The 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 Armond Dangerous, as evidenced by recent readers' comments -- when we take our man to task we're charged with malicious intent (including "hijacking") and when we agree with him every once in a while we're accused of letting Armond White off the hook. 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.
But what of the suggestion that we must 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 Dreamgirls review. Take what will surely one day be considered classic Armond -- his enraged review of the gargantuan smash comedy Borat. Read it? Okay. Now, after taking a moment to digest the humorless invective ("Borat 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 Borat. 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 Napoleon Dynamite (that he can roll with Bunuel shooting the Pope in The Milky Way but not the broad-side-of-the-barn torchings of Borat we can only figure as a product of Armond's "real movies = old movies" equation 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 Borat. Of course, Armond's ungenerous slant has Borat 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 Borat 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."

The 2006 Armond Year in Review: "Final Destination 3"

Sometimes it's almost too easy.
Never have we spotted a more perplexing case of critical schizophrenia than Armond White's lauding of Final Destination 3. Six years earlier White panned the first Final Destination in the following terms:

Sadly, I realize there is consensus for this type of flippancy. Conversely, the consensus blindness regarding Mission to Mars indicates a cultural crisis. The new teen thriller Final Destination gets flip about death, as Mission to Mars does not. Director James Wong uses the new shock f/x of Super Real Catastrophe seen in the car accidents of Meet Joe Black and Erin Brockovich 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 Gremlins. 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.

Yet regarding FD mark three:

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 Final Destination 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. Final Destination 3'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.

If this isn't an about-face . . . Even were one to defend this bizarro self-contradiction by pointing out distinctions between the first FD 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 Final Destination's "flippancy" about death with Mission to Mars' "emotionalism." Did director James Wong spend countless sessions between FD installments studiously viewing MtM (a la Orson Welles obsessively watching Stagecoach while making Citizen Kane) in order to properly infuse the franchise with De Palma's moral gravity?
Consciously perpetrated or not, what Armond's flip-flop tells us is that the man might want to have it both ways. When Mission to Mars 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 Final Destination; when the FD 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 A History of Violence and Match Point, as well as real titillating exploitation like Saw and House of Wax. But Armond's switcharoo is also a moralistic move:

And here's where Final Destination 3 takes one by surprise. It rejects cool for comic horror. That may sound like the flip of Munich, 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 Press 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, Final Destination 3 offers a message.

According to Armond, FD 3 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 FD 3 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:

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.

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 FD 3 thoughtlessly (but extremely effectively) participates equals an "awareness about modern culture." What's sad is that Armond connects FD 3 to Munich via their similar goals of "preserv[ing] human values" and "want[ing] audiences to be appalled at violence." Munich's complex (although often problematic) (re)presentations of violence as spectacle might warrant such words, but given FD 3'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.

Cineaste 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 AW boringly lumps together the canonical: "[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. The latest AW review of De Palma's The Black Dahlia (we'd provide a link of the review except Cineaste 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 the shorter New York Press review of the same film that came out almost three months earlier. Still we'll try to tease out what AW's wisdom by cutting out the non sequitur-laced bullshit that dots his prose:

-- De Palma's sensitivity to the politics/film connection explodes what people think of as the noir genre. . . . The Black Dahlia 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.

So far, so sensical. We'd maybe question the term "the 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.

-- [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.

Alright, now let's get to some examples.

-- Moviegoers confronting this strangely convoluted tale need to understand the background of De Palma's art and the movie fascination that led inevitably to The Black Dahlia.

The only thing convoluted here is Armond's review, which at this juncture forsakes analysis for pedantic backpeddling. We understand Cineaste 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 The Black Dahlia it is necessary to recognize that De Palma penetrates the Hollywood-noir 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?

-- 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.

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.

-- 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 The Black Dahlia.

Treading water. More talk about politics and the film's political awareness but few concrete examples of how this works.

-- 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.

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 Ask the Dust. Getting dizzy?

-- 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 Body Double but [sic] that fantasy film wasn't based on a real-life horror. . . .

And on and on he goes, further showing off his complete understanding of the De Palma oeuvre by haphazardly bringing up Casualties of War and Greetings for no analytical or critical purpose.

-- 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.

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.

-- A frightening, grinning clown's visage is a motif from Paul Leni's 1928 The Man Who Laughs . . .

You know what, we can't go on. Armond White's Cineaste review of The Black Dahlia is so unwieldy, so ridiculous, so blinded to the film's flaws (only mentioned in passing; the New York Press 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 the Brooklyn Rail's Sarahjane Blum thinks the exact opposite (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:

-- 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 Short Cuts) is observed with nonchalance.

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?

The 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 Armond White's dual review of Hostel and The Ringer:

Watch your back around anyone who likes Woody Allen's Match Point.

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 Match Point we were so sinfully desperate to sneak a glance at something -- anything -- from the film that we ended up staring longingly at the cover of the Jan/Feb issue of Film Comment (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."
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 Match Point'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 doesn't critique class envy and materialist soullessness in Match Point -- just as he didn't in Crimes and Misdemeanors -- but that he actually promotes those very deficiencies while deceivingly selling it as a Dosteovskian/Dreiserian tragedy. Armond gets it:

Fascination with Allen’s routine murder scenario -- disguised as Wasp-envy -- proves [those who like Match Point would] willingly kill for the same class advantages.

And that's why we need this man, more than ever. We will no longer think of Match Point and Hostel 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:

Fans of Match Point should confess that they are indifferent to brutality, having sunk to the same level as extreme-horror punks.

Even Allen’s “sophisticated” audience is inured to such basics as emotion, soul, empathy. Hostel 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.

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.