Two Films Enter, One Film Leaves

Over at The House Next Door, they're linking to Armond White's end of the year list--a side-by-side comparison called the "Better-Than" list, in which the always-cantankerous White lines up films he thinks are "better than" certain mainstream favorites. In the comments section, site editor (and recent addition to the New York Times movie crit roll--congrats!) Matt Zoller Seitz writes:

Armond's list, while necessarily fragmented, showcases the critic at his button-pushing, Sermon on the Mount best. It's also a refinement of an experiment from last year that's trying to move beyond the usual Top 10 list of capsule verdicts. ... This should be a weekly feature, I think.

But isn't it kind of already (regular if not weekly)? White regularly goes out of his way to champion his favorites as not just good but explicitly better than what he sees as the mainstream picks.

It's okay every now and then, but the regularity of it--and making it into a full-fledged feature like this--strikes me as a bit juvenile, fanboyish, and standoffish, like the Ain't It Cool talkbackers always arguing over whether Heroes or Lost or Battlestar is the One True Good Show--as if, Highlander-like, there can only be one.

This isn't to say that White doesn't often interest me, that he's not an unbelievably powerful writer (his best sentences, of which there are many, have wrecking ball force), and that we don't need someone challenging the conventional critical wisdom. But sometimes I think that he's more concerned with picking a fight than with championing good filmmaking.