If only to give Armond White a little cool-down time between Reverseblog spankings, we'll turn our attention today to New York's other, semi-relevant free weekly paper, the Village Voice, and its critical staff.

I don't want to go on too much about Dennis Lim's panting over Gus Vant Sant's new floater Last Days or Michael Atkinson's overthinking of 9 Songs' lifeless provocation, other than to say that write-ups like this only facilitate the production of anemic, fatuously "difficult" arthouse fare and allow idea-barren twat directors to coast on moddish minimalism, confident that there will always be plenty of dithery, quasi-intellectual writers to fill in their blanks with genius. Sure, Van Sant's new movies "waft," but so do dog farts.

This week's real prize winner, however: In the time-honored tradition of scraping the bottom of the rolodex for 15th tier critics when it comes time to review less-than-prestigious horror titles, we get "Benjamin Strong" waxing retarded on Devil's Rejects
First sentence: "If in retrospect musician Rob Zombie's 2003 directorial debut, House of 1,000 Corpses , reads like a yee-hawing harbinger of last fall's red-state triumph, then its sequel, The Devil's Rejects , is the smug Republican victory lap."
"If in retrospect"... But it doesn't. At all. Nice blind stab at "relevance" Ben; looking forward to hearing you place 'Dukes of Hazzard' in a "in the wake of 9/11" context. Jackass.

Atkinson, given to occasional bouts of interest, originally wrote a piece on Michael Winterbottom for Film Comment called "Winterbottom: Cinema as Heart Attack". Haha...I'll never forget that. More like "Winterbottom: Cinema as Mild Stroke."

Geez. I love you guys, not just for sticking it to Armond White on a regular basis and writing great criticism on a pretty regular basis, but I'm beginning to have a hard time distinguishing all this contempt with Armond's own. Of course, the first sentence of that "Devil's Rejects" review was pretty stupid.

Oh shit - I wrote as many words as Atkinson did on 9 SONGS...did I overthink? Will I be responsible for fatuous arthouse fare? Am I a quasi-intellectual? Jesus, maybe I'm dithery.

Hey, wait up guys...I hated LAST DAYS, I did I did I did...can I still be part of the club??

Hey "eshman," it's widely known that you're the least adjective-addicted member of the RS staff, so don't get up in arms. Have you read anything I've written (nobody does)? One opinion per 500 words, for God's sake.
I mean, for serious.

Pretty ironic that The Reeler makes "eshman" suffer for filmenthusiast's sins. I bleed, I bleed, but I will rise again.

Come on, Filmenthusiast, you can't be serious. Your writing is great, and freshly and incomparably opinionated.

I'm the megaphoner.

You fucknuts all phone it in. Thank god for editing.