I wish someone taught me how to be a critic.

Instead I learned how to do it the hard way – by doing it until I was good at it, then doing it more until I realized that I actually wasn’t good at it at all, and then doing it even more.

My secondary passion is now a decade old.  Throughout that time, I worked on Capitol Hill, went to law school, became an attorney, and met and married my wife.  Throughout this run, I have watched likely more than twice the number of films I saw in the two decades before.  I studied up on craft, screenplay writing, cinematography, film history, film culture, and, of course, a litany of filmmakers from the legendary to the reviled.  I read essays and books, watched countless hours of interviews and documentaries about great and terrible films and the people behind them, as well as television shows between them.  I became friends, correspondents, and peers of professional critics, followed their updates, and learned as much as I could from them.

The experience of doing this was more rewarding than anything I could ever have hoped for, but I’m glad I never did it as a career.  Did it all pay off?  That’s up to my readers.  If anything I write at any point gets even one person engaged in films, old and new, or personally affected by the power of cinema in ways they weren’t before, I will consider all of it to be worth it.  But I will never be on Rotten Tomatoes or on any list or aggregation of critics who collectively shape the fate of a film and its reception.  I doubt I’ll ever have the profile of someone the American film industry hopes to impress.  I am and will always be an outside observer – a critic who doesn’t count.

This piece is about the two critics who do.

I owe what I know to a lot of people, but there are two who stand heads, shoulders, and trousers above the rest: Armond White and Yahtzee Croshaw.

Armond critiques films (and music) while Yahtzee critiques video games, and both of them are the most unique critical voices in each respective artistic medium.  Both have a style of expression that’s distinctive and impossible to copy.  Both are utterly unafraid to be considered contrarian by the rest of their peers or contemporaries.  Both are often considered too critical. Both despise blandness.  Both are also imperfect, occasionally inconsistent, and sometimes simply wrong.  Yet always interesting, thoughtful, moving, clarifying, and even revelatory; both have had a profound effect upon me and my own experiences and ambitions with regard to my own writings.

To the extent that I myself have anything to say about them that can’t be found in their own work (which for Armond can be found here and here, and for Yahtzee used to be found here and here, and now can be found here and here), I would point out that the other thing they have in common is in their borderline allergic resentment of marketing hype and consumer fandom.  It would surprise me if either Yahtzee or Armond have even heard of one another, and it would surprise me even more if anyone has written a column about both of them in the same breath.  But that’s what makes me me, and where I connect with them further is in the fact that despite all the ways in which they anger or bewilder others in their scathing takedowns of popular media franchises and critical darlings, Armond and Yahtzee are perhaps the most loyal and meritorious defenders of the artistic mediums they discuss.

You might think you know everything about Armond White from the fact that he considered Man of Steel the film of the 2010s decade, but also considered The Dark Knight one of the films most responsible for the destruction of art and social cohesion.  I assure you, you don’t.  For starters, he has seen more films than you, your parents, and your grandparents combined.  Otherwise, strangely, the thing he’s best known for (or, at least, the first thing that comes up when you Google his name) is getting kicked out of the New York Film Critics Circle, of which he was the chair three separate times, for a supposed heckling incident at its 2013 awards banquet.  Armond denies anything like it ever happening, and I have no idea or even interest in whether it’s true or not.  But when other critics get brave enough to “defend” him, even they usually tack on enough qualifying caveats to make you think they were about to credit Benito Mussolini for the timeliness of the trains.

So compared to those, you can consider this both an unqualified defense and an essay that I hope will inspire more people to read his writings just as I hope they will read mine.

Armond once asked a group of college students why they wanted to write about film.  One of them answered to the effect of “I want to recommend good films and disparage bad ones.”  There could hardly be an answer Armond would find more offensive than that.  If Armond has a goal, it would be to improve both the discourse of American culture and its understanding of films.  If he had a dream on top of that goal, it would be for such improved and sharpened reception to improve films and filmmaking overall, just as D.W. Griffith, after Birth of a Nation produced such controversy and backlash, responded to his critics with the film Intolerance, which Armond heralds as the greatest film ever made, both for the narrative it weaves as its own work of art as well as for the maturity and reflection demonstrated by its creator by daring to make it.  I’m hard pressed to disagree.

Films, as Armond therefore sees them, are not only offerings of entertainment, but also artistic messages and morals.  He responds to them and to his perception of their impact upon American culture much the way a nutritionist might react to a chef’s most recent recipe.  He isn’t averse to fun.  Armond likely had more fun with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and nearly every Luc Besson film than you and anyone else did.  But a film – produced by a studio, written by an author, directed by an auteur, and performed by actors – is not just a product but an experience.  Both the result of millions of dollars and someone’s serious investment of time and labor, and a series of images that carries with it a transmission of cultural language; when the pictures move, Armond dares to wonder if he finds them moving.  When the film is popular, he considers whether it is that way because it imparts something that is actually uplifting and rewarding, or if it is that way merely because it has some line that all the cool kids want to start quoting as gospel, or some moment of violence everyone wants to start mimicking in their playtime fantasies.

This is why Armond’s writings aren’t really “reviews” so much as they are essays that touch upon the topic of a given film.  That, to him, is what criticism actually is – not a binary “thumbs up or down” piece of consumer advocacy, hype, or marketing, but a larger discussion.  To the extent that he believes that the separate mediums of film and film criticism ought to be connected, it should be as a kind of ongoing dialogue that inspires better art.  But if a film is an event without thought, the critic becomes a mere promoter of it.  And if the fact that the vast majority of critics have a consensus about a film, in one measurable way or another (i.e. Rotten Tomatoes), becomes part of the very marketing of or discussion around the film itself, nobody reacts with greater contempt for both than Armond, even if he otherwise generally agrees with that consensus.

If you asked him to separate the artist from the art, he would tell you that’s impossible.  He’s not there to be “objective,” i.e. to run through a checklist of arbitrary criteria of quality like a mechanic appraising a car.  A film is bigger than that, and he has far too much respect for the medium to denigrate it.  But he will sometimes separate how he views a film from how other people do.  It’s why he can sing the praises of Birth of a Nation or Leni Riefenstahl’s films as though they were never used as a means to galvanize evil.  After all, those movies never stopped being works of art.  And all of this is also why almost every essay he writes entails the mention of a film you and I not only haven’t seen, but likely haven’t even heard of.  A film could be a century old and utterly unheard of by most people, but he will write of it as though he watched it yesterday.  Films, especially great ones, simply stick with him, just as they do with his old compatriots at the New York Press.

Nobody else, even those others who might be qualified to do so, even attempts to write about films this way, or to take film seriously to the degree that Armond does.  Nobody else punishes a movie for being cynical, nihilistic, vulgar, or platitudinous, and no one else asks genuine moral questions about what kind of culture we want our films to foster.  “Why not be hard on them?” Armond insists.  A fair question, even though roughly two of every seven films he watches in a year will generate a positive review.  And some of Armond’s essays don’t simply recommend a film he thinks is good, but will celebrate it as the artistic triumph of the occasion.  Up until 2012, nobody – literally nobody – vouched harder for the genuine artistic merit of Steven Spielberg than Armond did.  Sure, everybody loves Jaws and Raiders, but you haven’t seen what a truly affectionate essay looks like until you have read the things Armond has written about Amistad.

So when I read his work, as I have done for nearly a decade now, I take it as a soul searching challenge.  Sometimes I think he has a movie wrong.  But no matter what, I’ve learned something important, and I come away from him with my opinions, whether in agreement with his or not, strengthened for having endured his written perspective.  It’s the same value that Justice Clarence Thomas adds to the Supreme Court, which is a comparison I am absolutely positive Armond would take as the compliment it is intended to be.  His is a similarly irreverent yet affectionate and affirming style of thought and method, which could only be written by someone with his experience, of his passion and point of view, and will similarly be wilfully caricatured by racists or charlatans who simply don’t understand how seriously he takes his work.

I certainly didn’t.  But I do have two criticisms that no assessment of Armond would be complete without a mention.  The first is that Armond is best understood not from any individual essay, but from either listening to him being interviewed on a podcast or if you read him in close continuity.

The second is that sometimes Armond sometimes falls for the trap of overthinking the timing of a film’s release, and also sometimes modifies his own appraisal of a film based upon how it is otherwise received.  To some extent, he understandably cannot help the former because timing is crucial to how he responds to a film.  But last year, Armond made both mistakes together when he reviewed Top Gun: Maverick.  In his original review, Armond cannot help but notice how viscerally effective certain moments are even if there is nothing original or deep about the film.  But he begins it by noting the strangeness of its timing, delayed by the pandemic and lockdowns.  The title of Armond’s review is “Tom Tests America.”  Armond’s followup piece provided much greater clarity, propping up the newly Kino Lorber re-released unsung Josef von Sternberg classic Jet Pilot (1957) as a reminder that everyone can and should expect more from films – even the kinds of films that are designed to impress people the way Maverick was.  But after that, everything else Armond wrote about Maverick was just dismissive, and very clearly in reaction to its nationwide celebration.  It was as though he had never written his original review.  Why?  That seems like both an overreaction and counterproductive to the critical endeavor to take the film seriously as a work of art, whether positive or negative.

Indeed, if you look at its production history, the script was written and rewritten over an entire decade, the filming was concluded by 2019, and the post-production was concluded by 2020.  In other words, Covid delayed the initial release, and then the post-Covid culture in 2021 delayed it by another.  Had Maverick released in 2020, it would have arrived during a different presidency, perhaps in a different culture, and might have been received differently by Armond.  Armond seems to acknowledge the way that film addresses a political culture that it could not have anticipated – i.e., an audience of Americans desperate to believe in their country again after the humiliating Afghanistan withdrawal.  But if it released two years prior, it might have been received by audiences as just another decent blockbuster, which would likely have not led to Armond’s subsequent sour writings.  Does Armond think that his response would have changed that much if Maverick had released at the time it was intended – i.e. at the time Tom actually wanted to test America?  Armond doesn’t make this clear.  You might say that he doesn’t have to, but this to me is what happens when a very good critic thinks too hard about the timing of a film’s release and what might be inferred of the creative thinking behind it.

Now contrast this with Armond’s writings on Spielberg.  These, to me, are his most interesting pieces, and I am rewarded to have read them in his book Make Spielberg Great Again: The Steven Spielberg Chronicles.  At the height of Spielberg’s popularity, other critics thumbed their noses at him much in the way Armond (mistakenly, in my view) did to Top Gun: Maverick.  Only Armond, along with a handful of others – chiefly among them being his colleagues in the New York Press – dared to take Spielberg seriously as an artist and celebrate the humanism and the great heart that beats deep within his pictures.  But in MSGA, Armond divides the book into four sections: (1) America and the World, (2) After The Color Purple, (3) 9/11, and (4) Obama.  The Obama section begins with Lincoln (2012), which is during Obama’s fourth year in office.  Obama was president during some of the films Spielberg made before Lincoln, but Armond shrewdly observes that nothing about The Adventures of Tintin or War Horse serves as any kind of creative, artistic, or moral response to him in the same way Spielberg very obviously responded to 9/11 over the 2000s decade.  But the 9/11 section begins with Armond’s review of A.I. Artificial Intelligence, which released in theaters before 9/11 itself.  While this could be a publishing error, Armond had to have known about it because his twenty-year retrospective piece on that film acknowledges its post-9/11 and even post-Obama prescience, which tells you that ever since 9/11, Armond has been thinking about that pre-9/11 film in post-9/11 terms.  This is a disservice in some ways to A.I.’s greatness.  It was not a response to 9/11, but a response to the death of spiritual storytelling in the 1990s, and it has only grown in its profound power over the two decades since.  It falls squarely and thematically into the Part II (A.B.C.) section of the book – alongside Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Schindler’s List, Amistad, and Saving Private Ryan as Spielberg’s most morally enduring humanist pictures.  But MSGA suggests otherwise, to its detriment, with the way it breaks down the chronicles by section.  Once again – the timing of release was overthought.

Years ago, I had the pleasure of connecting with him, and this is where I make my own disclosure.  No compliment from anyone about anything I’ve ever written on the subject of a film has meant as much to me as what Armond said when he read the special essay I wrote for the 50th anniversary of Patton, and then again when he evaluated my distinctly political appraisals of Saving Private Ryan, as well as the films Hacksaw Ridge, The Post, and Munich – together in a piece about disagreement with movie messages.  He said that these pieces spoke to him profoundly, recalled fond memories from his past, and provoked complex thoughts about generational morality.

When a guy who is so often accused of “hating everything” can say something like that to you and mean it, any and all contentious debates and arguments I’ve had with countless critics, friends, and peers just melt away.  But what Armond doesn’t know is that that Patton essay could never have been written without him.  If I had not embraced the spirit of his criticism and engaged with it as someone with a real interest in being the best possible critic I could be, I would not have grown and my reviews would be as worthless as those of most others.

Maybe most of them are.  But Armond’s are not.  And the other critic who counts is even better.

My friend said it better than I could: he is the most complete critic ever.

Whoops, there you go.  I guess you can stop reading now.  But Yahtzee didn’t set out to be a critic.  He set out to be a comedy writer and animator, and suddenly found himself famous for his searing criticisms of video games.

His name is Ben Croshaw.  His nickname is Yahtzee and he is notable for wearing a hat.  The show he hosts is called Fully Rambolmatic, and formerly Zero Punctuation – both named for their rapid-fire delivery of jokes, puerile and intellectual.  But if I merely called him a critic, I’d be doing him a disservice.  What I’m going to write instead is the kind of compliment to his skills and contribution, as I see them, that he would never have the temerity to give himself.

Yahtzee has been making ZP since 2007.  I first discovered him in 2009, and it has been a staple of my week, every week, for the last decade and a half.  I no longer play video games with the same frequency I used to, but I have never missed a ZP entry and I never will because every new game he reviews tells me something not only about him, but about his experience.

For video games, experience is everything.  Yahtzee adheres to this to a fault.  He never gives review scores (except when he was forced to do it for the last rhyme of his Wolfenstein (2009) limerick review) because he rejects the algorithmic thinking that so often goes into them.  If you look at any slate of reviews from IGN, for example, the average score at any given point varies between 7-8/10.  Really?  So almost every single game, with rare exceptions, gets a passing grade?  If you’ve played video games as I have, or at least as I used to, you know that this is impossible.  Let me give you an example: Bulletstorm (2011) by Epic Games and People Can Fly receives an 8/10 in Arthur Gies’s review on IGN, and his review both serves as a useless overcompensation for his shameless enjoyment, but also specifically criticizes the ending for cutting off a chance for real closure.  Really?  So a story you experience that has a poor and abrupt ending nonetheless gets an 8/10 – the equivalent of 4 stars out of 5 or 3.5 stars out of 4, or a B-/B grade?

I played Bulletstorm twice, and on each runthrough, the same thing happened.  I got about halfway through, and then suddenly a glitch froze the game and prevented me from continuing.  I uninstalled the game, deleted all trace of it, and a year later got a new disc and tried it again.  At the exact same moment of the game, the same thing happened.  So I never got to finish it, or at least to get far enough to know when my opinion of it would not change, and my opinion of it is at best a half-fun experience.  Now let’s contrast this with just one joke in Yahtzee’s review:

“It’s trying to have its cake and eat it too, which may explain how the space marines got so fat.“

As fast as Yahtzee talks, almost every paragraph opens itself up to a universe of ideas, questions, and interesting thoughts about video games, studio politics, cultural trends, and quality.  What he says there, from his obviously more complete experience with the game than mine, is a far more insightful synthesis of thought than Gies’s or almost anyone else’s.  His is a decidedly mixed take on the game, but your experience watching and listening to his review of it will be anything but.  Part of the reason for that is because Bulletstorm itself is a hybrid creation from two companies that not only have wildly different games, but perhaps even more wildly divergent attitudes on how to make them. People Can Fly created Painkiller, a dark, gothic hellspawn shooter where you never see your character, except in cutscenes, where you carry lawnmower blades and guns that shoot shurikens & lightning, and where you can strafe demons by the scores before lunch.  Meanwhile, Epic Games, at least at the time of Bulletstorm’s release, was best known for the Gears of War trilogy, where you play a grunting and growling sumo wrestler dressed up like a metal bunker, barely distinguishable overall from the very monsters you’re fighting while the camera lingers over your shoulder.  Yahtzee’s review, and the above line in particular, speaks to this disconnect, and it’s worth more than any arbitrary score or supposedly objective criteria could ever provide you.

But the interesting thing about Yahtzee is that even further beneath the vulgar surface and the superficial thrills is a deep philosophy that contemplates interactive experience and what they can make you feel or reveal to you.

Maybe the best games Yahtzee plays are the ones that he stops.  Not because he’s having a miserable time but because he finishes up something within the game that allows him the freedom to run around and wreck things to his heart’s content; or because the game has brought him to a dark place that makes him genuinely wonder if continuing it would compromise his soul, or because he realizes that the growling of his own stomach has been noise canceling the screams of his starving child.  But like all reviewers, there’s a tightrope to delicately balance in order to keep yourself in his good graces.  If your game is too loose and directionless, he’d choose his own adventure, which is probably the best way to guarantee your game making it into his Bland list of that year.  If your game is too linear, and you don’t have an ability to give him the freedom to go through it the way he might want to, he’ll tell you you’ve just put him on a conveyor belt in a narrow, noisy corridor, and he has no reason to be there in the first place.  If your facial animations are anything less than perfectly simplistic or perfectly complex, you’re in an uncanny valley guaranteed to earn his wrath.  But everything has an exception to it.  Spec Ops: The Line is clunky and linear to a fault, but you’ll hardly find a more affectionate review of anything than Yahtzee’s because of the various ways it haunted him for the sadistic intuitions that he brought with him into that game as a veteran of shooters.  Elite Dangerous and Just Cause 2 both feature exploration settings slightly bigger than the actual Universe, but the mischievous freedom and innate fun of going from one end of it to another made them the exact kind of organic experience that made for their own stories in ways only the best games can.

The key word in that last sentence is “organic,” which has a careful definition only true fans of Yahtzee understand.  It doesn’t just mean that it’s a natural outgrowth of something interactive.  It also means, specifically, that the player can mess it up.  A game has to work with the player, and with the player’s imagination and expectations in order to make the experience of playing it both challenging and cathartic.  If there is a consistent and coherent way in which you can mess up while trying to do something you’re interested in doing, and if the results of those are just as memorable as getting through it unscathed, you will inevitably create your own story from your own experience, and your reflection upon the main story and the journey through it will be all the more enriched.  It’s the, “you will believe a man can fly!” ad line from Superman (1978) updated as “you will believe you are flying.”  Related to this is the explorative emphasis and a game’s confidence at presenting its world to you.  If a game gives you no control over where you’re going or what you’re doing, how are you supposed to find anything in it surprising, and how are you supposed to do anything other than simply react to that which is happening in front of you?

Games that give you the tools to surprise yourself are criticized by many, stupidly and selfishly by tyrants posing as critics, as just mindless empowerment fantasies.  But Yahtzee takes these ideas to greater depths when the world is arguably too big for a player’s open journey, yet can make you feel genuinely small and even unimportant within it.  You have to find your own meaning in Rockstar and From Software games, often in ways that don’t involve “saving” the world, or doing something that matches its scale.

I have always been amused by the Playboy paradox.  Hugh Hefner’s brilliantly stupid or stupidly brilliant conceit made for a magazine that had provocative images of sexualized women on one page, and an in-depth article or interview on another, and once you had (organically) glued the pages together you might still have some surprisingly quality reading material that you wouldn’t be able to explain to your parents.  Yahtzee Croshaw operates from the same conceit, and I am enriched in ways I could never fully articulate for having followed him.  I also had the pleasure of meeting Yahtzee in person twice during the peak years of the Escapist, and I am pleased to report he is as tall and unintentionally imposing in his size and stature as his sharp wit and brutal critiques are.  He does not take compliments well, but he exudes the profundity his reviews offer.

Yahtzee has rebounded with the Escapist’s old video team with Second Wind, and with it I fully expect that he will become even more insightful and interesting as the years rage on.  I do not play games with the frequency with which I used to, but it is by, with, and through Yahtzee that I continue to follow the medium.  He is that good, and I aspire to his level as I do Armond’s.

—

If you found the tone of both of these essays somewhat jarring, it’s because I have written them in ways that, in my own way, speak to the style and authority of both critics. That is their influence upon me, and you can see it in nearly everything I write.

No one taught me how to be a critic.  But on the other hand, I had many teachers.  I found them myself, and even if their readership and viewership disappeared into a void, they would still have at least one.  I am not, and I will never be a critic who counts.  They are, and they deserve you as they have deserved me.

– Vivek