Wednesday, March 31, 2010

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Armond White

I was reading film reviews at work the other day, as I often do, when I ventured to Armond White's recently reviewed movies. Armond is, to put it mildly, a contrarian, which is fine. But he's a contrarian for the sake of being of contrarian.* How else to explain his panning of Inglourious Basterds ("QT manipulates WWII horror into hip pornography"), which was preceded the week before by a rave review of G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra ("There’s more realpolitik here than in the now-overrated The Hurt Locker")? Since I discovered him almost two years ago, when he was at that point the only critic to give a negative review to Wall-E, I've revisited him on about a monthly basis, mostly to annoy my roommate by quoting White's reviews to him. By the way, the best line of that G.I. Joe review? "[Director Stephen] Sommers isn’t quite in Michael Bay’s directorial class, but he has the ability to envision a nightmare and spin it into a provocative coup the Surrealists wouldn’t dare." Coming from any other critic, that's a devastating insult.

An interesting thing has happened over those two years, though. I've come to genuinely enjoy reading Mr. White. That in no way means I endorse or agree with any of his asinine opinions, but he has a certain flair about him that I find irresistible. His writing style is derivative but enjoyable (take a few minutes to compare his writing style to his mentor, Pauline Kael, and you'll see what I mean), at least in the sense that it evokes an emotion out of you, positive or negative, in much the same way as Ann Coulter's work. And that really is the only adequate comparison I can make; White is certainly more intelligent, but their writing has the same visceral impact. This is not necessarily meant as a compliment.

My original idea was to pick out movies Armond and I agree about, but that's a pretty narrow list indeed. He's a fairly prolific critic, having reviewed over 100 films in 2009, and I have by no means seen that many, but the only ones we feel the same about are It's Complicated, Avatar, Humpday, X-Men Origins, The Soloist, and Obsessed (negative) and Coraline, Tyson, and The Hurt Locker (positive). That's it. We both liked only three of the same movies in all of 2009, and even on The Hurt Locker, he claimed that G.I. Joe was better. Make of that what you will. I'll call his negative review of Antichrist a push, since I still have no idea what I think about that movie.

Just on a lark, let's see how he felt about this year's Oscar nominees.

1. Avatar: "Avatar is the corniest movie ever made about the white man’s need to lose his identity and assuage racial, political, sexual and historical guilt."
2. District 9: "District 9 represents the sloppiest and dopiest pop cinema—the kind that comes from a second-rate film culture."
3. An Education: "The film’s 1961 setting is a pretense by which pop novelist Nick Hornby’s screenplay (from Lynn Barber’s memoir) panders to his usual hipster market."
4. Up in the Air (he really hates this one): "Jason Reitman’s movies come in three forms: Rubbish (Thank You For Smoking), Crap (Juno) and Swill (Up in the Air)."
5. A Serious Man (he liked it!): "Any critic’s suggestion that a film as lovingly, emotionally precise as A Serious Man typifies Jewish self-hatred is ridiculous."
6. The Hurt Locker (likes it almost as much as G.I. Joe): "Bigelow conscientiously streamlines her filmmaking. Avoiding portentous Kubrickian camera dynamics—which are only about self—she’s evocative and focused, unlike the showy, undisciplined Apocalypse Now."
7. The Blind Side (he loved it!): "All Bullock’s films promote an edifying sense of human experience—she has an instinct for what people like to see—and that gift makes The Blind Side the perfect, God-sent antidote to Precious." (Which leads us to........)
8. Precious (and this line only scratches the surface): "Not since The Birth of a Nation has a mainstream movie demeaned the idea of black American life as much as Precious."
9. Up: "Pixar disgraces and delimits the animated film as a mushy, silly pop form.What used to be ridiculed as sentimental excess in old Disney animation now comes disguised in the latest technology."
10. Inglourious Basterds: "Only the most gullible film geek will think QT is confirming cinema’s righteous social influence."

My intention was specifically not to write a piece excoriating Armond White; that'd be too easy, and it's been done way too much. But it's what this has turned into, so let's try something a little different. Maybe his standards for Oscar movies are just a lot higher than that. Let's just pick a movie at random and see what he has to say:

"No matter how many people get verklempt over the lugubrious Benjamin Button, I know in my soul that history will avenge the Wayanses’ superior age/masculinity farce Little Man and fans who have already forgotten Eminem’s 8 Mile will one day catch up to Damon Wayans’ insightful hip-hop burlesque, Marci X."

Ah, yes. That's from his review entitled "Dance Flick: Marxian Brothers parody subverts Hollywood." Perhaps I should say no more on this matter.

*I discovered after writing this that that description was used almost word for word on Wikipedia. I swear I didn't plagiarize it.

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