As mentioned in the previous post, the New York Film Critics Circle had their awards ceremony this week, and as a three-time former chairman of the circle, our favorite old curmudgeonarion thesaurasaurus Armond White was in the audience. At one point, Michael Moore took the stage to present an award for How to Survive a Plague, at which point White and a friend began to heckle him, shouting “F*ck you!”, which is much less Armond White-like than when he shouted “Ethel Waters!” at Viola Davis last year.

Moore was on hand to present the award for Best First Film to David France, whose feature “How to Survive a Plague” is a salute to ACT UP, the radical protest group whose most notorious action was to send thousands of protesters to St. Patrick’s Cathedral during the Christmas season in 1989. Dozens stormed into the December Mass to disrupt the prayers and desecrate the Host, which Catholics believe is the Body of Christ. A stunned John Cardinal O’Connor looked on in horror. The publicity stunt was denounced by David Dinkins, Mario Cuomo, Ed Koch and the Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Rights.

Moore, saluting the ACT UP film, said the American public was indifferent to the AIDS crisis as it happened and indeed breathed “almost a collective sigh of relief that it [AIDS] was primarily victimizing gay men.” Moore went on to say he liked the film’s reminder that “the Cardinal couldn’t get through Mass at St. Patrick’s.”

Moore stated, “I personally like that one. I say that as a former seminarian.” But White and a friend shouted, “[Bleep] you!” “You liar!” “Shut up!” and “Drop dead!”

Moore responded, “I’ve pissed off the Catholics,” and began a blessing in Latin. He then went on to say that “those who would deify Reagan and Pope John Paul II are responsible for the deaths of thousands of people . . . because of their bigotry.”

You see, in the world of Armond White, Catholicism is almost as sacrosanct as those benefirous priapizians of modern masculinity, Neveldine and Taylor, whose effervesphorescent tours de force in multi-dimensionarious explosiatalitarianism out-patinas the lambency of even Paul WS Anderson and Jack and Jill. As such, a vulgar interloafer like Michael Moore must be punished with the most withering pejoratives in the junior high milieu. Read the rest of this entry »

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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"A-Dubz replaced Annette Bening's Kool-Aid with KNOWLEDGE. Let's see if she notices."

Last night was the scene of the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, an esteemed organization of which Armond White, our favorite thesaurificent cantankeramous, happens to chair.  White being an old-school gangsta of the country club Gutentocracy who once told producer Scott Rudin to “go throw a cell-phone at some PA, you thin-skinned pussy”, there were bound to be some fireworks.  Wait, did I say fireworks?  I mean TRUTHBOMBS BURSTING IN AIR/PROOF THROUGH THE NIGHT A-DUBZ STILL HERE SKEET SKEET!

Armond White brought up ‘Black Swan’ director Darren Aronofsky to present an honor to his cinematographer. Immediately, Aronofsky seemed to be channeling his own black swan. [*queeeeef* -Ed]

“Keep it up,” Aronofsky said to White, “because you give us all another reason not to read New York Press.” [VillageVoice]

OOOOH SNAAAP.  Meanwhile, Armond White is the ONLY reason anyone reads the New York Press.

It may have been a response to White’s review of Black Swan, which accused Aronofsky of “ethnic denial” and went on to discuss how much better Kanye West’s video for “Runaway” was.

But White is not “the Don Rickles of film criticism,” so his responses came off as “pompous and scolding,” [shocking. -Ed] the attendee says. Another person who was there describes it as “a mess—Armond broke the bank on insulting award winners he didn’t agree with.”

Like when he insulted Michelle Williams by introducing her with praise for her role in 2004′s Land of Plenty, which got mixed reviews. “I made that movie almost 10 years ago,” Williams said from the stage, according to people who were there. “I can’t imagine what you’ve said about me since then if you had to go back that far to say something nice.”

The only person he insulted by praising Michelle Williams’ acting was every other actor.  Look, I’m all for the criticizees getting their digs in on the criticizer (myself included), but you gotta do better than “I can’t believe he only praised a movie of mine that’s so old!”  By the way, your math sucks.

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