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The Baddest Film Critic In New York Grew Up In Detroit And Went To WSU

January 18, 2014, 11:10 AM

Armond White is hardly a household word in New York, but he's well-known in the culture capital's cultural community, where, after growing up in Detroit and attending Central High School and Wayne State University, for three decades he has reviewed movies like no other New York critic.

Or no critic anywhere. In a story today, The New York Times says White is variously described as the most contrarian, most hated or most important film critic around New York.

This week, White, 60, made news when he was purged from the New York Film Critics Circle, the nation's oldest such group. White had chaired the group three times and had been a member since 1987.

His offense?

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Steve McQueen, director of “12 Years a Slave.”

He reportedly heckled Steve McQueen, director of “12 Years a Slave,” at an awards dinner in Manhattan this month.

Cara Buckley writes:

The charge immediately went viral, fueled by the intriguing dual facts that Mr. White had loathed Mr. McQueen’s film, and that both men are black. The New York Film Critics Circle, which hosted the awards and had named Mr. McQueen best director, issued an immediate, agonized apology and promised disciplinary action. Mr. White, who wrote for New York Press and now edits CityArts, which covers arts for several New York community papers, denied the heckling in a recent interview and said that no one from the group had bothered to check the report’s veracity with him.


In White’s view, the expulsion was symptomatic of what he sees as a group in decline, beholden to studios that help foot the dinner’s bill and reviewers who are unwilling, if not unable, to criticize films as eruditely as he can — and thus they are jealous and vindictive.  In the last few days, he has publicly likened the group to “Mean Girls” and identified “enemies” who, he says, worked to successfully kick him, the unpopular kid, out.

“It’s an incestuous clubhouse of friends,” he told Buckley over breakfast the other day, “not people who made their bones as journalists or critics.”

In a 2009 New York magazine profile, white told the interviewer his family had been the first to move onto a an all-white block in a heavily Jewish northwest Detroit during the years of rapid neighborhood change in Detroit.

White fell in love with movies as a kid. "Detroit was a great movie town then," he has said, and he watched foreign films televised on Channel 9. In his senior year at Central High School, he was assigned to write a paper on a book, any book, Mark Jacobson writes in New York magazine.

On a twirling rack in a drugstore, he spied a copy of "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," the second collection of Pauline Kael’s movie reviews. White had never heard of Pauline Kael, but he liked the picture of the camera on the cover. He began with the shorter pieces, then the famous Bonnie and Clyde essay, and went from there. Forty years later, long after coming to New York, meeting and befriending Kael, who in 1986 would nominate him for membership in the Film Critics Circle—which makes him something of what is generally called a “Paulette,” even if one critic says “there’s Paulettes and there are Paulloons” — White still retains that original copy of "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang."

Jacobson wrote that light on White’s criticism might be shed by an incident that took place in late 1977, when he was working for The South End, the Wayne State University newspaper. White was assigned to cover the local screening of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." 

But Detroit’s being what it was in those days — they called it Murder City — no nearby theater was deemed suitable to show the picture. A screening was set up in Southfield, then a nearly all-white suburb. White took the bus out there and walked several blocks to the theater. The film, needless to say, blew him away, especially the climactic descent of the giant mother ship, a moment White took to be nothing less than a revelation of the “face of God.” During the time White had spent in the theater, a heavy snow came down, nearly a foot.

“There I was, having seen that film, a truly great film, and I was walking through this blanket of pristine snow in the suburbs. I was the only one around. I’d never experienced a moment of such purity; perhaps I never will again.” As I contemplate White, it is hard to think of an image “better than” this: lone seeker making footsteps across unbroken field of blinding white, under the impression he’d just seen the face of God in a movie theater.

-- Bill McGraw


Read more:  The New York Times


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