Xixax Opinion: Armond White

Started by Grand Epic, July 21, 2004, 12:18:03 AM

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Grand Epic

What do you think of Armond White? Sometimes I find myself agreeing with him, other times I can't get past how arrogant and condescending he comes off as.

cine

How to get posts in this thread:

1. Correcting your spelling of the subject title.

2. Talking a bit about Armond White since not a lot of people know who he is.

Sleuth

I want to post in this thread!
I like to hug dogs

classical gas

what the hell, i don't know armond white or care about spelling, but i'll post in here.


Grand Epic

Here's the magazine article that introduced me to Armond White.

http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/winter2004/features/the_critic.html

Also, Matt Zoller Seitz from the same website (//www.nypress.com) is a much better critic, it's just that White, being more controversial, gets talked about more.

Ravi

http://blogs.indiewire.com/criticwire/new-york-film-critics-circle-to-vote-on-armond-whites-expulsion

New York Film Critics Circle to Vote on Armond White's Expulsion
NEWS BY SAM ADAMS
JANUARY 8, 2014 11:20 AM

Last night at the National Board of Review's awards ceremony, someone gave Blue Is the Warmest Color's Adele Exarchopoulos one of the "Prize Winner" trucker caps from Nebraska. This story, unfortunately, isn't about that. But look how adorable she is. I bet everyone had a great time.

The members of the New York Film Critics Circle, is it safe to say, are not having a great time -- with perhaps one exception. The fallout from Monday's dinner, where NYFCC member Armond White and his guests yelled obscenities as Steve McQueen as he accepted the Best Director award for 12 Years a Slave, continues to spread in a mushroom cloud of bruised feelings and bad will.

According to Variety, outgoing NYFCC chairman Joshua Rothkopf sent an email to the membership the following morning with the subject "Ruined."

"It amazes me that we have members who are so self-serving, they would sacrifice the decorum of the group ... solely to satisfy their egos," Rothkopf added. "Never thought I'd write this, but after months of event planning and two years of service as an officer, I'm happy to be done with it."

The email chain also reveals that the NYFCC will be voting on whether to expel White -- as well as New York Post critic Lou Lumenick, who blogged the details of the Circle's voting meeting, apparently in contravention of its bylaws -- at an emergency meeting this coming Monday.

White, after spending most of Tuesday silent, started to punch back toward the end of the day. When fellow NYFCC member asked White if he had in fact been yelling at McQueen, White responded, "Wrong question, John," and added, "I was not in a position or vicinity to yell at McQueen. It was talk among my tablemates. The Variety and Wire lines are outright misquotes and lies. You might want to ask why the gutter bloggers continue to misquote and distort the event and NYFCC history."

To the Hollywood Reporter, White offered a lengthier defense:

The comments that I supposedly made were never uttered by me or anyone within my earshot. I have been libeled by publications that recklessly quoted unnamed sources that made up what I said and to whom I was speaking. Someone on the podium talked about critics' "passion." Does "passion" only run one-way toward subservience? ... Among some Circle members and media folk, there is personal, petty interest in seeing me maligned. I guess the awards themselves don't matter. It's a shameless attempt to squelch the strongest voice that exists in contemporary criticism....

Did I make sotto voce comments to entertain my five guests? Sure, but nothing intended for others to hear and none correctly "reported." I don't even know what it means to call Steve McQueen a "garbage man" or "doorman" even though the racist implications are obvious. None of this makes sense which is what happens when online journalism reports a malicious lie.

Before proceeding, let me make my position clear: Armond White is lying. I was in the room that night, halfway between White's table at the back of the room and the stage, and though I didn't catch their substance, his words were clearly audible. Either White doesn't know the meaning of "sotto vocce" or he needs a remedial lesson on using his inside voice.

I've spoken to Dana Stevens, who was at White's table until the persistently loud and unpleasant comments by him and his guests forced her to move, and to Vadim Rizov and Katey Rich, who were seated perhaps 20 feet away. Rich said she saw White's guest cup his hands and shout toward the stage, which clearly does not constitute "talk among my tablemates," and saw White yell "White liberal bullshit!" with her own eyes. It's possible some of the quotations are imprecise, but since White won't even admit he made the comments let alone clarify them, we're unlikely to do better.

Why does this matter? The issue of intra-group decorum, while vital to the Circle itself, is not of especial importance to outsiders. Nor does it matter because it makes critics as a whole look bad, as David Denby argued on the New Yorker's website. It matters because of pieces like John Semley's "Armond White is the Kanye of Film Criticism," and because of people who've left comments, on this blog and elsewhere, saying things like, "But 12 Years a Slave *is* white liberal bullshit."

No one does more to further the idea of White as a bold contrarian than White himself, aka "the strongest voice that exists in contemporary criticism." But bold contarians don't yell out public comments and then pretend they didn't, which is the very opposite of speaking truth to power. Notwithstanding its rhetorical lapses, White's review of 12 Years a Slave made a fitfully powerful case against the film, but yelling "Fuck you!" as its director accepts an award is not criticism. It's cowardice.

Jeremy Blackman

I just spent 20 minutes reading about Armond White. He seems to be not much more than a troll.

Jeremy Blackman

This is perhaps all you need to know. Just read the bolded part for the TLDR version.

http://cityarts.info/2012/09/17/battle-of-the-andersons/

QuoteIt's time now to assert Paul W.S. Anderson's status as one of contemporary cinema's most thrilling talents. He deserves a clarifying comparison to the fraudulent, annoyingly monickered Paul Thomas Anderson whose film The Master opened the same week as Resident Evil 5.

It's inevitable that Paul Thomas Anderson's artistic ambitions should be unavoidably juxtaposed to Paul W.S, Anderson's artistic success. Their differences immediately reveal how a pseudo-serious indie artiste fails the aesthetic and emotional impact of commercial craftsmanship.
The Master, a roman a clef about Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard and his paradigmatic follower, is a dull, nihilistic and mean-spirited presumption of cultural history whereas the futuristic fantasy of Resident Evil: Retribution turns nihilism into Apocalyptic Pop. This is the classic White elephant vs. Termite art parallel once coined by critic Manny Farber.

Memorably dubbed "P.T." (as in the huckster-showman P.T. Barnum) by New York Press' Godfrey Cheshire, Paul Thomas Anderson makes "big" movies that resemble the 1960s studio epics today's film geeks never experienced–and so become fools for the highly-hyped affectations of a brand-name charlatan. The Master's opening sequence–an extended pantomime of a WWII sailor's shameless perversities–presents Freddie Quell's (Joaquin Pheonix) sexual exhibitionism as if defining his character. Its blatancy is similar to the puritanical bluntless about the porn industry in P.T.'s Boogie Nights. Quell symbolizes the neuroses prone to authoritarian exploitation. Essentially a coming-of-age story, The Master's bad father figure is cult leader Lancaster Dodd, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman doing the same psychotic mastermind as in Charlie Kaufman's unbearable Synecdoche, N.Y.  There's a similarity to P.T. and Kaufman's egotistic conceits. They trade on "smartness" and both directors are incapable of providing an enlightening, entertaining vision.

jenkins

lol. he's from another galaxy probably. something star trekian about him. even from a multiplex perspective that's a wacky thing to say about paul w.s., we'd have to have a conversation about how he's not anybody's most thrilling talent, let's skip it, my point here is there's no reason to draw the comparison outside their shared names, and call me crazy but i think movie critics could spot actual interlaces and avenues of discussion

i think white makes a career from saying things that don't have merit, and tbh ok that's fine, it's good he stirs movie talk from outrageous perspectives. but his recent mcqueen escapade highlights the unfortunate detail that he shouldn't be in the room, if he attempts to discredit others for the sake of his personal vision. the guy does't know the right way to be insane, not giving him a pass

Brando

Quote from: Jeremy Blackman on January 08, 2014, 01:24:56 PM
I just spent 20 minutes reading about Armond White. He seems to be not much more than a troll.

He's been called that for years. He bashes any movie with critical acclaim and admires any film that other critics hate. He loves every Adam Sandler movie. At the time, his review of Jack and Jill was popular online cause it was so laughable.


Here are some quotes from his reviews:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/jpmoore/the-14-worst-movie-reviews-from-americas-jerk-fil
If you think this is going to have a happy ending, you haven't been paying attention.

Jeremy Blackman

If it is a kind of performance art, he seems impressively committed... and I might even admire that if he weren't so mean-spirited. You're exactly right Jenkins, this is the wrong kind of crazy.

It blows my mind that Dana Stevens was sitting at his table in the first place, since she has the total opposite disposition and is repelled by takedown critcism. (Yes, I listen to her podcasts.)

Reel

If anyone wants to hear Armond White's takedown of 12 Years A Slave in his own words you can do that at /Filmcast

It's interesting to listen to him bitch, but it gets tiresome because he never bases his criticism on anything other than "This movie didn't live up to what I wanted it to be." I like to hear dissenting voices about these kind of shoo-in oscar films, but Armond White has made a whole career out of JUST DOING THAT, and he never quite seems to be able to back up his claims of what good cinema is. "IT'S THIS!" or "IT'S NOT THIS!" that's all he's ever been saying.

Jeremy Blackman

The thing is, I don't think a contrarian film critic has ever been less needed. There is such a healthy diversity of opinion on movies and rarely ever a consensus. And there are always voices, loud and articulate voices, to take down Argo or Crash or The Iron Lady or even American Beauty.

Armond White should switch to music criticism. That medium is actually in need of consensus shattering.

polkablues

Music already has an Armond White. It's called Pitchfork.
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