The Armond White Thread

[Forrest Taft]

The Sandler Memo. As the ghost of Andrew Breitbart says, You'll want to read it all.

Who celebrates Todd Phillips as a cultural hero?

[Jeff]

How is this man regarded within the industry? Is he just a pet project for this forum, or is he widely syndicated and 'respected' by his peers?...Did his writing and persona change with the growth of the internet?...Is he taking the piss?

I think he's regarded as a pathetic joke amongst most professional critics now, but he used to be a moderately respected guy who wrote regularly for Film Comment and penned several Criterion essays. This contrarian "man of the people" persona seems to have been developed more or less over the past decade. There seems to be some evidence to suggest that it's all a put-on designed to draw attention to an increasingly marginalized figure in a dying profession, but it's possible that it's just your run of the mill descent into madness.

[Gregory]

There may be differences in his career then vs. now, but I think a lot of his nonsense goes way back and many were just more hesitant to call him out for it when he was riding high. I haven't read as much of him as many on here, but from pieces I remember from 10 years ago or more, it seems he's long had a screw loose or has consciously built a career on making inflammatory statements and odd analogies to see if people would buy them (and they very often did). The "man of the people" persona may have been something he adopted as fewer and fewer were willing to listen to him apply a limited range of ideas from familiar discourse about racial politics to his subjects in ways that IMO often strained all credibility.

For example, his lengthy takedown of Eminem, which, among many other claims, stated that Eminem could never match Flavor Flav's ingenuity (I love PE as much as anyone, but lets be serious about Flav's limits here) and basically suggested that Eminem and even the Beastie Boys were like Pat Boone, doing nothing but appropriating and watering down black music for white audiences and the white media establishment.

I also remember his review of Bridges of Madison County, in which he took serious issue with Eastwood using black vocalists on the soundtrack to a movie about white characters (pointing out Hollywood's scant interest in exploring black emotional lives -- a sound observation in itself, but where White went with it was totally ridiculous: as if Johnny Hartman's crooning of songs by white songwriters, etc. belongs strictly within a black context).

There was also his rambling review of Jay-Z's The Blueprint after Sept. 11, which strained to make Jay-Z's persona and that album in particular extremely timely and relevant to the issues of patriotism and war that were on most people's minds, despite the album having been completed pre-9/11 and lacking much if any content to lend it that kind of relevance.
There was also the strange and seemingly personal vendetta against Spike Lee from way back then. I'm sure the list goes on and on.

[cocaine socialist]

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[domino harvey]

What's Rip Torn doing and can he bring a hammer?

[wattsup32]

In his Magic Mike review, our hero writes this:

While avoiding the overblown existentialism of P.T. Anderson’s Boogie Nights, Soderbergh’s still arty.

That's a criticism. It's "arty." If there's one thing I hate in a work of art, it's art.

[The Narrator Returns]

And here's another, distinctly Armond, gem from the review:

If anything can be said with certainty in this life it’s that people who want to make furniture don’t become sex-workers. That term fits Soderbergh’s low-level shots of dollar-bills-in-thongs–a laughable Bresson affectation. But Magic Mike isn’t an analysis of leisure-as-work like Godard cinched in his capitalism/prostitution allegories A Married Woman or 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (which were also insightful essays on contemporary Paris).

[HistoryProf]

is it just me or does he seem to lose his grasp on basic grammar and punctuation rules a little more with ever review? Like the above post, there are run on sentences galore in his recent ramblings.

His spoofing of political correctness and middle-brow propriety is the real reason behind all the haterade which became ridiculous after last year‘s ingenious, heartfelt Jack and Jill provoked an endless backlash of unprecedented lunacy and vitriol.

Aside from the idiotic content, he's literally becoming unreadable.

[matrixschmatrix]

Ridiculous haterade comprising an endless backlash of unprecendented lunacy and vitriol. Good, clear writing there.

[Murdoch]

Haters gonna haterade.

[wattsup32]

When life gives you haters, make haterade.

[Grand Illusion]

Why did CinemaScope steal Armond White's "This Is Better Than That" format for an article about Cannes?

[domino harvey]

Who is this joke and why was he allowed to be published anywhere people could see? Did the world need bon mots like

A guaranteed bore, Walter Salles’ On the Road is a film I did not see, have no interest in seeing, and will never see.

[matrixschmatrix]

What the hell kind of critic falls asleep at fully a third of the films he's reviewing and brags about it

[knives]

Roger Ebert.

[Grand Illusion]

What the hell kind of critic falls asleep at fully a third of the films he's reviewing and brags about it

At least he went into the theater unlike the Salles film.

[mfunk9786]

The fact that someone bankrolled a trip to Cannes for him with a press pass and everything makes me want to throw up

[John Cope]

Peranson has been a Cannes curmudgeon for years now. It's almost his schtick by this point. I've actually grown to find it kind of endearing, as with much Armond.

[McCrutchy]

You know, lately I've really been wondering (especially now that I see he has a Twitter account, which I had no idea about) as I often do, whether the man himself reads boards like this, and even participates via pseudo-identities...it would go a long way towards the idea that he is now being more of an evil, contrarian persona than a serious film critic.

[zedz]

Peranson has been a Cannes curmudgeon for years now. It's almost his schtick by this point. I've actually grown to find it kind of endearing, as with much Armond.

Mark Peranson is actually a nice guy, but that particular schtick is pretty unbearable, and I worry that he's painting himself into a corner with the persona (peransona?) he adopts when writing these things.

[scoundrel]

I heard an interview with Elvis Mitchell recently in which he reveals that he's friends with White and insists that White is absolutely not crazy or trolling.

[tavernier]

yawn

[HistoryProf]

that was as predictable than tomorrow's sunrise.

[wattsup32]

yawn

You'll have to take my word for this, but on the basis of seeing "yawn" linked and then the posting after this one calling it predictable, I'm guessing it is a pan of the TDKR in which the word "fanboys" is used.

[starmanof51]

yawn

You'll have to take my word for this, but on the basis of seeing "yawn" linked and then the posting after this one calling it predictable, I'm guessing it is a pan of the TDKR in which the word "fanboys" is used.

I'm not taking the bait, but I'd also bet a sawbuck on "hipster" and "Spielberg".