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

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

Hipster Hollywood

Maybe I'm forgetting the weird misogyny of there will be blood, idk. Strange to hear that complaint, though, from a reverent fan of 3000 Miles to Graceland.

that instead of hollywood reflecting the red-state/blue-state schism, critics and liberal directors CAUSED it. in TWO THOUSAND AND FOUR.

"liberals ruined america, can i write about it for you?"

"Please do, older black dude with journalistic credentials! Score!"

"LO, HOW THE HANGOVER DID SHIT UPON MY ONCE BEAUTIFUL WORLD. OH CURSED TARANTINO. FOUL BRANGELINA!"

happy Brangelina Wedding Aftermath btw everybody

i hope his book fills in the gaps between nanook of the north and pulp fiction, maybe a bit about how in 1984 Beverly Hills Cop, Ghostbusters and Police Academy reflected a sense that hipsters and authority structures were learning to co-exist under reagan, smoothing the ruptures of the 60s

Surprised at how (relatively) subdued his pan of Boyhood was, with exactly zero shit-throwing over the Obama stuff or the (largely misunderstood, I think) representations of Red State America.

i hope his book fills in the gaps between nanook of the north and pulp fiction, maybe a bit about how in 1984 Beverly Hills Cop, Ghostbusters and Police Academy reflected a sense that hipsters and authority structures were learning to co-exist under reagan, smoothing the ruptures of the 60s

ha – isn't this what J. Hoberman's book is about?

not in a rush to find out but it wouldn't surprise me

In what the New York Times’s A.O. Scott called a “suave, scholarly tour de force,” J. Hoberman delivers a brilliant and witty look at the decade when politics and pop culture became one.

This was the era of the Missile Gap and the Space Race, the Black and Sexual Revolutions, the Vietnam War and Watergate—as well as the tele-saturation of the American market and the advent of Pop art. In “elegant, epigrammatic prose,” as Scott put it, Hoberman moves from the political histories of movies to the theater of wars, national political campaigns, and pop culture events.

With entertaining reinterpretations of key Hollywood movies (such as Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch, and Shampoo), and meditations on personages from Che Guevara, John Wayne, and Patty Hearst to Jane Fonda, Ronald Reagan, and Dirty Harry, Hoberman reconstructs the hidden political history of 1960s cinema and the formation of America’s mass-mediated politics.

capital letters, so it's important

Armond misses 2004, and this is all straight up nostalgia.

You'll Never Believe Which Of Your Favorite Movies Ruined Our Country

That said, I'll probably get What We Don't Talk about When We Talk about the Movies from the library when it comes out.

Armond misses 2004, and this is all a suave, scholarly tour de force.

I just hope Mel Gibson reads it and gives Armond a "you get me" bouquet

saw this pop up on twitter and i knew this thread would be all a-light

these sentences, my god

SARCASTIC VIOLENCE IS THE NEW MARRIAGE EQUALITY