All evidence to the contrary, I generally try to be open-minded towards other opinions on film. I may ridicule the idea that everything is subjective and that there's no distinction between a fan of Transformers and a fan of Citizen Kane, but I'm willing to accept reasonable debate. After all, a gentleman who dislikes There Will Be Blood and Barry Lyndon can't be too stuck up on this issue; film is an art and no two people will agree on everything. However, there are limits to which I'm willing to accept this, and a point where opinions go from acceptable to just plain dumb.
Which brings us to Armond White. The film critic for the New York Press has gained a great deal of infamy for his bizarre, contrarian opinions. Recently, none other than Roger Ebert wrote an article defending White's iconcolasm - only to retract it and admit he is a "troll". He is a figure of ridicule all over the Internet, even having a (now-defunct) blog devoted to lambasting his writings. Where White sees a brilliant, unique and controversial contrarian, most people see a race-baiting, self-aggrandizing, tasteless (and gormless) imbecile.
Lest you think Mr. White is being unfairly lambasted, let's look at a few of his reviews over the past few years:
- In his review of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen - universally panned by critics, but embraced by the popcorn blockbuster crowd - White says that director Michael Bay is "a real visionary" with "a great eye for scale and a gift for visceral amazement". If by amazement one means incredulity at a film's slack-jawed, effects-driven mindlessness, then I think he has a case.
- The much-beloved and garlanded Slumdog Millionaire is, in White's estimation, "pandering to liberal sensibilities while entertaining safe, middle-class distance", "absolving the white man’s burden with game-show flash and shrillness", and calls director Danny Boyle "a poverty pimp with an Avid". (Give him this much: if nothing else, White knows how to turn a phrase.)
- The towering comedic masterpiece Little Man "zeroes in on our culture’s usual infantilization of the black male, satirizing it as a literal form of bastardization". Funny, I thought it was an awful movie with a Wayans brother's face CGI'd on a child's body. Similarly, Eddie Murphy's Norbit is "a spoof on American gentility which Murphy then integrates with explosive caricatures" and is "enough to confirm his status as the most brilliant comic actor in America", even better than the late Peter Sellers!
- There Will Be Blood is, in White's eyes, a film which "personif(ies) everything that’s wrong in American character: greed, selfishness, stinginess and unchecked ambition", claiming that "Americans are meant to identify with Plainview for the worst aspects of themselves". Fair enough, as I'm not the biggest fan of the film myself, But, he does praise Daniel Day-Lewis' performance as "is the most remarkable movie performance since Eddie Murphy’s Norbit trifecta", so that's good.
These are just a few of the more obnoxious examples. Here's a quick chart to help you further break down Mr. White's decidedly eclectic taste.
The point is not that White simply strays from the critical consensus more often than most. There just doesn't seem much point to it; it doesn't seem his genuine opinion so much as an esoteric intellectual exercise. The late Pauline Kael, the matriarch of modern film criticism, brought snooty contrarianism to an art form; in White's hands, it seems like an erudite film student spouting off jargon to impress his professors. Or is it? Is he perhaps a master satirist, deliberately eschewing film criticism for all to see?
It's really difficult to gauge White's seriousness. His article on Little Man is critical analysis at its absolute worst. You could read a message of black society into Little Man, but you're much more likely to find it a juvenile, idiotic bodily function comedy. This is pretty close to the Jacques Rivette line of shit that Monkey Business is a masterpiece just because it's a Howard Hawks film. He seems to praise lowest common denominator trash as a challenge - either an attempt to see just how far you can possibly take film analysis, or as a massive joke on his readers. Certainly the archaic verbiage and compulsion to name-drop literary, philosophical and filmic references into every review wreaks of parodying a blog written by a wannabe film student. The results are devoid of any intellectual or critical merit - but, one must admit, extremely entertaining, in the way that Billy Jack is entertaining.
White is also preoccupied with issues of race, which I suppose is fair enough, if this obsession didn't manifest itself so obnoxiously. This article on Eddie Murphy suggests that anyone who dislikes his films - except for the despised-by-him Dreamgirls, Murphy's one post-Beverly Hills Cop performance most everyone can agree is good, but which White sees as "soul-rotting" - is a racist. That includes the universally-trashed Norbit and Meet Dave, which he claims contain insightful messages on the state of race relations in America. He wrote a similar article on marginally-funny black comic Tyler Perry, asserting roughly the same. Sometimes a spade's a spade, or a bad comic a bad comic, and race has nothing to do with it. Even more oddly, though, he spends an inordinate amount of time slamming Samuel L. Jackson, Will Smith and Spike Lee, presumably for "selling out to the Man" (track those reviews down yourself).
In this regard, White seems a parodic caricature of critics who read completely spurious "insight" and analyses into everything - the "Marxist", "Feminist", "Queer" and "Post-Modern" critics which every English, Theatre and Film student must suffer through at some point in high school and college, reading everything from Moby-Dick to a Geico commercial through the narrow prism of their personal obsession (and then writing a 25-page essay on it). (I will never forget the bottomlessy-stupid essay I once read on how Sense and Sensibility is a metaphor for female mastrubation.) I have to admit that I doubt it's intentional. If it is, though, White is a satiric genius.
Whether Armond White is serious or taking the piss out of his readers is unknowable. Either way, he's a dope who writes some of the most unintentionally hilarious reviews out there. God bless Mr. White, the Leprechaun of Film Critics; I hope to be ridiculing you for some time.
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