What's left to say of the film critic who haunts all others? To risk an unoriginal sentiment, I'm inclined to say that Pauline Kael remains the best critic with which the movies have ever been graced. She wasn't the sharpest or the most acute with detail (her friend Manny Farber could write circles around her in that regard), but like most great writers of all shapes and sizes, she was able to obliterate that often insurmountable distance that exists between the writer's intent and the reader's interpretation. Kael drew the reader directly into her obsessions and predilections, and to do that she often embraced an unapologetic recklessness that was exhilarating and infuriating in often equal measure. Like many young(-ish, sigh) aspiring film writers battling the blank page, the day I discovered Kael was a legitimately life-changing one.
As many others have sadly written, there's now at least a generation of filmgoers who have no idea who Pauline Kael is, and most of her books are distressingly out of print. The work of a giant such as Kael is, in these slam-bang hyperbolic times of Internet-empowered film illiteracy, more important than ever, and so it's somewhat comforting that The Age of Movies, a new collection of her work, has been released at nearly the same time as her first true biography, Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark. Continue Reading »
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg on Tuesday defended his decision to clear the park in Lower Manhattan that was the birthplace of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Mike White knew HBO's Enlightened would be a tough sell.
The ascendance of the stuttering king and Oscar's perceived instantaneous regression into the mottled pastures of White Elephant Cinema (how quickly we forget The Reader) has rendered some of our most reliable barometers speechless. Suddenly, the movie no one wanted to pay attention to became the movie all your friends and relatives who see two movies a year have seen and just know is the best picture of the year. What can one say in the face of that? Even dependable crank Armond White, who had been working himself up a pretty good head of anti-Social Network steam leading up to an Ingracious Basterd-worthy final snit as MC of the New York Film Critics Circle awards, has been more or less reticent in the wake of The King's Speech's dozen proofs in support of the theory that dusty linens, not bloody tourniquets and certainly not hackers' grease-stained pizza boxes, are the fabric that holds Oscar together. And why shouldn't he remain mum? There's no one this year to disabuse of the notion that Oscars actually matter. Continue Reading »
They really couldn't find better pictures for the winners? Anyway, Kanye West and Cee Lo top the Village Voice Pazz and Jop poll's albums and singles lists, respectively.
Xavier Beauvois's Of Gods and Men leads France's César nominations with 11. Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer and Johann Sfar's biopic Gainsbourg follow close behind with eight.
Back at the Voice, Michael Musto extols the 10 best New York City clubs of all time (ah, memories), and in the latest episode of That's Hagemony!, J. Hoberman responds to Armond White's response. Fun.
On the occasion of David Lynch's 65th birthday, Flavorpillreveals 65 things you may not know about the director.
The 16 books that will compete in the 2011 Tournament of Books's Battle Royale have been announced. Among them: a bunch of books we tried to review at one point or another but publishers wouldn't send us—oh, and Marcy Dermansky's Bad Marie. Congrats, gurl.
Lady Gaga gets her German on with a super-hot new remix.
We're praying for Kevin Lee's sanity this morning: They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? has just updated their 1,000 Greatest Films list.
Peach and Zelda catch up:
Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to ed@slantmagazine.com and to converse in the comments section.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced its Foreign Language Film shortlist. We're guessing Dogtooth, still in the running, made the shortlist in phase two of the voting process by the grace of that face-saving executive committee.
The Columbia Journalism Reviewthinks we're omnivorous.
A colleague of Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasulov, filmmaker Rafi Pitts, who now lives in Paris, reacts to the harsh sentences handed to his friends.
Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to ed@slantmagazine.com and to converse in the comments section.
The legendary Alejandro Jodorowsky won't talk to us, but he did manage to sit down with The Austin Chronicle on the occasion of the looming DVD/Blu-ray release of Santa Sangre.
Armond White is probably calling Lisa Schwarzbaum a four-letter word right now.
President Barack Obama delivered a beautiful speech last night at the McKale Memorial Center on the University of Arizona campus in Tucson, Arizona:
Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to ed@slantmagazine.com and to converse in the comments section.
Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to ed@slantmagazine.com and to converse in the comments section.
The Roman Catholic church has entered the 20th century (somewhat): According to Pope Benedict XVI, putting a condom on is less evil than spreading AIDS.
It's only a matter of time before this happens for real.
Julien Guiomar and Ingrid Pitt have passed. You may know him as the Spanish pirest from Luis Buñuel's The Milky Way and her for traipsing through a number of Hammer films.
Armond White is rejoicing today: Jennifer Jason Leigh has served Noah Baumbach with divorce papers.
A requiem for Nicolas Cage:
Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to ed@slantmagazine.com and to converse in the comments section.
Armond White always begins with himself and ends there too; like T.S. Eliot, the end of all his exploring is to arrive where he started and let us know he was the destination all along. Twice this year he's written "essays" that boil down, essentially, to how he's film's grail‐keeper and everyone else is a fraud. The first was March 17th's "My Greenberg Problem—And Yours," in which White, among other things, promised—in terms worthy of a HUAC friendly witness—to "no longer keep silent" on the conspiracy ("a racist lynching of a black critic by white critics," he noted) to throw "personal brickbats my way."
It wasn't really a subject he'd "kept silent" on; Armond vs. the world is a perennial motif of his writing. Still, enough was enough; he was going to dismantle the whole rotten system once and for all. The subject was a Gawker blip on the screen: White had been denied access to one of the earliest screenings of Greenberg, though he was allowed into an early enough screening to draft a review for print. The publicist was none too thrilled about White calling for Noah Baumbach's retroactive abortion in print, or indeed just calling him an asshole; White denied the latter, the proof was uncovered, and he issued another blustery statement about how his prose, having approached the interpretative complexity of late Foucault, had been misinterpreted. Continue Reading »
A week after 43 assholes in our U.S. Senate blocked the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" repeal, maintaining the status quo of repression and persecution that plagues gays in the military, a number of gay suicides due to bullying have taken the national spotlight. Props to our national media (especially to Dan Savage and his "It Gets Better" campaign) for treating this string of tragic deaths for the epidemic that it is. Our hearts go out to the families of Tyler Clementi, Asher Brown, Seth Walsh, and the countless others whose personal tragedies have yet to be televised.
Speaking of bullying, Armond White finally addresses the "agitated fanboys" that spam his reviews regularly on Rotten Tomatoes. The New York Press critic brings up many fine points about the groupthink fostered by review-aggregate sites like Rotten Tomatoes, shady review-mongering publicity tactics, and the fear of the almighty spoiler.
White's take on The Social Network is less defensible. I didn't see much deepness in the film, but I found its tone to be rather chilling, and as I texted Keith Uhlich last week after seeing it: "It's not great, but it definitely made me feel like I was looking at the face of a very depressing, very American, very intellectually bred evil." Now, if Armond believes that David Fincher was extolling Mark Zuckerberg's assholeness and not giving it the finger, did he become complicit by hobnobbing at the film's New York Film Festival after-party at the Harvard Club last Friday?
Related: New York Magazine's Mark Harris wonders if Fincher and Aaron Sorkin's depiction of Zuckerberg is fair, with Sorkin revealing that—like Armond—he's "not quite getting the Internet."
Finally, read this groovy, predictably evocative piece on my man Luis Buñuel's L'Age d'Or by Michael Atkinson, which the critic published on, um, Facebook.
Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to ed@slantmagazine.com and to converse in the comments section.
When New York Press critic Armond White panned the universally admired Toy Story 3, the disapproval he expressed and the backlash it inspired were so "predictable" that they were, well, predicted. Bumping TS3 from its briefly "100% Fresh" standing at the critical aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, White's piece (entitled "Bored Game") channeled a steady stream of pissed off Pixar loyalists to the Press website. "Registered just to say I think you are a massive twat and I feel really sorry for you," user woahreally weighed in. "Whoever ur boss is should be slapped for allowing you to publish this disaster of a review," opined the inventively pseudonymed usuckballs.
The comments-section calls for White to be fired are occasionally hilarious in their venom and vulgarity, all the more so for being so spectacularly self-defeating—could the Press have mounted a more successful campaign to increase their web traffic and user registrations? And there's the rub. White's detractors accuse of him being a "contrarian," someone who bucks the critical establishment and defies popular taste out of little more than cynical self-promotion and antisocial perversity. (This highly circulated chart of Armond's pans and praises has been offered as definitive "proof" that his opinions are reflexively reactionary.) But if this is true, any principled stand against White paradoxically rewards and enables him. "Don't feed the trolls," as the saying goes. Continue Reading »
The academy may have doubled the number of nominations, made room for more critics' faves and box-office juggernauts, and completely overhauled how ballots are going to be tabulated for the Best Picture contest this year, but to hear everyone tell it, it's all still going to boil down to a grudge match between Contender #1 and Contender #2, the same as it usually is. And likely the same as it always shall be until the academy's board of directors can jerry-rig a system that will automatically favor the movie that is not only seen by the fewest number of voters, but also represents that perfect middle ground between fiercely loved and fiercely loathed. Continue Reading »
"That man is an artist," Wendell B. Harris once said to me, of film critic Armond White. I was trying to set up an interview with Harris about his long-neglected film Chameleon Street, the 1990 Sundance Grand Prize winner that should have led to a brilliant career. The film, and Harris, virtually disappeared in the 1990's, his brief appearances in Out of Sight and Road Trip notwithstanding. Critics mostly saw in Chameleon Streeta colorful but fumbling amateur effort. White saw a masterpiece, championing the film in the Film Comment essay "Underground Man" and referring to it as a measure of artistry in other reviews. So perhaps Harris had self-serving reasons for calling a mere film critic an artist—one hand washing the other. I would be inclined to agree if I didn't see what White saw in Chameleon Street (basically, a low-budget peer to Orson Welles) or what Harris sees in White (a film critic as influential as his mentors, Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris). Armond White counts as an artist to me because his best work carries the power of art. It teaches audiences and artists how to see, feel and imagine more deeply.
Of course, anyone familiar with White's column in the NY Press (and the hate mail it regularly generates) knows that he is more often described as stone crazy. Or, "batshit crazy." Or simply, "insane." Just as often, exasperated readers and colleagues refer to him as "contrarian for the sake of being contrary." He does position himself in diametric opposition to virtually every film critic on earth. But does that make him crazy? A rebel for the hell of it? No: The best White writings agitate, scold, flail, balk, intimidate, insult and weep for the state of the world. But they're not an act. They give movies and pop culture a messy, personal reaction. (Hence this messy, personal appreciation.) Though he writes in a kind of crisp, omniscient-sounding voice, White's work expresses heartbreak at most folk's refusal to make/let culture enter their hearts/minds and change their lives/worlds. He's a grandiose dude.
Here are ten fragments from White's writing that I've wanted to frame and hang on a wall—and which make him count as something greater than a successor to Kael and Sarris. Sarris imported and bottled French auteurism for American cineastes. Kael humanized film criticism and brought filmmakers down to earth while proselytizing movie love. Both changed Eurocentric film culture irrevocably. White is out to change the world. Embedded in his reviews are the means to topple Ho'wood hegemony and the critical orthodoxy that keeps audiences expecting so little of movies these days. That's crazy. That's art. Continue Reading »
What's left to say of the film critic who haunts all others? To risk an unoriginal sentiment, I'm inclined to say that Pauline Kael remains the best critic with which the movies have ever been graced. She wasn't the sharpest or the most acute with detail (her friend Manny Farber could write circles around her in that regard), but like most great writers of all shapes and sizes, she was able to obliterate that often insurmountable distance that exists between the writer's intent and the reader's interpretation. Kael drew the reader directly into her obsessions and predilections, and to do that she often embraced an unapologetic recklessness that was exhilarating and infuriating in often equal measure. Like many young(-ish, sigh) aspiring film writers battling the blank page, the day I discovered Kael was a legitimately life-changing one.
White Power: Ten Armond White Quotes that Shook My World
by Steven Boone on December 10th, 2007 at 8:00 am in Film
Of course, anyone familiar with White's column in the NY Press (and the hate mail it regularly generates) knows that he is more often described as stone crazy. Or, "batshit crazy." Or simply, "insane." Just as often, exasperated readers and colleagues refer to him as "contrarian for the sake of being contrary." He does position himself in diametric opposition to virtually every film critic on earth. But does that make him crazy? A rebel for the hell of it? No: The best White writings agitate, scold, flail, balk, intimidate, insult and weep for the state of the world. But they're not an act. They give movies and pop culture a messy, personal reaction. (Hence this messy, personal appreciation.) Though he writes in a kind of crisp, omniscient-sounding voice, White's work expresses heartbreak at most folk's refusal to make/let culture enter their hearts/minds and change their lives/worlds. He's a grandiose dude.
Here are ten fragments from White's writing that I've wanted to frame and hang on a wall—and which make him count as something greater than a successor to Kael and Sarris. Sarris imported and bottled French auteurism for American cineastes. Kael humanized film criticism and brought filmmakers down to earth while proselytizing movie love. Both changed Eurocentric film culture irrevocably. White is out to change the world. Embedded in his reviews are the means to topple Ho'wood hegemony and the critical orthodoxy that keeps audiences expecting so little of movies these days. That's crazy. That's art. Continue Reading »
Tags: A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, Armond White, Bamboozled, Chameleon Street, Film Comment, Little Man, Maria Full of Grace, Mississippi Burning, Moolaadé, Mr. 3000, Shaft, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The New York Press, Village Voice
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