Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Wed Feb 11, 2009 6:24 pm 
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It's boring to keep going over and over the same tiny and dubious set of Academy picks, as if the best really had to come from there. In this context all may find diehard contrarian Armond White's Better Than list stimulating. White can be over-the-top, but he's liberatingly outside-the-box. A black man who writes for the New York Press, White is again currently Chairman of the New York Film Critics' Circle, having previously been elected to that position in 1994. His shrill, angry, sometimes awkward style belies the fact that he knows quite a lot about film. He has stimulated many debates.

Web page this lenghty quote comes from:
http://www.nypress.com/print-article-19237-print.html

My favorites of White's gambits below are:
Happy Go Lucky BETTER THAN 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days
Rachel Getting Married BETTER THAN Frozen River
Cadillac Records BETTER THAN Synecdoche, New York
My Blueberry Nights BETTER THAN The Curious Case of Benjamin Button


I sympathize with
Battle for Haditha BETTER THAN Frost/Nixon
But I like Frost/Nixon. I'm just glad to have Battle for Haditha mentioned.

Most off the wall:
RocknRolla BETTER THAN Slumdog Millionaire
RocknRolla is a terrible movie. However, White is justifiably suspicious of Slumdog's City of God-like romanticizing of squalor.
Twilight BETTER THAN Let the Right One
Twilght ain't bad, but come on!
Gunnin’ For That #1 Spot BETTER THAN Man on Wire
He calls Man on Wire "an egotistical stunt." Yeah, and so is the Sistine Chapel. I haven't seen Gunnin' For That #1 Spot though.
White's trashing of Gus Van Sant and accusing him of 'pedophilia' (wore in his incredibly mean-spirited review of Milk) shows him at his most perverse and libelous. But White is often libelous; his Milk review (which is also unkind to the memory of Milk himself) is just an extreme case. This is White's glory and his curse.

As for
Shotgun Stories BETTER THAN The Wrestler
This may be true; at least The Wrestler is being overrated. Read White's complete review of The Wrestler,
http://www.nypress.com/article-19175-the-wrestler.html
which is a revelation (or a refresher course) on how good Rourke is, and how this celebration of his "comeback" is artistically speaking, sentimal and corny and off-balance.

Quote:
Wednesday, January 7,2009
[From The New York Press]
Better-Than List 2008
Jason Statham trounces Chris Nolan’s caped crusader and more surprises in ARMOND WHITE’s annual reassessment of the year’s top films.

By Armond White

IT ALWAYS COMES down to this: Movies you must experience versus movies that threaten to diminish you. That’s the point of making a Better-Than List rather than pretending that the typical over-hyped product constitutes a consensus of worthwhile movies. Most of these high-profile films insult one’s intelligence, while the year’s best movies vanish from the marketplace for lack of critical support. This tragedy is exemplified by the scary acclaim for the year’s worst: The atrocious Slumdog Millionaire and Pixar’s hideous Wall-E, the buzz-kill movie of all time. Trust no critic who endorses them.

Happy Go Lucky BETTER THAN 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days
Mike Leigh devises a thoroughly humane heroine (Sally Hawkins) whose anti-capitalist faith (deeper than bourgeois “feminism”) upbraids the pity-party of two abortionhorny Romanian co-eds.

The Witnesses, Jump the Broom BETTER THAN Milk
Andre Téchiné’s AIDS history joined Ian-Patrik Polk’s gay-marriage rom-com to show how sexual politics enhance our lives. These films rendered silly the hindsight celebration of an ambitious pol—and the Prop. 8 protests that misread Gus Van Sant’s opportunism.

Rachel Getting Married BETTER THAN Frozen River Jonathan Demme rehearses multi-culti heaven rather than condescend to hard-luck working-class women.

Transporter 3 BETTER THAN The Dark Knight
Olivier Megaton, Jason Statham and Luc Besson reinvent the action movie as kinetic art, but impressionable teenagers mistook Chris Nolan’s nihilistic graphic novel for kool fun.

CJ7 BETTER THAN Wall-E Stephen Chow endowed a poor kid’s action figure with numinous potential (a tribute to the still-extraordinary E.T.), while Pixar twisted its standard formula into ugly, end-ofhistory cynicism.

Shotgun Stories BETTER THAN The Wrestler
Jeff Nichols’ moving Red State family feud tragedy was ignored by Blue State critics who prefer white-trash WWF stereotypes to encourage their sense of class superiority.

My Blueberry Nights BETTER THAN The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Wong Kar Wai’s visionary romanticism explores existential loneliness, but David Fincher merely remade Titanic as Forrest Gump—an endless, two-hankie Kubrick movie for fanboys.

RocknRolla BETTER THAN Slumdog Millionaire
Guy Ritchie comes into his manhood with this rich, Dickensian gangster comedy, while Danny Boyle gives colonialist Britain the last laugh in his epic Indian game-show travesty—a defilement of what Dickens revealed about character and society, humor and pathos.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull BETTER THAN Iron Man Steven Spielberg’s par excellence genre expertise wrung fresh amazement out of the Indy Jones franchise; it exposed Iron Man’s dung-like banality.

Gunnin’ For That #1 Spot BETTER THAN Man on Wire Adam Yauch brings fresh imagination to this Rucker Park bball documentary, extolling youth, class and American splendor; the other commemorates an egotistical stunt.

Twilight BETTER THAN Let the Right One In
Catherine Hardwicke finds her métier in an outsiders’ romance disguised as a vampire movie; she turns Stephenie Meyer’s book series into a Brontë-esque vision, especially compared to the dismal Scandinavian J-horror rip-off.

Cadillac Records BETTER THAN Synecdoche, New York
Darnell Martin treats Black American history as R&B and her sizzling cast (Jeffrey Wright, Beyoncé, Eamonn Walker, Columbus Short, Mos Def, Cedric the Entertainer) salutes pop music legends. Charlie Kaufman’s Actors Studio cast merely imitated Fellini’s 8 1/2 like amateurs.

Chaos Theory BETTER THAN Flight of the Red Balloon
Marcos Siega, screenwriter Daniel Taplitz and Ryan Reynolds found beauty in American sex farce, but Hou Hsiao Hsien shortchanged Gallic romanticism into high-brow desolation.

My Winnipeg BETTER THAN Paranoid Park
Guy Maddin reinvented his sexual autobiography as a funny, touching sociological history, outclassing Gus Van Sant’s morbid celebration of Northwestern pedophilia.

The Romance of Astrea and Celadon BETTER THAN A Christmas Tale Eric Rohmer, a forgotten master, revives classical lit for an exquisite satire of modern sexual mores (where did he find such beautiful human icons?). But it was Desplechin’s sac c har i ne French-family sob story that got the national release.

Battle for Haditha BETTER THAN Frost/Nixon
Nick Broomfield’s inspired treatment of the Iraq War shamed Ron Howard’s revenge-drama, the latest yawn of liberal self selfrighteousness.

_________________
©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.


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