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

one of the twitter replies implies that this is one of those people that has long dialogues with themselves on chan-style sites

which, again, of course

Not sure who will be lured in with a personal ad like that but good luck to them

like maybe they didn't get banned for NAZI but because letterboxd is a site for reviewing movies and not for experiments in conceptual trolling

I understand those are the same thing, to an extent, nonetheless...

just seems like a very mentally ill person. not especially funny.

If there is a poll the final option needs to be "Dude, it's just a movie. Maybe you should go lie down for a while."

so this person posted an incoherent paranoid screed that has nothing to do with movies to prove that they're... not armond white?

I think it’s actually two separate people. The one running AW’s account is speaking out on behalf of a kindred spirit who was banned.

there's the bizarre screed person and their friend who is criticizing their site ban, who also reposts Armond reviews to the site under a separate "Not Armond" account

i like how he seems to have deliberately put the WORST directors in all lower case just to really put across his contempt for them

so this person posted an incoherent paranoid screed that has nothing to do with movies to prove that they're... not armond white?

― “Hakuna Matata,” a nihilist philosophy (One Eye Open)

lmfao

armond white's letterboxd account is called "notarmondwhite". he reposted someone else's rant.

the "anti-cinema" screed was another user's bio.

armond white does not have a letterboxd account

idk why this is hard to follow:

some guy ("a_real_peanut") regularly reposts Armond content under "Not Armond White" so that people can see it on letterboxd

"a_real_peanut" decided to post on his not-armond account to chastise letterboxd for banning other users, as they have a much larger following on their account where they're copy-pasting Armond reviews

oh. makes sense now.

The whole world: Little Women is a fantastic, joyous movie.
Armond White: Fuck that shit https://t.co/BLZvG7CHj4

— Anthony Boyd (@CharlieBronze) December 27, 2019

The fetish for Obama-era posturing fascinates me.

even his jpegs are shitty

Greta Gerwig's debutante version of Little Women isn't nearly as good as Spielberg's The Color Purple yet vain feminists (and their supporters) prefer its privileged race-class basis. https://t.co/ZLUzA1PFD8 pic.twitter.com/AQrmeKZV8b

— armond white (@3xchair) January 3, 2020

While Gerwig features the flummery of period picture luxe, she misses the bold Caucasian eroticism that made Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides peculiarly compelling.

i can't get over how awful this line is

leaving aside how fucking gross it is to complain about the absence of "eroticism" in a story about four young sisters, how obnoxious is it to put "flummery" and "luxe" in the same sentence

idk I found that line inspiring

"bold Caucasian eroticism" three words that have never been combined before

It's that time of year:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/movie-reviews-better-than-list-good-movies-versus-netflix-cynicism/

Good movies vs. Netflix cynicism
This year the Better-Than List is more necessary than ever, given film criticism’s decline alongside corporate media’s ethical failure. Good movies received bad notices, little attention, and scarce distribution and exhibition. Visually effective storytelling, emotional exploration, and political scrutiny have been so obstructed by Marvel–Star Wars inanity and TV distraction (through the novelty of streaming services) that critics have lost sight of cinema aesthetics. Good movies still get made but languish for worthy audiences. Critical thinking has been lost to fake mythology. Here’s proof:

Dragged across Concrete > The Irishman
Craig Zahler made the best movie of the year by examining the contemporary American nightmare with both horror and compassion. Lawmen Mel Gibson, Vince Vaughn, and lawless Tory Kittles test private conviction and social desire — unlike Scorsese’s mob-fetishizing, morality manqué tale. Personal filmmaking vs. decadent commercialism.

Sorry Angel > Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Christophe Honoré’s AIDS-era morality tale confronted still-current ironies of desire minus the special pleading that fouled up Céline Sciamma’s misguided lesbian/abortion historical romance. Sorry Angel’s range of masculine behaviors bested simplistic feminist standard-bearing, Plus, Honoré transcended sexual politics through the single most powerful — leveling — movie-lover’s image this decade.

Pain and Glory > Uncut Gems
Pedro Almodóvar’s gorgeous emotional autobiography showed wisdom while the Safdie Brothers’ ethnic carnival was callow. Antonio Banderas’s expressive regret and grace-filled recollections went deeper than Adam Sandler’s deliberately ugly, unfunny self-reproach.

Domino > Knives Out
Brian De Palma reexamines his Millennial politics — depicting the War on Terror in a swift, effective genre exercise. Rian Johnson’s crass, pseudopolitical whodunit can’t tell where citizenship or humanity begins.

Richard Jewell > The Irishman
Clint Eastwood’s account of an actual American tragedy (initiated by irresponsible media and rogue government) shames Scorsese’s distorted labor-union history. Respect for life vs. the love of crime. Simple fluency vs. baroque dishonesty.

The Image Book >Netflix
Jean-Luc Godard recalls the political complexity of our cinematic heritage. Images of beauty and doom reflect on the artistic expression of mortality — an increasingly forgotten goal. Godard shows us everything missing from the inundation of Netflix’s reckless film-production excess. Through a climactic scene from Max Ophuls’s Le Plaisir, Godard challenged Netflix (Scorsese’s and Obama’s boss) as the enemy of cinema.

Sauvage/Wild > Marriage Story
Camille Vidal-Naquet’s extraordinarily intimate debut is more candid than Noah Baumbach’s latest act of pampered social-climbing. The tough story of a social outcast (Félix Maritaud) looking for love (without conventional definition) contrasts with the flimsy narcissism that our media elite share and defend. Homo sensitivity vs. Hetero superficiality.

Tattoo of Revenge > Little Women
Julián Hernandez’s film noir turns male–female empathy into a constantly inventive spectacle while Greta Gerwig’s literary adaptation sentimentalizes bourgeois privilege as a woman’s right.

John Wick 3: Parabellum > Joker
Chad Stahelski’s slapstick violence wittily satirizes Millennial desperation (imagine if John Woo had Fred Astaire’s aplomb). But Todd Phillips’s Batman spin-off, featuring Joaquin Phoenix’s bonkers Heath Ledger re-do, is a grim, sarcastic appeal to nihilism (imagine a Scorsese sellout with no craft).

Shadow > The Souvenir
Zhang Yimou combines Chinese lore and pure cinematic dazzle, in a royal court’s battle of wills imbued with Shakespearean richness. Joanna Hogg’s vapid film-school heroine (Honor Swinton Byrne) epitomizes a generation’s cultural ignorance and foolish pride.

I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians > Parasite
Radu Jude provides an ingenious perspective on Romania’s cultural and political legacy while Bong Joon-ho flirts with creeping fascism. Anti-Communist wisdom vs. cancel-culture terrorism. An Adam Schiff alarm vs. an Adam Schiff sitcom.

Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood > The Irishman
Quentin Tarantino recalls the Manson Sixties but with social perspective, while Scorsese brings back that ’90s malady: denial. It’s QT’s best-ever film — vividly acted and emotionally satisfying — a bulwark against film culture’s moral decay.

By the Grace of God >The Two Popes
François Ozon addresses the Catholic Church sex scandal without the defamation seen in Fernando Meirelles’s progressive calling-card movie. Ozon revives the astute reverence of Hollywood’s I’d Climb the Highest Mountain and A Man Called Peter. Meirelles is just smug.

Brian Banks and The Best of Enemies > Us, Clemency, and Queen & Slim
In this year’s race-movie genre, Tom Shadyac and Robin Bissell empathize with real-life civil-rights struggles. Their decent films rise above the insulting exploitation of Jordan Peele, Chinonye Chukwu, and Lena Waithe’s superstitious thrillers.

Peterloo > 1917
Before Mike Leigh succumbs to Marxist sentiment and secular skepticism, he gives us fine moments of common-people sacrifice and brilliant instances of British political rhetoric putting opposing sides of history at cross-purposes. Leigh senses contemporary national crisis, but Sam Mendes ignores it with a mawkish, tedious WWI pictorial stunt.

An Adam Schiff alarm vs. an Adam Schiff sitcom.

Sorry Angel’s range of masculine behaviors bested simplistic feminist standard-bearing,

oh

those simple women!

otm about By the Grace of God

he hates Scorsese more than the Marvelboyz do

Once Upon A Time and Richard Jewell both top The Irishman but he doesn't clarify which of those two wins. Disappointing.

Chad Stahelski’s slapstick violence wittily satirizes Millennial desperation

Of course! When John Wick kills that one guy by karate-chopping a book into his face, it was clearly a satire about the way millennials have been entrapped by college debt... it’s so obvious now!

Clint Eastwood’s account of an actual American tragedy (initiated by irresponsible media and rogue government)

I think it was actually initiated by a murderous religious fanatic but what are facts between friends?

Armond White is so stupid, that when he calls 'I do not care if we go down in history as Barbarians' 'anti-communist' I genuinely can't say if he just don't know which side Romania was on in wwii

Bong Joon-ho flirts with creeping fascism

...what

These always read like he just assembles them randomly, like mad libs. We should try to write our own next year and see how close we come. “Hellboy bravely met the moment with wit and elegance, while Atlantics traffics in the sour bootlicking of the Mueller-istas.”

Uncut Gems diminishes one of the richest comic sensibilities in modern cinema. It turns Sandler, the smartass who always chooses family and friendship over streetwise selfishness, into an icon of grungy nihilism. The Safdie brothers have reinvented nice Jewish boy Sandler as Johnny Depp.

e smartass who always chooses family and friendship over streetwise selfishness,

this is a lie. Did he watch the film?

One of my favorite Armond-isms in recent years is when he cited “critic John Demetry” to buttress an argument (Demetry being not a critic but a blogger who works directly w/him and perhaps strategically shares his taste almost exactingly).

Ah yes, I remember that sycophantic Skeletor back from the heyday of the Brian De Palma forum.

This is my kind of distraction from COVID news:

https://letterboxd.com/notarmondwhite/film/never-rarely-sometimes-always/

Good lord...

A photo worthy of Jean Genet. So is the story behind it (The Miracle of the Rose). @Gothamist pic.twitter.com/e8DKFiepBA

— armond white (@3xchair) May 5, 2020

Got my Rohmer Six Moral Tales BR box yesterday, saw he has an essay in it

Moments like this are what Arm0nd lives for...

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/review-hamilton-lin-manuel-miranda-monument-political-egotism/

Disney’s presentation of the Broadway blockbuster Hamilton marks a curious cultural turning point: The most heralded production in recent Broadway history has not been adapted into a movie — it’s a digital video recording of a 2016 stage performance — because it has to live up to its hype as an exclusive Broadway event. Hamilton’s celebration by elite media cadres contradicts the essence of cinema as an emotionally intense, unifying popular art form. This version happens at, literally, an emotional and intellectual distance.

Lin-Manuel Miranda conceived a treatment of the life of Alexander Hamilton, one of the Founding Fathers and the first secretary of the Treasury of the United States, to be a showcase of Broadway theater diversity. He followed legendary impresario Joseph Papp’s idea of multicultural, non-traditional performance that broadened the Western theatrical canon by asserting America’s ethnic variety (Papp’s gimmicky casting of Shakespeare in the Park productions). Hamilton recast American history as a racial gimmick: The white Founding Fathers are portrayed by black and Latino actors — an obtuse means of reclaiming American history not for “everyone” but for us vs. them.

This literal narrowcasting is ideological. Miranda first presented his show in 2015, during the second term of Barack Obama’s presidency, in observance of that era’s arrogant sense of new social authority — and the vanity Miranda no doubt felt as a Puerto-Rican theater aspirant finally finding a niche. Miranda uses hip-hop musical idioms in Hamilton according to the same specious perception of Obama’s identity as African American, or black, rather than as bi-racial. (There are allusions to Hamilton’s own cloudy background.) This novelty pretended to speak for non-white America, and in Disney’s video intro Miranda says, “It’s about how history remembers and how that changes over time.” That’s a theater hustler’s demagoguery.

Hamilton’s topsy-turvy spectacle recalls the racial reversal Jean Genet originated in The Blacks (1959), only Genet’s overt political intent (his mockery of colonial racism) is subsumed by the energy of hip-hop and its superficial polemics. Musical-theater people are squares who, adept at their own rich traditions, never get the gist of such pop music as rhythm & blues, rock & roll, disco, or hip-hop. They don’t know the hip-hop genre’s great artists Public Enemy, Biggie Smalls, The Geto Boys, Son of Bazerk of De La Soul. What you hear in Miranda’s Hamilton is ersatz hip-hop, which easily won over critics and audiences already in denial that Obama was bi-racial and eager to accept Miranda’s blackface revision of American history.

Miranda’s cynicism automatically dismisses the idea of a show about Pan-African or Puerto-Rican history. (The Boriqueneers to match Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Gondoliers?) Instead, the concept behind Hamilton — to make its squareness seem hip — is to sell the American Revolution in updated, anachronistic, slangy terms that will appeal to notions of revolution spouted by hip-hop’s most naive adherents. That would include the “fundamentally transform America” Obama admirers. (There’s even a pro-DACA song. Is there anyone waiting to see this show who is not a dyed-in-the-wool Obama liberal?)

Let’s include hip-hop haters who deplore the genre’s inherent youthful impudence, sensuality, and déclassé roots. Miranda’s music and lyrics most closely resemble the speed-rap of white rapper Eminem — a neurotic, distorted appropriation of hip-hop’s blues and reggae source. Miranda chooses a vernacular that betrays black expression every bit as much as a smoothly duplicitous, over-educated politician does. This linguistic jumble accounts for the play’s expository rather than dramatic nature. We watch Hamilton (played by Miranda) come to 18th-century America and enter the early political fray where he meets his ultimate nemesis Aaron Burr (Leslie Odom, Jr.) no differently than an episode of MTV’s Wild and Out.

The show alternates between battle-rap encounters and minstrel-style solos. Thankfully, the appearance of the Schuyler Sisters (Phillipa Soo, Renee Elise Goldsberry, Jasmine Cephus Jones), as women Hamilton and Burr engage on their journey toward historical destiny, offers vocal variety — always sung with genuine loveliness and persuasion. But even the Schuyler sisters, cast as three ethnically different, miscegenated phenotypes (Asian, black, Latin), perpetuate Miranda’s unceasing fake hip-hop and race-and-politics trickery. The show’s non-traditional casting obsession clashes with the limitations of today’s nutty progressivism that says actors can no longer pretend to be who they are not.

Hamilton’s race confusion hits unignorable dead-ends. Miranda’s unprepossessing lead performance depends on whiny hectoring, rather than brainy charisma; the role needs a star, and this film doesn’t have one. As England’s King George (Jonathan Groff), the single white performer diverts from hip-hop, reprising snide, Alanis Morissette-style pop as a foppish queer stereotype. Such trite characterization oversimplifies political history. Burr’s “Smile more/Don’t let them know what you’re against/Or what you’re for” flatters today’s cynicism about politics — politics has replaced movies as everyone’s expertise.

“No one really knows how the game is played,” Burr raps in “The Room Where It Happened,” the elites’ anthem that John Bolton chose as the title for his latest memoir. The song’s actually about deceit and disloyalty (the “Click—Boom!” line implying deadly threat). Something this odious also needs a star, a Sammy Davis, Jr., to pull it off but not sullen, grinning Odom. Odom’s Burr, who kills Hamilton in American history’s most famous duel, is another dark-skinned villain — like Taye Diggs’s evil landlord in Rent — who here personifies the insidious racism that even Broadway liberals keep hidden behind their public pandering.

By comparison, both Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell were modest about their subjects. Miranda’s ode to power pretends Hamilton’s drive is psychological insight and idolizes political chicanery the same as the Steven Spielberg–Tony Kushner Lincoln. Shameless Act Two features one song describing “a grace too powerful to name/We push away the unimaginable/Forgiveness. Can you imagine?” It proposes a humanism that is gone from the culture Hamilton represents; that’s why the scene and that song are weak. The show’s celebration of ruthlessness is seen as its justification — that 2008 idea of worshipping the purported political brilliance of an obnoxious individual.

Director Thomas Kail inserts a few bird’s-eye-views but never offers a single expressive image (Spike Lee’s film of the stage play Passing Strange was shot more effectively, and Julie Taymor’s visually wondrous A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the best unreleased American movie of the past ten years). This is not a film but an official preservation. It’s a great irony that Disney’s Hamilton streaming comes at a time of historical ignorance when institutional leaders, politicians, and media all condone the tearing down of history. Miranda’s vainglorious Hamilton edifice amounts to the same thing.

(Also, evidently, pretty much everyone I follow actively tweeting today, but I blame Twitter for that.)

I suppose it was inevitable that Armond would write something I agree with. (Not just about the repellent politics of the show but this, more than anything: "Musical-theater people are squares who, adept at their own rich traditions, never get the gist of such pop music as rhythm & blues, rock & roll, disco, or hip-hop.")

I've never given a shit about Hamilton, sounds horrible -- and I read every shitty bio of the Framers.

It was annoying me how much I agree with what is otherwise just Armond's excuse for taking yet another tired shot at Obama.

(let me be very clear in reiterating that Armond White is still a horrible piece of shit)

That this was going to be the moment of massive backlash against Hamilton was written in the stars.

that Passing Strange show video'd by Spike is marvelous

It was annoying me how much I agree with what is otherwise just Armond's excuse for taking yet another tired shot at Obama.

― A White, White Gay (cryptosicko), Friday, 3 July 2020 20:06 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

(let me be very clear in reiterating that Armond White is still a horrible piece of shit)

― A White, White Gay (cryptosicko), Friday, 3 July 2020 20:08 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

OTM although it interests me more than it annoys me. Regardless of several specious aspects that review is interesting, as someone who has never seen nor will ever see Hamilton.

"the same specious perception of Obama’s identity as African American, or black, rather than as bi-racial"

he's trying to redefine someone else's identity?

don't like that review, or any other of his

“Agree” with Armond insomuch as I think Hamilton sucks but jfc that review is stupid.