Opinion that is against the grain

tHE browsers ecstasy

Several film critics and film bloggers discussed the issue: Can a film studio or movie director or their PR agency ban film critics from seeing a new movie because they fear an unfriendly review? The answer to that is that though it is tasteless and ungracious, they can. Advance Press screenings for film critics is a privilege, not a right. When I reviewed films for the Deccan Herald, there were at least two English theatres in Bangalore that stopped giving me complimentary tickets after I panned two big Hollywood blockbusters in a row. From then on I had to pay for the tickets. I was mostly amused by this reaction: Firstly, I had never asked for freebies, that was how they wanted it (probably in the hope of a favourable review), and secondly I couldn’t imagine that reviews would keep a lot of people away from a movie.

Coming back to the critic everyone was talking about is Armond White, and the film is Greenberg (with Ben Stiller which will release sometime in the middle of March) written and directed by Noah Baumbach, best known for The Squid and the Whale, a movie about a crisis in a literary family that is funny and sad and acutely observed.
The PR agency responded that they did not mean for White to be banned from all the Press screenings, just the first, because White had been known to not only steadily attack all the films by Baumbach, but also make personal remarks about the filmmaker and his mother, Georgia Brown, once the film critic for The Village Voice.
I have, like so many film buffs around the world, admired White’s forceful, brilliant and idiosyncratic writing. He is the most contrarian film critic we have today.
White has just as many detractors as fans who feel he is contrarian for the sake of being contrary. When a new film releases, I read several first string critics and then turn to White’s reviews in The New York Press, and I’m seldom disappointed: Sure enough he has disagreed with all the other critics. If critics praise a performance or a movie, White is trashing it; if they are all damming a film, White tells us why it is a masterpiece. Most film critics respect him even when they strongly disagree with him. However, this Greenberg-Baumbach contretemps had many researching the history of the feud (was it criticism or just personal?) with the result that the film community has now taken sides.

 Lining up for or against White, film critics have quoted the way his review of the director’s last movie, Margot at the Wedding, opened: “Noah Baumbach makes it easy to dislike his films. Problem is, he also makes it easy for New York’s media elite to praise them. Start with his style: The Squid and the Whale and Baumbach’s new Margot at the Wedding are two of the decade’s most repellent movies. Visually, both look like mud; their smart-ass, low-budget affectations (shot by high-price cinematographers) bridge lo-fi mumblecore with Conde Nast hipsterism. This anti-aesthetic lays waste to the bromide that nobody sets out to intentionally make a bad movie; Baumbach does.”

And in an informal 2007 interview, White is quoted as saying, “You look at Noah Baumbach’s work, and you see he’s an a-hole. I would say it to his face. And, of course, he gets praised by other a-holes, because they agree with his selfish, privileged, stuck-up shenanigans.” Here White goes too far and does not play fair. Fellow movie critics who usually defend him have expressed their dismay at how personal the critic had become in this instance alone. It is now easy to see why he was disinvited from the Greenberg screening. I mean, which filmmaker in the world is going to take that kind of diatribe quietly? Roger Ebert, who has supported White even while disagreeing with him on many movies, recently concluded that this incendiary critic’s detractors were right: He was a troll after all, “a smart and knowing one, but a troll.” 

White has apparently been banned before from one other screening. A Spike Lee movie after a long feud between them. White is an African-American critic who pans the films of Spike Lee and defends the films of Steven Spielberg! White has consistently targeted several prestigious A list black films, including recently Precious, for their awfulness or wrong headedness. He thought Transformers 3 was better than The Dark Knight. On the Rotten Tomatoes meter the only thing that kept District 9 from a 100 percent rating was White’s sole negative review of it! (He got a lot of hate mail from fanboys for that). There’s a site just dedicated to closely scrutinising and challenging the reviews of this critic called ‘Armond Dangerous: Parsing the Confounding Film Criticism of Mr Armond White’ (!).

Another site lists all the films White reviews and divides them into the films he disliked and the films he liked, once again to show — in their view — that he is a troll for damming critically acclaimed movies and praising flops and misfires. I find myself agreeing with most films White has called overrated but not with the films he offers as better replacements. White has been unique as a critic in always substituting what he thinks is a overpraised film with a film he thinks was underrated or overlooked or unjustly panned. Whether one agrees with him or not, I think a critic like Armond White (when he is not being personal) is essential to have in any film culture: Someone who can be counted on to offer a judgment or point of view that is contrary and provocative and against the grain. Above all, to not spare films for their questionable politics and aesthetics; to sniff it out quickly and sharply. Now, if only we could come up with a desi Armond White!