another maniacal Armond White review, this time "Fahrenheit 9/11"

It’s rare for actors to delineate an athlete’s physical assurance; Pitt doesn’t even try. His Billy Beane is a beer-belly characterization by a pin-up

This is so wrong that it verges on parody.

A "beer-belly characterization" is kind of what I got from Pitt in that movie, but I liked it.

A player who's been retired for a dozen years doesn't nec have an active athlete's bearing. Pitt has it cuz he's a movie star, and the movie is synthetic.

and Hollywood is normally so good at accurately portraying schlubby leads

morbs am i right that hoffman as art howe is just some hilariously wrong miscasting? don't mind jonah hill as depodesta cuz it's just hilarious to imagine him finding out billy beane got brad pitt and he got jonah hill.

Hoffman is just not believable, and the character as written has no dimension.

also Armond: Beane turning down $12.5 M actually happened, schmuck.

yknow if turner was still in control there'd be a tnt dramatization of john schuerholz' built to win by xmas.

...Sandler knows how our plumbing works.

Sandler truly is our Lubitsch.

Superb stuff

comments on that are fantastic

Jaime N. Christley 8 minutes ago

You found it hilarious? You must have been internalizing your laughter, because I was sitting three feet away from you during the screening and you didn't so much as crack a smile.
Flag 1 person liked this. Like ReplyReply renegadeisback 14 minutes ago

If any movie has a religious backbone, hack Armond White is happy as a pig in shi*!.
Flag 1 person liked this. Like ReplyReply Pat Reynolds 15 minutes ago

Woah. This is amazing. Just like "Jack and Jill" seems like a parody of an Adam Sandler movie, I almost thought this was a parody of an Armond White review. That's how ridiculous this is.

"All Sandler’s best comedies (Grown Ups, Bedtime Stories, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry and the great Spanglish) are really love stories"

Oh My.

He has kind words for *Grown Ups* but neglects *Zohan*!? V. disappointed.

In Jill drag, Sandler looks like young women you see on the subway; she’s a homely archetype Fanny Brice, Judy Canova and Martha Raye made popular. (Eddie Murphy also mastered this comic affection in The Klumps and Norbit.)

Apatow produced Zohan i think?

If the comment about him not cracking a smile during J&J is in fact true, it is incredibly telling.

I'm just finding it super funny that White's taste in sandler films is disappointingly highbrow, relatively speaking.

Is this anti-semitism?

Sandler, of course, always goes back to Jewishness. He may be the least ethnically abashed Jewish film comic outside the Borscht Belt which is Jack and Jill’s natural strength. Jack’s self-consciousness about Jill is rooted in Jewish comics’ proverbial self-deprecation (that’s why the twinship premise). Jill’s large features, gaucheness, petulance and unsophisticated ways are not anti-Jewish traits but the qualities that insecure, social-climbing ethnic groups usually evade.

Of course, more problematic is that parenthetical. "(that's why the twinship premise)" seems to be missing a verb.

also armond apparently doesn't know what the word non-plussed means

A lot of people don't!

I think it's getting to the point where the wrong meaning for 'non-plussed' is becoming semi-acceptable

How do you know he's not nonplussed in that scene?

My favourite bit:

the key to classic comedy going back to the Greeks.

"You know the ones I mean."

http://leemasaur.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/hedonismbot.jpg

Spielberg changes games, heals the sick, raise the dead, makes all the little girls talk out of their heads

I think it is kind of cool that Spielberg makes Armond White so ecstatic.

"This ribbon of hurtling delight" is a nice Armondish turn of phrase

He can pan old movies too, oh yes he can!

(countdown to Morbs wholehearted agreement w/review in 10...9...8...)

I wish I could disappoint you, But I've seen C et J twice and it left me cold, as Rivette almost always does. Never heard the Kael quote!

funny bcz as rerelease hosannas for it have been unleashed in NYC the last 2 days, I was gonna look for demurrals.

That's a quality Kael zinger.

Not really worth linking to his Avengers review, but I love the mind that can bear down a film for its crass consumerism (fair enough) and somehow triumph Transformers.

his Avengers review is pretty disappointing tbh

I guess it depends whether you think there is something else going on in the tentpole movie, which can theoretically happen.

Celine reminds me of what AW wrote about some other alleged Gallic classic: "When people say they hate French films, this is what they're talking about."

every time this thread gets revived i wind up rereading the damn review at the start of it and being amazed once again by what a shitty writer AW is.

Celine and Julie can be viewed as a proto-Mumblecore movie for its seemingly arbitrary storyline and self-infatuated preoccupation with cultural privilege. Indeed, Labourier and Berto’s bland antics resemble the mundane actions and unprepossessing actors of Mumblecore. It’s a particular let down from the sexy wit that gave the French New Wave undeniable appeal.

and this. seriously, everything -- everything -- about this paragraph is vomitous.

his assertion that people who like or love the film are doing so as some kind of an anti-keal move is just baffling.

it's like:

"can be viewed" -- typical bizarre armond formulation that reminds me of greil marcus's funny description of albert goldman ("the addled syntax of someone who dictates instead of writes")
"seemingly arbitrary storyline" -- well, is it or isn't it?
"self-infatuated" -- how?
"preoccupation with cultural privilege" -- it's based on a HENRY JAMES story!
"It’s a particular let down" -- as opposed to what?
"the sexy wit that gave the French New Wave undeniable appeal" -- OK i give the fuck up

citing Greil Marcus in your argument = funny

his assertion that people who like or love the film are doing so as some kind of an anti-keal move is just baffling.

It's off point to be sure, but I would argue that 100 percent of the people who will watch C+J Music Factory will know who Kael is, tho maybe not what her opinion of Rivette is.

i'm 100% sure my ex has no idea who kael is and C&J was his favourite film.

Is your ex George Glass?

def not.

was his favourite film.... until he met tarkovsky. and i can assure you he still has no idea who kael is.

RIP Sarris, this killed him:

http://cityarts.info/2012/06/20/the-sandler-memo/

If you didn’t get the Memo to hate Adam Sandler, his new movie That’s My Boy would seem another likable, if minor, entry in his continuing series of unexpectedly challenging human comedies. The anti-Sandler Memo is a follow-the-leader pact–not literally a missive but an unconscious social ideology that protects Hollywood’s status quo. It perverts honest, healthy response to Sandler whose comic tendency is to affront the status quo in film after film. His spoofing of political correctness and middle-brow propriety is the real reason behind all the haterade which became ridiculous after last year‘s ingenious, heartfelt Jack and Jill provoked an endless backlash of unprecedented lunacy and vitriol.

i love how his reviews always have a needle of truth hiding in a haystack of goading horseshit

you got the memo!

Sometimes I'm astonished at how fine tuned he is as a mirror-image. That's My Boy is nowhere near as horrible as Jack & Jill, hence his enthusiasm isn't quite as overstated.

lol okay, he does have a slight point re: Jack and Jill, which was exactly the same type of gooey sentimentalism wrapped in a ball of crassness as all of his other movies and, as a result, kind of a weird choice to be the focus of the IRE OF THE AGES, but that is a spectacular piece of overstatement

that's the thing! it's not just foaming-at-the-mouth lunacy, it's a considered, contrarian stance apparently worded to annoy the largest number of people possible