Armond White - The most controversial film critic around.

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White's more likely to savage a movie if it's overtly trying to be meaningful than if if it's just happily going around blowing up giant robots with space lasers.
 
I think he's a necessary voice in the business. Despite probably still disagreeing with him about 75% of the time, the 25% when we see eye to eye is when he's taking down a movie that no other critic has the balls to criticize or call out, and he's always perfect in those moments. And he's not a bought and paid for mainstream critic either.
 
Armond White sees through the Hollywood pandering to give The Woman King a negative review (Archive).

Ever since Black Panther and The Lion King, Hollywood has used Afrocentricity to take advantage of black moviegoers and their self-congratulatory, “anti-racist” allies. Now, The Woman King is the latest example.
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Historical fraudulence is a problem, but the reasons behind it are what cause alarm. Director Gina Prince-Bythewood and screenwriters Dana Stevens and Maria Bello gainsay Dahomey’s role in the slave trade, trivializing the complications of that original sin. Instead, they offer another Millennial gender-flip, conceived to further sexual confusion via racial frustration and feminist anger.
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Only teenagers should fall for this nonsense.
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White also made an article claiming the overwhelming "pro-aboriton" stance from Hollywood producers is creating a new blacklist (Archive).

Finally, White gave a negative review to the bad press magnet Don't Worry Darling (Archive). Though, it seems he's in the popular opinion on this movie.
 
It really is hilarious how Armond White of all fucking critics is now one of the few and very much hated voices of reason within the "professional" critic community.

Clown world just really flipped everything upside down.
 
WULULULULU said:
I wish the other industries had their own Armond White, most game/anime/music/literature reviews are just filled with shills.
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We need an Armond White for everything.
Chilson said:
It really is hilarious how Armond White of all fucking critics is now one of the few and very much hated voices of reason within the "professional" critic community.

Clown world just really flipped everything upside down.
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The vindication of Armond White has been one of the more interesting storyline to come out as of recent.
 
I don't always agree with White's reviews, but he at least puts serious analysis and thought into his reviews, as opposed to most professional critics who write in a patois of cliches ("thrill ride", "thought-provoking", "edge of my seat", "breathtaking") and midwit opinionizing that usually goes no deeper than "I may not know art but I know what I like!"
 
Despite the Rotten Tomatoes critic score being at 95%, Armond White gave a negative review to the Billy Eichner gay rom-com Bros (Archive).

Bros sells the only thing Eichner’s got to offer: his political identity as a white gay male.
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At a time when the only American who cannot offer a definition of a male homosexual is probably the disingenuous Ketanji Brown Jackson, Apatow, Stoller, and Eichner deal in the deliberate confusion of today’s sexual-equity circus — which derived from Hollywood liberalism as much as from the old Human Rights Campaign, now warped into the leading trans-activism organization.
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The context in which Bros is released as a major studio project is the trans sexualization now threatening children, gender roles, social privilege, and political preference. In this light, Bros presents a fairly mild version of Eichner’s street harangues. The scene of Bobby leaving Aaron to a sexual threesome is like a safe, pre-monkeypox, Disney-certified orgy. The erotic tension in the Jackass movies is more daring.
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Long as one recognizes that he's there to take the piss and just be as stupidly contrarian as he can, he's harmless.

He's the embodiment of "oh YOU!"
 
NotJewishWario said:
Armond White sees through the Hollywood pandering to give The Woman King a negative review (Archive).







White also made an article claiming the overwhelming "pro-aboriton" stance from Hollywood producers is creating a new blacklist (Archive).

Finally, White gave a negative review to the bad press magnet Don't Worry Darling (Archive). Though, it seems he's in the popular opinion on this movie.
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I agree with him. It's amazing to think Producers will blacklist someone for being pro-life. Or will force them to scream their pro-abortion stance outloud. The man is definitely interesting in where he's coming from.
 
I feel the need to bump this thread because I read his reviews religiously. Not because he is funny, he is, it is that he always recommends a movie I have never heard of and he is bound to rile the commenters up. White has this New York style highbrow attitude to everything, which has more in common with conservatives like Matthew Arnold than it does with National Review. He'll recommend some obscure arthouse film and then criticise the latest capeshit for being woke. It's pretty based. Still has a hardon for Snyder though.

For the latest Beetlejuice film, White declares Mars Attacks! Burton's best movie and that the Marky Mark led Planet of The Apes remake has "brilliant social observation":

Mid-career Burton justified Hollywood’s trust in his eccentricity: the startlingly tender Ed Wood, the brilliant social observation of his Planet of the Apes remake, maybe half of Sleepy Hollow’s Americana spoof, and, best of all, the superb Mars Attacks! The latter is the only Burton film that combines his Boomer skepticism and anti-sentimentality with all-out death-defying daring — very close to a masterpiece. But Burton’s recent career has been disastrous, from his unbearable Sweeney Todd to his ungodly Alice in Wonderland and Dumbo remakes, the work of a Hollywood wunderkind turned hack. (Consider Burton’s 2010 presidency of the Cannes Film Festival jury, which awarded Thailand’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, a precursor to the reincarnation jokes in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.)
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He recently wrote a review where he said the Princess Bride sucked. The boomer readers of National Review got so ass-hurt in the comments (466) that he wrote another review saying they were stupid for liking it.

Reiner’s angry, deliberately offensive partisan posts on X, which appear on social media with psychotic regularity — as if the actor-turned-movie-director was intoxicated from playing a drinking game every time he heard the name “Trump” on MSNBC — ought to make conservatives suspicious of everything else the entertainer does.
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Their weird personal stakes in TPB suggest they are deeply invested in how the Hollywood system operates — the immoral ideology that even Theodor Adorno critiqued, in The Culture Industry. Conservatives who refuse to think about movies in mature ways are in danger of being had by Hollywood’s stealthy left-wing ideologies; they may even come to share them (ensnared by Pixar’s Toy Story trap). The TPB mob has no Family values, only Hollywood values. Feeling grateful to industry schlockmeisters like Reiner lets Democrat mountebanks have their way. Even conservatives who dislike being woke are in need of a cultural awakening. Rise up, movie-loving conservatives!
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/02/can-conservative-filmgoers-win-the-culture-war/
 
I wonder what Ted Cruz would think of his Princess Bride review, considering it is his favorite movie. Although, I don't think Cary Elwes telling Cruz that he hates his guts didn't seem to deter him on the surface.
 
Megalopolis is infected with TDS and Chronicle of Riddick is Shakespearean.
The Roman allegory — in which Cesar aspires to change his government while fulfilling his creative hubris, enjoying the perks of fickle celebrity — is both inexact and unoriginal. Vin Diesel already aced this in the surprisingly Shakespearean Chronicle of Riddick, and Coppola can’t compete with the extravagant world-building of comic-book movies. Miscasting Driver (Kylo Ren in the Star Wars reboots, now with a bowl haircut and that impenetrable Rags Ragland density), then surrounding him with mannered stylizations of social excess, is a miscalculation. Megalopolis has the same film-school artiness as George Lucas’s unwatchable THX-1138 (which Coppola produced in 1971). Cesar’s adversary, New Rome’s elderly conservative mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), advises, “Utopias offer no ready-made solution. Utopias turn into dystopias.” The conflict between the naïve Cesar and the wise elder falls laughably short of what every teenage fan of the dystopic Marvel Comics Universe already knows.

When far-left publications from the New York Times to the Washington Post praise Coppola for his aspirational determination, you know that something idiotic this way comes. Praising Megalopolis is a new form of elitism. Preview screenings for Coppola’s Hollywood surrogates proved that no one there understands artistic ambition anymore — so illiterate that they missed the film’s too-obvious parallels to contemporary politics. Coppola’s emphasis on white protagonist Cesar is, in Hollywood liberal terms, facile and archaic. We don’t even recognize clear thinking anymore. Expectations are diminished, contaminated by politics.
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New weekly article about the movie Dahomey : Dahomey Deconstructs Cultural Gatekeeping
Mati Diop plies her guilt trade.
Mati Diop’s “fantasy-documentary” Dahomey helps us sift through cultural exploitation by Hollywood, Broadway, and other centers of political instruction. Theodor Adorno, of the Marxist Frankfurt School, called this “the culture industry,” and 42-year-old Diop is its latest proponent.

In Dahomey, Diop addresses the restitution of 26 artworks housed in the Musée du Quai Branly–Jacques Chirac in Paris. After a campaign for repatriation, these artifacts were returned in 2021 to their place of origin in the African nation of Benin. Diop’s title, Dahomey, uses the country’s mythic name to invoke the history of the Kingdom of Dahomey that is so resonant in Africana studies but that now refers to Diop’s combined artful and reportorial approach.

She reports on the actual restitution process of packaging and shipping the valuable items but uses actors to “voice” the narration. It’s as if the ancient art pieces are themselves literally speaking — on their own behalf and to us — discussing what it means to be taken, traded, repossessed, colonized.

Those terms derive from academic critical theory, with its emphasis on appropriation and indoctrination. On her path to film-industry renown, Diop was a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. A native of Paris, she began her professional career as an actress portraying one of the black French-Senegalese citizens in Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum (2008), and then she applied that chic to directing, shrewdly choosing the documentary form to prove her feminist-intellectual bona fides.

It is Diop’s academic background that makes Dahomey a more creditable venture in the diasporic art craze that we are currently witnessing — whether the public debacle of the Met Gala, the trashy horror film Sinner, or the equally trashy adaptation of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson.

There’s genuine creativity in Diop’s “fantasy-documentary,” starting with her image of the dark, churning Seine. “These artifacts were among thousands looted by French colonial troops during the invasion of 1892,” we’re informed. “From then, 139 years of captivity are coming to an end.” Diop conveys this transition through vacant corridors, black-lens security cameras, guard-booth windows, and white noise in the emptiness of the museum after visiting hours.

The treasures speak in Fon, Benin’s native language:

I journeyed so long in my mind, but it was so dark in this foreign place, I lost myself in dreams . . . cut off from the land of my birth. As if I were dead. There are thousands of us in this night. We all bear the same scars. Uprooted, ripped out. The spoils of massive plundering.

Statues are shown tagged and wrapped before shipment, sealed in wooden crates, drilled shut as if in reverse enslavement, and soon to be carted away by a white crew wearing Covid masks.

Diop plays the guilt game. Museum gatekeepers and transporters are her true cosmopolitan peers. Her theme itself is an abstraction. The return of the artifacts but not the people suggests deportation, a reversal of the “colonialization” that is itself a fetish term for academics. Cutting from transport to close-ups of the almond-eyed, broad-lipped carvings and masks immediately evokes Picasso’s transcultural inspiration that ignited Western modernism.

Proposing that the artifacts belong where their makers live now is sensible, but the problem at the heart of Dahomey is its presumption of guilt without resolution or remedy. Documenting guilt simply stirs more guilt.

Because Diop works as an artist rather than an anthropologist, Dahomey neglects the Kingdom of Dahomey’s history in the African wars that made it a key port in the slave trade. Diop takes a surprising turn when the objets d’art arrive in Benin and the response from young black students is angry and perplexed: “During my childhood I grew up with Disney and Tom and Jerry, but none focused on Benin or our cultural heritage. So I grew up completely ignorant of my culture kept overseas for years. “

Fact is: The students argue with the complications of the culture industry’s bourgeois race hustle. Their skepticism contrasts with our own gatekeepers — from Nikole Hannah-Jones, who led the creation of the 1619 Project, to Anna Wintour, who designed the recent Met Gala on black dandyism (so far, the New York Times has published at least five articles promoting that show, extending the 1619 Project’s noxious exploitation).

“We are still stuck in patterns mapped out by the colonizers,” Diop’s students complain. “We need mobilization in Africa. It’s the materialization of bygone revolts.” The issue of identity is not just a fad but becomes a fact of self-determination — in this context, Dahomey’s flaws are instructive for this moment when race and gender exploitation runs rampant and unchecked.
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I haven't seen it yet, but the movie actually seems interesting. It's a short watch, barely more than one hour long.
 
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