Obviously it’s ironic to criticize a critic so aggressively, but that’s just what people love to do to infamously contrarian New York Press film critic Armond White, who seems to be getting his worst scrutiny yet over his negative review of District 9. The comments and campaigns against him have been going on all week, but now that Roger Ebert has gotten himself involved, it’s a bigger deal. Especially since Ebert first defended White and then took it back. Yet his initial statement that White is “the ideal critic” who “is often valuable because [his opinion] is outside the mainstream” remains on Roger Ebert’s Journal to contractrict the change of mind.

It’s also a bit ironic that this is all because of a movie about creatures who’ve been segregated against. Would District 9’s fanbase prefer to ghettoize critics who disagree with them? Should there be websites and free weeklies that have “Populist Critics Only” guidelines? I don’t want to side with or against White, becuase there’s no need to, what with freedom of speech and press and everything. I will admit that when I began writing film reviews many years ago, I looked up to White more than anyone and even gave myself the nickname “The Film Cynic” (which I still use for my Twitter moniker at least), because I was a more negative and cynical person back then, and also, I honestly admit, because I thought it’d help get me controversially noticed.

Certainly White gets a lot of notice and publicity for his opinions, too, but the important thing is that he’s an interesting read, and not just for how against-the-grain he is. Even if he is ever intentionally anti-majority just to be anti-majority, he presents reasonable arguments and raises necessary points while doing so. Besides, does anyone really want to live in a world where everybody likes District 9 or Up or The Dark Knight and where nobody has anything fresh, smart and positive to say about Transformers 2? How boring that world would be.

That’s my two cents. Check out a few other film blog responses to the White blackballing after the jump:

…Read more

Every year some over-hyped award-laden independent film faces a critical backlash, dissenting writers who cry it ain’t all that. This year it’s Ballast. To quote Armond White, from the NY Press:

“Director-writer Lance Hammer shows a black Mississippi family torn apart by a double suicide attempt, drugs and alienation. But you have to see through these ludicrous black phantoms to the actual white middle-class fantasies at the film’s core.”

Maybe “backlash” is a strong term for a handful of disgruntled critics, but I detect a similar sense of unrest in the audience.

The second time I saw Ballast, I dragged a friend along to Manhattan’s Film Forum (where it recently closed after a brief run). I told her that this film was everything I had been arguing for in American cinema (mostly on internet message boards, in my drawers—sad, really): Its angelic patience, its reverence for faces, silences and subjective experience (with more watchful over-the-shoulder shots than a ‘Nam combat doc) could teach American audiences how to look and listen again. Second time around, I was able to appreciate these qualities even more, as the story became fairly transparent, cleverly delineated though it was. Second time around, it was all about the beauty.

I suspect it was the story that had some of the folks in the Film Forum audience sighing, whispering and even snickering uncontrollably. Story-wise, Ballast can be easily mistaken for an entry in the Why We Be Black genre—films which depict underclass African-Americans scratching and surviving and tearing each other apart. Such films are said to exist mainly for the delectation of white liberals who like to think of poor blacks as lovable to the degree that they are irrational, impulsive and self-destructive. Mighty Joe Young in a do-rag. The fallacy of placing Ballast in this genre is as tragic as the critical backlash against Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple adaptation, which reduced that film’s towering humanism to Song of the South T-N-T.

…Read more

Funny how, in the indie film world, falls from grace tend to begin before you’ve even hit the top. Yesterday, Lance Hammer’s Ballast was nominated for four Gotham Independent Film Awards — the most of any single film — including Breakthrough Director and Best Picture. Meanwhile, the critical darling is, for maybe the first time since its Sundance premiere, provoking sour responses. Armond White wrote a scathing review of the film attacking it as evidence that “African-American life is imprisoned by the art fallacies of Indie filmmaking, controlled by white liberal condescension” — but he’s Armond White, so that was somewhat expected. Somewhat less expected was this Hollywood Elsewhere post, where Jeff Wells pounces on White’s review like it’s the smoking yellow cake that makes the case that Ballast is overrated.

…Read more

So much for Peter Bart’s pet dead horse about the untraversable gap between ticket buyers and film reviewers––Iron Man, so far the year’s best reviewed film, is also thus far 2008’s fastest moneymaker. The critic/audience sync continued this past weekend with Speed Racer. It takes a rare film to unite critics with as disparate a sensibility as Anthony Lane and Armond White in common vitriol; it’s almost unthinkable that the same critically-despised film would fail to appeal to the masses.

“Speed Racer kills cinema,” went White’s fuming, unusable pullquote. But does it? It would be wishful thinking to assume that the average ticket buyer actually cares about “cinema”, never mind the death thereof, but it seems clear to me that the audience’s failure to care about this particular movie could have lasting repercussions for those of us who do take cinema seriously. After jump, you’ll find five reasons why, love the movie or hate it, this bombing could potentially be Bad For Movies on the whole––and one reason why it might be kind of good. As usual, feel free to tell me why I’m a moron in the comments.

…Read more

I woke up this morning to a feed reader full of stories about film criticism, many of them blog posts in response to the latest bit of polemic from Armond White. It’s a prolonged screed against contemporary critics––young, old, print, web––anyone but Armond, essentially. Most of it just reads as noise, and since I’ve decided to put a moratorium on talking/writing about What Happened In Queens, I can’t respond to White’s not original complaint that the MOMI institute (which he did not attend) seeks to turn young critics into shill bots for studio films. I also can’t comment on his suggestion that the Institute itself is “a project seemingly designed to further confuse the profession,” although I will admit to being, before, during and after the Institute, confused about my profession. And I do suspect that all of our circular, internecine fighting about this stuff is, at least for me, making the confusion worse.

So it’s a relief to come across the second half of Rotten Tomatoes’ interview with critic Nathan Lee, and find an answer of sorts. You want to write film criticism? Stop reading it. Go look at art and get laid. The relevant quotes after the jump.

…Read more

At The Envelope, Tom O’Neil has a no-names-named recap of what went on at yesterday’s New York Film Critics Circle vote. First: the inside story on I’m Not There’s aforementioned non-showing:

I’m Not There did surprisingly well in many top races today. It didn’t win any awards, but it came in third place for best picture after champ No Country for Old Men and runner-up There Will Be Blood. Ditto for its helmer Todd Haynes, who placed third in the directors’ lineup behind the winning Coen brothers and second-placed Paul Thomas Anderson…In the supporting-actress race, Cate Blanchett came in second place.

I don’t know how “surprising” that really is, considering that three of the critics in the room are on the record as giving the film a score of 90 or higher. I think the only surprise is that the staunchest suckers for Haynes’ soulless scrapbook schtick defenders of the film actually let it leave the room without a single honor, and apparently without a fight. But let’s move on…

…Read more

• Steven Boone has published an a-ma-zing interview with film critic Armond White. There’s almost too much good stuff here; at one point, White deflates Boone’s theory that digital video has allowed filmmaking to transition from “aristocratic medium…to one where poor people make films.” White says: “Poor people don’t make films. They’ve got other things to do.” Also, check out Boone’s companion piece at The House Next Door: Ten Armond White Quotes That Shook The World.
• “What if this guy got you pregnant? Basically an over aged hippy who ended up with a woman far, far hotter than he could ever have hoped for.” Dennis Kucinich as Seth Rogen’s character from Knocked Up, and other 2008 Presidential Candidates as 2007 Movie Characters.
• David Hudson has the first round of competition titles for the Berlin Film Festival. Included: Errol Morris’ S.O.P.: Standard Operating Procedure, and my favorite English-language film of the year thus far, There Will Be Blood.
• Kate Coe has found a new twist in the Theresa Duncan vs. Scientology story: Apparently, sometime Scientologist Beck told an Italian newspaper that he was starring in Duncan’s Alice in Wonderland-inspired film, years before he told Vanity Fair that he had never even talked to Duncan about being in the project. The VF article theorizes that Beck’s withdrawl from the project led it to fall apart, which led Duncan to the depression that led to her suicide.

IFC Blog has a visual breakdown of the references employed by critics to describe Javier Bardem’s haircut in No Country For Old Men. Prince Valiant references were most abundant; ever the lone wolf, Armond White was the only critic to namedrop Richard III. Jim Emerson seems to have dropped his Tony Danza reference too late to make it into IFC’s calculations, but I think it’s spot-on (and period accurate, if we’re buying the contention that No Country takes place in 1980). Although, for the record, I’m with Andrew Tracy of Reverse Shot––it may engender colorful pie charts, but unnecessary quirk/kitsch like that haircut makes this film weaker, not stronger.

After explaining why Lionsgate declined to screen the film for critics, Armond White begins his review proper of Why Did I Get Married? on contrarian autopilot: “Most critics don’t ‘get’ Tyler Perry basically because most critics are whites who are not only clueless about Perry’s African-American culture, but unsympathetic to his particular expression.” Okay, probably. But isn’t that obvious? I started to wonder if old Armond wasn’t losing his touch.

Oh, but wait! Further down the page, he hits us Whiteys where it really hurts, by attacking sacred dude-com cow Judd Apatow. “Nothing in Knocked Up is as meaningful as Perry’s spectacle of men who must restrain their anger physically or his politically incorrect fashion show of women proudly, luxuriously wearing furs as signs of pleasure and achievement,” White sniffs. It gets better, when White insists that the derogatory terms most commonly used to describe Trapped in the Closet would be better applied to SuperBad. And I could go on. Just read it in full.