Armond Joy and the dining room table

Even beyond White's bipolar taste—he seems to respond to every film with either kneejerk dismissal or uncritical devotion—and his bullying rhetoric, it’s infuriating how many assertions, assumptions, and outright ridiculous claims he puts out there. Without backing up any of it. Maybe Godard IS an influence on Michael Bay. I doubt it. But there’s a chance. However, White throws out that these Godard films “are where Bay learned to love sound and image” without citing a single interview, article, or DVD commentary, let alone closely comparing shots or sequences from their films, to establish the connection.

JE: Yes, you'd think that citing evidence would be the first duty of a critic. Which is why White fits no known definition of one.

White is obviously a hacky, contrarian, not worth reading critic, and while reading Kenny's weekly deconstruction of all things White is entertaining, isn't the frequent mention of his name by actual writers like yourself, Mr. Kenny and Roger Ebert kind of a validation of what he's doing? Granted, he's eating up one of those precious, payed newspaper critic jobs with his non-sense, but is he really that important? Does anyone with a modicum of intelligence read or respect him? Posts lamenting his idiocy only serve to publicize it and make him seem more important than he is. He's a joke, he's Sarah Palin, and the less we mention either of them the faster they'll go away.

JE: I use him (and Palin, for that matter), only to cite specific examples of dysfunctional thinking that so many people don't seem to notice or acknowledge. This post is primarily about the brand of everyday demagoguery that has made FOX News the most popular TV "news" outlet in America. It won't go away if everybody treats it as if it is valid. We need to be as relentless about holding people like this accountable for the inanities they spew as they are about spewing it 24/7.

Maybe it's just me, but it looks like your "Fox correspondent" hyperlink is broken. If, by chance, you were intending to link to this Daily Show clip, which stands in parity with their evisceration of CNBC earlier this year as some of the best news ombudsmanship I've ever seen them do, then hear hear!

And on the subject of language, it's funny how, even though he was on the spot, under pressure, with cameras watching, and in front of an increasingly rowdier crowd, Frank managed to come up with three clean, simple sentences that are exemplars of good English: "[I]t is a tribute to the First Amendment that this kind of vile, contemptible nonsense is so freely propagated. Ma'am, trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table. I have no interest in doing it."

The included examples of White's writing, meanwhile, read like excerpts from Sarah Palin's collection of poetry. Maybe if we could get William Shatner to do a reading...

JE: Thanks, Kris! Meanwhile, I fixed the original link.

I knew that White and the 'Dining Room Chair Lady' both got me really frustrated this week but I hadn't realized for how similar of reasons. The revelation actually reversed the order though of who, between the two of them, I found more irksome. DRC Lady and White are both guilty of similar crimes, however White cannot be forgiven on account of ignorance. He is clearly an intelligent and thoughful writer yet apparently has nothing to say by way of substantive dialogue. The point is I think White is aware of his transgressions and continues anyway.

We need to be as relentless about holding people like this accountable for the inanities they spew as they are about spewing it 24/7.

Fair enough, but he doesn't at all have the reach Palin and Fox News do. Does NY Press have all that big a circulation?

You know what, I'd forgotten he was just re-elected as the head of the NY Film Critics Circle, I suppose that puts him in a prominent enough position to be worthy of scorn.

JE: You beat me to it!

There's an inherent narcissism to White’s whole approach to reviewing. His incomprehensible writing suggests that if you don't get what he's saying, then the problem is with you, not with him. Marc Jacobson summed this up best in his profile of White in New York Magazine (where he also reveals that White challenged a fellow film critic to a fight): "The possible notion that Spielberg, eternal box-office boy-king of Hollywood, may embody the Reagan-Clintonist consumerism White claims has ruined serious film appreciation in this country is rejected with little more than a sardonic chuckle. For White, defending Spielberg is a waste of his breath, “a distraction.” If you can’t grasp the self-evident greatness of A.I. and Munich, that’s your problem, not his." Yes, refusing to make a critical argument is such a powerful way to bolster "serious film appreciation."

I think the most representative sentence of White's style that I've read is this kicker from his review of "Star Trek" back in May: "Anyone who accepts [Star Trek] doesn’t respect Eisenstein and Peckinpah’s formal/spiritual innovations and will probably never understand Spielberg’s genre transformation." So if I like Star Trek, I am actually disrespecting Eisenstein and Peckinpah. Instead of lodging a serious critique of Star Trek's many flaws (its unmotivated lens flares, haphazard sense of cutting, incoherent spatial relationships), he makes it a personal attack.

And, yeah, most people reading the New York Press would probably know that Eisenstein and Peckinpah were formally innovative. But "spiritual innovations"? Care to share what you mean, Armond? Do you even know what you mean? It's like he's hinting at a depth of understanding, without ever actually demonstrating that understanding. So instead he falls back on personal attacks, freewheeling generalizations, and academic shorthand to keep us guessing about his arguments rather than having to coherently present one. The emperor has no clothes.

And yet Criterion has dubbed him one of their favored critics for some of their liner notes. And every now and then he comes up with something useful like his liner notes to "Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach."

But as I wrote on Roger Ebert's blog, my main problem with White, aside from taste (which does matter when it's so bad), is that he doesn't have the generosity of spirit needed to be a good film critic. By that I mean, he doesn't seek to meet films on their own terms with curiosity and excitement. Instead of reaching out to films, he demands that they cater to his whims. He isn't on an exploration of world cinema. He's simply trying to be a gatekeeper.

And you're right. White doesn't make arguments. He issues edicts. And what the heck use is that?

But I admit I feel better knowing I can rely on him to puncture holes in the gasbag middlebrow Oscar bait that far too many critics swoon over. I just wish he was more interesting when doing so.

I may be naive, but when did Capra use jump cuts?

JE: "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" (1939) comes to mind. Capra would shoot conversations in, say, two-shots and do several takes without significant changes in the angle. Some takes would be a little more tightly framed than others. Then he'd cut together what he liked. The effect (you can see it in "It's a Wonderful Life," too) is almost subliminal, but it's basically a jump cut -- joining together two shots from virtually the same angle:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jump_cut

It pains me to defend Armond White, but my latest theory is that he is useful BECAUSE he is insane (or because he has assumed the public persona of a madman).

I get more of an intellectual workout from trying to figure out why White is wrong, wrong, WRONG! than I do from reading a review that agrees with me.

A friend of mine who was a huge movie buff could be relied on to hate every worthwhile new movie while lavish praise on every B-grade "Underworld" and "High Tension" because he would give the movie a political / feminist / Marxist reading.

I never came to agree with my friend, even though I did start to see some of the things he was talking about in those movies. But, because of him, I had to clarify my own position and theories on those movies. For instance, because of people like White and this friend of mine, I've decided that movies like "Transformers" and "GI Joe" and "Underworld" don't live or die because of their political implications or commentary on race or consumerism or whatever, they live or die as action movies!

Put simply, if I were 8-years-old, would I want to re-enact any of the stunts from "Transformers" with my friends? No. But I would never tire of getting toy guns and re-enacting the Little Bohemia shootout from "Public Enemies." In their crazy way, the Armond Whites of the world helped me to realize that.

Just think: the world would be a little blander without him.

The whole notion that the lack of spatial logistics in ROTFL isn't just a cliche that's been applied to many other movies, it's wrong as far as I can tell. I haven't seen Made in U.S.A., but in Godard's other movies from the era that I have seen, when Godard creates a discrepancy in continuity, he makes certain that the audience has perfect spatial intelligibility both before and after the cut. After all, that's the whole point: if we aren't certain what's going on, how do we know that there's been a disruption in continuity? In order for it to be a deconstruction of cinema, we have to be able to see exactly what he's doing in order for us to reflect on how he's doing it. In ROTFL and other such movies, it's so difficult to make sense of the space for so much of the time, disruptions in continuity become almost irrelevant because we can't notice them.

By the way, I think I have decoded White's review: "I appreciate Godard's movies, which have been determined to be important and groundbreaking. Therefore, if you disagree with my opinion that ROTFL is good and Harry Potter is bad, you must not be capable of appreciating Godard and, by extension, do not understand the cinema." That little piece of writing seems to be a nice example of the terrorism of obscurity with a little bit of shameless name-dropping thrown in for good measure. He phrases his nonsensical writings in a more effective way than the woman who asked Barney Frank about the "nazi policy," but this only gives his opinion the illusion of substance rather than actual substance.

You know, when I first read White in the form of a review of Depalma's BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES, I actually thought he was pretty perceptive in a fearless way. He was the only critic who "got" the film in the way I "got" it. (I know, I know... save your outrage that a couple of us liked the film's willfully shallow look at a willfully shallow decade.) He actually had a good argument and used a lot of examples from the film.

Still, since then he does seem to have "gone off the deep end," with each review nuttier than the last. Considering his love of Godardian auto-critic, one might want to consider if he's now just pulling our collective leg. Maybe he's engaged in a career long project of film critic self-loathing self-parody.