Every once in a while, I feel like Armond White is speaking for me in ways that I don’t speak.
Here is an excerpt of his review of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford…
There
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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?
So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.
And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.
There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.
I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.
So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.
But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”
My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher
“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.
~ David Simon
Armond White likes “Sahara.” End of discussion. 🙂
Why, it’s the new Brokeback Mountain!
“…following some strain of errant homosexual attraction among these men. Despite numerous reasons to suspect Ford
Armond didn’t like Dreamgirls either.
‘Armond didn’t like Dreamgirls either’
Then perhaps there’s hope for him.
Armond be Armond. Love him when he agrees with you, dismiss him when he doesn’t.
But I’m a fan of THE LONG RIDERS (and pretty much everything Hill directed pre-BREWSTER’S MILLIONS – though I bet Armond’s got an apologia for that one, too). A best-case scenario would have TAOJJBTCRF (whew!) garnering some awards heat and necessitating a Special Edition DVD of Hill’s underrated film.
Wake me when Armond weighs in on REDACTED.
I have to say, re: Redacted, I was surprised when Armond admitted that he liked but didn’t love The Black Dahlia (but he blamed it on Ellroy, not DePalma).
I’m always surprised when anyone admits to liking The Black Dahlia…it’s been a year and that movie still makes me angry for being so terrible.
(well, I liked it too, he said meekly yet firmly)
The Black Dahlia is the terrible price you pay for hiring actors who think cigarettes are only props.
Really, Jeff? The wooden acting by Hartnett and Johannsen was one thing. But it seemed terribly misconceived from the beginning. Hillary Swank as a sexy femme fatale? And having her supposed to be a doppelganger for Mia Kirshner, despite the fact that they don’t look anything alike? And the ending with Fiona Shaw going batshit insane?
Sorry, that movie just makes me angry because I actually had some hopes for it and aside from some very cool shadows and lighting, it was just one bad idea poorly executed after another.
I thoroughly enjoyed Fiona Shaw going batshit insane. It was probably the high point of the movie for me.
Matt Zoller Seitz wrote the best review of the movie that I saw, although he was more forgiving than I was.
Jeff, Armond later wrote a second far more positive review of Black Dahlia for Cineaste. White’s review of Redacted will be one of the big events of the fall season, one of his favorite pet filmmakers doing an anti-Iraq war film (his least favorite subject ever) and being pretty explicit about what the film is about in interviews so White can pretend evil hipster critics are misreading it; the amount of rethoric in that review is sure to be very entertainment.
Ah, I missed the second one. He must have thought to himself, ‘wait a minute, I called Mission to Mars a masterpiece, surely I can find some more to salvage in this movie’.
I’m just disappointed that Armond Dangerous seems to have been abandoned.
“Hillary Swank as a sexy femme fatale? And having her supposed to be a doppelganger for Mia Kirshner, despite the fact that they don’t look anything alike? And the ending with Fiona Shaw going batshit insane?”
All of those issues are so glaring that they can’t possibly be accidental. I don’t understand what De Palma was going for, but I enjoyed every second of it.
I think he was playing with Hartnett’s stone face by having him react so stolidly to Shaw’s freak-clown act (which was a pure expression of contempt for the privileged class), and the Swank/Kirshner incongruity was purely to throw off the audience’s ability to believe what they see.
And if you have to have a sexy femme fatale who has lesbian tendencies and a past full of gender identity issues, who better to cast than Hilary Swank?
Well Rob, I guess if you’re saying that De Palma’s goal was to make a purposely bad film then he succeeded. But that doesn’t necessarily make it a good film. I just would have rather him try to actually make a good film because the story is a good one and it should be dark and haunting, instead it was laughable and hokey. I guess that’s why I’m extra disappointed, because I think there’s a good movie that could be made from this material but it seemed like De Palma wasn’t interested in doing that.
Hilary Swank may not be conventionally beautiful, but hot and sexy? Fuck, yeah!
Suggested short title: THE ASS. OF JESSE JAMES.
Hillary Swank sexy?
I think she’s a talented actress, but sexy she ain’t.
She looks like a horse.
I think Rob is right, that DePalma was trying to make a good movie – just that his idea of good is different from most peoples’.
I was so excited when Fincher was helming Dahlia, one of my favorite crime novels.
I was heartbroken when he left the project.
I was worried when DePalma took over.
I was flabbergasted at how it was worse than I could ever have imagined.
And then when I saw Zodiac, I could only wonder at what he would have done with his original project. If he treated Dahlia with the level of care and professionalism he showed on Zodiac, Dahlia could have been a towering noir masterpiece, and would probably have put L.A. Confidential to shame.
What if.
DP-as someone alluded to…just because everyone calls you crazy because you didn’t like the Jesse James flick it certainly doesn’t help your cause to jump onboard with Armond White. It’s the film critic equivalent of grabbing for straws. Of course, I have yet to see the film and don’t read reviews until after I see it….you both could be right.
I constantly feel as though DePalma is totally, totally misreading the language of cinema when he makes his films. It’s like he understands theories like semiotics and “the double” and he digs Hitchcock…but totally, totally misinterprets those things onscreen. It’s like a freshman college student not getting alecture and then writing a whole paper on it based on their incorrect interpretation.
White is one of those really really smart guys who doesn’t come across as having any real conviction in him. It’s like he could reasonably put up an argument for or against any movie at the toss of a coin. His opinions are at times so pointed I could see how some could mistake them for a real point of view. But the guy is high on himself not movies.
Stephanie Zacharek, a Pauline Kael follower like Armond White, is to me still America’s best critic.
Well, I just got back home from seeing the final cut, and everything I said about the film back in late Spring still holds true today. Best Western since the days of Peckinpah and Leone.
Pet… not so many people disagree. The tyranny of the loud.
Armond White’s idolization of Pauline Kael causes him to write one-note movie reviews that he hopes conform to what Kael would have thought of the movies in question. Sadly, the quality of his writing and conviction is a pale imitation of Kael’s.
Armond White (who incidentally, I love) also really holds tight to high falutin critical notions and I don’t think he ever expresses a “personal” opinion and judges movies solely on critical criteria. That’s a generalization, I know…but I think it holds mostly true.
Hillary Swank as a sexy femme fatale? And having her supposed to be a doppelganger for Mia Kirshner, despite the fact that they don’t look anything alike? And the ending with Fiona Shaw going batshit insane?”
But that’s exactly why the movie is a hoot. The cinema I saw it in had about 20 others in it and the people who didn’t walk out after half an hour were laughing like it was Borat. Fiona Shaw was legitimately great though. Completely unhinged and, like – for instance – Gina Gershon in Showgirls, she was the only one who seemed to realise the movie surrounding her was completely and utterly absurd.
I imagine the final product was closer to what someone like David Lynch would have created with the story than someone like David Fincher.
Oh, a quote from my sort-of review:
“Movies like The Black Dahlia are rare. A movie so hopelessly bad, yet it is because of it
Petaluma: really? I think of DePalma as understanding all of that stuff a lot more than most people. I can’t think of more than a handful of other filmmakers who would even have an inkling of what you’re talking about, anyway.