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

The specter of Cranston’s Bad Husband recalls Dede the pimp in Jean Renoir’s 1931 La Chienne

Yes, and Transformers 3 has been getting some relatively ok reviews so he had to go the other way

I actually like Armond White's reviews. I don't always agree with them, and they can be hastily written, but I find them frequently insightful.

"Bay’s ongoing premise—good guy Autobots battle bad guy Decepticons—isn’t just boyhood army play writ large; it charts the distance our culture has traveled during the past decade. By avoiding contemplation about the emotional nature of its clanging, morphing, warring creatures—or even why the combat is never, ever decisive—Bay and executive producer Steven Spielberg accommodate the insensitivity that characterizes post-9/11 culture."

"ongoing premise"

"contemplation about"

ugh that review

Bay’s fantasy of mankind’s upheaval is certainly about dynamism, yet not much else. (Would the Futurists approve of such decadence?) Still, critics and fanboys should demand more—that he dig deeper. The smallest narrative link between Chicago’s decimation and a single character’s caring about it would make this sequence magnificent, not just spectacular. (A curious line of dialogue describing “a visual and therefore visceral betrayal” is oddly apt.) Scenes where robots destroy cities apparently uninhabited by people—a bloodless Armageddon—either excavates Chicago’s secret moral corruption (perhaps a timely private fantasy of Rod Blagojevich?) or else is just another tentpole time-killer, as stupid as Inception or Avatar.

i mean does no one even bother editing him? this paragraph is a total mess

i know its the ny press but jeez

i had to read it 3 times lol

i mean its insulting grammatically, stylistically, intellectually

every single sentence needs a big red question mark next to it

Would the Futurists approve of such decadence?

would they indeed

michael bay already had to go through being called hitler by megan fox so it seems kind of mean for armond white to call him a futurist

Scenes where robots destroy cities apparently uninhabited by people—a bloodless Armageddon—either excavates Chicago’s secret moral corruption (perhaps a timely private fantasy of Rod Blagojevich?) or else is just another tentpole time-killer, as stupid as Inception or Avatar.

this may be the worst sentence armond white has ever written. aside from the subject-verb agreement problem, its like, armond, hi, you are the critic, you are supposed to tell me if this movie means something, or nothing

Bunch of fanboy bros sitting around thinkin "wish Bay's fantasy of mankind's upheaval was about more than just dynamism tbh"

oh wait, haha, he does tell me that the movie means nothing:

"In Dark of the Moon, Bay’s machines mean nothing."

Bunch of fanboy bros sitting around thinkin "wish Bay's fantasy of mankind's upheaval was about more than just dynamism tbh"

― polyphonic, Sunday, July 3, 2011 10:49 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lold at this btw. lets go to aicn and comment "Man, I loved Transformers 3 but I couldn't help but wonder... would the futurists approve of this decadence?"

a disapproving Umberto Boccioni watching Transformers 3

http://www.italiamia.com/art/UmbertoBoccioni.jpg

"what decadence"

said it in the transformers thread but this guy's terrible grammar and completely incoherent self-contradictory prose is way more damning and indicative of a nonfunctional mind than anything he's ever said about norbit

excavates Chicago’s secret moral corruption

man this is such classic armond

This guy's non-functioning binaries and constant K-Lo-esque begging for sympathy is way more damaging than his beret.

what is "secret" about chicago's moral corruption anyway?

no one cept Armond knows about it exists

*omit about

A Decepticon army buried on the dark side of the moon that tries to destroy Earth is an allusion to Daley's attempt to (Deceptively) rig the 1960 election to destroy Earth with buried voters think about it

It's the mid-year best, with The Green Hornet and Film Socialisme!

http://www.nypress.com/article-22612-the-2011-mid-year-reckoning.html

Plus, Joe Nussbaum’s serene Prom and Tom Hanks’ also serene Larry Crowne.

What, he couldn't think of another word?

and an honorable mention for repo chick!

"Jodie Foster’s melodrama The Beaver"

that is one word for it, yes

Joe Nussbaum’s serene Prom and Tom Hanks’ also serene Larry Crowne.

Attack the Block

Not so much for the review as a whole, but for this bit:

Attack the Block's comic-ghoulish street sense (the aliens are described as looking like a "monkey fucked a fish") is exactly the kind of thing Tina Fey, Alec Baldwin, Tracy Morgan and cohorts don't do on the SNL knockoff sitcom 30 Rock, with its snarky celebration among privileged media-elites. Here, awareness of class dissatisfaction applies to different races and professions (including cops vs. dole-queuers), if not exactly uniting them.

I mean, where the hell does 30 Rock have come into this? And what does it have to do with anything?

sometimes i feel like he just sits down with a few dozen clauses and then sort of attaches them together at random, a comma here, a semicolon there, parentheses around this one, an em-dash offsetting that one

I love it when snarky media elites from one medium attack ones from another with no trace of irony whatsoever.

...Or in other words, Armond's pot & kettle must not match.

loathing sitcoms shd be applauded in any context

i'm glad to see ppl noting what a bad stylist he is: sometimes i feel like his wack opinions are mainly there to distract you from how awful and unreadable he is on a sentence by sentence level. he writes like a guy dictating on quaaludes.

loathing sitcoms shd be applauded in any context

― satan club sandwich (Dr Morbius), Thursday, August 4, 2011 6:53 AM (23 minutes ago) Bookmark

Figured you at least for a staunch supporter of the multi-cam, Mary Tyler Moore style sitcom. Either way your comment is loveably ridiculous.

post-Shelley Long-leaving-Cheers, obv

Is he writing reviews anywhere?

http://cityarts.info/category/film/ ?

cheers!

Not only that, he's EDITOR of that fortnightly.

And he hates Moneyball even more than I do! Tho as usual, damned if I can figure out why.

http://cityarts.info/2011/09/27/nerds-strike-out/

I didn't get the sense that you hated Moneyball.

weird that he wanted 50/50 to be about god or some shit

is Armand an Xtian?

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