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

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.

b-but he said that the FALLACY was they were rejected

(i think: it's a fkn confusin way to make a point)

i love this:

...critics’ faves There Will Be Blood, In the Valley of Elah, Redacted, Rendition and The Kingdom

b/c everyone loved those last three unreservedly

Did anyone love those last FOUR at all?

i think a lot of people liked ITVOE and ebert liked rendition. no one liked the other two iirc

I remember most people thinking both were pretty flawed and the general consensus was undeniably pretty meh all around.

Let's put it this way, I don't think any of those four movies were in the top 20 (or maybe even 50) critically lauded films from last year. That kind of takes 'em out of the realm of critic's favs for me.

going by metacritic's stats, which ranks 594 films from '07 on their site, this is where they place:

205 - in the valley of elah
310 - the kingdom
320 - rendition
357 - redacted

CLEARLY SO LOVED!

he was suggesting those films were praised by critics while others such as shotgun stories, which is #20 out of 146 for 2008 thus far, have been bashed/ignored/whatever.

i find it a little disingenuous of course for him to go on for years about critics bashing de palma when they actually tend to like him for the most part, and then to turn around and wonder why they praise him unreservedly when in fact not a single person on the planet liked 'redacted' as far as i know.

Well obv (except for TWBB) they weren't praised very much (except in ARMONDWHITESMIND!)

ok reading it

- print crix whaling on bloggers: zzzzzz who cares? internetters are not 'undermining the (cough) professionalism' of the big dogs.
- he doesn't know what he's talking about and confuses lots of things. it doesn't seem obvious to me that reportage on b.o. has "replaced" the kind of criticism he's talking about -- hasn't it supplemented it?
- "the crisis of contemporary film criticism is that critics don’t discuss movies in ways that matter. Reviewers no longer bother connecting movies to political or moral ideas." i almost feel the exact opposite is more of a problem, but i also don't think he verifies this point at all.
- "the crippling social tendency that 1990s sociologists called Denial." o_O
- "The most powerful, politically and morally engaged recent films (The Darjeeling Limited..." he's fucking with us.
- "...Private Fears in Public Places, World Trade Center, The Promise, Shortbus, Ask the Dust, Akeelah and the Bee, Bobby, Running Scared, Munich, War of the Worlds, Vera Drake) were all ignored by journalists" he's fucking with us
- "only movies that are mendacious, pseudo-serious, sometimes immoral or socially retrograde and irresponsible (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Army of Shadows, United 93, Marie Antoinette, Zodiac, Last Days, There Will Be Blood, American Gangster, Gone Baby Gone, Letters From Iwo Jima, A History of Violence, Tarnation, Elephant) have received critics’ imprimatur." he sort of needs, at this point, to explain how 'zodiac' is "immoral" or how '4 months' is "mendacious" or how 'army of shadows' is "socially retrograde". or how 'american gangster' has "received critics’ imprimatur".
- "That there isn’t a popular hit among any of these films proves how critics have failed to rouse the moviegoing public in any direction." i thought we were meant to be above quoting the b.o.?
- "You can’t praise the Pirates of the Caribbean movies or the Bourne movies and then expect benumbed thrill-riders to sit still for A Prairie Home Companion, Neil Young: Heart of Gold or Munich." right, because you can't enjoy more than one kind of movie.
- "A generation of readers and filmgoers were once sparked by the discourse created by Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris during the period that essayist Philip Lopate described as ìthe heroic era of moviegoing.î The desire to be a critic fulfilled the urge to respond to what was exciting in the culture." lol boomer nostalgia -- do your homework.
- lays into ebert, who is at least not a menk and can write entertainingly
- what exactly is white's claim to 'professionalism'? what is it? he doesn't strike me as very knowledgeable on, say, film aesthetics or film history? he doesn't have to be, to be a critic, perhaps, but what does he mean?
- article degenerates into incoherency when he starts on about bosley crowther vs village voice
- "It’s entertainment—weakly." it's a clever play-on-words.
- heh, heh, heh he thinks mike leigh is a socialist
- "Hollywood’s emphasis on impersonal product then holds sway over art. Ideas get smothered in formula, and hype becomes the language of so-called discourse." he has spent much of the review defending hollywood against elitism. that passage could be from any piece of criticism from the last 90 years -- literally.
- "Does the training of movie critics matter if they aren’t taught to preserve the idea that movies must affirm our humanity?" "training"?

Never seen this film. Bet it's top-notch. Gonna print out banriquit's post & take it into the cinema with me. Then I'm gonna sit on it.

i just post for myself and if anyone else likes it, that's a bonus

That's a shitty attitude.

Benjamin Franklin on John Adams:

"He means well for his Country, and is always an honest Man, often a Wise One, but sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his senses."

I loved when he said that V FOR VENDETTA was a forgotten film, unaware that by name-checking it and assuming readers would know what he was on about, it kinda isn't quite that forgotten.

I think he's gone, well, mental with his hysteric modifying words. The 'decline' in 'film culture' (whatever that is, aside from the ivory tower in hi head) is a "CALAMITY!", a "TRAGEDY!"

ALL film writers who are not Armond White are regularly labeled "idiots", "stupid", and far worse. He can't resist a sentence without sideswipes like "of course, this is the sort of tripe that gullible, idiot reviewers will worship" (i paraphrase; I'm not pathological enough to mimic him properly.) THEN he goes on to, for the nth time, to explain to other idiots--his readers--how DePalma's MISSION TO MARS was one of the greatest films ever, if only you nitwits could understand the things only White can understand. Then he'll try to browbeat you into understanding that NORBIT was not only funny--White thinks humor can be beaten into you--but that it was the greatest movie about race ever. Or silicone fat suits ever; I forget.

A film can't just be, you know, not-great and its makers just some folks who failed to make a good film--oh no: These films are a THREAT!!!!! to, uh, everything and their makers evil cabalists who meet fortnightly at some unspecified dark ceremony where, after donning black robes with pictures of Kubrick as they plan, chortling, their latest stealth attack on Film Culture.

It's remarkable how he shrieks about Nicole Kidman--who he despises with a very discomforting zeal--being a despicable careerist--imagine, a professional wanting a career, wanting to work, what a skank--and then falls on his knees to worship the latest Spielberg Oedipal reenactment, making arcane claims of assorted genius that would have old Steve going WTF??? THEN he gushes about the brilliant nuance Tom Cruise brought to, er, WAR OF THE WORLDS, make us this what you will.

Not only does he evidence zero understanding about filmmaking technique or acting, he's so far up his own shimmeringly astute posterior that he honestly thinks that the reason movies don't make it is because the Evil Idiot Critic Cabal did not pimp it. And so he has no notion that there's a thing called marketing, or a thing called dumb luck.

Finally, as oft noted, the real reason he goes on and on and on about the TERRIBLE THREAT posed by hipsters is that he's miffed that they dare threaten his positioning of himself as the ultimate hipster who always knows more than anyone than anyone and is always correct, more moral than you, and the one brave soul standing between collapsing world and the fact that, again, NORBIT rulz.

Really, it's like he suffers from some sort of academia-based PTSD: The sky is always fallimg; only he can prop it up by trashing anyone who disagrees.