Strap in, kids, we’ve got an abundance of posters to savor this week. First up, Iron Man 3. I’ll be honest, it sort of bums me out how excited grown adults get every time a comic book character so much as farts on celluloid. I mean, I like plenty of comic book movies (possibly more than half, even) it’s just the automatic excitement of it. It seems like a weird form of brand loyalty. Anyway, I like this poster fine, I’m just not that into the idea of a third Iron Man after the last one. Is this one just going to be Robert Downey flexing at the camera shouting “I’m Robert Downey, bitch!” while he bangs supermodels? The first one was fun, but let’s face it, Iron Man is kind of like the Entourage of superhero movies.

I call this pose the Angry Upside-Down Jesus. My girlfriend and I tried the Angry Upside-Down Jesus once, but we didn’t have the right sized railroad spikes.

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Deep down, I always knew this day would come. I’ve been writing about Armond White, the New York Film Critic Circle’s palavricent trucularian, for a few years now, with my opinion of him evolving over the years, but my fascination always consistent. I knew it was inevitable that one day someone would drop the dime on how much fun we’ve been having with him and FilmDrunk would find itself in the crosshairs of one of A-Dubz’ revolutionary truth torpedoes. A-Dubz was on the Ron & Fez show yesterday morning (which you may remember as the place where he outed that schmuck Hoberman and that dingy slit Schwartzbaum for the racist fascocrites they are), and a FilmDrunk post (the one about White at the NYFCC Awards — aka The Bull Moose Moving Picture Appreciation Society of the 1934 World’s Fair ) was discussed.

I’ll post the transcript below, but to make a long story short, while I was a bit disappointed not to be called a racist, I’m proud to be a mole-like sub-human, ruining journalism one slimy, libelificent smear scrawl at a time. [Thanks to Stephen for recording this for me]

WHITE: I’m there [at the NYFCC Awards], and little did I know there are little moles standing around listening to what I do.

[about telling Albert Brooks that Hoberman was a jackass] I was quoted correctly, but it was only a fraction of what I had to say. We talked about an album he did called “A Star is Bought.” It’s absolutely brilliant, and I had to tell him so. And that was really the gist of our conversation. But the little Hoberman moles, the Hobermites standing around, they didn’t care about that, they just wanted to… broadcast something about me, I don’t know.

RON (or Fez, I have no idea): Over at FilmDrunk.com, Vince Mancini wrote an article, do you know him?

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Last year’s awards ceremony for the New York Film Critics Circle (or as we like to call it, The Golden Seal Bull Moose Moving Picture Appreciation Society of the 1934 World’s Fair) were hosted by our favorite thesaurifinous curmudgel, Armond White, who took the occasion to repeatedly diss The Social Network and almost make Annette Bening cry. This year’s ceremony took place last night, and while Armond didn’t host this time, he still managed to leave his mark. The chairman’s seat was always better suited to bourgeois, plutofascicrats than verbidinous revolutionary ramblificators like Armond anyway, who prefer to shout their criticisms from the back row. Which Armond did, frequently, according to witnesses.

This year, White didn’t have the hosting gig to make his opinions known, but he shouted out his opinions and non sequiturs from the crowd nevertheless, yelling “The Good Shepherd!” while Robert De Niro was speaking and shouting the name of the second black actress to be nominated for an Oscar — “Ethel Waters!” — twice while Viola Davis was on the stage.

God I love that man. From now on, instead of booing, we should all just shout “The Good Shepherd!” Of course Armond White heckles in esoteric non-sequitirs, that’s just his way. If he were able to epethize less obfuscatorily, it would only serve to burnish the patina of the au-courant anti-intellectualism like that daffy twat Schwarzbaum. Meanwhile, the guy’s not made of stone, he does still get starstruck:

After Brad Pitt went to take a smoke break accompanied by Sorkin, Angelina Jolie, and a big security detail, Armond White ran up to the group to introduce himself to the Moneyball actor. [Vulture]

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I’m not going to falsely eulogize him by pretending that I read his reviews (they seem okay), but long-time Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman (I’ll admit I have sort of a knee-jerk dislike for newspaper writers who use initials as a first name) has been s-canned after 34 years with the paper. Here’s S.T. VanAirsdale’s succinct recap:

Fun fact: Hoberman’s 34-year relationship with the Voice commenced with a high-low glimpse at David Lynch’s experimental blast Eraserhead (“Eraserhead‘s not a movie I’d drop acid for, although I would consider it a revolutionary act if someone dropped a reel of it into the middle of Star Wars“) and concluded this week with a high-low glimpse at Ken Jacobs’s experimental blast Seeking the Monkey King (“This homemade slingshot has the capacity to resist and pulverize the idiotic visual aggression of a commercial behemoth like Transformers. It’s a ’60s vision happening today—beautiful, terrifying, and determined to storm the doors of perception”). |Movieline|

Those seem to me the kind of reviews that say a lot more about the critic than they do the movie he’s watching, but I realize not everyone’s a low-brow shitheel like myself. Anyway, it’s not like he’s dead, just probably moving to a medium that has the money to pay him. Mainly, I was aware of him as the guy Armond White thinks is racist. Is that unfair to Hoberman? Probably, but you find me something funnier than two peacocking New York intellectuals in a feud. “THERE’S BEEN A BLOODLESS COUP! THE BULL MOOSE FILM APPRECIATION SOCIETY OF THE 1962 WORLD’S FAIR HAS A NEW LEADER!”

Here’s video of Armond White talking about the beef:

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