I’m not going to falsely eulogize him by pretending that I read his reviews (they seem okay), but long-time Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman (I’ll admit I have sort of a knee-jerk dislike for newspaper writers who use initials as a first name) has been s-canned after 34 years with the paper. Here’s S.T. VanAirsdale’s succinct recap:
Fun fact: Hoberman’s 34-year relationship with the Voice commenced with a high-low glimpse at David Lynch’s experimental blast Eraserhead (“Eraserhead‘s not a movie I’d drop acid for, although I would consider it a revolutionary act if someone dropped a reel of it into the middle of Star Wars“) and concluded this week with a high-low glimpse at Ken Jacobs’s experimental blast Seeking the Monkey King (“This homemade slingshot has the capacity to resist and pulverize the idiotic visual aggression of a commercial behemoth like Transformers. It’s a ’60s vision happening today—beautiful, terrifying, and determined to storm the doors of perception”). |Movieline|
Those seem to me the kind of reviews that say a lot more about the critic than they do the movie he’s watching, but I realize not everyone’s a low-brow shitheel like myself. Anyway, it’s not like he’s dead, just probably moving to a medium that has the money to pay him. Mainly, I was aware of him as the guy Armond White thinks is racist. Is that unfair to Hoberman? Probably, but you find me something funnier than two peacocking New York intellectuals in a feud. “THERE’S BEEN A BLOODLESS COUP! THE BULL MOOSE FILM APPRECIATION SOCIETY OF THE 1962 WORLD’S FAIR HAS A NEW LEADER!”
Here’s video of Armond White talking about the beef:
The gist: “I’m not paranoid, Hoberman and Schwarzbaum don’t like me. …And I do think that part of them not liking me is that I’m the only black man in the room.”
My favorite bit: “…And though I made some snarky comments here recently, essentially, I don’t want to talk about them as people, because I loathe them.”
I love that quote so much I want to buy it a puppy and meet its family. Armond White is a master of defying your expectations. “I know I made some jokes today…” and here you expect him to say how much respect he still has for the people he was joking about… “…but what I really meant to say is that I hate them and I wish that they were dead.”