of a story?

i would have liked just a little more of a story than what was there...i don't even remember the point of it, tbh. i did sort of like it while i was watching it, because it was certainly very well done.

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

-- milo z, Thursday, April 24, 2008 9:57 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

even if it wasn't, this was the most cackhandedly earnest bullshit -- omfg! satirist takes quote out of context! they got it wrong there.

fairly sure the "manufacturing dissent" guy is a lefty

yeah they basically are (it's a twosome).

they could have hit moore a lot harder on stuff like the 'saudis own america' b.s. in 'fahrenheit', but they instead mostly make it about moore being an egotist (iirc).

but moore's thing is he doesn't just want to preach to the choir, isn't it? hence man-of-the-people act, which the makers of 'manufacturing dissent' says is weak and hypocritical.

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

I'm sorry, was there actually anything else in that movie?

i think whatever moore's intent is--and i think his intentions are what you say--the way his work is perceived depends upon your party affiliation. which may have as much to do with the current political climate but probably isn't helped by his persona!

After actually buckling down and reading the latest Armond tirade, I'm left eerily indifferent. Speaking purely solipsistically, he's right that the function of film criticism has been degraded. I can't even read Armond and feel much anymore. So I guess you could say that White's writing is responsible for killing my interest in film criticism.

i will read it at some point but the guy is such a pseud. there is no such thing as the "Vachel Lindsay-Manny Farber tradition", it's a practically meaningless phrase. (also manny is great so stfu.)

Yah seriously, if Manny Farber is supposed to be considered un-great, then the institution is not worth defending.

you should read my book abt "if...." eric!

(can't stop bein shameless today it seems)

naming a critic most people have not heard of (vachel lindsay) gives his essay that bit of heft and 'historical perspective' i suppose. speaking as someone whose 'job' it is to read vast volumes of old film crit, i don't think this is an era particularly notable for bad film writing.

wasn't vachel lindsay famous in his day for treating film as if it wasn't just theatre on screen? -- which presumably means most other film writers back then DID, hence weren't much cop

actually i know dick abt him except he wrote a poem called "the congo" and liked jazz and pere ubu's "voice of the sand" is based on another poem

wasn't vachel lindsay famous in his day for treating film as if it wasn't just theatre on screen? -- which presumably means most other film writers back then DID, hence weren't much cop

-- mark s, Thursday, April 24, 2008 10:21 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Link

pretty much yeah. (part of the thing here is that lots of films in the early 1910s WERE like theatre on screen! deliberately!) it's more that he was practically one of the first Serious Writers to Take Film Seriously. there really weren't many film critics in the modern sense at the time. he was one of a tiny number of people who wrote perceptively about d w griffith (not a theatre-on-screen guy) at the time, as he was working, in the 1910s.

(the thing about film-should-not-be-filmed-theatre is, it turned into film-should-have-no-points-of-contact-with-theatre, in the '20s...)

After actually buckling down and reading the latest Armond tirade, I'm left eerily indifferent. Speaking purely solipsistically, he's right that the function of film criticism has been degraded. I can't even read Armond and feel much anymore. So I guess you could say that White's writing is responsible for killing my interest in film criticism

Isn't every serious film critic supposed to write about the Death of Film Criticism? Pauline Kael wrote one every two years.

What annoys me is taking Bosley Crowther (there's revisionism for ya) over decent mediocrity Roger Ebert. I'm not sure what this is supposed to represent, other than Armond's being "difficult" again.

I'm not sure I've ever even heard of Vachel Lindsay before today.

Eric, a friend of mine (thirtyish Canadian female) hasn't seen any Sirk, so aside from the obvious '50s stylings I think she mostly took Far from Heaven at face value, and loved it. So it's possible there WAS more to it.

haha I always interpret Vachel Lindsay's legacy as "terrible poet, good film critic," though I've read two examples of each.

what was in Far from Heaven that wasn't at 'face value'? i thought the point of sirkyness was that everything is direct and out in the open? it's not like the shit was subtle

the hairdos were at war with the wallpaper

the most offensive idea on this thread is that Hero and House of Flying Daggers are "awful"! they are his best two movies...

i used to defend White a lot...but i frankly can't even understand what he's talking about these days....

Far From Heaven was terrrrrible...I'm Not There is good tho...

iirc 'house of... flying daggers' wasn't even rejected by critics, armond's just being weird. again, not that this kind of carping has any place in a 'film criticism ain't what it used to be' article. cultural pessimism was so much better in the '90s.

iirc 'house of... flying daggers' wasn't even rejected by critics

Yes, but they weren't real film critics.