The Armond White Thread

[Brian C]

What's unintelligible to me is the statement that Jackson "mis[took] F/X for content." Has anyone actually read the books? A. there is no way to film them without without using the level of special effects Jackson did. B. it's a story of heroes walking around killing trolls and goblins. I don't know how much content was expected, but the movies incorporate all the content you're ever going to get out of those books. Unless you blithely make things up as you go along, mountains of mythical creatures being slain is what you're going to get when you film this story. The criticism makes as much sense for LOTR as it would for the 7th Voyage of Sinbad or Jason and the Argonauts.

Movies - even movies like Transformers with inherent reliance on special effects - get criticized all the time for putting more focus on the special effects than story, characters, etc., which is all I took Armond's (typically inelegant) phrasing to mean.

I don't know what the big deal is. I'm hardly the only person to find Jackson's adaptation unsuccessful.

[matrixschmatrix]

I think the problem is that more or less every detail of his (irrelevant) critique is wrong or grossly misleading? I mean,

The precedent was already set by Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings debacle—unintelligible fantasy epics that people went to out of consumerist habit and left unable to recount or fondly recall. Jackson's fantasy overload laid the groundwork for mistaking F/X for content.

They're pefectly intelligible- the plots are actually fairly streamlined- and the accusation that people went to them out of 'consumerist habit and left unable to recount or fondly recall' the movies is just nonsense, given the incredibly hardcore fanbase and extended-edition buying following they have. I mean, I really hate the movie Avatar, but I wouldn't make that claim about it- shoddy though it was, it was evidently a world people felt immersed in, and followed up endlessly in message boards, fanfiction, and evidently tattoos and shit. That is at least equally true of LotR- look at the IMDb ratings, which are a terrible measure of how good a movie is but a great one of how much people care about it. It's pretty well 180 degrees from the 'seeing it because it's out, forgetting it as soon as it's over' thing Armond is claiming here.

As for mistaking CGI for content, that claim is meaningless, because as Sausage points out, CGI is content in that context, as much as special effects were content in the original Star Wars movie. That's part of the nature of a blockbuster, and particularly a fantasy blockbuster. It would be a sensible claim if it were 'has no content other than CGI', but it's not, and as such it's indefensible- like saying that a Western mistook gunfights for content.

The part that really makes me angry, though, is White's sheer contempt for the movie-viewing public. "They like this because they're too stupid to know what's good for them" is about as far from a winsome claim as you can make, and I think that attitude in particular is why people hate him so much- there are plenty of contrarians out there, but most of them don't go out of their way to hate you for liking what you like.

[Mr Sausage]

I don't know what the big deal is. I'm hardly the only person to find Jackson's adaptation unsuccessful.

You're missing my point if you think this is about whether or not anyone likes the movies. It's not (I happen to think the movies successfully represent the middling source material, for whatever it's worth). The (very small) deal is that the actual criticism offered up makes no real sense as a criticism, especially when there are any number of better ones laying around: overlong, monotonous, sentimental, not enough Christopher Lee, ect.

Movies - even movies like Transformers with inherent reliance on special effects - get criticized all the time for putting more focus on the special effects than story, characters, etc., which is all I took Armond's (typically inelegant) phrasing to mean.

Armond loved Transformers 2, so I really don't know how to take it.

[HistoryProf]

the CGI was incredibly well done....I don't see how that's something to whine about. Unless, of course, you just want to whine and deride something popular because it's popular.

Apropos to the most recent infighting thread, I actually think this does come very close to stating opinion as if it were fact. Get a grip, dude - it ought to be possible to think the f/x work was cheesy (e.g., when Legolas takes down the oliphaunt in the third movie) without having motives questioned.

The effects were revolutionary at the time, and did as well as anyone was capable of doing with the almost monumental challenge to create an entire world with special effects. But this has nothing to do with those who took issue with Jackson's adaptations, there have been many perfectly reasonable complaints and you are more than welcome to them. I, for one, enjoyed them, but was not exactly a huge fan.

But the point remains, as Sausage says better than I, that the comment by Armond is completely meaningless in this context. HP has zero to do with LOTR other than they are fantasy novel adaptations who REQUIRE f/x to create their content and are anything but unintelligible. My 7 year old nephew watched Fellowship of the Ring and understood every bit of it. AW is simply incapable of praising anything that is popular and has a disturbing amount of contempt for moviegoers.

[Brian C]

As for mistaking CGI for content, that claim is meaningless, because as Sausage points out, CGI is content in that context, as much as special effects were content in the original Star Wars movie. That's part of the nature of a blockbuster, and particularly a fantasy blockbuster. It would be a sensible claim if it were 'has no content other than CGI', but it's not, and as such it's indefensible- like saying that a Western mistook gunfights for content.

I'm a stupid fucking idiot for defending Armond in the first place, however mildly and I regret it, but ... I know what you and Sausage are saying. All I'm saying is that, however dumbly Armond put it, I think I knew what he meant, as I explained. If I'm being overly charitable, so be it.

By the way, for clarity's sake, I'm referring only to the specific "mistaking f/x for content" phrase in this comment. I do not wish to associate myself with or defend his broader attacks on audiences on the whole, the link between LOTR and the Potter films, etc.

[MichaelB]

They're pefectly intelligible- the plots are actually fairly streamlined- and the accusation that people went to them out of 'consumerist habit and left unable to recount or fondly recall' the movies is just nonsense, given the incredibly hardcore fanbase and extended-edition buying following they have. I mean, I really hate the movie Avatar, but I wouldn't make that claim about it- shoddy though it was, it was evidently a world people felt immersed in, and followed up endlessly in message boards, fanfiction, and evidently tattoos and shit. That is at least equally true of LotR- look at the IMDb ratings, which are a terrible measure of how good a movie is but a great one of how much people care about it. It's pretty well 180 degrees from the 'seeing it because it's out, forgetting it as soon as it's over' thing Armond is claiming here.

I completely agree. I saw all three Lord of the Rings films and Avatar, even though fantasy is far from my favourite genre (growing up with an RPG obsessive scarred me for life on that score), but although I have no especial desire to see any of them again I can easily understand why people have become obsessed with them. And I certainly haven't forgotten them - I must have liked the LOTR films enough to not only voluntarily sit through all three but pay top whack to see them in decent cinemas. (I haven't bought any of them on DVD or Blu-ray, though).

Mind you, one of the challenges of reviewing things for which there's already an obsessively devoted fanbase is that there's a strong possibility that certain things might whizz right over your head thanks to your inability to pick up the relevant references. I recently drew the short straw of reviewing Yu-Gi-Oh! 3D - Bonds Beyond Time for Sight & Sound, which I thought was incomprehensible gibberish from beginning to end - in fact, if it wasn't for an obsessively detailed Wikipedia entry I'd have really struggled to write a coherent synopsis. But it was equally obvious that the film was squarely aimed at people who'd read the manga originals, watched the TV series, seen the other features and doubtless played the videogames as well. So from my perspective the film was a miserable failure because it made no attempt whatsoever to appeal to newcomers - but it's equally clear from delving into fan forums that others consider it a roaring success. And while no-one sane could possibly interpret my review as being positive, I did at least acknowledge this last point, and the fact that I clearly wasn't part of the film's target audience.

[Thomas Dukenfield]

What's unintelligible to me is the statement that Jackson "mis[took] F/X for content."

Based on his other reviews, I think by "content", he means "something that is any good", rather than the content of a medium (book). I have a feeling that if LOTR bombed at the box office, Armond would have written something akin to "the F/X uplift the human spirit, but audiences are too brainwashed by hipster nihilists to appreciate true art".

[colinr0380]

Had you watched the first Yu-gi-Oh movie too Michael? I have only seen that one on a television screening but couldn't shake the idea that the series must basically be a poor man's Pokemon with card games instead of wild animal fights!

[MichaelB]

Had you watched the first Yu-gi-Oh movie too Michael? I have only seen that one on a television screening but couldn't shake the idea that the series must basically be a poor man's Pokemon with card games instead of wild animal fights!

No, but I read my long-suffering colleague Andrew Osmond's review. He seemed to have had a very similar experience to me, only the film he watched was half as long again.

And yes, to the untrained eye the films are exactly like watching people play a variant of Top Trumps with incomprehensible rules.

[colinr0380]

I actually quite enjoyed that first Yu-gi-oh! film - mainly because I liked the way that the amped up conflict between the characters played at the extreme emotion of an action film regularly came to a screeching halt for generic scenes of characters showing off their card collections to each other (If you've ever played any of the Final Fantasy games, those similarly have a yawning disconnect between the 'story' and the 'battle' sequences)

[jojo]

The thing with Yu-gi-oh and other movies of its ilk is that it's this anime industry phenomenon of a product being obviously targeted at a very specific audience being released for a mainstream audience to see, as theatres are still perceived by the majority as something "for everyone". I wonder how Japanese critics review such films? My bet is they largely ignore them, unless they have a relevant or vocal fanbase in numbers (such as Evangelion movies). But probably the latest One Piece or Detective Conan movies go unnoticed by a large majority of Japanese film critics.

[starmanof51]

Last night, I happened across the entry on Godard in David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film. The section that follows is regarding JLG's time as a film critic:

He was an extraordinary critic, hurling down one dogma after another in the pages of Cahier du Cinema and Arts. Richard Bond has said that he was “unkind, unfair, unreasonable,” but that seems secondary to the schizoid mingling of incoherence and penetration in his writing. Already, he was the noble madman, Pierrot le Fou, in that truly useful insights were offered in writing that was appalling, trite, chaotic, and gratuitously unreadable. It came armed with frightful name-dropping from literature and painting. Hardly a film could be classified without reference to Faulkner, Proust, Auguste Renoir, or Velazquez. In part, this was his need for classification, the unappeasable urge to cross-refer rather than to describe a thing itself. And these references are meaningless. What is it to wonder whether eyes are Renoir grey or Velazquez grey, but to doodle with the coffee-table art expertise no different from the grotesque advertisement language parodied in Pierrot? Godard’s criticism is so aggressive that one feels only its insecurity. The craving for a Pantheon and the inverted appeal to conspiracy that hopes for others whose tastes will support the same gods is like the atmosphere of Rivette’s Paris Nous Appartient. It means that his articles are addressed to himself, rather than to readers. The tone is austere and forbidding, as if to exclude others from cinema in the very act of celebrating it.

I haven't read any Godard criticism that I can remember, so I don't know if it's remotely accurate. I do know that with only modest tweaking, I would take this as a pretty good reading of Our Man Armond.

[domino harvey]

Godard's criticism is nothing like Armond White's. One, Godard cares little about the audience, intended or otherwise, of the films he discusses. He is far more concerned with the filmmaker and what he's done with the medium. On occasion he will swipe rival critics from Positif or film festival programmers, but this is political posteuring that fit in well with other Cahiers critics. Two, because the Cahiers policy was to write only about the films one was passionate about, the majority of Godard's writings were effusively positive. As someone steeped in many mediums, Godard used literature and paintings to not only contextualize but legitimize cinema as an art form, as did many film writers before him. Does Godard make many sweeping comments to build up a given director or film? Of course, but with the positive passion of a convert trying to talk a drunkard into a church. White would just as soon assume everyone but the congregation of his church is wasted, so fuck 'em.

[starmanof51]

Godard's criticism is nothing like Armond White's. One, Godard cares little about the audience, intended or otherwise, of the films he discusses. He is far more concerned with the filmmaker and what he's done with the medium. On occasion he will swipe rival critics from Positif or film festival programmers, but this is political posteuring that fit in well with other Cahiers critics. Two, because the Cahiers policy was to write only about the films one was passionate about, the majority of Godard's writings were effusively positive. As someone steeped in many mediums, Godard used literature and paintings to not only contextualize but legitimize cinema as an art form, as did many film writers before him. Does Godard make many sweeping comments to build up a given director or film? Of course, but with the positive passion of a convert trying to talk a drunkard into a church. White would just as soon assume everyone but the congregation of his church is wasted, so fuck 'em.

I'm not saying Godard's criticism is like White's, I'm saying Thomson happens to have written an entry for him that could be repurposed for Armond with the barest of tweaks.

[domino harvey]

You wondered if Thomson's thumbnail was an accurate summation of Godard's criticism, I replied that it wasn't and why.

[starmanof51]

You wondered if Thomson's thumbnail was an accurate summation of Godard's criticism, I replied that it wasn't and why.

No, I didn't actually wonder that. If I did, I probably would have strolled over to a thread about Godard, rather than Armond White.

Not that it's not worth knowing for its own sake, so thanks!

[domino harvey]

You wondered if Thomson's thumbnail was an accurate summation of Godard's criticism, I replied that it wasn't and why.

No, I didn't actually wonder that. If I did, I probably would have strolled over to a thread about Godard, rather than Armond White.

I haven't read any Godard criticism that I can remember, so I don't know if it's remotely accurate.

:-k

[starmanof51]

You wondered if Thomson's thumbnail was an accurate summation of Godard's criticism, I replied that it wasn't and why.

No, I didn't actually wonder that. If I did, I probably would have strolled over to a thread about Godard, rather than Armond White.

I haven't read any Godard criticism that I can remember, so I don't know if it's remotely accurate.

:-k

Try this: "I don't know if it's remotely accurate or not, nor does that particularly animate me, but I'm struck how much this puts me in mind not of Godard, but of Armond White."

[domino harvey]

Which isn't what you said initially. I have no earthly idea why you're pitching a tanty over this, but if there was ever a more appropriate thread to do it in...

[starmanof51]

Which isn't what you said initially. I have no earthly idea why you're pitching a tanty over this, but if there was ever a more appropriate thread to do it in...

Funny, I was wondering the same thing, tanty-wise. If my meaning wasn't clear, I apologize.

[domino harvey]

Can we hug now?

[starmanof51]

Can we hug now?

Sure, but if there was ever a less appropriate thread to do it in...

[swo17]

Finally, the thread's Spielberg moment.

[bella darvi]

Two, because the Cahiers policy was to write only about the films one was passionate about, the majority of Godard's writings were effusively positive.

Didn't Rivette write a scathing review of Kapo in Cashiers?

[Phil]

Two, because the Cahiers policy was to write only about the films one was passionate about, the majority of Godard's writings were effusively positive.

Didn't Rivette write a scathing review of Kapo in Cashiers?

Yes, and it's one of the most passionate pieces of film criticism ever.