THE DEVIN'S ADVOCATE: WHO CARES ABOUT ARMOND WHITE?

And then came the uproar. Like clockwork. People who don’t understand what an opinion is have been up in arms all day, Tweeting and writing blog posts about what a monster this man is that he should break Toy Story 3‘s streak of positive reviews. Apparently Toy Story 3 was on track to be the most positively reviewed movie in the history of Rotten Tomatoes, which is some major achievement if you treat movies like a sporting event.

White is a critic at The New York Press, an alt-weekly that a few years ago I thought was going to become the new Village Voice. It never quite happened, and White, who was always a little… off, seems to have slowly drifted into sheer insanity. According to Rotten Tomatoes he agrees with the Tomatometer 52% of the time, which is I’m sure meaningful to someone who thinks statistics has a place in the discussion of art. The fact of the matter is that White seems to embrace movies that most folks hate while shitting on movies most folks love; this week he trashed Toy Story 3, as mentioned, and gave the awful Jonah Hex a glowing review.

So here’s the thing about White: either he has awful, crazy taste or he’s just fucking with you. Either way, there’s a question that must be answered:

Who gives a shit about Armond White?

If he’s just fucking with us, which is what many people say, then you’re playing right into his plan when you get outraged that he dared, that he had the audacity!, to give a negative review to a movie you liked. If he’s just fucking with us, the obvious answer is to quit paying attention, to not link to his outrageous reviews on Twitter or Fark or Reddit or whatever, to just let him howl into the night and get no response. Don’t feed the trolls, we say, and this would be a prime example of that. People cry out ‘How can Armond White have a job as a film critic when his opinions are like this?!?!” and the answer is “Because you keep driving traffic to his reviews every time you get up in arms that he shat upon another mainstream movie.” So ignore him, and he’ll go away.

What if White is dead serious? What if he honestly believes, as he says in his Toy Story 3 review, that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen did the same story but better? Is it somehow worse if he truly believes that and isn’t just juicing it up to get outraged hits on his reviews? 

Of course not. The same question applies – who gives a shit? Nothing Armond White says about a movie matters, whether he means it or not. Let’s for a moment assume that the opinions of critics are actually important. Even if you take that concept as a truism, White’s positions of ultimate contrariness – such as being apparently the only human who didn’t like Toy Story 3 – are just as ultimately marginalized. He’s not leading the discussion or setting the tone, he’s the lonely guy screaming at a brick wall. Will Toy Story 3 somehow be less beloved by audiences because it has a – gasp! – 99% rating on Rotten Tomatoes? Will the movie somehow tank as a result of the one lone negative review?

Basically the only power White has is when he gets the internet all riled up to yell at him. All of a sudden the discussion is no longer about how good Toy Story 3 is, it’s about this one single opinion, and that’s completely and totally because of you (the rhetorical you, of course). Armond White isn’t cluttering Twitter with discussion of Armond White’s negative review, it’s the people who ostensibly love Toy Story 3.

This all raises an interesting question for me, which is why people care about this stuff in the first place. Why do people care if a movie has a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes? It’s especially baffling for a movie like Toy Story 3, which is going to be a huge moneymaker even if it had a 40%. This is a massive, blockbuster, mainstream film; the third movie in a series that founded an entire empire that eventually went on to take over the Disney empire. Think about that – this isn’t exactly the underdog you’re rooting for here. This isn’t some movie that desperately needs good word of mouth to open. Pixar could likely release a wire frame movie and with the Disney marketing machine push it to a 150 million dollar gross in three weeks.

Part of it must be insecurity. Writing on the internet for a decade has taught me one thing – people hate seeing opinions that disagree with their own. Folks get downright furious when confronted with a dissenting opinion, no matter how well written or argued (and the obverse is true as well – people have applauded poorly written reviews of mine that they agreed with by saying it was great writing). I don’t know if this tendency was always there within us as people, to react so negatively against opinions (on the slightest things) that clash with our own, or if the internet has exacerbated it to the current level, but if White is a troll, it’s this tendency upon which he counts.

Part of it is that there’s a growing contingent of self-professed film fans who just seem like statistics junkies to me. Every time Scott Pilgrim vs the World comes up on this site we get people dissecting its box office chances. Folks love talking about – and getting upset about – what movies earned what each weekend (I rarely even know what came in first, to be honest). And then there’s the whole arm of the movie blogosphere that is obsessed with awards season, the most crass and meaningless aspect of the movies. I’m always confused when Slashfilm runs a story about some movie getting some extreme user rating on IMDB – I honestly can’t see why anyone would care. I’m doubly bemused when people get all worked up about the box office of mainstream films, as if Avatar being the number one grossing movie of all time means anything about the movie. I do get people rooting for underdog films – hell, I was just doing that for Splice – but there’s a motive behind that, and it’s supporting good movies and filmmakers so that more good movies get made and more good filmmakers get work. As movie fans that’s in our self interest. But getting caught up in the box office or the Tomatometer rating of a massive, mainstream, crowd pleasing, guaranteed smash hit like Toy Story 3? It doesn’t make any sense to me on any real level, except that there are people who love statistics and not movies. These people should go watch baseball instead. 

Honestly, I’m most worried about the people claiming Toy Story 3 is the best film of the year (it’s the third best of the franchise) or giving it perfect scores. It’s a very good movie but it’s not a Great Film (my review is coming) and I think overselling a movie actually does it a greater disservice that panning it. Even still, who really cares – I love a good argument as much as anybody else, if not more than most, and I think that arguing about film reviews is fun and educational. But I also understand that people have opinions and that they may not always agree with mine.

So let Armond White hate on good movies and love bad movies. He’s not hurting anybody. He’s not making you wrong. He’s not destroying careers or forcing changes on films. You’re still seeing the final work of filmmakers, and you’re still allowed to make up your own mind about it. And if you’re a smart person and a good thinker, you’re going to be secure enough in your own opinion that someone else’s won’t make you furious. And if you’re a really smart person and a good thinker you’ll be able to take even the opinions of those who disagree with you and learn something from them and make your own opinions better and smarter and more well reasoned.