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

it hits hard enough to make you think "who thought it was a good idea to pay people to share their thoughts on things?" and "we should probably stop talking about movies now"

it's just tiring and I'd like that pill

NB I am going to count the responses to this latest thread bump vs the Andrew Sarris RIP thread tomorrow.

on taste and observation armond white could be a great critic

He was.

not a Neveldine/Taylor stan by a long shot, but Gamer was too bugfuck crazy to not kinda love.

oh yeah, it was a shit film, but there were a lot of great ideas bubbling up in so many scenes i figure there's about 15 different masters theses just waiting to be written

The problem with Gamer is that Gerard Butler plays the lead as a drip when everything else is fucking awesome. This could have been solved very easily with STATHAM.

My biggest problem with Gamer was how it tried to make the teenager sympathetic towards the end. If we were to keep hating hi thought the entire film, it would have felt like a stronger indictment of the whole system (if that was in fact the whole point all along, and really who knows with this film).

Sounds like I'm saying that I woulda liked the movie even better if it'd only killed a kid off at the end, but I guess I sorta am.

gamer was so bad that i resolved never to watch anything those guys do again. they just dont have the talent to realize their ideas

Armond's mid-year report, done up in even more convoluted fashion than usual in order to pay tribute to Andrew Sarris.

http://cityarts.info/2012/07/03/mid-year-reckoning/

Actually seems really credible for the first few entries, but once I remembered what A Thousand Words was it was like, "oh right...Armond."

Wanderlust (David Wain)—audacious mockery of Occupy sentimentality and its outdated hippie heritage.

there it is

:D was just going to post that one

Except that that movie was written and shot before Occupy really took off.

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor)—addresses action movie tropes to satirize the deficiencies of contemporary genre excess.

o rly

such a gross sentence

Armond apparently did not see the featurette where the director was bragging that he'd promised the stuntmen that any footage of them taken during a stunt where they were injured would be used in the movie

this isn't it but it reuses a lot of the same footage:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqgI2kKUqqc

yes but satire

genre films cannot be bad they can only be satirical commentaries on bad genre films

http://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/20091002.gif

which one is the literature professor

Trick question, they are both TAs.

wanderlust is hilarious but it is not really at all what armond says it is

is it really funny?? i saw trailers but it looked really bad. isn't it paul rudd and jennifer aston?

yeah. its great! its david wain who did wet hot american summer + role models

i generally like david wain but those trailers looked so bad. i'll check it out.

this roundup sadly lacking in maniacal vigor

yeah mordy i thought the same thing, and then caught it on dvd and was pleasantly surprised (so maybe dont go in w/ expectations). basically the same thing happened to me with role models too -- shitty trailers so i passed in theaters then ended up really liking it at home

Wanderlust feels pretty inconsequential and a lot of the humour is kind of obvious but it's a great cast and it's just fun to hang out with them. Rudd's mirror scene is something else

I do want to watch the Téchiné flick. Armond is generally OTM about him.

wanderlust is very funny, atlanta = mcmansions + asshole is otm, alan alda is really good in it.

Wanderlust is about 7 percent as funny as WHAS, and more than half of that 7 percent is Rudd's mirror scene. But still, worth a watch.

and i thought he'd fallen off

It’s time now to assert Paul W.S. Anderson’s status as one of contemporary cinema’s most thrilling talents. He deserves a clarifying comparison to the fraudulent, annoyingly monickered Paul Thomas Anderson whose film The Master opened the same week as Resident Evil 5.

http://cityarts.info/2012/09/17/battle-of-the-andersons/

this guy is a national treasure, tbh

It’s inevitable that Paul Thomas Anderson’s artistic ambitions should be unavoidably juxtaposed to Paul W.S, Anderson’s artistic success.

this guy

Follow Armond White on Twitter at 3xchair

Tags: armond white, hugo, Martin Scorsese, Milla Jovovich, Paul Thomas Anderson, Paul W.S. Anderson, Richard Brooks, Sam Peckinpah, stanley kubrick, steven spielberg

He's hardly the only one aboard the PWSA > PTA crazy caboose, among cinephiles I know.

really?

even if that opinion is not unique to Armond, the clumsy construction of that sentence is a bit of a marvel.

" . . . inevitable . . . unavoidably juxtaposed . . ."

--Armond White, City Arts

(Not that I wouldn't pay a dollar to see a Resident Evil movie announced as Best Picture at the Oscars.)

Yeah, PWSA has quite a bit of critical caché these days amongst a certain set.

I doubt any of them would write a review like Armond's though.

lol Phil

I mean whatever his ideas and his idiosyncrasies, he may be a worse WRITER than, like, Harry Knowles.

"PWSA is a master. PTA is a masturbator." -- Armond White, City Arts

Unrelated (or maybe not), but I'd always known Armond's contrarianism extended to politics but I never figured that he was an out and out Republican until he was tweeting support for Romney during the RNC.

link? I don't think supporting one of the country's 2 major political parties qualifies as "contrarian." Mindless, perhaps.

Was gonna quote the Ann Romney one, but just scroll through his recent tweets:

https://mobile.twitter.com/3xchair#!/3xchair

Supporting one of the country's two major parties isn't contrarian in and of itself, but supporting the republicans is a good way to piss off the kinds of people who love Paul Thomas Anderson films, I suppose. I just figured his occasional Obama bashing was less partisan and more just trying to be provocative. It's not like he doesn't have a history of that.

a good way to piss off the kinds of people who love Paul Thomas Anderson films

really? how about ppl who love Coen Bros films, like Mitt Romney?

I dislike Paul Thomas Anderson films – guess that's why I'm non-affiliated?

Hell, I don't care either way. I'm not even an American, though if pressed id certainly rather see you guys with a genial quasi intellectual as president than the Mormon Mr. Burns. Was just saying that the kinds of ppl who regularly read the film reviews in NYC alt.weeklies and care about movies like The Master are gonna tend to be liberal more often than not, and that armond knows which buttons to push.

Didn't know Romney was a fan of the Coens. Ok, then.

There's very little in his writing before he lost it to indicate that he would be a Romney supporter. So if he is, then yes, contrarianism has officially become his life support.

Xpost, ok make that "the kinds of ppl who" blah blah blah are going to generally be of a liberal or highly politically skeptical leaning.