Tuesday
I hope Armond White searches for responses to his reviews
The most infuriating film review (spoiler in the third paragraph of the review, skip that if you haven't seen the movie) I can recall having read. It claims, of a class of which I am a member, that we, "promote[] middle-class covetousness," "[would] willingly kill for the [WASP] class advantages" (and the author thinks being a member of this class is proof of that second), that we are "inured to such basics as emotion, soul [and] empathy," and finally that class members should enjoy Abu Ghraib photos.
What class is Armond White describing, you may wonder: people who have been convicted of violent crime perhaps, or diagnosed with certain disorders commonly taught in abnormal psychology, or maybe people who have political views that he sees as explicitly or implicitly condoning genocide. But those are all non-crazy answers, they don't describe me (I promise), and wouldn't it be weird to find them being discussed in a film review? No, those desciptions are all what Armond White has to say about people who fall into the class described by "X is a class member if and only if X liked the film Match Point."
Interestingly, I think that people who claim that War of the Worlds was tied for the best film made last year have the depth of understanding of world events shown by most preschoolers; are cockeyed optimists who find it intolerable for any story to end sadly, even when the actual ending is so unrealistic that buying into it requires a higher level of cognitive dissonance than that exhibited by the chiropractor in this story, and are having trouble repressing their longing to sleep with Dakota Fanning.
