I can't conceive of how retaining Terence Moore would not reduce, let alone broaden, their national profile. I mean that guy is terrible.

AOL is still around? Why?

I can't conceive of how retaining Terence Moore would not reduce, let alone broaden, their national profile. I mean that guy is terrible.

I'm reasonably convinced Armond White has almost solely destroyed the NY Press. How the editors don't see this is beyond me.

AOL is still around? Why?

The Sporting News is still around? Why?

I'm reasonably convinced Armond White has almost solely destroyed the NY Press.
Do you really think he makes that much of a difference one way or the other (to their future)?

“We’re focusing on those national voices that created a differentiation,” Price said.

But their columnists, in the context of the columnist world, are second-rate. At least that's my perception.

But this is pretty much the Sporting New Radio strategy as well (with the exception of Steve Czaban, who's an idiot but puts on a good "sports morning zoo" type of show that is far preferable to the ESPN radio guys opposite him).

My best friend and I used to edit NY Press, and we would have fired everyone else at the paper and written the entire thing ourselves if it had been necessary to keep Armond there. He is one of the real journalistic treasures of the United States, equally vital whether writing about Bresson or Precious.

My best friend and I used to edit NY Press, and we would have fired everyone else at the paper and written the entire thing ourselves if it had been necessary to keep Armond there. He is one of the real journalistic treasures of the United States, equally vital whether writing about Bresson or Precious.

If you say so. But saying that Jonah Hex is a superior film to True Grit is pretty indicative of too much of what I've read of his over the years, and every time I check back, it's something similar. He provides a definite smidgen of good writing and good insight swimming in loads of utterly pretentious hater crap, IMO.

I knew a girl in college who had an epiphany once in a conversation about the fact that she and her friends loved to date boys who were jerks and terrible - so they could find that one kernel of goodness that existed surrounded by all that awfulness. And then.... they were left with all that awfulness surrounding a tiny bit of good.

EDIT: I would like to say with full disclosure that I have tried and tried throughout the years to like the NY Press, and never, ever have. I've been reading it on and off since 1994. From Mugger to Taki to Taibbi to White it has been a publication that has seemed to take pride in being full of utterly unhappy bile. No one has to be happy all the time, but if the paper seems to pride itself on the fact that everyone writing it is unhappy and disdainful of everything all the time, I can't understand how that would seem sustainable.


Do you really think he makes that much of a difference one way or the other (to their future)?

I'm not sure, but something has made their most recent issue 8 whole pages of new material. I can't imagine anyone's blameless.

When White first came to the NY Press, I found him sometimes interesting, but after awhile it was obvious he was hitting the same notes again and again. Still, when they had White, Matt Zoller Seitz and Godfrey Chesire all covering film, it was awesome.

For a less charitable view, here's the A.V. Club:

Armond White debuts live version of his contrarian dick act at New York Film Critics Circle Awards

I can't conceive of how retaining Terence Moore would not reduce, let alone broaden, their national profile. I mean that guy is terrible.

Seriously. If I were a rich bastard I'd be buying Fanhouse for the sole purpose of putting him out of a job.

Seriously. If I were a rich bastard I'd be buying Fanhouse for the sole purpose of putting him out of a job.

Careful. He'd just start writing a (Not quite) blog (But not really).

Naa...I'd go overboard. "Make him jobless, homeless, penniless and...hairless."

Really, though, I think the only person I've hated longer than Terence Moore is Bud Selig, and while it's true my loathing for them did nurture me through my formative years, I continue to bear them all possible ill will.

Armond is no hater. All you have to do is read him on Demy, Melville, Burnett or, yes, Spielberg to tell. I don't always agree with his line on junk films—Transformers 2? really?—but then I don't really read him for his taste in junk films, and he's often right anyway. Better a moment of Bernie Mac than everything Noah Baumbach has ever put to film!

As to the decline of the paper and the size of its edit hole, that certainly has nothing to do with Armond, it has to do with alt-weeklies having taken their place alongside the eight-track. Besides which, boy could I tell some stories about that place. A favorite: I was rooting around in my desk right after I took the job and found three months' worth of freelancers' checks. Another: The guy who owned the shop at the time kept telling us to run the paper according to his mantra of "Colorful, clever and classy." Finally we told him that the paper's main income stream was ads for whores and he looked wounded, then tried to convince us to hire someone to write a weekly column on ATM fees, that being the sort of thing the kids wanted to read about.

I think Armond White is about as bad a critic as could be imagined. He is unprofessional, makes constant personal attacks, commits several errors of fact, is intellectually dishonest, and writes in an incoherent style.

I could go on and on, but I think this analysis of his Toy Story 3 review (you don't need to know or care about Toy Story 3 to read this, though it's probably worth scrolling down a bit to get the actual breakdown) sums up a lot of his problems. Also, there are the famous cases of his wishing retroactive abortion upon Noah Baumbach (and then denying he ever did so when presented with the citation), going back to his (White's) conflicts with Baumbach's mother (wherein White labeled her a racist and refused to present his case), or his positive review of The Hurt Locker, a movie that once it was embraced by other critics he turned against without explanation, and even started using aspects of the movie that he had initially praised as reasons to dislike it vis-a-vis such classics as GI Joe.

As to the decline of the paper and the size of its edit hole, that certainly has nothing to do with Armond, it has to do with alt-weeklies having taken their place alongside the eight-track.

Coming from the reader side rather than the production side, I am going to have to respectfully disagree. I kicked myself for not acknowledging the obvious print media black hole in my initial critique, but the content of the paper is not some kind of insignificant factor in a city the size of New York. People would - and DID, when it was better than it is now - a counter to the Village Voice. I'm not buying it. The declining quality and content is a bigger reason than the internet in this case.

As far as telling stories about the place, you don't really have to, I've known contributors myself. Not to mention the hilarious public sex-columnist debacle among other things.

Lastly, the fact that that you had to dig up Melville for an example of things that White doesn't hate seems to prove my point more than yours. I will again admit that I've read enough to see his insight, when it comes. But even Rey Odonez hit the ball sometimes.

My problem with the Press was that it always seemed to be having a meta conversation with the other rags in the city and I just wasn't interested in that. Maybe I haven't read the right White articles, but my impression of him is that he's a troll. It's been a few years since I've read the Press so maybe I'm being unfair. The good thing about the Press was that no one I worked with had heard of it so I didn't get any crap for having a copy on my desk. If I had the Voice on my desk I would get weird looks.

There isn't anything to disagree about. There was a point where the Press had Sam Sifton, Chris Caldwell, Alexander Cockburn and William Monahan among others all regularly writing, plus the best film section in the country. That wasn't just down to having good editors; the shop had money. The problem isn't that people won't pick up a free paper, the problem is that there isn't advertising revenue (plus other sources of money) to support the kind of content that would inspire people to pick up a free paper. All the other problems the place has had are comical, but they aren't the issue, nor is Armond. How can anyone help but love a man who wrote the following two grafs?

"It is man that we need. A look caught with surprise can be sublime." That's Robert Bresson quoted in Babette Mangolte's The Models of Pickpocket (showing at Anthology Film Archives), a documentary exploring the mystery of Bresson's art by interviewing the performers of his 1959 film Pickpocket 43 years later. Mangolte investigates the processes that made Bresson's films distinctive, but her inquiry into the phenomenon of film acting is a pop-art coup. It dovetails with Bernie Mac's remarkable performance in Mr. 3000.

Comic-turned-actor Mac intuitively and instructively reveals a mutual sensitivity to the dilemma of a public figure fighting for his place in history. With Pickpocket, Bresson gave its principal actors Pierre Leymarie, Marika Green and Martin Lasalle a form of immortality. First called "interpreters," then "models," they all feel that their lives were changed by working with "Monsieur Bresson." Leymarie carries the memory into his work as a genetics researcher, Green became a professional actress and Lasalle pursued various career options as actor, painter, gardener, always haunted by Bresson's influence. Each performer admits how they "gave" themselves to Bresson. Years later they understood his dictum, "When the model is free of all intentionality, his expressiveness is adequate for the filmmaker." This is not just a high-art command; one gorges on the honest and authentic humor of Mac's characterization.

How can anyone help but love a man who wrote the following two grafs?

Because I've also read stuff like this:

[INTERVIEWER]: You learned from Margot at the Wedding, a great film. (laughs)

Armond White: Yeah, sure. Not from that #######. (laughs) Part of the problem, not part of the solution.

[INTERVIEWER]: I ran into two guys who recently interviewed you at the New York Film Festival and they said they were shocked that you liked Darjeeling Limited ‘cause they weren’t expecting you to. But when I listened to the interview, you threw me for a loop by saying that Wes Anderson was good friends with this guy [Margot and the Wedding director] Noah Baumbach, that he’s friends with an #######. How could you say that? Do you know him? Do you personally know these guys to say that Baumbach is an aasshole, Wes Anderson is a good guy, and it’s a mystery to you why they’re friends?

AW: Look at the movies. That’s how I know. You’re aware of what D.H. Lawrence said about writing…? Trust the tale, not the teller. So, Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach, they can tell you what they believe they’re about. They can get on a podium and say, “This is what I believe in, this is what I feel, this is what I love, this is what I dislike…” Can’t trust any of that. You’ve got to look at the movie. You look at Noah Baumbach’s work, and you see he’s an ####### I would say it to his face. And, of course, he gets praised by other ########, because they agree with his selfish, privileged, stuck-up shennanigans. I don’t need to meet him to know that. better than meeting him, I’ve seen his movies.

This didn't stop the NY Press from assigning White to review Baumbach's Greenberg; when his screening was delayed he cried foul, and attacked the publicist in print:

[The publicist] Dart demonstrates her disregard for the truth and her preference for gossip over bylined criticism. She defends her ban decision by referring to illegitimate, unauthorized blog items, that I allegedly impugned Baumbach as “an asshole”.

So, despite, calling the guy an ####### several times in the course of an interview, White flat-out denies calling Baumbach an #######. But then, in that same rebuttal, he said "Dart’s objection to the perfectly apt '#######' as a Baumbach description is laughable" ... so I guess he is calling him an #######?

It could be that White's project as a critic is to destroy criticism. It's not hard to talk pretty about anything, really. I can use plenty of French and German philosophy to explain the design and utilitarian genius of my Pilot G-2 ballpoint pen. (My favorite pen. Love those things.) It could be I'm underestimating him. I wonder what the experience of reading White's reviews collected into book form would be like?

And who can forget White's great exegesis of The Hurt Locker, as I alluded to above?

The Hurt Locker’s prologue, “War is a drug,” suggests it could be about any war. This is a breakthrough in the pop-war genre that, since Vietnam, has accustomed us to sentimental agit-prop.

[...]

So far, the best fiction films about the Iraq War are Nick Bloomfield’s Battle for Haditha, Irwin Winkler’s Home of the Brave and John Moore’s allegorical Flight of the Phoenix remake, which Bigelow evokes in a stand-off scene between Bravo company, a group of British contractors and distant insurgent snipers. It’s sufficient praise to say The Hurt Locker joins that short list.

Pretty good, right?

From his Lorna's Silence review:

When Lorna’s pimp tells her “You shouldn’t worry about it, a junkie prefers drugs to life,” it recalled the misconception in Kathryn Bigelow’s now overrated The Hurt Locker that “war is a drug.” The pimp’s alibi is another art-movie fallacy.

How did the "War is a drug" line turn from a "breakthrough" into "another art-movie fallacy"? And how telling is the phrase "now overrated"? The problem was that White miscalculated, and when the critical establishment and audiences embraced The Hurt Locker, he had to turn against it. He continued to do so:

It is worst than inexact when critics call [The Hurt Locker] “One of the best war films ever made.” Any appreciation of Bigelow’s artistic ambitions and psychosexual, gender-bending sensibility forces one to understand that The Hurt Locker is not a war film but another of her explorations into the masculine thrill complex. It is disingenuous to use The Hurt Locker as an opportunity to comment upon the Iraq War—hijacking its dubious treatment on combat as a mental dysfunction (“War is a Drug”) beyond Bigelow’s deliberately noncommittal stance.

This misreading of The Hurt Locker has gotten twisted-up in the mainstream media’s Oscar hoopla. Bigelow’s unexceptional film has gotten her heroized as an exceptional American female filmmaker through way-late feminism.

A trollish view; he has stopped even caring about the movie, and while he flirts with the potential of an interesting discussion situating the film in Bigelow's career, he simply yells at everyone else for being wrong, and continues to harp against a line that he once declared as a liberating positive.

What little he has to contribute to intelligent discourse is overshadowed by his megalomania, dishonesty, self-contradictions, cruelty, and incoherence. Other than that, he's great.

There isn't anything to disagree about. There was a point where the Press had Sam Sifton, Chris Caldwell, Alexander Cockburn and William Monahan among others all regularly writing, plus the best film section in the country. That wasn't just down to having good editors; the shop had money. The problem isn't that people won't pick up a free paper...

Well, yes, there is. We're disagreeing about whether or not New York City is a lost cause for a quality free weekly to counter the Voice. I'm disagreeing that work has been done to pick up good, young, hungry writers of quality and instead stay with goons like White, who I doubt is working for free.

As far as what you've quoted, I don't really know what to say. It is quite easy for me and thousands of New Yorkers to not love those ridiculously pretentious grafs, and that lack of love has an effect on the advertisers, no matter what you think. Do have any other answer to his detractors and endless easy examples of terribleness?

I can use plenty of French and German philosophy to explain the design and utilitarian genius of my Pilot G-2 ballpoint pen.

I see no need to justify the G-2, it is beyond criticism.

There was a point where it wasn't a lost cause. I took a ridiculous pay cut to work there because I thought it wasn't. At this point, though, the format is just dead. It isn't as if the Voice is doing so well, and the Reader can't even find an editor.

I think that calling two paragraphs where someone straightfacedly compares Bernie Mac's performance as Stan Ross to the performances in Pickpocket "pretentious" misses the point. I don't know about responding to his detractors; some make good points about how his schtick gets in the way of his aesthetic, some are just idiots, some don't get his sense of humor, some have bad taste in movies, some have perfectly good taste in movies that just differs from his. I'm not going to lump them all together.

I guess you could start by defending him against the criticisms I have laid out here.

I think Armond White is about as bad a critic as could be imagined. He is unprofessional, makes constant personal attacks, commits several errors of fact, is intellectually dishonest, and writes in an incoherent style.

And most importantly, he has terrible taste.

It could be that White's project as a critic is to destroy criticism. It's not hard to talk pretty about anything, really.

White is one of those reviewers whose prose is so florid and academic that it seems entirely divorced from the film itself. You can read the review, be impressed with the intelligence of the reviewer, and yet have absolutely no idea why he liked or disliked the film.

So there's that, and that's bad enough, but you have to add in his trollish tendency (his obsessive need to distance himself from other critics) and his insane tastes (loved Norbit!).

A great example of all of this disgusting weirdness is his review of the newest Indiana Jones film, which of course was absolutely ghastly, just horrifyingly bad.

During a marathon Kingdom of the Crystal Skull chase scene—one of those non-stop, gear-shifting, three-ring-circuses-on-wheels that you expect from the series—a brief interval shows a character bounced from a hurtling jeep and then moving bodily through trees as if in an aerial ballet. The details of this swinging, rapturous jetée must be seen to be believed (and its humor instantaneously interpreted). Spielberg turns a jokey, lowbrow movie reference into a distillation of character and an anthropological theorem—without ever slowing the moment’s pace, or lessening its significance as a plot point. Film craft at this level is wondrous indeed, not only surpassing expectations for the Indiana Jones formula (action, action, action) but enhancing it with a bonus of suggestive lyricism.

For those who have forgotten the scene, it's the one where Shia LeBoeuf is flung from a jeep into a tree, notices monkeys swinging from branch to branch, has a kind of embarrassing eureka moment, and then outpaces the car chase by swinging through the trees monkey-style.

The astonishing image of Indy rising from post-WWII rubble to observe a nuclear mushroom cloud has the effect of situating historical catastrophe in modern terms... It simultaneously updates the Raiders series’ original, mid-century setting while implicating the modern audience as conscious, wide-eyed witnesses to the phenomena of modernity. Playfulness at this level gives way to shock and awe.

This is for when Indy survives a nuclear bomb by hiding in a fridge at the epicenter of the blast. He is flung a mile or two into the air and then walks away from the crash like Wile E Coyote. Both of these scenes made me want to vomit, and I mean that literally, they disgusted me in a visceral way that art usually is not capable of. The cynicism, carelessness and shocking enormity of poor taste sickened me. White's take on these scenes must be comedy, right?

White's take on these scenes must be comedy, right?

I've long felt White must be conducting a career-long experiment in his audience's gullibility. Which was even kind of fun at first, but like any act that stays the same too long, it's gotten pretty tired.

I don't care if a critic agrees with me. Hell, White agrees with me on some movies, such as those of Whit Stillman. What concerns me is if the critique (or apologia) is insightful and thought-provoking, if it makes me think of the movie from a new perspective, or brings things to light that I may not have thought about. Or, sure, if it summarizes views I had that I was unable to formulate in quite the same way.

I was wondering how an article about Sporting News could generate so many comments. Simple: Talk about something other than Sporting News.

There was a point where it wasn't a lost cause. I took a ridiculous pay cut to work there because I thought it wasn't. At this point, though, the format is just dead. It isn't as if the Voice is doing so well, and the Reader can't even find an editor.

I freely admit - as I did in the beginning - that I'm coming at this point from a reader and consumer perspective. My take on the current viability is philosophical and on-the-ground, so the validity is theoretical, absolutely. I still think I'm right, of course, but until someone makes it work or the Press returns to a level of respectability it's pretty hard to back up my claim.

The claim that Armond White is a terrible critic is something else entirely, however.

I don't care if a critic agrees with me. Hell, White agrees with me on some movies, such as those of Whit Stillman. What concerns me is if the critique (or apologia) is insightful and thought-provoking, if it makes me think of the movie from a new perspective, or brings things to light that I may not have thought about.

First and foremost, I want a critic to tell me whether or not a movie is worth seeing, and I want to be able to rely on his opinion. I feel like that's the number one job of a critic. Armond White is 100% useless for this purpose.

I was wondering how an article about Sporting News could generate so many comments. Simple: Talk about something other than Sporting News.

Indeed, this is one of the most interesting threadjacks I've ever seen here.

Speaking of film, I'm going to see "The Leopard" tonight at the Film Forum. The sick, twisted horror of White is that for sheer entertainment's sake I'd be curious what he thinks of it. I suppose there's some value in THAT to the paper, but having a sideshow draw isn't particularly awesome.

I don't know thing one about the inner workings of the New York Press, but I do know this: I would never have heard of it if not for Armond White. I suspect I'm not alone in this, and I suspect that his particular brand of insanity draws enough pageviews to make his employment there more than worthwhile.

I wouldn't dispute this, but I can't be the only one in the city who - when walking by a NY Press box and contemplating picking one up - thinks "ugh, Armond White, fucck it" and just keeps walking.

First and foremost, I want a critic to tell me whether or not a movie is worth seeing, and I want to be able to rely on his opinion. I feel like that's the number one job of a critic. Armond White is 100% useless for this purpose.

Actually, if you just assume that you'd hate any movie he liked and vice versa, you'd get a lot closer to seeing only good movies than following a lot of other critics the conventional way.

Finally we told him that the paper's main income stream was ads for whores and he looked wounded, then tried to convince us to hire someone to write a weekly column on ATM fees, that being the sort of thing the kids wanted to read about.

The whores charge extra for ATM, obviously.

I'm not familiar with White's body of work (at least until I read this thread and some linked articles), but the fact that he like Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer sealed the deal for me. To this day, that's the only movie I've ever been angry at after watching it.

To this day, that's the only movie I've ever been angry at after watching it.

So, did you actually expect a good movie or are you a comics fan distressed over minutiae in the portrayal of Richard Reed?

I don't know thing one about the inner workings of the New York Press, but I do know this: I would never have heard of it if not for Armond White.

I would have never heard of it it not for Repoz linking Tim Marchman.

did you actually expect a good movie or are you a comics fan distressed over minutiae in the portrayal of Richard Reed?

Reed Richards designed shoe bombs for al-Qaeda, but his worked, dammit!

So, did you actually expect a good movie or are you a comics fan distressed over minutiae in the portrayal of Richard Reed?

Neither. But I expected to at least be moderately entertained for an hour and half. My roommate (who paid for the rental) and I were not amused by it at all.

I can't really explain it. We were left in disbelief that anything could be so bad. Perhaps anger isn't the right term.

Reed Richards designed shoe bombs for al-Qaeda, but his worked, dammit!

Oops. I fear they will recall my nerd card.

Worst. Malapropism. Ever.