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mfunk9786 wrote:Ebert knows a terrible critic when he sees one.

aox wrote:simplified

swo17 wrote:Also, I know I'm supposed to look at that hate column and get all in a tizzy but I honestly only care about a handful of those movies myself.

Is this Tyler Perry someone I should seek out while I am going through Ozu's filmography?

cdnchris wrote:

Is this Tyler Perry someone I should seek out while I am going through Ozu's filmography?

Most definitely!

If you're suicidal.

swo17 wrote:This thread serves a purpose, I suppose, though someone posting a link more than once is hardly the most redundant thing that has ever happened here.

Also, I know I'm supposed to look at that hate column and get all in a tizzy but I honestly only care about a handful of those movies myself.

Michael Kerpan wrote:Seems a lot like some sort of elaborate performance art stunt to me.

james wrote:

Michael Kerpan wrote:Seems a lot like some sort of elaborate performance art stunt to me.

That's precisely what it is. I'm surprised more people don't get this by now.

aox wrote:

james wrote:

Michael Kerpan wrote:Seems a lot like some sort of elaborate performance art stunt to me.

That's precisely what it is. I'm surprised more people don't get this by now.

has he publicly said/written this? How are you privileged with this information?

cdnchris wrote:

Antoine Doinel wrote:Reads like a movie review Mad Lib to me.

And then you guys beat me to it, but yeah, that's all they are. (I see he even name dropped Van Sant in a review of Transporter 3. I would have been more impressed with Godard but he saved that for Transformers 2 apparently.)

This Eiffel Tower image also recalls the postmodern epigraph that closes Godard’s In Praise of Love : “I will go to my grave with more visions than man has previously ever known.” The trashy secret of G.I. Joe is its ironic capitalizing on the fact that awesome, dread-filled visions don’t necessarily destroy childhood innocence.

Perkins Cobb wrote:The NY Press offers an editorial (unsigned in the print edition, bylined on-line) defending Armond vs. the Tomatoes.

Not terribly surprising or insightful, but presented for completeness' sake.

By Sue D. O'nym on August 20, 2009 12:03 PM

I am a former colleague of Armond's and am very familiar with his work (I am writing under a fake because I like Armond on a personal level. In person, he was always nice.)

The following points have been made in previous posts, but bear repeating: Armond is a piss-poor writer and a terrible constructor of arguments.

He has a taste for five-dollar words like "fealty," "bane" and "genuflect" but lacks the skill and timing to effectively deploy them. His sentences sometimes lack necessary things, like verbs, or are structured awkwardly. His meanings are often obscured or hidden behind clutter as a result.

He doesn't build arguments. Instead, he links together strings of assertions whose truths he presents as self-evident. This can be infuriating. Imagine he was a courtroom attorney trying to make a case for a client rather than his opinion on a movie. "The idea that my client was there at the time of the murder is preposterous! Any fool could see that my client was, like any intelligent viewer of Speilberg's classic Always, enthralled in pure, childlike wonder at the time."

Look at his review for "Up," which begins with the following sentence "Pixar rules pop media like nothing since mid-20th century General Motors held sway as the preeminent American corporation (and the bane of grassroots individualism)." As with the rest of the paragraph that follows, it's a jumble of syntax and meaning. And when the individual ideas are broken down, they still require clarification. For example, is he saying that Pixar is a bane of grassroots individualism? And, for that matter, what does he mean by grassroots individualism? I think his point is that Pixar is powerful and people are reluctant to criticize them, either because Pixar is so powerful or because of cultural consensus. But then he further muddies the water with his graf-closing sentence: "this absurdity clarifies contemporary news media’s unprincipled collusion with Hollywood capitalism."

"Clarifies" is a presumably a poor word choice. He most likely wants to say the absurdity "shows," "illuminates" or "demonstrates." And that's the only verb in a sentence overstuffed with clunky modifiers. But he's tossing a bomb at Hollywood and the media which is always intriguing, right? But then even that falls apart upon cursory inspection. Contemporary news media (probably only need to say "media," but I don't want to get snippy) has an unprincipled collusion with Hollywood capitalism. What, in this context, does Armond mean by Hollywood Capitalism? What is the nature of this collusion? The idea, desperately crying for attention and care, never receives the tending it needs to blossom into something that makes sense.


In the end, his themselves opinions are worthwhile. His writing, unfortunately, is not.

Ebert: Like all of us, he would benefit from a good copy editor.

manicsounds wrote:How do you know that Sue D. O'nym isn't Armond White himself?