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

By his standards, this is actually a somewhat tempered take.

It's official. His first NRO post that isn't a review:

Now, after the mess of Charlottesville and the mainstream media’s deliberate misreading of White House statements, these czars have uncustomarily succumbed to show-business, art-world, and theater-bubble peer pressure. Peer pressure is an undeniable part of the arts-panel experience — as it is also evidence of millennial virtue-posturing.

"deliberate misreading"

wow

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/450637/nea-resignations-good-riddance

Refute the Obama revolution that “transformed” America into an elitist state of empowered celebrities. It had filled the government with uncompromising progressives — wealthy ones at that — who would rather see the system collapse than compromise their egotism. Let freeloader grant applicants squirm, or let Hollywood, Broadway and the mainstream media — our new czars — get off the government tit and totally fund themselves.

On the fall of Armond

http://hazlitt.net/feature/critical-failure

Good read, thanks

Level headed in every way. The diametric opposite to Armond today.

Q&A with James Toback smartest, most honest director in America. https://t.co/f9GWEiPVSE

— armond white (@3xchair) October 23, 2017

armond white is what happens when you're a creep to those around you and subsequently rejected and forgotten, i.e. the perfect mark for the alt-right.

excellent point.

well times, Armond https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/oct/22/james-toback-sexual-harassment-writer-director-accused

well that's why he revived a 17-year-old interview.

There might be a perceptive, level-headed critic out there who can cogently make the argument that a filmmaker can be a great artist AND still be a sexual predator. But Armond isn't that critic, and Toback isn't that filmmaker.

I think Armond could, but Toback no fucking way

Armond's timing and wording dare you not to assume that being a great filmmaker and being a sexual predator go hand-in-hand.

Armond White can't, because his entire POV is untrustworthy, it's a reaction to the people who rejected him for being a creep. sorry you can't call female film critics cunts anymore, Armond!

he follows 17 twitter accounts, and he's probably the only guy on Twitter who follows Saint Etienne, Bryan Ferry, Curt Schilling, Mike Cernovich, *and* Scott Adams.

he's been pathetic his entire career but now it's almost a tragedy. i suspect he's deeply unwell.

he follows 17 twitter accounts

No, but he does check his @'s religiously.

AW used to do a good annual music-video review show at Lincoln Center earlier in the century, before he lost his mind.

I liked him as a music critic.

I even liked him as a film critic for a time.

Now I only like him as a cautionary tale.

An oasis of civilization in the California desert

Some of those music video review thingys used to be (are?) up on YouTube in poor quality recordings. I watched enough of them that I'm convinced they were his best work.

I called this one:

A few years back, as chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle, I hosted a criticism panel at Columbia University and was bemused when one participant from a national weekly entertainment magazine, insisted that his “reviews are not political!” It’s demonstrable that most movie critics, like most journalists, work under an unacknowledged left bias. I was reminded of this again yesterday when a conglomerate of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the New York Film Critics Circle, Boston Society of Film Critics, and the National Society of Film Critics all rounded their wagons, moving to disqualify Disney films from the groups’ upcoming awards consideration, subsequent to a feud — over a news article the L.A. Times wrote about Disneyland — in which the corporation refused to invite the paper’s critic to a movie screening.

Reviewers who normally resist writing political analyses of films, even when praising movies that are blatantly partisan, now presume to form a united front by issuing the quasi-political statement that Disney’s interdiction was “antithetical to the principles of a free press and set a dangerous precedent in a time of already heightened hostility towards journalists. . . . [This] should gravely concern all who believe in the importance of a free press, artists included.”

But this is delusional. It is the typical liberal “free press” blather followed by punitive action. Involvement in an individual business dispute diminishes the idea of journalistic solidarity unless there’s recognition that Disney exercised a legitimate right to choose its audience for film previews—even to withhold advertising to whatever media outlet it chooses. Ignoring the business facts of the matter to pretend this is a First Amendment issue exposes the critics’ hypocrisy.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner

Disney exercised a legitimate right to choose its audience for film previews—even to withhold advertising to whatever media outlet it chooses

Would that Disney decided to stop advertising their shitty product.

This one slipped by me ... http://www.nationalreview.com/article/453744/charles-burnett-academy-award

https://www.out.com/armond-white/2017/11/30/call-me-your-names-sex-lives-rich-and-immodest

I don't regard this as actually from the maniacal side of things, but certain to raise hackles.

fabulous url

what, NRO wouldn't publish it?

Also:

nstead of powerfully exploring gay passion as in this year’s Paris: O5:59 and God’s Own Country, Guadagino’s movie is regressive. It harkens back to a pre-Stonewall sensibility in which closeted emotions are inflated due to an out-dated, introverted and mostly inept sensibility.

Did he watch the scene where Elio grabs Oliver's balls, or, like, the whole movie? Elio hides the crush from no one, himself least of all.

I don't disagree that Paris and God's were more unbridled tho. But that's certainly not the ONLY measure by which films about gay romance should be judged.

I have never used a bridle.

You're missing out.

Seven Bridles for Seven Brothers.

i’m bridling at this offtopic horseplay

Jump in the saddle, hold on to the bridle

Armond writes regularly for Out as well as Soto's favorite t.p.

God's Own Country is quite bridled

It's beautifully bridled.

Better-Than 2017: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455151/annual-better-movies-list-european-films-dominate

fucking moron of course backtracks on Lady Bird once other people loved it as well, the same as he did with The Hurt Locker.

hipsterism run amok.

hipster decadence.

without appreciating its coup de grâce rebuke of hipsterism

it's always worth control-f-ing hipsterism with Armand, it seems. I'm probably a bad person, but I do occasionally agree with him about some widely liked movies - but don't like to talk about it. But Jesus wept "Edgar Wright’s autism action film" - stfu man!

Sentence most in need of an editor: “Plain, neo-realist beauty exposes the useless, cynical sanctimony of three ahistorical, sanctimonious, paranoid fantasies.”

But Jesus wept "Edgar Wright’s autism action film" - stfu man!

Can I confess that I had no idea wtf he was talking about here? So, Baby was autistic? Or Wright is somehow crafting an "autistic" style of filmmaking (whatever that means)? Seriously, what the hell is he talking about?

It's the point behind his original review: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/448901/baby-driver-almost-great-beguiled-hipsterdom-last-knight-pyrotechnics

I actually agree with about half of his review of The Post.

I'm probably a bad person, but I do occasionally agree with him

oh come on
armond is great
(imo)
agreeing with a controversial critic does not make anyone a "bad person." i'm sick of that leap people make with controversial people.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DWg1CGJXkAAoS99.jpg

oh god just heard about his latest. Look I love when he's a mischievous pill when he's writing about movies, but this kinda shit is disgusting

It's ... admirable isn't the word for it, but it's something how many deeper ends he finds to go off of this late in the game.

this is just boring though, like i don't go to armond for warmed over right wing talking points i could get from literally thousands of people on twitter, i go to him for shit like "the recent Eddie Murphy films that are so personal and ingenious, they transcend racial categorization.”