His review of the film has, as usual, much food for the comment trolls, particularly in his insistence that, by attaching their names and confessing personal histories of abuse, Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey are converting "their private agendas into heavily hyped social preoccupation," which I guess means... child abuse is really just another way for a couple of whiny celebrities to beg for attention? He also compares "Precious" to "The Birth of a Nation" and does a good job of hiding the fact that he does have a point -- any movie that features a morbidly obese black woman stealing a bucket of fried chicken probably isn't as nuanced as it thinks it is.

Just to make sure he alienates any potential allies, though, White saves his best salvo for the last paragraph, reminding everyone that no matter how much he dislikes any given movie, he hates his fellow critics more. The same Armond who instructed us not to trust any critic who endorsed "WALL-E" (effectively all of them) says that what was even worse than "Precious" itself was "the ordeal of watching it with an audience full of patronizing white folk at the New York Film Festival." He then proceeds to commit his semi-factual error for the week, proclaiming his certainty that the crowd at Harlem's Magic Johnson theater would laugh it off the screen; would that be the same theater where it was test-screened pre-Sundance and widely acclaimed? Yup. Arguing this on strictly racial lines won't work.

Still, I have to concede a point to Mr. White -- there do seem to be plenty of guilty white liberal critics signing off on this movie for reasons other than pure admiration, as patiently spelled out by the L Magazine's Mark Asch. Even the judicious pan from Slate's Dana Stevens' hedges its bets in the headline with an apologetic "Sorry, I didn't like this movie."

Meanwhile, way to the right of Armond sits a Wall Street Journal editorial by Juan Williams, which is about how awesome "The Cosby Show" was and how terrible ghetto literature is and how it encourages pathological images of blackness sold back to the community. Basically, it's like an episode of "The Boondocks" without the jokes. But you could substitute pretty much any cultural artifact Williams disapproves of for "Precious" and have the same ready-made editorial.

Still, my favorite objection to "Precious" is an entirely common-sense one from Newsweek, where, in a brief but well-done piece, Jennie Yabroff points out that Precious loves math class at the start of the movie, but upon entering alternative school is encouraged to journal her life away and never does math again. "The world does not reward self-expression as readily or consistently as it rewards a good head for numbers," Yabroff scolds, pitilessly dissecting the cliche of self-rehabiliation through journaling. This polemic in favor of math education being celebrated on-screen is actually a far more trenchant analysis of the film than any of the criticism thus far.

[Photo: "Precious: Based on the novel 'Push' by Sapphire," Lions Gate, 2009]

What's funny is they both end up pointing out the same thing.

Kunzru -- the awesome British novelist whose "Transmission" is one of my favorite novels of the decade -- offers up his thoughts on the political context of Haneke's films, and on the groundswell of disgust at the way Austria tried to disassociate itself from its Nazi past. But he gets into shaky territory when he gets to Haneke's more recent work, generalizing about "the link between the personal and the political, the influence of the media, video surveillance, social control and the possibility of authentic human community." His inadvertent conclusion is that Haneke's indictments aren't nearly as universal as he'd like -- outside Austria, he's just another media-decrying doomsday pessimist.

Klawans goes about his work in an entirely different way. Haneke's refused to point-blank say that "The White Ribbon" -- which is set in Germany just before WWI -- is about how Nazism came about, though the narrator does say the tale might "clarify some things that happened later in our country." So Klawans talks to a number of historians who, unsurprisingly, are unimpressed with the film's suggestion that sexual repression laid the stage for mass genocide.

"There are people all over the globe who are sexually repressed," Jeffrey Herf snipes. "Why is it that this particular repression took the form of National Socialism?" And when Haneke protests his film isn't specifically about Nazism but about anything awful you want it to be about -- Islamic terrorism, etc -- the professors are equally unimpressed by his lack of specificity.

The further Haneke gets drawn into the "big picture" (i.e., people are awful) and further away from his specifically Austrian-critiquing roots, what he sees as "ambiguity" and being thoughtful starts to seem kind of silly. Or as Klawans puts it, "The White Ribbon" just doesn't justify its cavalcade of over-the-top misery.

[Photo: "The White Ribbon," Sony Pictures Classics, 2009]

Mitchel Zuckoff's "Robert Altman: An Oral Biography" hit shelves last Tuesday, a book built out of Altman's final interviews and the voices of his collaborators that doesn't skirt the fact that, however acclaimed he was as a filmmaker, Altman could be a real dick. Janet Maslin notes actor Michael Murphy's anecdote about how "Bob would make the best bloody mary I've ever tasted. Then he would stand up and make a speech, pretty much the same speech every night... 'No one in this room knows what this movie is about except me.'"

Reviews have been generally respectful, with exception of a blind haymaker from veteran film writer Richard Schickel at the LA Times, who spends, oh, about a paragraph of his 939-word review actually talking about the book before rambling off about how terrible Altman's movies are, and what a jerk he was to so little end. Schickel likes "McCabe & Mrs. Miller," "Nashville," "California Split" and that's it. The rest of Altman's movies are "solipsistic," like being "trapped in someone else's not-very-interesting drug haze."

The article's prompted some LA Times infighting, with filmmaker Alan Rudolph ("Afterglow," "The Secret Lives of Dentists") writing in to defend his mentor from the wrath of Schickel. "He negates Altman because of his life style. Would he dismiss Huston's drinking or Hitchcock's sexual repression as influences on their film gifts?" Furthermore: "Directors, writers and actors don't have to replicate Altman for him to have impacted their sensibilities. [...] Bob's insistence on doing things his own way was essential. It's the major struggle. And Altman won."

For all his influence, no one's ever successfully imitated Altman stylistically, or even tried. In a way, Rudolph's admirably intentioned defense does Altman a disservice: it suggests that his major legacy isn't in the work, but in paving the way for other mavericks who wanted to flip the bird to studios while taking their money. The lesson to take: when a guy like Schickel takes a book assignment for the clear purpose of being a cranky reactionary, it's really better to just let it be.

[Photo: Altman and Lindsay Lohan on the set of "A Prairie Home Companion," used without permission]