ARMOND WHITE'S RAGING BULL

Those of you who will care at all will likely already know that Armond White’s “review” of Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg went live yesterday. The Vulture Blog highlights some of the more incendiary moments, and J. Hoberman, who provided the evidence of a White review in which he seemed to suggest Baumbach’s mother, the “undistinguished, forgotten” film critic Georgia Brown should have aborted Baumbach (presumably so White wouldn’t have had to suffer through his movies), and who is himself scorched in the piece as (among other things) “the scoundrel-czar of contemporary film criticism,” has checked in with own rather bemused response. Who knows (or much cares, at this point) whether there is anywhere left to go between these gentlemen (White, Hoberman and Baumbach) outside of a three-way showdown in an empty graveyard, the whistles of Morricone wafting in the hot breeze? Assuming for the moment that there isn't, Bill Ryan has responded to White’s piece, and not only to the vitriol the critic unleashes at Hoberman and others but as a piece of writing, particularly the way White tries to explain his own murky metaphors by piling on even more muddled language, in a fine post entitled “Our Armond White Problem, and His,” which dismantles White’s defensive response with clarity and intelligence. Do check it out.

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