tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-65176462254418252592024-03-07T15:57:34.322-08:00Armond DangerousParsing the Confounding Film Criticism of Mr. Armond WhiteRowinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00547348802149549833noreply@blogger.comBlogger25125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6517646225441825259.post-51833759025131338812007-03-26T09:10:00.000-07:002007-06-01T11:45:27.537-07:00New York Press Review: "Pride"<a href="http://www.nypress.com/20/12/film/ArmondWhite2.cfm">Armond White's review of <i>Pride</i></a> is the first one by him that we've even partially agreed with in quite a while, but at the risk of coming across as negators we'd like to call attention to its most revealing passage:<br /><br /><i>Some will dismiss </i>Pride<i> as schmaltz and sentimental, but that diabolical attitude merely prefers noxious, pessimistic fantasies that deny human possibilities.</i><br /><br />Whether intentional or not, White has never more clearly stated the parameters of his Manichean cinematic cosmology: schmaltz and sentiment v. noxious pessimism. Those who even question the simplicity of the former brand of filmmaking contain "diabolical attitudes." In the meantime, despite its limitations, a formulaic, oftentimes superficial film like <i>Pride</i> is accorded "uncommon substance."<br />We understand what White sees in <i>Pride</i>: "It’s the inspirational aspect of <i>Pride</i> that makes it anachronistic now when such lousy films -- <i>Black Snake Moan</i>, <i>I Think I Love My Wife</i>, <i>Dreamgirls</i> and <i>Waist Deep</i> -- reduce the African-American experience to cliches of superstition, licentiousness, minstrelsy and crime." But in getting so excited about the film's "human possibilities" he neglects to mention its rather tame dependence on a host of other cliches. Which invites questions: isn't there a gray area of complexity between sentimental schmaltz and noxious pessimism? And couldn't this area of complexity even exist in the "pop" arena White so loves? Armond's binary logic is critically flawed. It allows for little nuance when he tries to combat the backward cynicism of Hollywood crassness by promoting virtuous films that are equally one-dimensional. His readers, and our movies, deserve better.Rowinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00547348802149549833noreply@blogger.com85tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6517646225441825259.post-55303591909340195232007-03-13T06:26:00.000-07:002007-06-01T11:49:27.168-07:00New York Press Review: "The Wayward Cloud"From the very beginning of <a href="http://nypress.com/20/8/film/ArmondWhite2.cfm">his confused review</a> Armond White reveals he has no idea how to process the bizarre, provocative experience of Tsai Ming-liang's <i>The Wayward Cloud</i>. First off, he calls it a "porno musical," a misleading term since the film is a musical <i>about</i> pornography -- its participants, its viewers, and the society it influences with its images -- and not a musical featuring actual pornographic material. Then in the second paragraph he offers a series of contradictory statements: <br /><br /><i>These [musical] numbers occur in unexpected contrast to the humdrum dailiness that is Tsai's specialty. He introduces his characters as they wander the gray, dull, bizarrely empty city; sometimes walking past each other without recognition—almost refusing to communicate. This reticence is the exact opposite of what movie musicals are about.</i> <br /><br />Characters acting out fantasies in lavish musical numbers that allow them to express what they cannot in their boring, quotidian existences? Sounds in line with a particular strand of the traditional movie musical to us. But maybe we should wait for AW to explain what he means: <br /><br /><i>When Tsai follows this dysfunctional union with musical numbers, it demonstrates a changed perspective on human relations. Today, even the romantic fantasies of typical movie musicals are infected with pessimism. </i>The Wayward Cloud<i> isn't a deconstructed musical like the great postmodern </i>Pennies from Heaven<i>. Instead, Tsai reconstructs a classical genre to match the desperation of an era that has rejected musicals' implicit outworn utopianism. For some viewers this depersonalization will make Tsai's vision seem new, perhaps even radical, rather than simply depressive. But it's a coherent vision and unafraid of emotional affect. Tsai dramatizes a new approach to anomie. Linking private sexual thoughts is his way of giving shape to a pervasive loneliness.</i> <br /><br />Very, very odd. Initially White believes that Tsai "demonstrates a changed perspective on human relations." Then, all of a sudden, he doesn't, an idea implied in White's rejection of others' collective misperception of the film: "For some viewers this depersonalization will make Tsai's vision seem new, perhaps even radical, rather than simply depressive." But then, faster than you can say "muddled," Tsai's vision is new again: "Tsai dramatizes a new approach to anomie." <br />What in the name of watermelon fucking is going on here? Armond's flying contradictions might very well be unconsciously perpetrated, but judging by the next paragraph, they very well might not. After foolishly drawing a comparison between <i>The Wayward Cloud</i> and <i>Three Times</i> (why, because they're both directed by Asian art cinema faves? If so, that's a pretty weak link), White finally expresses his ambivalence about the film in direct terms, calling it "a self-conscious musical about dislocation -- an, at times ingenious, at times, enervating [sic] variation on Tsai's usual unhappy theme." <br />But why the reservations? Again the comparison to Hou Hsaio-Hsien's empty formalism, and thus this:<br /><br /><i>Unfortunately, after the heightened emotional quality of Tsai's musical numbers, he also retreats to distanced long shots and detached framing held so long it drains your involvement. </i>The Wayward Cloud<i> culminates in a marathon copulation scene that unites the three protagonists in desolate joylessness. It cannot be the fault of decadent western pop but of Tsai's own preference for pseudo-profundity. His anti-musical is, finally, equivalent to joyless sex.</i><br /><br />"Pseudo-profundity"? That's it? That's all White can come up with in his criticism of the film's shortcomings (pun totally intended)? Can we at least get some reasons for this pseudo-profundity more substantial than "distanced long shots and detached framing held so long it drains your involvement"? (Waaaaaah, Armond's bored; Waaaaaah, Armond needs his fix of Hollywood "pop.")<br />Look, <i>The Wayward Cloud</i> is a difficult film. It's at once silly, beautiful, disgusting, obvious, moralizing, beyond moralizing, and frustrating. And it is most definitely challenging. One can either decline that challenge, as did <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0708,lee,75858,20.html">Nathan Lee of <i>The Village Voice</i></a> in his (as usual) dismissive review, or accept it, as did <a href="http://www.brooklynrail.org/2007-02/film/watermelon-time">David Wilentz of <i>The Brooklyn Rail</i></a>. Or one can, as did Armond, give equal consideration to the film's failures and successes. If choosing this last route one must be especially clear in describing one's mixed feelings about the film, as well as proving the ability to back up those feelings with insightful analyses and ideas that carefully weigh pros and cons. But Armond's review of <i>The Wayward Cloud</i> is full of ambivalent feeling without much thought behind it. There's no insight in what he has communicated to his readers about this film, just flailing musings and halfhearted praises and disapprovals. Even when limning the film's basic themes and structures AW contradicts himself. "I liked this but not this," Armond seems to be saying, without venturing far enough into what Tsai's trying to do, where he goes right and where he goes wrong. "Pseudo-profundity" indeed.Rowinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00547348802149549833noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6517646225441825259.post-13997160018610025892007-03-06T11:15:00.000-08:002007-03-06T12:45:45.990-08:00New York Press Review: "Zodiac"It's probably fair to say that once you've landed on Armond White's shitlist, it's going to take a solid effort on your part to be removed. This has happened in the past -- Oliver Stone and Todd Solondz come to mind -- but on too many occasions Armond just can't get over the past indiscretions of certain auteurs. David Fincher's <i>Zodiac</i> provides a perfect case, not because it's a sudden masterpiece by an overrated director (AW says he's been wrongly "lionized" even though <i>The Game</i> and <i>Panic Room</i> were deservingly rejected by audiences and critics alike), but because Fincher's doing something different in his latest film and Armond just can't see it. Is the something new successful? Hell, no. But AW should give the man a little more credit than this:<br /><br /><i>Fincher and screenwriter James Vanderbilt provide no definitive answers to the killer’s mysterious identity, yet that doesn’t hinder their prurience. Fincher’s talent? Knowing that violence not only sells, it thrills.</i><br /><br />A strange criticism, in that <i>Zodiac</i> isn't particularly violent (three murder scenes that take up roughly fifteen minutes of a two hour and forty minute film), not in comparison to most Hollywood fare and certainly not in comparison to previous Fincher outings like <i>Se7en</i> and <i>Fight Club</i>. And it's not just the film's quantity of violence but its depiction of it -- <i>Zodiac</i> is in ways a thankful departure from Fincher's other serial killer film, <i>Se7en</i>, in refusing to celebrate the murderer and revel in his misdeeds. By concentrating on the realistic, stage-by-stage investigations of the police and newspapermen in the hunt for the Zodiac, Fincher actually drains the potentially titillating story of much of its tabloid allure. But Armond holds to the opposite, failing to properly distinguish <i>Zodiac</i> from <i>Se7en</i>:<br /><br /><i>Specializing in lurid stories of violence and madness, Fincher taps the zeitgeist. His 1995 hit </i>Se7en<i> was praised by nihilistic critics for its glorying in modern-day grotesques. Audiences were simultaneously appalled and agitated -- a peculiar mix of fear and excitement that initiated the Fincher cult. </i>Zodiac <i>continues this perverse appreciation through a tedious, numbly-paced police-procedural storyline and contrasting flamboyant digital-video technique. The usual artistic interest in human experience is replaced with Fincher’s almost immoral emphasis on film technology (that’s why he is idolized as a modern-day Kubrick).</i><br /><br />If generous, one might actually call <i>Zodiac</i> Fincher's most human film, or the closest thing approaching human. This is where the film fails, however, because without his usual bells and whistles ("immoral emphasis on film technology"? Aside from being shot on hi-def digital video, there's little in <i>Zodiac</i> that's so overly stylized or technically gratuitous) Fincher is lost -- he definitely needs a lesson in how to create compelling characterizations. But, man, Armond can't even hint, or accurately represent, that Fincher's at least trying.<br />We realize close only counts in horseshoes and handgrenades, and <i>Zodiac</i>'s effort doesn't excuse it from being bad. But Armond's whining invective is out of all proportion to the failure of this film -- ironically, his obsession with Fincher's ostensible appeal to "fanboys" (feminized by White's suggestion that the director gets them "wet") by creating "nerdy, soft-voiced" on-screen male surrogates stinks of the sort of macho bullying at the heart of Fincher's pseudo-anarchic <i>Fight Club</i>. Our favorite moment, though, and the one that exemplifies AW's inflation of Fincher's cinematic crimes, follows:<br /><br /><i>Problem is: Fincher’s technique distracts from a resolved mystery or narrative closure; it encourages apathy that suggests resolution and absolution are impossible.</i><br /><br />Or it could be that the Zodiac Killer case has never been cracked. But whatever. Fincher can do no good, relatively or otherwise, in White's eyes.Rowinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00547348802149549833noreply@blogger.com52tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6517646225441825259.post-87022784333730317872007-03-02T10:14:00.000-08:002007-03-06T12:46:37.266-08:00New York Press Review: "Amazing Grace""Christianity Trumps History": this should be the headline for <a href="http://nypress.com/20/8/film/ArmondWhite.cfm">Armond White's naive review of "Amazing Grace."</a> Coming only a week after White's review of "Norbit," in which he unforgivably misses the racist overtones of Eddie Murphy's unfunny "comedy," our man's analysis of "Amazing Grace" is remarkable for never addressing the film's noticeable lack of African characters, the very people the film should somehow represent by directly imparting their stories and struggle. For how much time director Michael Apted and screenwriter Steven Knight spend on Pariliamentary procedure and behind the scenes political maneuvering they certainly could have found the room to do so. But instead "Amazing Grace" is a film about the slave trade that features just one African character of any note -- and he's shuttled to the background so that William Wilberforce can stand centerstage in his noble crusade to end the horrible institution in Parliament. Christian ethics fuel that crusade, and White applauds the film's emphasis on Wilberforce's faith. But White should have been clued into the whitewashing of history that supports this Christian hagiography. Whenever an historical film raises its protagonist to the level of infallibilty (see <i>JFK</i>) we're always suspicious. And lo and behold, the story of William Wilberforce and his convictions, it seems, <a href="http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/02/18/amazing-grace/">isn't as rosy as the film suggests</a> -- the worst part is that Wilberforce's Christianity contributed to a condescending and dehumanizing understanding of Africans, who were, because of it, only offered partial emancipation. Granted, we don't expect Armond to be an expert on British history (or the history of the slave trade), but just the slightest critical skepticism toward the film's gross negligence of the African experience and/or its halo-crowning portrayal of William Wilberforce might have prevented this lapse. White's desire to champion "Amazing Grace" as a corrective to cynicism -- "What could be bolder than a film that insists upon virtue and dedication today -- an age ruled by political distrust?" -- has fostered in his critical skills yet another blind spot.Rowinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00547348802149549833noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6517646225441825259.post-64879075616978570032007-02-22T22:07:00.000-08:002007-02-22T22:15:35.141-08:00New York Press Review: "Norbit" [Vol. 2]Armond White's recent, seemingly much talked about <a href="http://www.nypress.com/20/7/film/ArmondWhite.cfm">review of <i>Norbit</i></a> is dumbfounding in a number of respects. First, White, through critical and rhetorical bullshitting, spins Eddie Murphy's unoriginal, unfunny, and downright offensive caricatures as "explosive," "democratizing," and as existing "on a realistic continuum." What "realistic continuum" would that be? "We laugh at their types since we, in fact, recognize their types," he says. By employing that pseudo-populist pronoun "we," AW suggests that viewers should buy into the lazy offensiveness of <i>Norbit</i> without considering that the characters therein are nothing but hand-me-down stereotypes culled from a brain dead American popular culture. The "freakishness" on display in <i>Norbit</i> isn't a creative response generated from "black comics self-consciously relat[ing] to ideas of normalcy," just lowest common denominator pandering: Murphy-as-Rasputia simply occasions typical fat jokes, from shattered beds to water-emptying splashes in swimming pools to bikini waxes. But from the way he writes, you'd think Armond never saw a director use a wide angle shot to grotesquely distort features: "A perfect illustration of [director Brian Robbins'] buoyant sketch-style is the water amusement park sequence where Rasputia appears in a bikini and mounts a water slide." Didn't Mike Judge recently mock this level of devolved anti-entertainment in <i>Idiocracy</i>? Next up: Armond champions the buoyant artistry of <i>Ow! My Balls!</i><br />It should be noted by now that White's tone-deaf sense of humor leads right back to his remarkable inability to call out caricatured depictions of minorities because the two glaring critical blind spots are intertwined. White cites the following as an example of the "sly social commentary" contained in <i>Norbit</i> : "When Mr. Wong querulously says 'Blacks and Jews love Chinese food. Go figure!' it tweaks the anomalies of American habit at which ethnic comics are rightly bemused." This is not social commentary but the weakest, most cliched sort of observation. Read Armond's statement again: Murphy's "joke" doesn't even deserve to be called that. It doesn't provoke laughter or insight or anything at all save dull recognition (get it? Because both blacks and Jews eat Chinese food!) As for Mr. Wong, what can we say? He's only the most insulting Asian caricature we've seen since Fu Manchu (thanks to Mark Asch for directing us to <a href="http://www.filmfreakcentral.net/screenreviews/norbit.htm">Walter Chaw's terrific review of <i>Norbit</i></a>: "[Wong] reveals his dream to be a whaler, making him more Japanese than Chinese, but hey, a slant's a slant.") Ironically, in the film Norbit tells Mr. Wong that the latter's quip about African-Americans "running fast" might be racist, and Wong admits as much -- Murphy tries to deflect similar, potential charges against his lampoonery by literally questioning himself on screen, a disingenuous move that, like the Mr. Wong character as a whole, White fails to catch onto. Neither does our man wrestle with the film's misogyny, which comes forth most clearly when Eddie Griffin's trite pimp character invites two women to work for him and instead of receiving a slap in the face is serenaded with their willing pleas to be his "ho." Nor does he investigate Rasputia herself, the butt of most of the film's humor and disgust, let off the hook by AW with this pretentious, circumventing gibberish: "Rasputia herself is an outsized image of the frustrations that fuel obesity and black female stereotypes that turn into (often comical) rage." She's just one of the nearly unanimous face-pulling African-American cartoons crying out self-hatred in nearly every frame of the film. Like Murphy, White doesn't seem to notice, or care.<br />What White's done with his review of <i>Norbit</i> is destroy the trust of anyone -- from those hanging on his every word to those casting a permanent wary eye -- who reads his work to look to him for incisive, relevant criticism. There are two possibilities here: either White's critical faculties are far less than stellar in understanding cinema -- how films impart meaning and for what reasons -- or else he has other motivations. If it's the latter, then those motivations are transparent. Maybe we're in denial, but to us there's not a single sentence in this review that feels genuine -- as Victor Lazlo describes Rick in <i>Casablanca</i>, White writes "like a man who's trying to convince himself of something he doesn't believe in his heart." White knows his audience, knows the general consensus of the high-minded, left-leaning criticism his readers usually refer to, and frequently goes in the other direction to upset their comfort. This sometimes provides provocative challenges, but more often than not it finds AW taking up positions that seem antithetical to his own intelligence and common sense. That's why in our last post we called attention to excerpts from White's review of <i>Coming to America</i> -- he once could call it like he saw it. But times have changed. When a film like <i>Norbit</i> (see also <a href="http://www.nypress.com/17/24/film/ArmondWhite%20.cfm"><i>Napoleon Dynamite</i></a>, <a href="http://www.nypress.com/16/51/film/film2.cfm">the Farrelly Brothers' atrocities</a>) comes along and provides a perfect opportunity to show he's down with "humanistic" low-brow eye-junk and against the rest of the critical community (and able to name-check Capra and Chaplin in order to do so; remember, he still has to prove his hipster credentials and raise this crap to level of Cinematic Art), Armond takes it. Even though the film, by any serious standard, is hateful. And racist. And unfunny. And shallow. And all the things that would prompt even the most knee-jerk contrarian to confess taste enough to reject it as satire or entertainment. And if our second hypothesis is true, (and we're not sure if it's more or less depressing to imagine than Armond's possible critical ineptitude), then the ramifications are clear: Armond White cares more about how others perceive and react to him than he does about writing incisive, socially and artistically astute criticism. A scary thought.Rowinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00547348802149549833noreply@blogger.com21tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6517646225441825259.post-15225063194559182102007-02-19T07:53:00.000-08:002007-02-22T07:57:56.451-08:00New York Press Review: "Norbit" [Vol. 1]/"The Resistance": "Who's Coming Out of Africa? The Man Who Lost His Roots!"Ladies and gentlemen, due to overwhelming popular demand and dependable antagonism: <a href="http://www.nypress.com/20/7/film/ArmondWhite.cfm"><i>Norbit</i></a>!<br />First, some "compare and contrast." Almost two decades ago (July 6, 1988, to be exact) Armond White wrote the following about Eddie Murphy's <i>Coming to America</i> in <i>The City Sun</i>, in a review titled "Who's Coming Out of Africa? The Man Who Lost His Roots!" (later reprinted in <i>The Resistance</i>). Bear with us:<br /><br /><i>Murphy pretends to bring to pop culture insider details of Black experience: manners and dialects that he dredges up with specious authority, always falsifying or excluding their socio-economic, psychological contexts.<br />Black politics, Black consciousness, has never figured in the plots of Murphy's movies, but his comic's acumen uses the idea of Black awareness in order to seem truly </i>Black<i>, up to date. Actually, </i>Coming to America<i> is a betrayal of every instance of politics, history, sex, and ethnic culture Black people have ever known. . . .<br /><br />Obviously, attending an Eddie Murphy movie is nothing like attending a Black awareness rally. There's ethnic self-loathing and humiliation throughout </i>Coming to America<i>. Murphy's consciousness is the kind that is completely detached from political action. He's a casualty, I would guess, of that period of arrested social advancement for Black people -- the aftershock of the civil rights movement -- the 1970s. In that period the predominant Black cultural figure was not a politician or demonstrator but the superficially, stereotypically ethnic icons of Blaxploitation movies and television sitcoms. As part of the TV generation, Murphy doesn't connect being Black with social injustice or political struggle. For him all Black life is vaudeville. . . .<br /><br />Take this ignorance and insensitivity and add it to Murphy's undeniable talent for mimicry, his comic timing and wit, and what you get is a showbiz atrocity. As a showbiz kid, Murphy has adopted the "Black consciousness" of white ideology: Murphy sees and comments upon Black people, life, and experience in ways and terms that the mainstream readily understands and that, I fear, make Black people tolerable to whites so that they won't be surprised by Blacks and won't have to fear them or respect them.<br />Unlike Richard Pryor, Murphy does not make humor about how we are all foolish, ambitious, shy, neurotic, horny, greedy, and human. He confirms how Black people really are the stereotypes their enemies have always claimed. This may be New Age Blackness, which accepts denigration by others. After all, one does not make movies that gross an average of $75 million . . . by appealing only to the interests of a minority audience.</i><br /><br />And now, only last week in the <i>New York Press</i>:<br /><br /><i>It’s not the ethnic and gender stunts that prove Murphy’s ingenuity. He has learned (perhaps from Jerry Lewis’ example) to place his gift for mimickry [sic] in an appealing context. </i>Norbit<i> takes place in a fairytale setting, an All-American burg called Boiling Springs that combines the small-town settings of </i>It’s a Wonderful Life<i>, </i>Back to the Future<i> and </i>The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek<i> (the name Norbit is no doubt derived from Eddie Bracken’s Norbert) for a spoof on American gentility which Murphy then integrates with explosive caricatures. It’s a democratizing impulse, less hostile than the Wayans Brothers’ satire </i>Little Man<i> but not far from that underappreciated film’s skepticism about American complaisance. Both </i>Norbit<i> and </i>Little Man<i> express how black comics self-consciously relate to ideas of normalcy. Here, Murphy’s gender/ethnic split embraces a sense of freakishness because Norbit, Rasputia and Mr. Wong are all, also, on a realistic continuum. We laugh at their types since we, in fact, recognize their types. . . .<br /><br />It’s significant that Murphy has moved past the family quandary of </i>The Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps<i> (where he was at his most brilliant) into an area of sly social commentary. When Mr. Wong querulously says “Blacks and Jews love Chinese food. Go figure!” it tweaks the anomalies of American habit at which ethnic comics are rightly bemused.<br />Murphy responds to post-Dave Chappelle self-insult comedy with a better, more experienced sense of self-awareness (that is, self respect). </i>Norbit<i> is the meek part of Murphy, yet he wears a perfectly spherical Afro (like the teens in TV’s “What’s Happening”) that is like a halo of blackness—a nostalgic affection for his own youth. And don’t get angry at Norbit’s attempt to off his ogre-wife; its precedents recall Walter Mitty performing the Martha Rayes scenes of Chaplin’s </i>Monsieur Verdoux<i>. Not misogynist, just a funny function of a frustrated id. Rasputia herself is an outsized image of the frustrations that fuel obesity and black female stereotypes that turn into (often comical) rage. Dig the name, Rasputia. It’s a satirical ghetto moniker that brilliantly suggests a blinkered awareness of the non-black world; a joke worthy of Murphy’s terrific animated TV series “The PJs.”</i><br /><br />How the mighty have fallen, not only in terms of basic sensitivity but in terms of critical insight. And this from the man once considered <i>the</i> leading African-American film and culture critic. Sad, really. If any current Armond White review demonstrates the self-willed blindness he's effected in order to place himself in uncomplicated opposition to the critical majority, no matter how weak his own reasoning or how off the mark his points, this is it. We'll talk more about it later.Rowinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00547348802149549833noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6517646225441825259.post-17373287769129375432007-02-01T16:28:00.000-08:002007-02-19T03:39:24.090-08:00New York Press Review: "The Good Shepherd"We know, we know. We'll talk about it later.<br />We finally got to see <i>The Good Shepherd</i>, a very good film -- a little too proper for our own personal tastes but still an engrossing account of the CIA and one man's descent into emotional callousness for its cause. Going back to <a href="http://www.nypress.com/19/51/film/ArmondWhite.cfm">Armond White's review of the film</a> from approximately a month ago we saw that he perfectly describes how Robert De Niro generates empathy for Matt Damon's aware but self-effacing anti-hero while also exploring the complex motivations behind involvement in something as bureaucratic and bizarre as a secret government agency (although AW does skimp on the issue of racial exclusivity, which he barely acknowledges as "privilege.") But for one unforgettable moment Armond succumbs to the temptation for a cheap shot and consequently lapses into classic frothing mode:<br /><br /><i>This may be the boldest movie characterization of the year because it defies the snarky, anti-American, self-hatred and nihilism and distrust of Bush-bashers, also known as </i>Borat<i>-mania.</i><br /><br />Sigh. And you wondered why we were away for so long?Rowinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00547348802149549833noreply@blogger.com75tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6517646225441825259.post-23809028602586647732007-01-17T13:11:00.000-08:002007-01-17T23:28:20.981-08:00"The Resistance": "Class Clowns" [AW on WA, Vol. 1]It seems like months since we last posted on our own creation. Sadly, due to an accumulation of work we've had to pay less attention to <i>Armond Dangerous</i> of late, forcing it into a relative state of neglect: there's a new <i>New York Press</i> out today containing <i>three</i> AW reviews, and we didn't even get to write about either of last week's. In other words, we're falling behind. We knew going into this project there was a strong possibility this would occur from time to time, though, and we're proceeding undaunted.<br />We're also using our lack of attendance at current Armond White-reviewed films to return to the pages of "The Resistance" -- it struck us after attending a ton of the "Essentially Woody" series (which only last week ended its run at Film Forum) that a couple of articles from AW's book explore the Woodman's films in depth. Now, from <a href="http://armonddangerous.blogspot.com/2006/12/armond-year-in-review-hostel-and-ringer.html">recent reviews of WA's films</a> it's clear Armond not only hates the director with an intensity we find out of all proportion to the work in question but also that he doesn't even understand what Woody's doing. How else to explain Armond's complete misreading of <i>Match Point</i>'s intentions, blaming the success-motivated immorality of the film's protagonist with Allen's and his audience's own values? This disingenuous critique had us in a wary frame of mind regarding two Woody-heavy (hehehe) articles Armond penned back in the day, the first entitled "Class Clowns," an article on WA's <i>Radio Days</i> and Robert Townsend's <i>Hollywood Shuffle</i> for the March '87 issue of <i>Film Comment</i>; and the second (to be analyzed soon) entitled "Simi Valley Aesthetics," a September '93 article for <i>Film Comment</i> on the Rodney King verdict and the decline in Americans' ability to interpret images, where <i>The Purple Rose of Cairo</i> is worked into the thesis.<br />"Class Clowns" gets some things right regarding <i>Radio Days</i> and the trajectory of Allen's work up to that point. Observing that in <i>Radio Days</i> "[t]here's no pretense, as in <i>Hannah and Her Sisters</i>, about the experience Allen is capable of authentically delineating or the lifestyle that infatuates yet eludes him," Armond contends that after the career pinnacle of <i>Annie Hall</i> "it was as if Allen made a gentleman's agreement to avoid being Jewish or, as a last resort, to satirize and patronize it" and that the films he shot until <i>RD</i> "were WASPier than films by the WASP, John Avildsen"; <i>RD</i> represents "Allen's return to what he knows" and is thus "a moral and artistic breakthrough." There's no mistaking <i>RD</i>'s very different understanding of American Jewish identity as compared to most everything else in Allen's oeuvre, and what Armond calls the "homey/urbane dialectic of <i>Radio Days</i>, where ethnic foundations are regarded as respectfully as cosmopolitan expansion" can be seen in the film's contrasting milieux, of working class Jews dreaming through the WASP fantasies decimated via mass media (radio plays, game shows, etc.) and the behind the scenes fakery of pop culture where stars transform their own reality (often ethnic into WASP) to structure and promote these fantasies. In AW's words, "[Allen] understands his relation to the WASP world through a nostalgic but not nebulous reconsideration of its media-sanctioned allure." But one also senses White doesn't like anything messier as when between <i>Annie Hall</i> and <i>Radio Days</i> . . .<br /><br /><i>. . . Bergman and Fellini became touchstones for Allen, who wanted to make serious non-Jewish art so badly that in remaking </i>Fanny and Alexander<i> as </i>Hannah [and Her Sisters]<i>, he misinterpreted Bergman's view of the Jew: an outsider and purveyor of magic who saves the WASP hero; Allen turned Bergman's Jew into the death-plagued insider whose infertility is cured by the WASP family! Perhaps working through that perversity allowed Allen to come back to his roots in </i>Radio Days<i>. He keeps the Jewish and WASP worlds separate, alternating memory with fantasy.</i><br /><br />Armond does a few things here to reveal his hand, i.e., his complete misunderstanding of American Jewish identity and how entertainers have expressed that identity through humor. First, he passes over the strong possibility that Bergman's Jew is more of a cliche than Woody Allen's onscreen persona. Second, in saying that Allen "misinterpreted" <i>Fanny and Alexander</i> he unfairly blames (and himself misinterprets) the director for working in a proud Jewish tradition of ironic, self-deprecating comedy that allows the outsider (Allen almost never plays an insider in his films -- even within "insider" academic, intelligentsia worlds he remains dislocated and alien) to subvert uprightness and authority. That doesn't mean Allen's films don't often end up extolling upper-class privilege, but it also doesn't mean that they do so at the expense of their creator's American Jewish identity or his own individual character -- when Allen refuses to keep "the Jewish and WASP worlds separate," that's when the messy confusion, and often the hilarity, of colliding ethnic identities suffuses his best work (and even a "non-Jewish" comedy like <i>A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy</i> is sweet and funny without the galvanizing effect of such collisions.) When White suggests that confusion -- or "perversity," as he calls it in his skewed analysis of <i>Hannah</i> -- needed to be worked through for Woody to "come back to his roots in <i>Radio Days</i>" he either disregards or discredits the Jewish roots essential to the humor so inseparable from most WA comedies. White's oversight comes through in the very first line of "Class Clowns": "No one ever asks Woody Allen for a deeper accounting of his Jewishness; the needling voice and profile seem enough." What about the funny, Armond? Couldn't that be why so many people consider him a quintessential Jewish comedian and comic director? Sad to say, but it may be our man lacks an appreciation of Jewish humor and its ability to foreground and make absurd the difficulties of adapting to Protestant American society:<br /><br /><i>Once a stand-up comedian, Townsend chafes at the fact of ethnic stereotypes his Jewish colleagues often accept; he doesn't share their sense of ironic projection (which is what built Hollywood), where identity is submerged in other characterizations and your responses are detached. This detachment, the source of most media cliches and inauthenticity, has consigned ethnic groups to buffoonery or villainy on screen. Jewish filmmakers rarely subvert it even for themselves, which doesn't mean they are above swallowing and believing stereotype; just that they are reluctant to deny it . . .</i><br /><br />Elsewhere:<br /><br /><i>[Townsend] digs at ethnic cliches to avoid the Groucho-mask compounding Woody Allen used in </i>Take the Money and Run<i>; that film accepted the established contrivances of Jewish comedians as their spiritual essence, and for Allen this was as much intellectual pretense as ethnic naivete.</i><br /><br />And further on:<br /><br /><i>Unable to assume that making movies will automatically raise him in society, or speak well for his people, Townsend is forced to follow the modernist practices that have occassioned the best movies of the past thirty years.</i><br /><br />It's insulting that White ignores a seminal tradition of provocative Jewish comedy (Jerry Lewis, Lenny Bruce, Mel Brooks, Mike Nichols) and names as his only other specific examples of Jewish films or filmmakers, aside WA, playwright Neil Simon and <i>Down and Out in Beverly Hills</i>. It's also insulting that White can't comprehend the Groucho masks worn by Virgil Starkwell's parents in <i>TTMAR</i> as silly send-ups, as well as an homage to a legendary Jewish comedian, of the television convention of blocking out scandalized countenances (Allen's parents and older generation Jews appear with some regularity in his films, opposing the idea that he "shields" their ethnic identity.) But most insulting of all is the supposition that social- and class-conscious Jewish humor is the exception to the rule, whereas "A Black filmmaker can take nothing for granted." No filmmaker worth his salt can, of course. But luckily for those Jews who control the film industry -- just come out and fucking <i>say it</i> if you think so, Mr. "Which is what built Hollywood" -- they can raise themselves in society through the movies that submerge their ethnic identities, rather than make those identities the comedic sites of warring individual, cultural, and entertainment concerns. Anyone with a lick of sense knows that our last, sarcastic sentence, the essence of which Armond imparts in his analysis, cannot possibly tell the entire tale: throughout Hollywood history the conflicting forces at work for Jews both in front of and behind the camera have been incredibly complex, and they've produced as many subversive heroes (the Marx Brothers, Ernst Lubitsch, Eliot Gould) as effacing betrayors (those producers and studio heads for whom Jewish representation was forbidden and elided in their films.) All of which is to say that if Armond's smart enough to recognize the insidious values propelling the comedic persona of <a href="http://armonddangerous.blogspot.com/2006/12/new-york-press-review-pursuit-of.html">Will Smith</a> and the progressive ones inspiring the renegade rebillion of Melvin Van Peebles, then he should also recognize the conflicted, not fully complacent, nature of Woody Allen's persona and project, not to mention the plethora of paths -- from honorable to "inauthentic" -- available to the "Jewish colleagues" his criticism pigeonholes. Except in "Class Clowns" Armond doesn't.Rowinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00547348802149549833noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6517646225441825259.post-47067225937043121442007-01-11T13:31:00.000-08:002007-01-11T17:57:54.699-08:00The 2006 Armond Year in Review: "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan"You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. This aphorism has been reconfirmed for us while still in the nascent stages of <i>Armond Dangerous</i>, as evidenced by recent readers' comments -- when we take our man to task <a href="http://armonddangerous.blogspot.com/2006/12/cineaste-reviewthe-armond-year-in.html#comment-6603709569576884972">we're charged with malicious intent</a> (including "hijacking") and when we agree with him every once in a while <a href="http://armonddangerous.blogspot.com/2007/01/new-york-press-review-dreamgirls.html#comment-7753768418816279677">we're accused of letting Armond White off the hook</a>. Which leads us to think of another aphorism -- you can't please everybody -- and the sense that our inability to pander maybe, just maybe, means we're on the right path.<br />But what of the suggestion that we <i>must</i> pick Armond apart even when we like what he has to say? That's a fair criticism, and we'll try harder in the future to look at "good" reviews as thoroughly as we do for the ones with which we have problems. But in our defense, things usually aren't as clear cut for us they were with the <i>Dreamgirls</i> review. Take what will surely one day be considered classic Armond -- <a href="http://www.nypress.com/19/44/film/ArmondWhite.cfm">his enraged review of the gargantuan smash comedy <i>Borat</i></a>. Read it? Okay. Now, after taking a moment to digest the humorless invective ("<i>Borat</i> is not funny -- except, perhaps, to 13-year-olds or people who imagine Cohen’s targets (that is, other Americans) as mortal enemies") and the childish name-calling that places him on an equal level, at least according to his own standards, with his object of derision (“'Ethnic-Cleansing' humor," classy), recognize the validity of what Armond's trying -- and we emphasize the word "trying" -- to say. Like his prose or not -- we personally detest the rant-style -- he's one of the few film critics in America to wonder at (via railing at) the political one-sidedness of <i>Borat</i>. That doesn't make the film any less funny, nor does it excuse Armond's starchy attitude toward satire that can't be redeemed by sickly-sweetness a la <a href="http://www.nypress.com/17/24/film/ArmondWhite%20.cfm"><i>Napoleon Dynamite</i></a> (that he can roll with Bunuel <i>shooting the Pope</i> in <i>The Milky Way</i> but not the broad-side-of-the-barn torchings of <i>Borat</i> we can only figure as a product of Armond's <a href="http://nypress.com/17/48/news&columns/feature.cfm">"real movies = old movies" equation</a> that plays it safe regarding the Canon; his love of recent Solondz we're still working on); but it does make for a polemical questioning of what exactly audiences and critics alike found so affirming in <i>Borat</i>. Of course, Armond's ungenerous slant has <i>Borat</i> pegged as "divisive," even though people offended or turned off by the film are clearly not culturally marginalized or split apart from fellow Americans by its success. If that's the case, where was White for the Larry the Cable Guy movie? Nonetheless, Armond's criticism is that the <i>Borat</i> phenomenon reveals a strand of deep-rooted condescension and superiority among American liberals who lapped up the film's hi-jinks. Buried somewhere beneath his frothing vitriol, Armond's point may very well be valid. But we wish White could see how the film's nastiness might very well come from a healthy, collective feeling of resentment and exasperation of one political persuasion toward another. No rule states that pop culture -- or, for that matter, humor -- must be a "unifying force."Rowinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00547348802149549833noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6517646225441825259.post-57350095819659189352007-01-09T06:22:00.000-08:002007-01-14T13:24:58.364-08:00New York Press Review: "Dreamgirls"Alright. We've now settled in at <i>Armond Dangerous</i>, having answered our backlog of comments (the ones that needed answering, that is), spoken our piece on the Armond White reviews we felt needed a challenge, and even tackled that silly <a href="http://armonddangerous.blogspot.com/2007/01/new-york-press-article-better-than-list.html">"Better-Than List"</a> that got everyone all in tizzy. Now it's time to get happy. Sorta.<br />At first we were in complete agreement with <a href="http://www.nypress.com/19/51/film/ArmondWhite2.cfm">Armond's review of the atrocious <i>Dreamgirls</i></a> but couldn't understand why he was all worked up about it. Then we learned the extent to which people -- friends and co-workers as well as <a href="http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/dreamgirls">critics</a> -- actually love this piece of garbage. And we were shocked, not so much that anyone could give a pass to the horrendous representation of music and history that <i>Dreamgirls</i> puts forth (if <i>Forrest Gump</i> proved anything it's that the American public will readily pay to view its own belilttlement), but that moviegoers -- you know, people who attend movies -- enjoy the barrage and din that Bill Condon and company pass off as entertainment. In other words, we're flabbergasted that human beings with functioning eyes and ears actually <i>like</i> <i>Dreamgirls</i>.<br />So this is one of those moments where we fully sympathize with AW's alarmist response to both an individual film and the general state of film culture (especially after seeing a near-double bill of <i>Kansas City</i> and <i>Jazz '34</i>, two films that at least <i>respect</i> the unbreakable bond between life and art.) "Sure," writes White, "<i>Dreamgirls</i> is basically a confection, but its core is soul-rotting." Amen. There's pretty much no moss- and slug-covered stone AW leaves unturned regarding <i>Dreamgirls</i>, so we'll just leave the terrific lashings to his prose except to point out the best line in his review: "Condon zips past the styles of the era without feeling (characters step out of a recording studio into—uh, oh—a race riot)." That's <i>Dreamgirls</i> in a nutshell, probing into the intersections of pop music and social change only as far as it gives itself the appearance of authenticity and a servicable background for the undistinguished, synth-drenched, Broadway-bland numbers that only allude to the feeling of the real-life moments of musical bliss that supposedly provided the film's inspiration. We love that White can point out and mock the <i>Dreamgirls</i>' pretensions in a single sentence -- it's the critical equivalent of a well-rocked solo.Rowinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00547348802149549833noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6517646225441825259.post-74146690641703818692007-01-08T07:30:00.000-08:002007-01-08T11:21:26.785-08:00New York Press Article: "Better-Than List"Long live hyperbole!<br />Yes, it's the beginning of January, the time when critics and pundits look back on the calendar year that was and pronounce stern judgment on the feats, flops, and fickle trends defining the cultural landscape. And who better for such a seasonally predictable task than Armond White, that wonky bullshit detector always ready to take out films both deserving of demotion (<i>Babel</i>, ugh) and those really just a speck on the ass of badness, if bad at all (<i>Three Times</i>), comparatively placing in their stead the overlooked (yes, we admit, nobody talked of <i>Broken Sky</i>) and the facetiously-pretending-to-have-been-overlooked (<i>World Trade Center</i>).<br />Look, we're a little amazed and nervous that relatively so many people are interested in our take on <a href="http://www.nypress.com/20/1/film/ArmondWhite2.cfm">Armond White's "Better-Than List."</a> We don't want to let our readers down, but <a href="http://armonddangerous.blogspot.com/2006/12/critiquing-our-critic.html">as we've pointed out before</a>, we have little interest in lists -- they're reductive and calcifying, and, as <a href="http://armonddangerous.blogspot.com/2007/01/armond-dangerous-update-fast-and.html#comment-3326348005049250981">Andrew Tracy</a>, <a href="http://www.thelmagazine.com/index.cfm?listings_id=104298">Mark Asch</a>, and <a href="http://www.thereeler.com/the_blog/today_in_top_10s_armond_goes_t.php#comments">others</a> have duly noted, they bring out the worst in a critic like White prone to the sort of extremist positioning that while temporarily incendiary really provokes little critical thought in the long run. So if you're interested in thorough analysis of the films White mentions we suggest searching for his original reviews. Not that the "Better-Than List" doesn't contain some veritable LOL moments, as when Armond:<br /><br />-- subtitles his article "The 2006 smackdown [Jesus Christ, what is this, a wrestling tournament?] deflat[ing] this year's hype-bloated productions" and then lists among his cinematic correctives <i>World Trade Center</i> and <i>A Prairie Home Companion</i>.<br /><br />-- says about <i>Broken Sky</i>, "Julian Hernandez's existential love story proved Mexico held the heart of cinema in 2006," even while failing all year to mention Carlos Reygadas' tremendous <i>Battle in Heaven</i>. Not a fucking peep.<br /><br />-- earnestly pens these words: "But Oliver Stone's film was a great act of empathy and facilitated catharsis. Those who saw it were healed . . ." Even only a week into January this is the Armond White quote of the year.<br /><br />-- ends his comparison of <i>The Promise</i> vs. <i>Letters From Iwo Jima</i>/<i>Flags of Our Fathers</i> with, "It's 'The cinema I love" vs. 'The cinema I don't want.'" Wouldn't that make a perfect title for a career-spanning anthology of White's writing?<br /><br />-- counteracts <i>Army of Shadows</i> with non-retro <i>Changing Times</i>. Aren't seemingly similar but qualitatively different films being juxtaposed? (Oh, and we think AW meant " . . . critics and audiences running away from the political present, seeking the <i>moral clarity</i> of WWII" instead of "the safety and security of WWII." The second World War probably wasn't too safe and secure for that many people, but what do we know?) Something tells us Armond failed to bother with the film event of the year, if not decade: the Museum of the Moving Image's screening of Jacques Rivette's legendary thirteen hour-long 1971 magnum opus <i>Out 1</i>. White's loss.<br /><br />All in all, some good, unintentionally funny stuff -- we needed a frivolous offering after the heaviness of the last three postings. Armond, we can always count on you.Rowinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00547348802149549833noreply@blogger.com61tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6517646225441825259.post-54504963227525371842007-01-05T08:18:00.000-08:002007-06-01T11:43:49.316-07:00Armond Dangerous Update: The Fast and the Furious/New York Press Review: "Children of Men"Things here at <i>Armond Dangerous</i> are moving fast and furious. Not only are we receiving more comments than ever before and having a difficult time responding in kind (don't worry, Mark Asch, we'll get to you soon), we're also receiving more notice. Why, just last week <a href=" http://www.thereeler.com/the_blog/screening_gotham_12292006.php"><i>The Reeler</i> gave us a major holler</a> and then, with the release of the new <i>Press</i> and <a href=" http://www.nypress.com/20/1/film/ArmondWhite2.cfm">Armond White's "Better-Than List"</a> therein, <a href=" http://www.thereeler.com/the_blog/today_in_top_10s_armond_goes_t.php ">did so again yesterday</a>.<br />But <i>The Reeler</i> and others (such as <a href=" http://daily.greencine.com/archives/002987.html"><i>GreenCine Daily</i></a> and <a href=" http://www.thelmagazine.com/index.cfm?listings_id=104298">Mr. Asch at the <i>L Magazine</i></a>) who want to hear our say about the "Better-Than List" will have to wait a bit -- we just attended <i>Children of Men</i> for the second time Wednesday evening, and since the film is fresh in our minds we'd rather look at <a href=" http://www.nypress.com/20/1/film/ArmondWhite.cfm">Armond's <i>New York Press</i> review of it</a>. This is one of those cases where we don't quite know what to make of AW's decision to review a film after most critics sent out copy. Of course, critics can write about films whenever they want to (Jean-Luc Godard once suggested -- to Pauline Kael, no less -- that critics might think of reviewing films while they're in production), but Armond does this often, and sometimes we wonder if it's in order to gauge a critical consensus and then form his opinion in reaction to it. This is pure speculation, but we know others have wondered the same. Anyway, White's opening paragraph: <br /><br /><i>Alfonso Cuarón is not a virtuoso, although his </i>Children of Men<i> style might convince the politically obtuse that a decorative illustration of their social alarm is a visionary achievement. Below the garish surface of this paranoid fantasy lies political antipathy -- not the sort of soulful detritus of Tarkovsky's </i>Stalker<i> tableaux or Spielberg's hallucinogenic </i>War of the Worlds<i>, but Cuarón's cheap specialty: fashion. By distorting contemporary social fears into facile apocalyptic imagery, </i>Children of Men<i> does little more than rework the ludicrous, already-forgotten </i>V for Vendetta<i>.</i><br /><br />Just because it stuck out to us, we'd like to address White's use of the word "hallucinogenic." Where were the <i>Press</i> editors on this one? According to the <i>American Heritage Dictionary</i> "hallucinogenic" means "a substance that induces hallucination." Does AW mean to say <i>War of the Worlds</i> causes its viewers to see or hear things that don't exist? We haven't learned of anything like this happening with Spielberg's film, although it would be pretty neat. We're pretty sure Armond meant "hallucinatory," which means "of or characterized by hallucination," instead of "hallucinogenic" -- it's probably a minor mistake, but it says a lot about the <i>Press</i>' editorial overview and White's tendency to play fast and loose with language. <br />White establishes in this opening paragraph what he thinks of <i>Children of Men</i>'s aesthetic: a "style [that] might convince the politically obtuse that a decorative illustration of their social alarm is a visionary achievement," "below the garish surface of this paranoid fantasy lies political antipathy," "fashion," "facile apocalyptic imagery." In other words, shallow filmmaking imparting false ideology. How does this work? <br /><br /><i>Here, Cuarón uses the canniest youth bait -- focusing on the near-future.</i><br /><br />Huh? How's that? We're not sure what age demographic White is referring to with "youth," but we know "near-future dystopia" films like <i>Strange Days</i> and <i>Gattica</i> flopped across the board. And did Spielberg "use the canniest youth bait" by "focusing on the near-future" in <i>Minority Report</i>? Without following through on this statement, AW goes on to explain <i>Children of Men</i>'s machinations:<br /><br /><i>Instead of the cartoon jokiness that vitiated </i>V for Vendetta<i>, Cuarón caters to cynicism about global conditions. Those who felt that the world slipped away from them after the 2000 presidential election and later with the events of 9/11, will see their dread visualized here. Journalist Theodore Faron (caffeine-haggard Clive Owen) embodies their fear and sanctimony as he traverses the trash-strewn, gang-filled streets of Cuarón's London, walking past neo-concentration camps, evoking WWII or Bosnia or the United States-Mexico border—take your pick. He's witness to sly evocations of both al-Qaeda terrorism and Homeland Security crackdowns, and underground rebels abduct him and ex-wife Julian (Julianne Moore)—who may be either illegal-immigrant freedom fighters or fascist henchmen. But then Cuarón adds a sanctimonious twist: a mock virgin-birth by a Third-World woman named Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), whose delivery and protection becomes Theo's neo-white man's burden. You can't get more Lefty sentimental than that.</i> <br /><br />Ugly ending, echoing the same one-liner that capped the previous paragraph. A good review doesn't necessarily have to be smoothly written, though, and Armond makes some good points. Or does he? We're not sure how Cuaron "caters to cynicism about global conditions" any more than Spielberg (since White's the one comparing <i>Children of Men</i> to <i>War of the Worlds</i> and <i>Minority Report</i>) caters to the public's fear of large-scale catastrophe and of government surveillance. Both filmmakers seek to create cathartic, thought-provoking entertainment inspired by traumatic events and controversial issues, only the latter gets the benefit of the doubt as to his intentions while the former is deemed opportunistic. In fact, the word "cynicism" seems somewhat inappropriate in this context considering one of <i>Children of Men</i>'s themes is how "faith" wins out over "chance." Granted, it's a simple theme, not incredibly well-developed, but it still offers a vague hope against the vague cynicism White suggests. The ostensible evidence supporting this suggestion is that <i>Children of Men</i> visualizes the dread of "those who felt that the world slipped away from them after the 2000 presidential election and later with the events of 9/11." Alright, but how? Armond ticks off a list of the film's evocative imagery, making it sound jumbled and not thought-out. Which it very well might be -- a solid case might be made for that -- but AW never spells out how except to throw out the adjective "sly." Earlier another adjective, "sanctimony," was used to describe Theo and, presumably, liberals whose qualities he embodies, but no explanation is made as to how this is so, no examples of Theo's behavior or worldview being provided. The description of the film's blatant Christ symbolism as "sanctimonious" is perfectly apt, however, which got us on Armond's side for a moment until he blew it with that "neo-white man's burden." How is Theo's redemptive heroism any more of a "white man's burden" than Ray's in <i>War of the Worlds</i>? White yet again fails to back up his statements. <br />Now, we understand that due to space constrictions reviewers don't always get a chance to expand on their ideas. But a little more than half the page on which White's piece ran in this week's <i>Press</i> featured a production still from <i>Children of Men</i> featuring Clive Owen and Julianne Moore -- including the enormous pull-out quote and the margins, White's review takes up only about a quarter of a page. Did the <i>Press</i> force this short review on Armond (who also got a full page spread for the "Better-Than List") or did Armond just phone it in? We'll never know. <br />And we'll never know -- unless he chooses to elaborate on it elsewhere or at some late date -- what exactly Armond means when he describes <i>Children of Men</i>'s aesthetic as "resembling the surreally distanced, uninterrupted viewpoint of a videogame." Which videogames? Certainly not first-person shooter videogames (which <i>Elephant</i> mimics at one moment in order to make a connection to the fps games the teenage killers play at home) because the film's celebrated long takes are not pov shots. The long takes' panoptical surveys -- with action occurring on multiple planes and often disappearing beyond the scope of the lens -- would only resemble videogame aesthetics for the most unsophisticated and -- dare we say -- cynical viewer. For one thing, the moviegoer cannot interact with the image in the same way a videogame player can -- an obvious point that White conveniently ignores. For another, the film maintains spatial integrity in presenting and exploring its realistic environments, an integrity that stands in sharp contrast to the comic book nonsense of <i>V for Vendetta</i>, the film that Armond White compares to <i>Children of Men</i> without properly explaining thier distinctions. It seems to us that <a href=" http://www.reverseshot.com/article/strong_children_of_men_strong">Elbert Ventura of <i>Reverse Shot</i></a> has far more interesting points to make in this regard: <br /> <br /><i>It's somehow telling that two of the best films of the year are defined by death and the long take. Both </i>Children of Men<i> and </i>The Death of Mr. Lazarescu <i>capture man's dilemma eloquently, pinning him to his environment without the respite of a cut. Tracking death—of one man in the former, of the human race in the latter—both movies express with unique power the inescapability of the physical world. This anxiety about the world we live in is further illuminated by a pairing with a natural partner: </i>V for Vendetta<i>. An incendiary piece of agit-pop, that film stages its call for revolution in a recognizable dystopia, much like </i>Children of Men<i> does. Ghosts from our pixilated nightmare populate both: detainees in black hoods, snarling dogs in prison camps, martyrs calling for revolution. </i>V for Vendetta<i>'s irresponsible politics finally complicate its critique. </i>Children of Men<i>, on the other hand, charts a path to the future that looks depressingly familiar. Cuarón makes us see how we can get there from here. </i> <br /> <br />The last lines (especially "depressingly familiar") would only seem to confirm Armond's ideas about liberal "sanctimony" even as they go against his point that "<i>Children of Men</i> never explains how the world got this way and so its dread is convincingly sophomoric." In one sense, White is right here: <i>Children of Men</i>'s scenario -- that women for eighteen years haven't been able to have babies -- doesn't account for the details of civilization's decline into anarchy and, in Britain, an isolated police state. This insufficient understanding of the causes of "social collapse," one might argue, proves Armond has unmasked "Lefty sentiment" which wants to see its worst nightmares and thus its righteousness about the "exagerrated state of the world" realized and confirmed in the most simplistic cinematic terms. But when Ventura states <i>Children of Men</i>'s aesthetic "express[es] with unique power the inescapability of the physical world," he complicates this notion by giving deserved credit to Cuaron's directorial approach. What sort of entertainment is <i>Children of Men</i>? The film's violent and decayed surroundings (the film begins with a terrorst bombing, with a person stumbling out of the wreckage burnt and armless) surely aren't meant to be experienced in the conventionally thrilling way <i>V for Vendetta</i>'s superhero fantasy is. If anything, <i>Children of Men</i> has much more in common with a blockbuster like <i>War of the Worlds</i>, a big-budget film steaming with death and despair. If wanting to be honest with oneself, one would recognize that these films, while trafficking in the sort of "thrill-ride" format palatable to mass audiences, sternly question that mass audience's relationship to spectacle by creating a realistic experience of violence, death, and survival. That's a responsible, perhaps even "political" strategy far from the "game" pejorative Armond levels at <i>Children of Men</i>.<br />But White dismisses this line of inquiry, upset as he is over the film's political iconography:<br /><br /><i>The political antipathy of Iraq war protestors and War on Terror skeptics is what drives this pretentious action flick. It panders to a decadent yearning for apocalypse as if to confirm recent fear and resentment about loss of political power.</i><br /><br />Iraq war protestors and War on Terror skeptics don't corner the market on a "decadent yearning for apocalypse." Audiences of all stripes have for decades been getting their eschatological jollies from films Left, Right, and in between. But if Armond White despises <i>Children of Men</i> because it alludes to contemporary issues from a liberal perspective, that's his business. In failing to critically evaluate the means by which <i>Children of Men</i> boldly does so, however, he not only cheapens the discourse on a genuinely provocative, if compromised, film, he also fails to generate a cogent discussion on the ways in which cinematic aesthetics, politics, and representation actually work.Rowinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00547348802149549833noreply@blogger.com32tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6517646225441825259.post-11931581407607950502007-01-02T16:23:00.000-08:002007-01-11T18:38:34.919-08:00The 2006 Armond Year in Review: "Final Destination 3"Sometimes it's almost too easy.<br />Never have we spotted a more perplexing case of critical schizophrenia than <a href="http://www.nypress.com/19/8/film/ArmondWhite.cfm">Armond White's lauding of <i>Final Destination 3</i></a>. Six years earlier <a href="http://www.nypress.com/13/12/film/film2.cfm">White panned the first <i>Final Destination</i></a> in the following terms:<br /><br /><i>Sadly, I realize there is consensus for this type of flippancy. Conversely, the consensus blindness regarding</i> Mission to Mars<i> indicates a cultural crisis. The new teen thriller </i>Final Destination <i>gets flip about death, as </i>Mission to Mars <i>does not. Director James Wong uses the new shock f/x of Super Real Catastrophe seen in the car accidents of </i>Meet Joe Black<i> and </i>Erin Brockovich<i> to jolt rather than insinuate fear or reveal squeamishness. The plot of a psychic teen Alex (Devon Sawa) trying to outwit fate becomes a series of Rube Goldberg death rallies, staged bluntly, not cleverly. When Alex's classmate (Ali Larter) recalls her father's death, it's a bland recitation without being strange or evocative like Phoebe Cates' in </i>Gremlins<i>. And though minor characters all have the names of movies figures associated with horror films -- Lewton, Browning, Wiene, Schreck, Hitchcock, Chaney, Murnau, Dreyer -- it's fake sophistication, disgracing a grave, poetic tradition.</i><br /><br />Yet regarding <i>FD</i> mark three:<br /><br /><i>Director James Wong displays genuine cinematic inventiveness. Having obviously studied DePalma [sic], Wong makes good use of screen space and split compositions, and times the chain-reaction, fatal-accident relays with snap and gallows humor. The </i>Final Destination<i> series is all about spectacle—the only thing we know this side of death—which means its violence is stylized, where so many other youth-targeted movies . . . present it with tactless brutality.</i> Final Destination 3<i>'s unexpected visual wit—it is a live-action Road Runner cartoon—distinguishes it from those grind-house flicks, making it fascinating and defensible as pop entertainment.</i><br /><br />If this isn't an about-face . . . Even were one to defend this bizarro self-contradiction by pointing out distinctions between the first <i>FD</i> and the third (of which there are practically none) that our man remains brilliantly sensitive to, well, that wouldn't help because AW now seems to approve of the entire series. Not only that, he's favorably comparing the third to his immortal De Palma, whereas before he contrasted <i>Final Destination</i>'s "flippancy" about death with <i>Mission to Mars</i>' "emotionalism." Did director James Wong spend countless sessions between <i>FD</i> installments studiously viewing <i>MtM</i> (a la Orson Welles obsessively watching <i>Stagecoach</i> while making <i>Citizen Kane</i>) in order to properly infuse the franchise with De Palma's moral gravity?<br />Consciously perpetrated or not, what Armond's flip-flop tells us is that the man might want to have it both ways. When <i>Mission to Mars</i> gets unfairly bashed he runs to the rescue by chiding the culture and media at large for ignoring its humanism in favor of titillating exploitation like <i>Final Destination</i>; when the <i>FD</i> series fades (relatively) into the cultural background he backs it so as to offer a "surprising" reading of its b-movie subversiveness to combat high brow critiques like <i>A History of Violence</i> and <i>Match Point</i>, as well as real titillating exploitation like <i>Saw</i> and <i>House of Wax</i>. But Armond's switcharoo is also a moralistic move:<br /><br /><i>And here's where </i>Final Destination 3 <i>takes one by surprise. It rejects cool for comic horror. That may sound like the flip of </i>Munich<i>, but it's still essentially humane because it recognizes dismay as an honest response to death. Sensitivity comes through in the reflective moments when teens Kevin and Wendy (Ryan Merriman and Mary Elizabeth Winstead) plot to cheat death. These innocent-looking highschool seniors have witnessed the decimation of their classmates at an amusement park and then await—and attempt to outwit—their own fates. One clever scene announces the presence of the Grim Reaper with the image of a Ramones bobblehead doll. This connects with a student's brave boast that "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, man," which is made prior to boarding a rollercoaster (the film's first scary set-piece). Pop-Nietzche [sic -- is AW or the </i>Press<i> to blame for these embarrassing typos?] and pop-nihilism have been swallowed whole without real comprehension by the characters. In permitting audiences to see the irony of its protagonists' youthful flippancy being expressed moments before they die, </i>Final Destination 3<i> offers a message.</i><br /><br />According to Armond, <i>FD 3</i> warns its audience and its audience's on-screen surrogates not to be so damn flip about death. It's almost as if Armond offers <i>FD 3</i> as a corrective to the first two films' lack of self-reflexivity, except that he doesn't explicate any change in the direction of the series from film to film. He also seems to like his moral instruction served cruel and unusual:<br /><br /><i>Despite its domino-effect game quality, the film startles us into awareness about modern culture. It'll be hard to top the comment on sexist consumerism and teenage narcissism made in the sequence where a tanning salon bed becomes a sarcophagus. Its climactic image—a phosphorescent close-up of a nude hottie in eyeshades, her mouth open to scream and her tongue pierced with a sex stud—is like a Polaroid snapshot capturing contemporary degeneracy. It's eerily fatal and fantastic—a death-fixated version of a Warhol silkscreen.</i><br /><br />So now we know: "contemporary degeneracy" equals tanning. And the lurid punishment of female sexuality so essential to the reactionary strand of the horror genre in which <i>FD 3</i> thoughtlessly (but extremely effectively) participates equals an "awareness about modern culture." What's sad is that Armond connects <i>FD 3</i> to <i>Munich</i> via their similar goals of "preserv[ing] human values" and "want[ing] audiences to be appalled at violence." <i>Munich</i>'s complex (although often problematic) (re)presentations of violence as spectacle might warrant such words, but given <i>FD 3</i>'s simplistic moralism we're not as willing as AW to twist ourselves into critical knots in order to give this film such heft. Especially after we felt the exact opposite about its nearly indistinguishable predecessor.Rowinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00547348802149549833noreply@blogger.com42tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6517646225441825259.post-12203287949961184452006-12-29T08:58:00.000-08:002007-01-02T16:32:49.429-08:00Cineaste Review/The 2006 Armond Year in Review: "The Black Dahlia"Throw out "Armond White" during a round of cinematic word association and the director's name most likely called out in response -- "Spielberg" aside -- will surely be "Brian De Palma." No other critic currently working is as attached to his pet auteurs than White, who does an unequaled job of undervaluing their critical standing in order to then overpraise their work, acting more as a cheerleader in failing (or refusing) to chart the complications and difficulties of Hollywood directors whose artistic-political merits just might be less unassailable than imagined. But whatever the shortcomings of his tunnel-visioned auteurism, our man's nearly unconditional love for particular directors (the two mentioned above plus Altman, Boorman, Demme, Techine, Kar-Wai; directors who peaked before the 70s don't count since <a href="http://nypress.com/17/48/news&columns/feature.cfm">AW boringly lumps together the canonical</a>: "[Most moviegoers] don't know the excitement to be had from real movies (which is to say old movies)") can often lead to idiosyncratic takes on their films, partisan as they are. <a href="http://www.cineaste.com/home.htm">The latest AW review of De Palma's <i>The Black Dahlia</i></a> (we'd provide a link of the review except <i>Cineaste</i> doesn't offer such links on their site, forcing one to buy the magazine) is surely in this idiosyncratic vein, positioning the film as thoroughly political in contrast to other recent neo-noirs, and calling attention to the film's subversive examination of the Hollywood dream machine despite its failings as a well-acted, well-oiled piece of filmmaking. Unfortunately, the review is also stunningly incoherent -- we can barely make sense of it even after reading <a href="http://www.nypress.com/19/37/film/ArmondWhite.cfm">the shorter <i>New York Press</i> review of the same film that came out almost three months earlier</a>. Still we'll try to tease out what AW's wisdom by cutting out the non sequitur-laced bullshit that dots his prose:<br /><br />-- <i>De Palma's sensitivity to the politics/film connection explodes what people think of as the </i>noir<i> genre. . . . </i>The Black Dahlia<i> is De Palma-personal; a consideration of the price paid by folks who live in the Hollywood environment either by working within the filmmaking industry or under the sway of movie mythology.</i><br /><br />So far, so sensical. We'd maybe question the term "<i>the</i> politics/film connection" (aren't there many possible conenctions between politics and film?), but when Armond isn't going off the rails one usually lets him glide.<br /><br />-- <i>[De Palma] shows the political economics of the place by examining the way the cops perform, the civilians subsist, the ruling class rules, and the anonymous besotted dreamers get crushed.</i><br /><br />Alright, now let's get to some examples.<br /><br />-- <i>Moviegoers confronting this strangely convoluted tale need to understand the background of De Palma's art and the movie fascination that led inevitably to </i>The Black Dahlia<i>.</i><br /><br />The only thing convoluted here is Armond's review, which at this juncture forsakes analysis for pedantic backpeddling. We understand <i>Cineaste</i> reviews tend to be long enough to provide such breathing space for its writers, but Armond's decision to "school" readers in the history lessons of De Palma isn't one of gratuituousness, it's one of condescension. Read the last italicized sentence again if you don't think so -- the flagrant "need" is a dead giveaway. What follows is a waste of two paragraphs that barely skims the surface of De Palma's "political" background and completely circumvents the complications arising from his representations of women, violence, minorities, etc., etc. At the end of these paragraphs we get this: "To understand <i>The Black Dahlia</i> it is necessary to recognize that De Palma penetrates the Hollywood-<i>noir</i> genre, upending its conventions, emphasizing its social and political bases." Fine, for a repetitious statement. Now let's get to the nitty-gritty, shall we?<br /><br />-- <i>Bucky and Lee represent the L.A.P.D. as a social agency stressed between the area's racial antagonism and class-based priorities. They're introduced in the midst of a race riot -- not participating in the infamous zoot suit altercation but putting down the unruly sailors and soldiers who initiated it. (Although they arrest one Latino . . . ) Bucky and Lee's allegiances are torn. . . . Their roles in municipal politics are precarious.</i><br /><br />Perhaps Armond's rolling with this, but we're not yet sure where exactly. We see how the race riots position Bucky and Lee within a racial quagmire, but how does class enter into it? What classes do the sailors and Latinos come from and how do the police stand in relation? How are Bucky and Lee's allegiances torn? We've been given statements but little evidence to back them up.<br /><br />-- <i>This is one of the few movies to answer the rarely unasked but fundamental political question: 'What makes a cop?' . . . When the precinct chief is angered by a cop's inconvenient display of scruples, he shouts, "You are a political animal!" . . . De Palma sees every character as a political animal -- and that's the way to see </i>The Black Dahlia<i>.</i><br /><br />Treading water. More talk about politics and the film's political awareness but few concrete examples of how this works.<br /><br />-- <i>As Bucky's career succeeds, his friendship with the platonic couple Lee and Kay rescues him from the blighted habitat of his German immigrant father: Bucky experiences the splendor and respite of Lee and Kay's well-appointed, white-walled bungalow. He's moved up in class, but the higher he climbs, the lower he has to fall.</i><br /><br />Finally. But this small nugget -- replete with a mistake ("platonic couple"? Lee and Kay definitely seem to be lovers; if Armond's referring to platonic in the sense of "ideal," then he's off there, too) and a groaner of a last line -- comes at the very end of a lengthy, rambling paragraph that 1) states Bucky and Elizabeth Short are "political animals [that] reflect the different choices available to denizens of the capitalist dream capital" only to 2) return to mentioning De Palma's subversion of noir tropes (with a brief allusion to "character psychology and social history") and 3) mention Vilmos Zsigmond's cinematography that brings us into 4) a tangent on Robert Towne's <i>Ask the Dust</i>. Getting dizzy?<br /><br />-- <i>Bucky is drawn to [Madeleine Linscott] by more than duty; he's fascinated by Madeleine's toying with sexuality as he himself is split between Lee and Kay's sexual arrangement [what happened to "platonic"?]; he's intrigued with the dark side of his own libido and political duty. It's a familar De Palma theme, especially well dramatized in</i> Body Double<i> but [sic] that fantasy film wasn't based on a real-life horror.</i> . . .<br /><br />And on and on he goes, further showing off his complete understanding of the De Palma oeuvre by haphazardly bringing up <i>Casualties of War</i> and <i>Greetings</i> for no analytical or critical purpose.<br /><br />-- <i>There's every reason to view the Elizabeth Short tragedy consistently with our current tabloid involvement with crime and scandals. De Palma uses the past as a political mirror of the present. The issues of sexual exploitation, racial unrest, industry corruption, and police brutality still haunt us -- as much as Short's gruesome remains haunt Bucky. Our modern mortification is symbolized by the stuffed dog Balto that guards the foyer of the Linscott mansion.</i><br /><br />Phonograph needle off the record -- we're stopping right there. What the fuck was that? We understand what Armond's attempting, but the way he goes about it leaves significant room for improvement. We'll buy that De Palma is satirizing both tabloid sensationalism and upper class decadence (the latter in the form of the Linscotts), but is it really a "political" act to wag a finger at the buying and selling of lurid sex scandals? Is it also a political act to portray the rotting American aristocracy in the most cliched cinematic terms? As for the stuffed dog . . . wow. We thought it just might be a symbol of the Linscotts' sheltered, ersatz existence, but whatever you say, Armond.<br /><br />-- <i>A frightening, grinning clown's visage is a motif from Paul Leni's 1928 </i>The Man Who Laughs<i> . . . </i><br /><br />You know what, we can't go on. Armond White's <i>Cineaste</i> review of <i>The Black Dahlia</i> is so unwieldy, so ridiculous, so blinded to the film's flaws (only mentioned in passing; the <i>New York Press</i> review blames them on the James Ellroy novel that is De Palma's source material) and inability to follow through on its supposed "political" ambitions, that its thesis gets completely lost. Towards the end White goes into great detail about the Elizabeth Short screen tests and how the film uses them to reflect back to the viewer his or her relationship to the immortality of images and the fame and desire they provoke in their subjects and audiences. What's interesting here is that White thinks this morality play and Bucky's own moral dilemma are portrayed in a politically conscious manner, whereas <a href="http://www.brooklynrail.org/2006-10/film/another-dead-broad">the <i>Brooklyn Rail</i>'s Sarahjane Blum thinks the exact opposite</a> (and most certainly would scoff at White's typically unsubstantiated claim that the film's "careful exhibition of sex and violence . . . entails a feminist consciousness worth further discussion.") Both views about De Palma's glorious mess of a film (which we liked, by the way) interest us, but the difference is that Blum's argument can be followed and understood point by point; White's argument, on the other hand, is a collection of unelaborated salvaging that he takes for granted his viewers will accept wholesale. One more sample just to prove it:<br /><br />-- <i>No scene better displays the sick side of cinema's appeal than the moment police officers convene to coldly watch Short's foray into mid-century erotica. It's a strange scene of cops watching porn -- a bizarre deconstruction of authority, hypocrisy, and insensitivity. In this precinct, even an earthquake (symbol of a society's moral tremors in Altman's L.A. epic </i>Short Cuts<i>) is observed with nonchalance.</i><br /><br />Repetitious, inconclusive, dangling. How does the scene deconstruct authority? Hypocrisy? Insensitivity? For all the words White wastes (thanks for the Altman shout-out, totally necessary), we never find out. Which is a shame, because we thought White's gushing enthusiasm over De Palma's unappreciated genius might yield a kernel of cinematic knowledge. When does the next Spielberg film come out?Rowinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00547348802149549833noreply@blogger.com71tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6517646225441825259.post-88824625154037389372006-12-28T13:08:00.000-08:002006-12-29T08:57:58.811-08:00New York Press Review: "We Are Marshall"Because his review(s) of <i>The Black Dahlia</i> (coming soon) interest us more, and because his ability to click off the critical radar so as to kiss some red state ass has now reached a career zenith, we have decided to forsake a traditional review in order to quickly but carefully translate and summarize <a href="http://www.nypress.com/19/52/film/ArmondWhite.cfm">Armond White's review of <i>We Are Marshall</i></a> paragraph by paragraph:<br /><br />1. AW: <i>Sports rabble-rousers have been a movie staple ever since the first</i> Rocky<i> flick when Hollywood discovered how easy it is to play on audiences’ emotions: appeal to their proletarian sense of justice and inspire ideas of virtue and, most of all, winning.</i><br /><br />Translation: An explanation of the structure and basic meaning of a subgenre a month-old koala can understand. Not quoted above: A classic Armondism coined for this subgenre -- Jock Uplift.<br /><br />2. AW: We Are Marshall <i>proves that Jock Uplift can provide a pretty good template for dealing with social issues, showing how a person’s individual problems fit into a community model. In other words, demonstrating how ideology works—how people come to share and clarify basic ideas about day-to-day living.</i><br /><br />Translation: Because it is pure, unadulterated schmaltz, I will find some sort of rationalization to commend this steaming pile of All-American Conservatism via advanced critical language.<br /><br />3. AW: <i>Although the specifics of this tragedy describe a local community, there’s no escaping that the large-scale catastrophe parallels 9/11: Average people were forced to bear shock, grief, loss, death and a lingering depression. There’s no disrespect in the filmmakers hiking-up the significance of </i>Marshall<i>’s crisis. They are right to do so—making the audience members share the experience, apply it to their own lives and learn something.</i><br /><br />Translation: I am the corniest person alive.<br /><br />4. AW: <i>This movie does something special: It confronts the problem of America attempting to heal itself.</i><br /><br />Translation: Culturally specific ritual of football = The symbolic healing process of the entire United States.<br /><br />5. AW: <i>Director McG, best known for the </i>Charlie’s Angels<i> pop-fests, uses the colorful emotional shorthand of commercials and music videos—a new lingo. McG has gone from no real emotion to dealing with genuine tragedy, but who’s to say he is any less equipped than the rest of us?</i><br /><br />Translation: Who's to say the man responsible for discovering a subtle visual vocabulary to compliment the nuanced music of Smashmouth is unfit to convey real-life tragedy and pain?<br /><br />6. AW: <i>McConaughey is steadily becoming one of the most reliable and surprising American actors.</i><br /><br />Translation: As opposed to unsteadily becoming.<br /><br />7. AW: <i>Keeping his head bowed, leaning forward when he talks to people, McConaughey combines an egotist’s modesty with Midwestern bonhomie. He’s cadging, attentive and fumblingly seductive—not unlike George W. Bush. McConaughey channels Bush’s deliberateness and stubborn, foolhardy optimism. By offering this idiosyncratic portrait of a local commander-in-chief, </i>We Are Marshall <i>dares present the shell-shocked American public with an alternative idea of leadership. Which public leader myth is true: Giuliani as “America’s mayor” or Bush as America’s coach? And which is the post-9/11 audience willing to accept?</i><br /><br />Translation: Simple-minded moral conviction, no matter how calculating or destructive, should be bought as lovable, aw-shucks gumption. Not convinced? Then I'll force you to choose it from the false binary I set up between two uncomplicated media images.<br /><br />8. AW: <i>By proposing this option, </i>We Are Marshall<i> redefines the body politic in more substantive ways than its pop song soundtrack first suggests. Its restorative sense of nationhood may be unpopular among liberals, but </i>We Are Marshall <i>is good because it’s not propaganda; its regard of healing goes beyond 9/11 to the essence of American character. Listen at the way McConaghey urges a player to “Head-slap the shit” out of an opponent. Beneath its Jock Uplift formula, </i>We Are Marshall <i>is sly, hard-core Americana. It head-slaps the shit out of the divisive </i>Borat.<br /><br />Translation: <i>We Are Marshall</i> is a 9/11 allegory that's somehow apolitical, ostensibly transcending politics by gathering viewers of all different backgrounds, beliefs, cultures, religions, races, and, yes, political persuasions into its hegemonic fold -- "the essence of American character." See, even though I've refused to qualify what "the essence of American character" is in an attempt to sidestep the ideological ramifications of okaying an elementarily reactionary film's cynical plea to universalism, I nonetheless use it in order to shame anyone who disagrees with me. No propaganda here. No propaganda at all.Rowinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00547348802149549833noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6517646225441825259.post-45816272170431546142006-12-27T09:39:00.000-08:002006-12-27T09:47:30.723-08:00Armond Dangerous Update: Our First Mention!The word is out about <i>Armond Dangerous</i>, and our friends at the IFC Blog have done us the honor of calling us their <a href="http://ifcblog.ifctv.com/ifc_blog/2006/12/the_end_of_the__1.html">"favorite blog of the moment."</a> We'd like to say thanks, and also give a salute to <a href="http://www.ifccenter.com/index">the IFC Center</a> for recently showing that beautiful new print of <i>El Topo</i> and rocking out with <i>Inland Empire</i>. See it nine times and go the tenth for free -- we're there!Rowinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00547348802149549833noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6517646225441825259.post-20123061448553532132006-12-25T07:46:00.000-08:002006-12-25T12:44:29.263-08:00New York Press Review: "Apocalypto"We meant to write this post earlier, but the holiday season and family obligations stood in our way. Yet how appropriate that we should examine <a href="http://www.nypress.com/19/49/film/ArmondWhite.cfm">Armond White's review of <i>Apocalypto</i></a> on none other than Christmas Day, considering two years ago actor-turned-director Mel Gibson's <i>The Passion of the Christ</i> generated a firestorm of controversy regarding its possible anti-Semitic overtones, an issue renewed this past summer when Gibson was caught in an anti-Semitic rant during a DWI arrest. It's difficult, then, to speak of Gibson's work without addressing its critical reception. White does so unabashedly, getting immediately to it and stating his position on Gibson's detractors in no uncertain terms:<br /><br /><i>Mel Gibson’s press whipping for</i> The Passion of the Christ <i>was like no other movie vilification seen in my lifetime.</i><br /><br />AW proceeds to do a couple of interesting things in following up on this bold opening statement. First, he backs his defense of Gibson's films by referring to and quoting extensively from the pro-<i>Passion</i> approval of Quentin Tarantino. Now, if you're familiar with his criticism you know <a href="http://www.alternet.org/story/16964/">White's not exactly QT's biggest proponent</a>. While there's nothing wrong or hypocritical in agreeing with somebody one usually abhors, given the vehemence of White's judgments of QT this sure makes for one of the more fascinating cases of strange bedfellows, wouldn't you say?<br />The second tactic is less amusing and more disconcerting. An example:<br /><br /><i>Only viciously, politically-biased, anti-art pundits can deny that lately, with these two films, Gibson has been thinking in visual terms and putting most American movie directors to shame.</i><br /><br />As <i>Armond Dangerous</i> reader <a href="http://armonddangerous.blogspot.com/2006/12/new-york-press-review-inland-empire.html">Christopher Shinn has astutely written</a>, "This is not thought, this is not exploration; it is a personal attack on those who seek to view Gibson's last two movies in light of his explicit and implicit anti-Semitic remarks. This is inexplicable for a critic who began his career championing the work of the oppressed." What strikes us as most egregious about AW's track is that even if one were to divorce art from politics and champion Gibson's directorial brilliance despite the questionable messages of his films, the work itself doesn't provide the platform to justify such a leap. After finally attending a screening of <i>Apocalypto</i> we saw hints of what White lauds in Gibson's aesthetic: storytelling as nearly pure visual expression. But that's it, just hints. A bit of Griffith and DeMille comes through in <i>Apocalypto</i>'s traditionalist moral universe as portrayed in ornately detailed contrasts between decadent urbanity and harmonious naturalism, in finely realized scenes whose parallel editing structures both masters would have surely appreciated. But <i>Apocalypto</i> is also incredibly simplistic narratively (the last third of the film descends into a numbing and predictable chase) and in its understanding of ancient culture -- just as <i>The Passion</i> crudely (although, unlike <i>Apocalypto</i>, ineffectively) described Christ's final hours to cynically pander to the same audience instincts White harangues in his anti-Tarantino tirades, so does he reduce a dead culture to Hollywood cliches to offer the laziest lessons on human nature. <i>Apocalypto</i> is more thematically interesting in what it says about Gibson's worldview -- his obsession with martyred masculinity and the reactionary longing for a civilization uncorrupted by vices he associates with liberalism (that <a href="http://www.pr-inside.com/gibson-inspired-by-fear-mongering-bush-r4937.htm">he's offered the tale as an allegory against the Iraq War</a> complicates matters, though we're still suspicious of this claim for now) -- and contemporary audiences' desire to see it enacted in moving pictures. In his review White betrays a realization of these issues. But rather than address them as open to cinematic criticism and, dare we suggest, anthropological discernment, he spins them as wholly positive traits. Words like "simplicity" and "naivete" are associated with "natural phenomena" and "everyman plight" -- the political ramifications of <i>Apocalypto</i> disappear beneath White's awestruck reverence of Gibson's showmanship, just as the director most likely wants it. Or does White not mind? After all, from all evidence Gibson and White's moral and religious views are very much in sync. Since White confuses criticism of Gibson's politics with criticism of Gibson's film's politics, perhaps he also confuses the need to chastise critics (actually, reviews for both <a href="http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/passion_of_the_christ/"><i>The Passion</i></a> and <a href="http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/apocalypto/"><i>Apocalypto</i></a> were mixed, but has the evidence of a complex reality ever stopped this man from bombarding his readers with generalizations?) with the need to overstate Gibson's talents.Rowinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00547348802149549833noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6517646225441825259.post-21264826685701163742006-12-21T08:22:00.000-08:002006-12-26T08:29:40.302-08:00Armond White's Top Ten Films of the Year and Other FavoritesAs announced in <a href="http://www.indiewire.com/movies/2006/12/critics_poll_06.html"><i>Indiewire</i>'s 2006 Critics' Poll</a>:<br /><br /><b>Best Film</b><br />1. <i>Broken Sky</i> <br />2. <i>Neil Young: Heart of Gold</i><br />3. <i>A Prairie Home Companion </i><br />4. <i>World Trade Center</i><br />5. <i>Nacho Libre</i> <br />6. <i>The Promise</i><br />7. <i>Infamous</i> <br />8. <i>Akeelah and the Bee</i><br />9. <i>Bobby</i><br />10. <i>Running Scared</i><br /><br /><b>Best Performance</b><br />Toby Jones, <i>Infamous</i><br />Paul Walker, <i>Running Scared</i><br />Chris Evans, <i>London</i><br />Sook-Yin Lee, <i>Shortbus</i><br />Marlon Wayans, <i>Little Man</i><br /><br /><b>Best Supporting Performance</b><br />Laurence Fishburne, <i>Bobby</i><br />Daniel Craig, <i>Infamous </i><br />Sharon Stone, <i>Bobby</i><br />Lily Tomlin, <i>A Prairie Home Companion</i><br />Maria Bello, <i>World Trade Center</i><br /><br /><b>Best Director</b><br />Julian Hernandez, <i>Broken Sky</i><br /><br /><b>Best Screenplay</b><br />Douglas McGrath, <i>Infamous</i><br /><br /><b>Best First Film</b><br /><i>A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints</i>, Dito Montiel<br /><br /><b>Best Documentary</b><br /><i>Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That!</i>, Adam Yauch<br /><br /><b>Best Cinematography</b><br />Alejandro Cantu, <i>Broken Sky</i>Rowinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00547348802149549833noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6517646225441825259.post-145153287950242322006-12-19T17:36:00.000-08:002006-12-25T10:20:51.625-08:00Armond Dangerous Update: LinksThe furious posting rate for <i>Armond Dangerous</i> having dwindled over the last few days due to unforeseen busyness (not happyness), we've decided, as inspired by an anonymous comment-leaver, to tide over our ever-growing fan base by creating a new links section for Armond White-related web material (also the heading for the section -- see sidebar). There's some good stuff already, including interviews, anti-AW screeds, and even a couple of essays by the man himself, and we plan on adding more with each week. So dig in and fear not -- we'll be back soon with more The Armond Year in Review, new <i>New York Press</i> review reviews, and ongoing readings of <i>The Resistance</i>.Rowinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00547348802149549833noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6517646225441825259.post-23598057062389395812006-12-16T16:30:00.000-08:002007-01-02T16:33:41.068-08:00The 2006 Armond Year in Review: "Hostel" and "The Ringer" [By Way of "Match Point"]2006 in the year of Our Lord began in wrathful judgment, with Our Man doing what he does best: heaping righteous indignation upon the cinematically wicked. The second issue of the NYP in '06 featured this opening salvo in <a href="http://www.nypress.com/19/2/film/white.cfm">Armond White's dual review of <i>Hostel</i> and <i>The Ringer</i></a>: <br /><br /><i>Watch your back around anyone who likes Woody Allen's</i> Match Point<i>.</i><br /><br />Unfortunately, due to the hysterical nature of this comment, we decided not to heed White's advice -- and paid dearly for our naivete. While waiting in line for <i>Match Point</i> we were so sinfully desperate to sneak a glance at something -- anything -- from the film that we ended up staring longingly at <a href="http://filmlinc.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=FCBIJF06&Category_Code=FCBI06">the cover of the Jan/Feb issue of <i>Film Comment</i></a> (you know, the one with Scarlett Johansson sopped head to foot in rain). Arousingly distracted, we were easy pickings for the gang of elderly Jewish women who, in an insane fit of violence inspired by having just lapped up Allen's latest vision of immorality like mangy dogs slurping from a filthy puddle, jumped us, beat us silly, emptied our pockets and took everything that spilled out, leaving us with these chilling words: "The innocent are sometimes slain to make way for grander schemes. You were collateral damage." <br />We somehow still managed to see the film, with both the crones' and Armond's words echoing in our damaged craniums, any previous Allen fandom now circumspect as we mentally referred back to White's review while seeking out <i>Match Point</i>'s images for clues to the complete disrespect for law, order, and the very foundations of Western society it obviously fosters in its susceptible viewers. Needless to say, we were quickly assured of White's rightness. Allen's brand of filmmaking is so insidious and seducing in its bourgeois voluptuousness that if we hadn't experienced the strange realization of Armond's warning we wouldn't have been aware that Allen <i>doesn't</i> critique class envy and materialist soullessness in <i>Match Point</i> -- just as he didn't in <i>Crimes and Misdemeanors</i> -- but that he actually <i>promotes</i> those very deficiencies while deceivingly selling it as a Dosteovskian/Dreiserian tragedy. Armond <i>gets</i> it:<br /><br /><i>Fascination with Allen’s routine murder scenario -- disguised as Wasp-envy -- proves [those who like </i>Match Point<i> would] willingly kill for the same class advantages.</i><br /><br />And that's why we need this man, more than ever. We will no longer think of <i>Match Point</i> and <i>Hostel</i> as existing on opposite ends of the cinematic rainbow due to their far different generic parameters, themes, and aims. For now on we will link, no matter the stretch required to do so, Allen's ethical investigations -- taking place within posh settings, and therefore execrable -- with titillating shocksploitation in order to guilt it by association. And then we will revel in the underappreciated hypocrisies of tepid, unfunny gross-out flicks in order to prove our populist credentials. Oh, and we will come down on you if you get in our way:<br /><br /><i>Fans of </i>Match Point<i> should confess that they are indifferent to brutality, having sunk to the same level as extreme-horror punks.</i><br /><br /><i>Even Allen’s “sophisticated” audience is inured to such basics as emotion, soul, empathy. </i>Hostel <i>features vomit as ejaculate, pus as blood and butchery as fun. As with Allen, it’s just means to an end, a disavowal of humanism for the pleasure of killing. These movies can’t be blamed on Donald Rumsfeld.</i><br /><br />But they can be blamed on craven audiences and their base, putrid souls, swarming movie theaters like maggots and doing unto us what we would never do unto them. We should have listened to Armond. We should have watched our backs. Luckily, we're now Armond-baptized -- we've learned our lesson and and have even been saved. At the very least, we'll never go to the Upper West Side again.Rowinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00547348802149549833noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6517646225441825259.post-80331892579346352582006-12-14T15:50:00.000-08:002006-12-15T07:47:40.464-08:00New York Press Review: "The Pursuit of Happyness"One reads <a href="http://www.nypress.com/19/50/film/ArmondWhite.cfm">Armond White's latest review</a>, of Will Smith's "triumph of the human spirit" plea for an Oscar, <i>The Pursuit of Happyness</i>, and wonders in amazement how this could be the work of the same critic who also defends the conservative, capitalist fantasies of Spielberg and Gibson. But then one thinks back only three posts ago to White's "Places in the Art" article for <i>Film Comment</i> in 1984 and considers that White, like any critic, has his strengths and weaknesses, and that these might be informed by the fact that he's a religious (we're guessing, but pretty sure) homosexual (ditto) African-American. That's certainly not to say, in a stereotypical vein, White's critical reactions are predictable; rather, we can be sure his unique background makes him absolutely sensitive to particular subject matter and its cinematic representation more so than the average white heterosexual secularist (or even the average white attuned liberal film critic). One of those subjects is the African-American experience, and AW's <i>Happyness</i> review provides profound insight into a fellow African-American's misunderstanding of that experience as it pertains to nobody but himself. From what we've seen of Smith's previous efforts (and by the way, we, like Armond, are shedding our auterist skin for a moment to recognize that Smith is of such star power as to be the veritable creative force behind the projects he chooses to produce and act in, as in this case), it's clear the Fresh Prince has easily adapted to the structures and designs of the powers-that-be: if he ever had to adapt at all. We'd list his filmography and its overriding conservative theme, but we don't want to insult you. Unless someone sees it otherwise -- and of course we love debate -- we think most people would agree that Smith's take on the African-American experience is far from representative or progressive. So we agree with White. But unlike our look at his <i>Inland Empire</i> review yesterday, we won't spend as much time on this one, partly because we haven't seen <i>Happyness</i> and don't plan on shelling out eleven bucks to be granted that privilege (<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0454921/trailers">the theatrical trailer</a> before <i>Casino Royale</i> gave us more than enough sense of this likely piece of dreck), and partly because it's so much more fun to pick Armond apart than to praise him. Nonetheless, some highlights:<br /><br /><i>[</i>The Pursuit of Happyness <i>is] yet another product of the Hollywood system, but this time with a personal message: I got mine, get yours.<br /><br />. . . it has a pre-set, benign vision of privilege and luck -- a capitalist’s notions of grace. <br /><br />. . . it cleverly sneaks-in [sic] bald-faced capitalist faith (and its concomitant indifference to the history of slavery and institutionalized racism) under the guise of sweetness and willpower.<br /><br />Will Smith implies that the cities are now conquerable -- the Chris Gardner story is merely a brick in that public monument Smith is building to himself. Worse,</i> The Pursuit of Happyness <i>suggests that the drive for success is what defines Americans. In other words, Smith is no longer merely a figurine fronting the Hollywood institution; he now owns a piece of the plantation.</i><br /><br />Damn. Not only insightful, but well-written. Are we dreaming?!<br />If you noticed that we've included no room for a take on <a href="http://www.nypress.com/19/50/film/ArmondWhite2.cfm">AW's dual review of <i>Bergman Island</i> and <i>My Dad is 100 Years Old</i></a>, fear not -- we'll be on top of it next week after we've spent time recuperating from a busy week and checking out those films at <a href="http://www.filmforum.org/films/bergman.html">Film Forum</a>.Rowinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00547348802149549833noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6517646225441825259.post-84409735633994511992006-12-13T07:59:00.000-08:002007-01-06T17:07:50.835-08:00New York Press Review: "Inland Empire"On the eve of the new issue of the <i>New York Press</i> <i>Armond Dangerous</i> will take it upon itself (ourselves?) to not fall too far behind our man's weekly output. We have a whole year and career's worth of reviews to sneak up on, tackle, and pound into tender, black and blue pulp, so our desperate sprint to surprise Armond at the corner of 2006 and 2007 begins now. We still haven't seen Mel "Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world" Gibson's Armond-approved (we know that much) epic <i>Apocalypto</i>, but we've been familiar with David Lynch's shape-shifting <i>Inland Empire</i> since feasting our eyes on it at the New York Film Festival and are well-equipped to counter <a href="http://www.nypress.com/19/49/film/ArmondWhite2.cfm">AW's muddled review</a>.<br />Because this take on <i>Inland</i> and Lynch's new artistic direction exemplifies White at his boorish, self-righteous worst. It starts off harmlessly enough, likening the film to a sketchbook -- not a bad comparison given <i>Inland</i>'s disparate, fragmented, piece-by-piece assemblage. Then White makes his true critical intentions known:<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">We've already seen similar sketches in such recent Lynch films as </span>Mulholland Drive <span style="font-style:italic;">and</span> Lost Highway<span style="font-style:italic;">. That means the most fascinating thing about </span>Inland Empire <span style="font-style:italic;">is the degree to which Lynch's personal cosmology (deliberately disturbing, if not off-putting figures and devices) has become an accepted—and expected—part of contemporary film culture.</span><br /><br />Ah. As he does so often when confronted with cinematic experiences beyond his reassuring "pop" island, White flips the mirror around to ostensibly gauge a general critical reaction and then position himself in stubborn opposition. As we'll see, that position is incredibly shaky. Onward:<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Since Lynch is releasing </span>Inland Empire <span style="font-style:italic;">himself . . . it's clear that he has no shame about repeating himself. Lynch obviously depends on a devoted audience that is interested in his continuing oeuvre and the twisting of his mind. (These viewers are not perturbed by obvious silliness such as the rabbit-like characters who pop up here.) The film's gloomy title is an art-student's invitation to project: Come visit unreachable, far-off places; journey through someone else's egotistical labyrinth. As Dern's Nikki disintegrates into her newest film role as Sue, the adulterous murder mystery may possibly reflect back on Nikki's own professional and private crises. Still, </span>Inland Empire <span style="font-style:italic;">must be taken in a relaxed attitude as Lynch's in-joke, a psychotic, Bosch-like doodle. It seems designed to confound newcomers as much as to delight devotees.</span><br /><br />The first warning signs arrive when White states Lynch is "repeating himself." Those who think Lynch is merely treading over the same comfortable ground (if ever comfortable in the first place) with <i>Inland</i> must have, we can imagine, hallucinated a more linear, less experimental narrative while viewing the film so it could compute. <i>Inland</i>'s complete disregard for convention is related to but far afield from the Orphic genre-bending nightmares of <i>Lost Highway</i> and <i>Mulholland Drive</i> and a critic that can't spot the former's radical aesthetic departure needs to get his or her (but his, really, we're talking about Armond) eyes examined. As to whether Lynch "depends" on a devoted audience, our cynicism isn't so advanced as Armond's to believe Lynch wouldn't do (as he has done) whatever he wants according to his singular artistic temperament. But are his devoted followers not perturbed by the "obvious silliness" of the rabbit family? We're not sure how obvious it is in the first place, since this very odd -- even for Lynch -- element of <i>Inland</i> seemed to us more unsettling than anything else. And we still haven't gathered a consensus as to what Lynch's fan base collectively thinks about it. But unlike White, who we guess doesn't know himself, we haven't made such presumptions.<br />The paragraph's worst presumption, however, is that the film "must" not be taken seriously. Why not? Every tactic White has so far used to relegate it to minor status won't wash and, judging by White's inability to meet a work of art on its own terms when it steps outside the boundaries of "pop" (except in special cases, like late Godard), we suspect this a move designed to get the critic off the hook of analytical responsibility.<br />White's next volley is to charge that <i>Inland</i>'s digital video images "[look] like crap." We don't fully agree, although there is something to say about the general inferiority of dv to film, but fair enough. It's the next passage that absolutely kills us:<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">[Lynch] wants to hijack movie audiences and take them to the lesser realm of gallery installations and home-sketchpad-digital whimsies. But does the willingness of critics to gallery-hop make our film culture more sophisticated than in periods of truly revolutionary and controversial film aesthetics? Are we smarter because we don't question Lynch's confounding mannerisms the way critics once foolishly scoffed at Alain Resnais' magnificent </span>Last Year at Marienbad <span style="font-style:italic;">or Ingmar Bergman's </span>Persona<span style="font-style:italic;">? The real enigma of </span>Inland Empire <span style="font-style:italic;">is how it seduces critics who ignored Julián Hernández's very beautiful and artful </span>Broken Sky; <span style="font-style:italic;">they lack the confidence to see what's wrong when Lynch is simply being wacky as in </span>Wild at Heart<span style="font-style:italic;">,</span> Lost Highway <span style="font-style:italic;">and </span>Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.<br /><br />"Hijack." We remember White similarly employing the word "destroy" to describe the objectives of Lars von Trier in <a href="http://newyorkpress.com/17/21/film/ArmondWhite.cfm">his review of <i>The Five Obstructions</i></a>. Such wild accusations make a name for Armond as a take-no-prisoners flayer of charlatans, but they also make for lousy criticism. Maybe it's our hipster naivete, but we refuse to attach filmmakers we dislike to such insidious aims -- to do so betrays a breakdown in critical skills, substituting finger-wagging for analysis. And again, White supposes readers automatically agree with the values he never qualifies. Even if Lynch does want to take audiences to the lesser realm of gallery installations and home-sketchpad-digital whimsies (just so we're all on the same page, <i>Inland Empire</i> was blown up to film and is being released theatrically), why is that realm necessarily inferior? White never explains his reasoning, so we remain in the dark.<br />But the main problem regarding the above passage is the confident presumption of an ignorant or short-sighted critical consensus. If you know your Armond, though, you know this sort of presumption is a regular occurrence. The hilarious thing about it apropos <i>Inland Empire</i> is that the film has garnered a host of different reactions and seems headed toward a much more unsure critical fate -- it's far too strange and alienating for the likes of <i>Entertainment Weekly</i> and only just interesting enough for even a Lynch supporter like J. Hoberman. But acknowledging that even devoted fans might be split about the film and the various paths Lynch has taken throughout his career (for example, us: we love <i>Eraserhead</i>, <i>The Elephant Man</i>, <i>Blue Velvet</i>, the <i>Twin Peaks</i> series and movie, <i>The Straight Story</i>, <i>Mulholland</i> but feel ambivalent about <i>Wild at Heart</i> and <i>Lost Highway</i> for reasons close to, but more complicated than, the ones Armond sets forth) would be to acknowledge an untidy critical landscape (and who says critics who like <i>Inland</i> ignored <i>Broken Sky</i>? Can he name just one?) impossible to make into a hegemonic monster. Instead, it's a veritable windmill.<br />The next paragraph discloses what has by now been apparent: White wants more pop to compliment Lynch's snap and crackle. That was the beauty of the <i>Twin Peaks</i> series, he says, until it got out of control with the weirdness. Finally, a good point -- we similarly wish that <i>Inland</i> had a bit more to hang onto character- and narrative-wise. But Armond somehow associates Lynch's freak-outs with a harmful artistic direction taken due to the influence of unnamed critical enablers. Let's only in passing call attention to his ridiculous, unsupported claim that <i>The Straight Story</i> and <i>Mulholland</i> were "unpopular" (they were actually his two most critically and financially successful projects since <i>Twin Peaks</i>, but whatever) and highlight this nugget of wisdom:<br /><br /><i>Lynch’s retreat into the arcane of</i> Inland Empire<i> betrays the revolution he almost started. Having already established his high-art credentials (receiving carte blanche that is denied even Matthew Barney), Lynch doesn’t run into the problem that his surrealist rival Brian DePalma faced with</i> The Black Dahlia<i>. Critics expect DePalma to follow Hollywood narrative conventions despite his constant subversion of them, while Lynch is permitted to make capital-A art. Fact is, </i>Inland Empire<i>’s conceptual obscurities are less enthralling than the latest DePalma and Barney.</i><br /><br />Funny that White should bring up the facts. Fact is, we should support all artists receiving carte blanche and being able to follow through on their visions without interference. But the fact that Lynch apparently can (and does so independently, now distributing and marketing <i>Inland</i> himself) has no bearing on de Palma, who still chooses to play the Hollywood game. And critics are not the ones responsible for dolling out money or restricting artistic freedom.<br />Poor Armond -- his beloved de Palma will always be misunderstood while Lynch shucks about among the gallery-crowd, betraying "pop" principles (he showed so much promise with <i>Eraserhead</i>, which clearly demonstrated his adherence to a conventional visual language) and blocking the appreciation of more deserving filmmakers. In his review's last paragraph White (begrudgingly?) admits Lynch to be of talent and interest, but sees <i>Inland</i> as just falling short:<br /><br /><i>Here, an overworked Dern walks in and out of corridors, drawing rooms, soundstages, continents and time as if she and the maestro know exactly what they’re doing without divulging their intentions to the audience. It’s moviegoers who must compromise their entertainment standards.</i><br /><br />White says "compromise," we say "meet halfway." White, due to a delusional belief in a wrongheaded critical consensus and his need to valantly stand outside it, refuses to walk through the worlds Lynch has created. His is a dishonest position, built on faulty assumptions and leading to nonsensical conclusions. We see through his illogic. And we plan to journey into <i>Inland Empire</i> again and again.Rowinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00547348802149549833noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6517646225441825259.post-5493112817012294452006-12-12T07:51:00.000-08:002006-12-13T09:16:50.112-08:00Critiquing Our CriticWe here at <i>Armond Dangerous</i> aren't big on lists. This isn't an ice skating competition, it's art, and the ranking of expressive aesthetic works just doesn't do justice to their complexities as cultural products and creative statements. In that regard we're casting a wary eye on <a href="http://www.timeout.com/newyork/Details.do?page=1&xyurl=xyl://TONYWebArticles1/584/features/film.xml"><i>Time Out New York</i>'s "Critiquing The Critics" article</a>, yet another serendipitous signal for the start of our blog but ultimately an unsatisfying exercise in cinematic simplification. Sure, we agree with some of the <a href="http://www.timeout.com/newyork/Details.do?page=1&xyurl=xyl://TONYWebArticles1/584/features/the_panelists.xml">the panelists'</a> collective decisions, especially in placing Village Voice hero J. Hoberman in the top slot, although others are downright loony (cinephobic Anthony Lane at number four!?!?!), but our main gripe is with the perfunctory format -- ratings instead of analysis, one-line, unattributed quotes instead of an illuminating dialogue about the possibilities and responsibilities of criticism. Armond White hit at number thirteen out of fifteen, but there's little constructive criticism in this placing. What makes him better than the unforgivable Rex Reed but worse than bland Stephen Holden? <i>Time Out</i> provides little insight into our man (at least <a href="http://www.thelmagazine.com/4/15/feature/best%20of%205.cfm?ctype=1">Mark Asch's short critique of AW in the <i>L</i></a> gives one something to chew on), only reaffirming <i>Armond Dangerous</i>' commitment to actual in depth criticism. Of our critic.Rowinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00547348802149549833noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6517646225441825259.post-59609060591712412172006-12-11T10:38:00.000-08:002006-12-12T10:16:24.348-08:00"The Resistance": "Introduction" and "Places in the Art"How strange it was to begin Armond White's <i>The Resistance: Ten Years of Pop Culture That Shook the World</i> and immediately read these words: "Determined to oppose the standard of journalism by which writers unwittingly support the system of privilege and oppression that hires them and constructs middle-class public opinion, I approached <i>Film Comment</i> editor Harlan Jacobson with the idea to permanently change my byline to 'The Resistance.'" We swear we had no idea about this -- that's the same name we chose to ironically -- knowing full well his oppositional tendencies and the title of his collection of essays and reviews -- "resist" Armond! An irony on top of an irony, and perhaps a good omen for the launch of <i>Armond Dangerous</i>.<br />Beyond this terrific coincidence, though, the introduction to <i>The Resistance</i> is a little fuzzy. After reading it, we still don't understand exactly what White's critical approach is, at least by his most direct self-assessment of it. He freely throws around generalizations and refuses to define his terms, and when it comes time to explain his righteous appropriation of the potentially explosive "resistance" as a one-word ethos for his criticism, he fails to come up with a new or exciting call to arms: "Resistance meant defying the standard 'objective' approach to art as innocuous entertainment. Resistance was also evident in artists who changed the norm of popular entertainment by making it reflect the country's variety rather than some conformist fantasy." Alright, but vague and certainly nothing new, even in 1984, when this collection starts. We can think of about a dozen critics occupying different places on the scale of relevance who also defied or defy "the standard 'objective' approach to art before, during, and after our man's time. Armond tries to set himself apart by first referring to his status as an African-American critic and then emphasizing his interest in and ability to trace the social and political ramifications of popular culture. Which is fine, except White makes exaggerated claims here in order to increase his importance, such as this doozy:<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">In 1984 Jesse Jackson ran for president of the United States, and I began writing for</span> The City Sun<span style="font-style:italic;">. Both auspicious beginnings, they announced the most significant change in popular culture in three decades -- specifically, a new moment when Black Americans asserted their ideas in the political arena.</span><br /><br />In this statement there's the questionable term "new moment": is AW saying that a change had come in the form of Black Americans for the <i>first time</i> asserting their ideas in the political arena in 1984, which of course isn't and wasn't so, or is he saying this was a new expression of such an assertion? We never find out, and our man leaves himself open to charges of misunderstanding history. And that's not even mentioning the self-inflating comparison between a presidential run by an African-American -- an enormous, publicly visible stride -- and his own initial Kael-heavy scribblings in a now-defunct newspaper.<br />Then there's the latter tract. We understand the importance of any cultural moment in history, but overvaluing one so as to increase the currency of criticism during that time seems foolish and unnecessary. Armond loves the 80s: "<i>The Resistance</i> chronicles cultural changes since 1984, the year Hollywood -- the institution representing America's consciousness -- woke up to the reality of nonmainstream expression." Woke up? Really? Nonmainstream expression had never infiltrated Hollywood before 1984? Never? The 60s fell into some cinematic black hole of irretrievable influence? We won't cite the mountains of evidence to counter this claim, simply because it's a waste of energetic typing and we're guessing most discerning readers can immediately smell the wrongness of Armond's hyperbole and know why it stinks.<br />Anyway, Armond's intro goes on to explain the thrill of his encounter with what he considers seminal 80s artists and works, from Spielberg to Morrissey to Charles Burnett to pre-<i>Mo' Better Blues</i> Spike Lee. There's a distancing from the "school of ecstatic culture writing" and a proud proclamation that "I tried -- always -- to search out and interpret the political secrets and emotional value of artists expressing themselves through resistance aesthetics." He charts the rise of African-American artists (although lets slip another brow-furrowing remark with, "It was a marketplace where third-world filmmakers competed with Hollywood" -- uh, what marketplace was that?), the cultural prominence of hip-hop, the urgency of his aesthetics-as-sociology approach -- all are thinly sketched. Perhaps it's unfair to thusly criticize an introduction, but one can't help notice, given AW's track record, a penchant for assuming the reader's agreement with his viewpoint and then not backing it up.<br />"Places in the Art" is another animal entirely. It's the first esaay in <i>The Resistance</i>, a fifteen and a half page manifesto of sorts on then current Hollywood representations of African-Americans, first published in the December 1984 issue of <i>Film Comment</i>. It's also too sprawling and complicated an essay to sufficiently discuss in a posting we originally wanted to keep at palatable length (so much for that!), but the basic idea is to deflate or else take to task the flawed portrayals of African-Americans, their struggles, and the issue of race in America as rendered in such middle-brow fare as <i>Places in the Heart</i>, <i>Moscow on the Hudson</i>, <i>An Officer and a Gentleman</i>, and <i>A Soldier's Story</i>. The contributions of Sidney Poitier, the films of Martin Ritt, and the persona and <i>Purple Rain</i> project of Prince are all singled out for their ability to resist -- that's right -- trite characterizations and simplistic understandings of society, and instead forge ahead with pride, intelligence, and astute reasoning with their truer visions of racial relationships and identities. "Places in the Art" is, dare I say it, the best piece we've ever read by AW, a full realization of the ideas only briefly alluded to in <i>The Resistance</i>'s intro and an understandably upset voicing of African-Americans' invisibility or else problematic marginal roles in post-Poitier Hollywood. One great moment:<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Usually present onscreen only as stereotype or efficient caricature, a black character is often hard to react to. Is the gang of punks in </span>Dressed to Kill <span style="font-style:italic;">threatening -- apart from being Black? Is the film's screaming cleaning lady a comical Black hysteric or just simply frightened? In </span>King of Comedy <span style="font-style:italic;">is Diahann Abbott a thief because she is Black or because some other motivation was left on the cutting-room floor? Are the killings of Frank McRae in </span>Red Dawn <span style="font-style:italic;">and Scatman Crothers in </span>The Shining <span style="font-style:italic;">plot necessities or racist conveniences? The stunted history of Black presentation in movies confuses most interpretations when the characterizations are sketchy or incidental. The past conditions us to have prejudiced responses that disrupt a film and make suspicious some filmmaker's </span>[sic] <span style="font-style:italic;">intentions.</span><br /><br />All pertinent inquiries. While White misses or fails to address certain points, most notably in his too ecstatic -- gotta practice what you preach -- celebration of <i>Purple Rain</i> and <i>Sparkle</i> at the expense of ignoring what it might mean that two of his rare endorsements of progressive representations of African-Americans might be construed as "African-American as natural song-and-dance man (or woman)" stereotypes (and the puzzling sentence "The objectification of performance in this setting seizes and vanquishes the aesthetic problem of beauty and appearance -- the last frontier of movie acceptance" and its subsequent explanation just doesn't cut it), for the most part his analysis is a still-needed commentary on how far not just Hollywood but also African-Americans working within the industry (his calling out of post-<i>Live in Concert</i> Richard Pryor and movie idol Eddie Murphy is spot-on) had and have to go in providing adequate depictions of a people that even at the end of 2006 remain the big screen's most conspicuous absence.<span style="font-style:italic;"><span style="font-style:italic;"></span></span>Rowinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00547348802149549833noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6517646225441825259.post-90399692548469789352006-12-09T15:22:00.000-08:002006-12-12T09:24:00.838-08:00Do the White Thing<span style="font-family:times new roman;"> No, no, no, the title of this inaugurating post isn't a terrible pun putting across some pernicious racial agenda (although we readily concede our name is a terrible pun putting across absolutely nothing) -- it's actually an opening battle cry announcing the completely cinema-related intentions of </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;" >Armond Dangerous</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;">, the new blog dedicated entirely to, as our subtitle puts it, "parsing the confounding film criticism of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armond_White">Mr. Armond White</a>." Our goal is to gain a better understanding of this pop culture-minded, provocative, reactionary, often writing-impaired critic currently penning head-scratchers for the <a href="http://www.nypress.com/"></a></span><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;" ><a href="http://www.nypress.com/">New York Press</a></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;">. Film- and culture-wise, who is White? What is he getting at when he admonishes critics (often labelled "hipster" or "smug") for unthinkingly lauding films with political agendas while he unabashedly defends the Bush administration from artistic attacks? How does he reconcile the hatred of one of his starred auteurs, Jean-Luc Godard, for another of his favorites, Steven Spielberg? Is White for real or fucking with his readers when he draws polemic lines in the sand such as his now infamous challenge: </span><span style=";font-family:times new roman,times,serif;font-size:100%;" >"It can be said with certainty that any reviewer who pans [<span style="font-style: italic;">Mission to Mars</span>] does not understand movies, let alone like them." Is White the most courageous African-American critic at work today, or a moral conservative unwittingly selling-out to the system he rails against? Or is constructing such binaries an insufficient way of attempting to unravel the mystery of Armond?<br /> Thus, our blog: we can't say we really <span style="font-style: italic;">like</span> the nasty, superior tone and frequent sloppiness of White's writing, but it's damn fascinating and sometimes even possible to agree with. An incisive look into its rhyme and reason may not only make sense of the contradictions of our man's work, but perhaps even illuminate the contemporary state of American film criticism, the mainstream and intellectual strands of which White vehemently opposes or "resists."<br /> <span style="font-style: italic;">Armond Dangerous</span> will operate accordingly: once a week, after the <span style="font-style: italic;">New York Press</span> hits local newstands, our blog will be updated with an analysis of the latest Armond White reviews or articles. This means, of course, having to obtain an informed opinion by watching a ton of the absolute crap (<span style="font-style: italic;">The Cat in the Hat</span> or <span style="font-style: italic;">Little Man</span>, anyone? Anyone?) White contrarily adores and champions, but we're that hardcore in our commitment to this project. The site will then devote the remainder of the week to catching up with White<span style="font-style: italic;"></span>, going into the <span style="font-style: italic;">NYP</span> vaults, scouring old <span style="font-style: italic;">City Sun</span>s and <span style="font-style: italic;">Film Comment</span>s, thumbing through <span style="font-style: italic;">The Resistance: Ten Years of Pop Culture That Shook the World</span> and deepening our approach to all things White. So stay tuned and drop a line -- <span style="font-style: italic;">Armond Dangerous</span> is as much a forum as a blog, and participation and communication is encouraged. God knows we'll need some help cracking this nut. No pun intended, of course.<br /></span>Rowinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00547348802149549833noreply@blogger.com92