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

link?

― a group of dadfucker types (Matt P), Monday, January 13, 2014 6:19 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

From his ridiculous rant against the Palm D'Or re: Blue is the Warmest Color:

The Festival circuit is notoriously gullible and 2013 moviegoers may never have seen stuff like this, not even Radley Metzger’s Therese and Isabelle or Jake Deckard’s Men in the Sand) but at best they’ll be shocked, not enlightened, bored not edified.

(ok, so my memory failed me a bit--he's not referencing Wakefield Poole directly, but rather a recent remake of Poole's 70s gay porn film Men in the Sand. Still...)

A Google search didn't turn up his reference to Michael Lucas, and I can't remember which review it occurred in (probably something from the NY Press days), but as far as I can recall, it was a similar kind of comparison.

oic he's got a catholic block

toting up the religious bigots itt

on the Armond story and other hot-take 'controversies'

http://blog.sundancenow.com/weekly-columns/bombast-124

http://cityarts.info/2014/02/11/p-c-ping-pong/

The film tours pre-Feminist oppression and indicts Catholic Church restrictions before arriving at its predetermined destination: a harangue on sexual tolerance regarding Philomena’s gay son which includes the mushiest, most calculating AIDS exploitation since Brokeback Mountain.

!!?

Brokeback Mountain exploits AIDS by having a gay guy be a victim of a homophobic murder in the 1970s, duh!

That said, Philomena does sound insufferable. The church and Republicans are homophobic? You're shitting me!

he should have just coined "AIDSploitation" otherwise really what's the point?

Okay, why didn't any of you tell me that Armond has a column in Out magazine now?

Anyway, I may be misreading this review but if I get the gist, it's that the 300 sequel is good because it has hot men and abs: http://www.out.com/entertainment/armond-white/2014/03/16/zack-snyder-re-invents-epic-erotic-300-rise-empire

"Most adventure movies offer fleeting thrills, Snyder’s 300 series combines an emotional surge with a chubby that keeps you ready for more."

The spiky and smooth neck hairs are as textured as the different sets of aureole and bulgy nipples that—through 3D imagery—seem touchable.

genuinely feel this could be a rejuvenative direction for him. rex reed should do it too.

news to me! defensible standard for such a film imho

xp

LOL, I actually only just today found out Armond was in OUT myself. I can only hope this strong editorial guidance helps him achieve lucidity. This particular review (and the one for Long Day Closes) make more sense than almost anything he's written in the last decade.

Not serving as your own editor will do that.

Her black eyes and dark heart recall the great Irene Pappas’s Helen of Troy in The Trojan Women, yet she wields a sword with slo-mo vaginal power.

gorgeous men enflamed by their emotions

emotive men engorged by their flaming

Best thing he's written in years.

The spiky and smooth neck hairs are as textured as the different sets of aureole and bulgy nipples that—through 3D imagery—seem touchable.

it's like armond's dirrrty cousin, raymond white.

i smell a sitcom

identical cousins, one a pugnacious, self-deluded critic for a prestigious daily (ok, we can take a little license) who is a lightning rod of controversy, the other a randy, hedonistic gossip columnist for a LGBT magazine.

wow I had totally forgotten Armond White took Public Enemy to task for "caving" to the white media over the Prof Griff/anti-semitism flap

"With this attitude, Chuck D isn't good for anything except recording mindless, pointless confections. This is the first tough fight Public Enemy has had to face and they've crumbled like chalk."

never change bro

http://www.indiewire.com/survey/top-films-of-2014-so-far/best-film/armond-white

01. 300: Rise of an Empire
02. Blended
03. Dormant Beauty
04. Jimmy P.
05. Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons
06. The LEGO Movie
07. Maladies
08. Palo Alto
09. Rob the Mob
10. Young and Beautiful (Jeune et jolie)

Mildly disappointed he didn't go all-in with a vote toward God's Not Dead or Heaven Is For Real.

we agree on #10 at least. Glad to see he and his National Review masters align on The LEGO Movie and capitalism.

I'm guessing 05 isn't the Tsai Ming-liang one...

LEGO Movie is p great

All this comes through in a time-shifting narrative no less complicated than Faulkner or an Alain Resnais art movie, yet dared by director Tate Taylor and screenwriters Jez and John-Henry Butterworth. They cohere Brown’s personality contrasts through the counterpoint of grueling personal experience. It seems jumpy and fatuous at first — and the opening scene of an elderly Brown’s rifle-toting eccentricity is appallingly misjudged, mixing toilet humor and orneriness — but eventually the film parallels Brown’s own staccato, percussive orchestrations.

Taylor, who directed The Help (and so I expected the worst), grasps the enormity of his subject with both hands, telling an individual and a cultural history at once. This was a risky project during the Obama era, especially following what Harvey Weinstein named Hollywood’s “Obama Effect” (seen in patronizing films from The Butler to 12 Years a Slave that sought to rationalize black history as a long-gone prelude to triumph). Taylor’s The Help seemed part of that specious movement, but Get on Up has a more rigorous, inflected narrative — not as fine as Cadillac Records, but superior to Ray and more exuberant than both.

i also loved cadillac records

Red Hollywood, the film essay by academics Thom Andersen and Noel Burch now presented at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, revives the mythology of the Hollywood Blacklist–a Cold War topic that, after 9/11, should have collapsed into rubble along with the World Trade Center.

hmmm, a new level of delusion. where did this run, the NR?

mais oui!

That sheds some new light on why he loved Stone's WTC.

AW does not care for that new Sin City movie costarring "Joseph Gordon-Lewis."

copy editors do not care for AW.

Is there any decent online index of Armond's reviews? I keep hoping for a cheap Kindle compilation (like Ebert's themed collections of zero- and one-star reviews, only funnier) but no such luck :(

He is making all of our cards

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/386521/across-ungreat-divide-armond-white

Since 2004, the year that film culture split along moral and artistic lines, political and class biases have been exhibited in films that became more and more partisan.

I deeply admire his ability to have your head spinning with challop-driven confusion from the very first sentence.

Not just entertainment, the 20 films listed here effectively destroyed art, social unity, and spiritual confidence.

...

9) Knocked Up (2007) — Judd Apatow’s comedy of bad manners attacked maturity and propriety.

The Dark Knight (2008) used the Batman myth to undermine heroism, overturn social mores, and embrace anarchy.

I'm no fan of Nolan's trilogy, but wasn't this the one where Batman gets all Patriot Act to stop the Joker?

wow even the commenters are like WTF

but then

The Anger of This Place Amazes • 3 hours ago

Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds wasn't anything even remotely about the history of WWII!!

we should also acknowledge the article where he goes into how 2004 was the year everything changed

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/386468/year-culture-broke-armond-white

re: negative reviews of passion of the christ

It was moral vandalism, sullying ideas and totems sacred to many. Such a fundamental offense devastated civilized behavior in ways many still have not realized. It drove a wedge between the public and the elites who make movies; the very ground we walked upon as enlightened, cultured people was scorched like Ground Zero at the World Trade Center.

half of the blurbs are otm

the fact that he's half-right is part of what makes him a troll beyond compare

14) A History of Violence (2005) — David Cronenberg’s new take on Ugly Americans blamed patriotic sadism.

*~~American flags flutter in the breeze over the compound of corrupt Republican Senator Richie Cusack (William Hurt)~~*

He's right re: the vile Mr. & Mrs. Smith, but, as evidenced by his Dark Knight blurb, he doesn't even properly read the films he has good reason to trash.

the Slumdog blurb is tom

otm too

i can easily imagine someone realizing that 2004 had two very striking, very different blockbusters and considering the effect of those hits on hollywood. but it takes a real champ to roid up to AND SUDDENLY GLOBAL TEATIME WAS SHATTERED AND THE NOBILITY OF POP CULTURE WAS LOST FOREVER without even the slightest bit of second guessing

and throwing in weird asides about how the fix was in at cannes thanks to tarantino instead of an actual investigation of pop film history