The Armond White Thread

[matrixschmatrix]

But which film is he going to elevate in the process? My money's on Streetdance 3D.

I was going to guess Shrek, but his Shrek Forever After Review is actually totally fair- even his usual 'this is bad because it's not that' line ("After last year’s animation breakthroughs—Coraline, Fantastic Mr. Fox and Where the Wild Things Are—we can’t go back to this inanity.") is unusually relevant.

[Brian C]

"Pixar's Toy Story 3 gets wrong everything that the unfairly overlooked Planet 51, with starring voicework from The Rock that avoids the blistering sense of entitlement that is part and parcel of every Tom Hanks role, managed to get right."

[Fiery Angel]

"Pixar's Toy Story 3 gets wrong everything that the unfairly overlooked Planet 51, with starring voicework from The Rock that avoids the blistering sense of entitlement that is part and parcel of every Tom Hanks role, managed to get right."

Awesomeness.

[dx23]

What did I say?

But Toy Story 3 is so besotted with brand names and product-placement that it stops being about the innocent pleasures of imagination—the usefulness of toys—and strictly celebrates consumerism.

Fucking idiot troll.

[mfunk9786]

So I guess Armond must have had an orgasm, seeing that this movie had 100% on RottenTomatoes after 100+ reviews, reveling in the opportunity to pan the shit out of it.

We’re meant to enjoy our susceptibility, not question it, as in Joe Dante’s more challenging Small Soldiers. Have shill-critics forgotten that movie? Do they mistake Toy Story 3’s opening day for 4th of July patriotism?

Huh?

[knives]

There's one other bad review floating around that manages to be more idiotic in places than White's review (though one wonders why he complains about product placement here, but has a chubby for Bay). The responses on RT are more humourous than White could ever be though

[Brian C]

Small Soldiers? Rosenbaum ought to sue Armond for stealing his bit.

[HistoryProf]

The comments are gold both at the NYPress site and RT - complete one a handful of ardent Armond Trolls calling everyone who likes Toy Story 3 stupid....but this made me lol...

Must suck to live in a world without wonder, or fun. Too bad for you. By the way, "evidence" is still not a verb, genius.

I too thought to myself, "i wonder how long before Armond gives it a negative review" when I saw it was at 100% the other day...then Ebert tweeted the same thought. The fact that he's so freaking predictable is about as damning as any criticism anyone as ever thrown his way. It's all just so painfully obvious trolling. He's going to complain about product placement and then champion Transformers 2? One of the most blatant overflowing self-referential product placement extravaganzas in history? Hypocrisy reigns in his tiny little mean spirited world.

[HistoryProf]

Ha...I was hoping the Jonah Hex flick would be good, because I love westerns and it was a good comic back in the 70s...then I heard Megan Fox was cast and I knew it would suck...then I heard the Crank guys wrote it and I knew it would suck bad. So glanced at the reviews to see it is indeed terrible, but of course Armond raves about it, and uses the review as a chance to make a few more jabs at Toy Story 3

o, although Jonah Hex doesn’t effervesce like Neveldine & Taylor’s own avant-garde innovations, Crank and Crank: High Voltage, Hayward yet makes it pell-mell; it’s still got N&T’s anarchic spirit. That alone makes Jonah Hex the best movie to open this week—easily overshadowing Toy Story 3.

And then there's this:

Jonah Hex does for the western what the Crank movies do for the urban action film

which is what? ruin them?

he of course ignores the fact that the ad budget was slashed because they didn't even bother having a trailer done a month before release, or early screenings, because they were doing reshoots and cutting the hell out of it to try and salvage something from the mess of a script. But Armond sees the big Hollywood machine at work again...

Without a $50 million ad budget to make Jonah Hex seem important, the media feels free to trash it—doing so exposes their collusion with marketing and refusal to read film for personal reflection. True art is watching hot-chick Megan Fox (as Lilah the hooker) fearlessly staring at the most grotesque side of Jonah’s face as if coming to grips with her own exploitation. Beautiful and brilliant. I previously remarked how "Neveldine-Taylor stand so lonely on the culture’s edge that their au courant ingenuity seems absolutely avant-garde when compared to standard box-office formula." Greed is a cultural hex.

Of all the bullshit he's penned, that has to be some of the stinkiest. He can't possibly write this shit with a straight face can he?

[matrixschmatrix]

True art is watching hot-chick Megan Fox (as Lilah the hooker) fearlessly staring at the most grotesque side of Jonah’s face as if coming to grips with her own exploitation. Beautiful and brilliant.

I think that little critical nugget tells you everything you need to know about Armond White...

[mfunk9786]

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[knives]

then I heard the Crank guys wrote it and I knew it would suck bad.

I think they actually managed to improve a lot with the sequel and Gamer. They've got this weird sort of trashy social satire thing going on that I'm managing to groove to. The fact they were kicked off the project for it to be entirely refilmed and rewritten is more damning to me.

[GaryC]

The word is spreading. Someone on another forum (not a film-related one) I'm on has just started a thread entitled "Armond White needs to die, NOW!!!"

[wattsup32]

The brilliance here isn't that you all predicted he would chime in with a negative review of TS3 (I did, too, as soon as I saw it was at 100%). What is truly brilliant is that you nailed the content and language of the review. I don't know how he can live with himself knowing that jerks like us can produce his exact work output as well as he can, but faster and without having to actually see the movie.

[dx23]

I heard a theory that makes sense: Armond and the other idiot that that gave the negative review just do this to drive traffic to their sites and as consequence get more ad money. Since Rottentomatoes doesn't give you the full review, you have to always click to their sites. If this is the case, both of this idiots should just be taken out and banned from the site.

Again, it goes back to the fact that at least Armond is doing a complete disservice to the film critics community but also to the black community.

[dx23]

The brilliance here isn't that you all predicted he would chime in with a negative review of TS3 (I did, too, as soon as I saw it was at 100%). What is truly brilliant is that you nailed the content and language of the review. I don't know how he can live with himself knowing that jerks like us can produce his exact work output as well as he can, but faster and without having to actually see the movie.

They guy has become so predictable that I knew which low hanging fruit he was going to talk about.

[mikkelmark]

Maybe he's a cronic-ironic. All the attention he's getting seems to be driving at some kind of point, just haven't figured it out yet.

Made me think of a line in the diaries of Albert Camus, that goes something like:"My entire body of work is ironic."

[HistoryProf]

I heard a theory that makes sense: Armond and the other idiot that that gave the negative review just do this to drive traffic to their sites and as consequence get more ad money. Since Rottentomatoes doesn't give you the full review, you have to always click to their sites. If this is the case, both of this idiots should just be taken out and banned from the site.

Again, it goes back to the fact that at least Armond is doing a complete disservice to the film critics community but also to the black community.

i would have no problem with White if he was just a quirky critic with odd tastes and chose to champion leftovers...there's certainly room for that. What makes him so palpably and purposefully worthless is that he's made a schtick out of it all and clearly is doing it for attention. Saying things like

That alone makes Jonah Hex the best movie to open this week—easily overshadowing Toy Story 3.

isn't reviewing, it's provoking. No one with a wit of sanity can say that Jonah Hex "easily overshadows" TS3...you might prefer JH to TS3, but saying it is clearly superior is simply and baldly trying to drive traffic to your 3rd rate paper/site for $$. Which all makes him the exact opposite of what he claims to be. He'll lambaste anyone who dares to question him that he is a singular voice of reason and purity divorced from the Hollywood machine. But it's clear he's even worse than a Hollywood shill - he's a free paper shill! A normal person, who may truly enjoy JH more than TS3 would say something like "don't let this gem of a film get lost in all the hoopla of Toy Story 3 this weekend. The latter is getting all the buzz, but Jonah has some surprises for you" - or something like that....but he HAS to disparage a sacred cow in order to compliment a piece of shit. It's what he does. He is incapable of just saying "you know what? I kind of liked it!" Instead he has to proclaim it the best movie of the summer - until some other piece of shit opens next week and then he'll do it again.

Someone should forward him this thread...the fact that Ebert and various forums across America predicted his review should tell him something about himself...but probably won't.

[stroszeck]

In all seriousness, and all jokes etc aside, how is this guy a reputable critic? Why is he getting paid to churn out these ridiculous reviews? Crank and Jonah Hex are awesome etc etc....do the people that pay him read his reviews? Like what the uckf is going on????

[tavernier]

He also loves pretty much everything by Godard, Altman, Loach, Demme, Leigh, Techine and Troell, and his reviews of their movies are just as unreadable.

[matrixschmatrix]

His liner notes on Z seemed cogent and worth reading- I honestly suspect he's perfectly capable of being a real critic, and just chooses not to. For reviews and writing that aren't going to get people abuzz, he frequently slips into making sense.

[tavernier]

His liner notes on Z seemed cogent and worth reading- I honestly suspect he's perfectly capable of being a real critic, and just chooses not to. For reviews and writing that aren't going to get people abuzz, he frequently slips into making sense.

The Criterion people keep him on a short leash, obviously, which is not the case at the NY Press.

[dx23]

His liner notes on Z seemed cogent and worth reading- I honestly suspect he's perfectly capable of being a real critic, and just chooses not to. For reviews and writing that aren't going to get people abuzz, he frequently slips into making sense.

Which is why people like us are so pissed of his so called "film criticism". He has shown at some points that he is an intelligent, well read person, but he chooses to take the high road and just be an asshole, doing a complete disservice to his profession, which is losing jobs more and more each day.

[Mr Sausage]

Armond White has two pretentions that ruin his reviews (but which are sometimes absent from his longish pieces on the canon). They are as follows:

A. To be the high moral critic of his age.

B. To be the Prophet and the Vicar of pop culture, the champion of its high seriousness and its relevance to our cultural heritage. The things that qualify are whatever is least likely to be championed by anyone else, other critics especially.

The one thing that needs to be understood about both of these pretentions is that they are almost exclusively about status. Armond White's reviews are written, again, almost exclusively under the assumption that they will raise his cultural prestige and show how he is not just a movie critic but a warrior and a prophet fighting the battle for truth against error. It's written all over his reviews: read them and see how often he invokes "myth" and "fable" and our cultural imagination for movies that partake of none of those things. See how often he invokes the formula of "true art" for movies that, if they are enjoyable, are enjoyable quite obviously for not being so. See how easily and frequently he reacts to a middling movie as tho' he had discovered Joyce or D.H. Lawrence for the first time, and see if you can find a reason for it other than to claim the prestige of being the first to discover greatness. His reviews can no longer even be called reflections of his taste, because he seems only capable of mobilizing films on behalf of a dimly felt and dimly understood program to alter our sense of culture and merit.

And worst of all, he writes very bad prose.

[HistoryProf]

This combo review of the Karate Kid and a film called The Lottery that has no connection whatsoever to the KK remake is just bizarre, in addition to being nearly impossible to read or follow. I don't know what in the hell his point is supposed to be.

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