P.S.: dunno maybe some of you just do not get bored easy.
TS3 is really boring, empty, insipid, a 2nd rate mix of dubious methods; I could not watch the movie to the end, that's how boring it is; your author's fight to resurrect old feelings could have direct connection with anyone's life at any age, but the fact that he is trying to transmit old stories with modern tools doesn't make them very credible: it's like I would demonstrate against pollution, while driving my Volkswagen Touareg V10 TDI on the streets

I hadn't actually done more than skim Armond White's reviews until very recently, and it's been an interesting experience. He hates probably 80% of the movies I love, and yet I find his takedowns fascinating in a way that negative reviews by other critics usually aren't. His critical standards are complex, and I think that leads to a great deal of misunderstanding, but once you perceive his process, you (may) find that he's actually very intellectually consistent, and that's what separates him from a mere contrarian. He can praise a film like Transformers 2 while trashing the commercialism of Toy Story 3 because Michael Bay has no artistic pretensions beyond over-the-top kinetic spectacle — there's a purity in that film that I'm guessing White admires, whereas he (correctly) identifies a strain of self-congratulatory hypocrisy in Toy Story and most Pixar films that, by his lights, is more odious than open, unapologetic crassness.

White, I think, just really does not give a shit about anything in a film outside of his narrow set of standards, but by the same token he judges every film fairly according to those standards, popular consensus be damned. You can't remain that faithful to a very particular critical code and not fall on the wrong side of popular sentiment most of the time. Agree with him or not, though, the man has integrity, and people with integrity tend to be labeled contrarians by a culture whose values are constantly shifting.

It's easy enough to pick apart his reviews and nitpick them to death, but the problem with this approach is that it's destructive without really illuminating any truths. This piece would have been much more interesting and useful if it had been an honest attempt to figure out what White is talking about, and examining that, then approaching his work with the express purpose of discrediting it.

One issue that you neglect to bring up however, is White's politics. A sort of crypto-conservatism pervades many of White's reviews but he's occasionally more explicit about it, as in this week's review of Fair Game, in the NY Press. Parts of this review could have come from a Republican press release.

"A pouty anti-Americanism—born of the selfloathing liberals felt ever since their disenfranchisement by Bush’s 2000 election—fuels this degradation of the action and political flick."

White uses the review to bash all liberals. Also, it's one thing to argue that a movie is excessively one sided, but White takes it a step further and argues essentially from the point of view of a Republican operative; Wilson and Plame were committing treason, Bush was really thinking about the consequences of the impending war, the White House had nothing to do with the leak etc…

I think that White often uses his reviews to push his political agenda and that making the case for a movie being good or bad is strictly secondary. Take his constant comparisons of movies. When discussing movie A, White inevitably brings up movie B and the fact that those awful critics either ignored or maligned it. This is evidence of liberal elitism and nihilism etc… It seems much more important for him to make this point than to say whether movie A is any good or not. This is why I would never use one of White's reviews to help me determine whether I should see a movie or not despite the fact that I find him fascinating.

While I agreed with you on 99.99% of things, there's one small thing I do disagree with you on, respectively- Armond White should be taken off of RT, and please hear me out as to why.

White is not a movie critic. He does not do the job of a critic (any critic). Said job, is to explore why this worked and that in a piece of art. He simply states his opinions as facts, and offers little to no validation for what he says/ writes, and offers no insight as to how he reached his conclusion.

He's just a guy, with an opinion, which happens to get published and read by thousands, if not more people weekly. Since he does not deconstruct, analyze, or in any other meaningful way, support his statements such as "Toy Story 3 sucked" (paraphrasing) he's not a critic, and thusly, should not be counted as one.

With that, excellent article!

And I would sincerely be thrilled it if someone responded to one of my pieces like this. I don't think I've published anything as consistently sloppy as White's TS3 review (though there are typos to be found for sure), and I would welcome feedback that dispassionately pointed out the factual errors in my arguments or the recurring weaknesses in my style. How else am I going to get better at this? Thanks for reading to the end despite the tedious length.

The only valid point you make is highlighting the fascistic views of the Rotten Tomatoes/Metacritic mob (similarly exhibited by last week's ridiculous slash film podcast). You'd think they'd made TS3 or Inception with their own hands, the way they protest a negative review!

I've picked up more insight from one of Armond's lines than I have in this entire tediously looooooong piece.

"It distresses me, the number of people who write like me…It's like a succubus. It's awful to open something up hoping to read something [new] and find your own thoughts being echoed. And sometimes your own thoughts of so many years ago–that you wrote about a totally different picture–are being used to apply to something they don't even apply to!"

And on a non-contrarian matter, White has been (justly) taken to task for masturbating to every single Spielberg film, even dubious dreck like "Always" and "Hook". And not only that, he actually recommended two crappy movies from 1987, "Harry and the Hendersons" and "*batteries not included*, that just *happened* to have been merely executively produced by Spielberg. (However, hardly any writer has cited this because the only way I know about it is because I remember this Critic's Ratings section in the 1987 Premiere magazine issue that they put out every year that listed all these films and 20 critics' ratings of about 70 films of the year. Again, yes, the rememberance of a bona-fide film geek like myself.) And this also applied to Robert Altman's films, even unwatchable stuff by the likes of "O.C. and Stiggs" and "Ready to Wear". Hell, White even creamed in his jeans over every film Alan Rudolph made just becasue he used to be Altman's protege and Altman co-produced several of his films.

I want to say that I am in complete and total agreement with McBride; Spielberg truly is the most unfairly maligned, criminally unappreciated director of that generation. My only qualification would be that White has probably done more to cement the negative consensus than initiate reevaluation. Isn't it just too easy to dismiss his enthusiasm as a willful provocation? By contrast, Nigel Morris' lucid, sustained and much needed corrective (Empire of Light) seems capable of actually converting the skeptics. And of course there's McBride's own biography, available used for $1.48(!) on Amazon.

One of my first encounters with Mr. White's writing was him remarking of the characters in Squid and the Whale (I think he was quoting a friend, but approvingly) something like "I wouldn't want to live next to them, much less see a movie about them," a criticism which would seem to negate much of the best American cinema of the modern era (Scorsese, The Godfathers, There Will Be Blood). The characters in Nora Ephron and Nancy Meyers movies are probably quite pleasant to live near but that doesn't make Ephron or Meyers good filmmakers.

And he actually liked Transformers 2? I'd be impressed if he could create a convincing, articulate defense of that ghastly monstrosity, but given the rest of his writing, I'm not expecting it.

I wholeheartedly agree. While I haven't invested the attention to detail of the author, I believe most people will conclude by instinct that Armond's cynical view of the world is as much of a construction upon itself let alone the misguided comments expressed in his reviews. Mr. White lacks the talent to be a great reviewer, nor does his have the capacity of logic nor the freedom from his own emotionally-jaded psyche to offer any reasonable analysis – so he preserves his notoriety by moving against the grain of the general public. However, will such notoriety survive such a decisive and delicious deconstruction provided above? I think Armond's days are numbered.

@roscoe: It's not hard for me to imagine an incisive critique of TS3; in fact, Richard Brody has already written it: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2010/06/sheesh.html Your implied criticisms of TS3′s emotional button-pushing could similarly comprise the basis of a coherent, principled challenge. You shouldn't misconstrue my anti-anti arguments as an unqualified endorsement; I wasn't reviewing TS3, I was analyzing White's own arguments about it. || I did not and would never reject anyone as "anti-human." I'm honestly not sure what that would even mean. What I object to in White's writing is the ethically incoherent nastiness that infects nearly everything he now writes. I have yet to discern a coherent cultural and aesthetic philosophy unifying his critiques; the primary through lines in his work are (a) self-congratulation and (b) contempt for others. The intellectual justifications seem purely ex post facto and–on the micro-level of individual reviews and especially on the macro-level of his entire body of work–increasingly nonsensical. || As for your thoughts on Rotten Tomatoes, I would like to hear you elaborate them. I find that many of the unqualified anti-RT positions manifest an empty, self-defeating cultural elitism. As a clearinghouse for critical reviews, RT is an exceptionally useful tool; if it didn't exist, I would have to manually scroll through google search results to survey the field of contemporary criticism, an incredible waste of time. (Granted there are better curated "aggregators," like David Hudson's excellent yeoman work for Mubi or individually customized RSS feeds.) But the fact is that RT's composite scores are not primarily displacing traditional film criticism, but supplementing and *promoting* it. There's one simple fact that is constantly elided in the hand-wringing "think" pieces over the intellectual impoverishment of internet film crit: more people are reading more film reviews (including those published by the legacy media) then ever before. The journalism industry has a revenue problem but they certainly do not have a readership problem. Because of Armond's inclusion on RT, he has reached more readers than ever before. The NYPress would almost certainly not opt out of RT if they had the option. (Bleg: do they have the option? Is RT's blurbage fair use or could NYP insist on their digital copywright?) In any case, the NYPress editors have clearly fueled the controversies and angry readerships: in February 2009 they posted a poll to their website to vote for White's "worst recent review" (they subsequently changed the wording to "review you disagree[d] with the most.") That is an example of an organization deliberately cultivating an adversarial relationship with their audience in order to monetize that hatred. The relationship there is at best unexamined, at worst hypocritically self-serving.

And perhaps I also owed it to you to distinguish more finely your own petition from the sentiments your average commenter has expressed. On principle, one should always address the highest embodiment of an opposing viewpoint, not the lowest. So I will concede you that as well.

Here's what you wrote:

"This troll has been screwing up the Tomatometer for years. He's been railing against the most popular and beloved movies, while praising utter garbage. The worst offense, however, is that his reviews are incomprehensible, off-topic, overly political and generally insulting to his audience. Having bad taste in movies is one thing – not being able to justify it is much worse."

You then list movies he likes, and movies he dislikes. Though you rightly point out that his "worst offense" is the "incomprehensibility" of his reviews, you also frame his taste in movies as damning evidence. Maybe the best way to move forward would be for you to clarify something for me: when you complain that he has been "railing against the most popular and beloved movies," how is that different from wanting critics to "affirm public taste." Maybe there is an important distinction there that you feel deserves clarification.

And thanks again for reading and responding.

As the creator of the “Ban Armond White” petition that you deride, I can only attest to my own motives. When you claim that I want critics to “affirm public taste,” you are simply wrong. I have been saying this for a long time: I want debate on film. I cherish honest debate on film. However, Armond is being contrary for its own sake and that will NEVER spark true discourse. I want those who disagree with me to make real points, not “categorically inaccurate” statements or “seething tissue of factual errors, self-negating examples, glaring elisions, logical inconsistencies, specious industrial analysis, mystifying rhetorical constructions and basic grammatical errors,” as you yourself so elegantly wrote.

I concede your point that it is dangerous to remove voices from the internet. However, I’m not in favor of removing White from the internet. I just think that Rottentomatoes.com, as an aggregator, should not give equal voice to him, as he is either an incredibly bad critic or acting in bad faith. After all, you or I would not be able to post on Rottentomatoes.com. Does that mean that they are committing an act of censorship upon us? Certainly not. They are merely exercising standards of who is an appropriate voice in the critic community and who is not. I am just trying to make sure those standards rise beyond the level of critical nonsense that you yourself just plowed through in great detail. If we can’t improve upon the level of film criticism that we encounter as lovers of film, what is the point of having critics? Or rather, what was the point of all the work you just did?