Armond White gives us a mid year reckoning

The film critic world’s favorite grousing, curmudgeonly academic, Armond White, recently posted his mid year roundup, titled with the appropriately aggressive moniker "Midyear Reckoning." White is a critic who always seems to have his hand on over his holster, itching for a showdown, and this is no exception. As usual, White’s taste is all over the spectrum, alternating between brilliant political readings of underappreciated films and cranky dismissals of anything he thinks reeks of hipster sass.

He starts by snidely dissing Brian Grazer’s pathetic, apoplectic response to Cinderella Man’s box-office failure, mocking Grazer for saying “I feel like crying” as his treacly weeper bombed amidst an onslaught of summer bombast. White, correctly, is incensed at Grazer’s idea that filmgoers are somehow responsible for the fact that movies now come in seasons. Just as we expect snow in winter and sun in summer, we concurrently expect self-serious epics and films imprinted stamped with a seal of Bold, Serious Import in the Christmas months and jubilant (and juvenile), silly explosion-fests when it’s hot. Grazer suggesting that these arbitrary seasons are the creation of anything other than Hollywood and its increasingly standardized release schedules, which ghettoize films into strict, seasonal genres, is absurd.

White then goes on to praise Kung-Fu Hustle and War of the Worlds, singling out War as especially essential.

“It’s an apocalyptic vision based in how we live today, amidst worldwide trauma, but every astonishing sequence demonstrates the hard psychic work of civilized man forced to rehumanize himself. This challenge to good-time filmgoers' expectations is the latest example of the 70s modernist urge to revise genre in order to face life more knowledgably.”

While the critical consensus on this film was generally favorable, White is one of the few to understand its emotional significance as well as its importance to the sci-fi genre. War of the Worlds is, of course, a smarter retelling of the standard invasion story, but it’s also much more. It’s an important step towards serious, thoughtful science fiction filmmaking that allows for exhilarating action (and truly, it’s some of Spielberg’s best) that’s not confined to the goofy, serio-comic ride atmosphere of movies like Independence Day. Even further, Spielberg invests the film with an unflinching emotional core, avoiding his tendency for gushingly sentimental paternalism until the film’s final frames. It’s not just smart science fiction, it’s deeply human and politically thoughtful too, stamped with the approval of one of Hollywood’s most respected directors – a real step up for a B-movie genre typically content with shallow stories and cheap thrills.

But then White pulls his usual shtick and stands up for a totally worthless film – in this case, the dog Sahara. I’ve already written about that incoherent mess of a film, but White’s insistence that it brings “consciousness to modern African politics” and that it “entertains historical and political issues” is laughable. Just because the film’s stock villain is a badly designed, over-simplified caricature of a nasty African dictator doesn’t give the film any more political relevance than a P. Diddy Vote-Or-Die commercial. Or, for that matter, a bag of rocks labeled "rocks for Kerry."

Mentioning politics doesn’t equate with substantively addressing them, nor does it make up for the film’s lazy, arbitrary narrative and poorly staged action sequences. I think White is just using it as an excuse to justify an undue appreciation for the film's unrelenting parade of beefcake - after all, Mathew McConaughey's bronzed, hairy chest is quite the attraction to some.

At the beginning of the article, Brian Grazer is quoted as saying that U.S. audiences’ failure to attend Cinderella Man is “biorhythmic.” That’s certainly not the case, and as Armond White consistently proves, head-scratchingly inconsistent taste can rear its head in any weather.