The Armond White Thread

[Mr Sausage]

Armond’s bad with words, so I’m just going to guess he meant she’s too fit and toned to look delicate.

[The Elegant Dandy Fop]

Again, I used to find him sort of fascinating especially when he's wrong, but all his recent works for the National Review grasp at straws and seems hell bent on engaging with culture war elements that will be irrelevant after the next weekly outrage. Now what I would love to see him do is watch and defend the Sound of Freedom, I'm sure an empty work that aligns with his new political beliefs. His work is truly confounding now because do National Review readers even exist anymore? I feel like whoever took that magazine seriously is either dead or have moved onto to The Daily Wire. The culture war writing is clearly meant for clicks and engagement, but look at this article about the top political films. How many National Review readers would care about Altman's HEALTH, Godard's Le Gai Savoir, and von Sternberg's The Scarlet Empress?

I'm not sure he understands the physique of Barbie. Yes, she's a literal doll, but far from delicate. To complain about Margot Robbie not being delicate enough is missing the point as she's more of a symbol of classic American femininity. He just has brain rot from the losers he surrounds himself with. And how many children does he know? Sure there are girls who dream about being mothers and wives, but children have expansive imaginations that evolve and create new ideas rapidly. I probably imagined myself in a million scenarios as a child.

[furbicide]

Further to the above, it still kind of blows my mind that there’s a long-form piece extolling the virtues of Jacques Rivette in National Review. Of course, as always, the price of entry is that it has to be framed as a broadside against feminism and Barbie (one wonders what Rivette himself would make of the comparison; I suspect he would have loved Gerwig’s film). But once you get past that, there’s still a weirdly satisfying frisson in reading a loving paean to Up/Down/Fragile and Love on the Ground in a newspaper designed for people who like Ron DeSantis and Ted Cruz. Kinda feels like the matrix is glitching.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/07/ ... s-picture/

White may be a crank and, like most – I assume – I can hardly bear to read his work at the best of times, but I can’t help but find him a fascinating character and feel the world is a somewhat more interesting place for his existence.

[swo17]

Why does he randomly lump Damien Chazelle in with Gerwig midway through that review? Did he mean to say Noah Baumbach or is he still bitter about Babylon?

[diamonds]

I don't think he meant to say Baumbach; knowing White's history with him, he'd probably reserve a lot more venom for him than a mere sideswipe. If I had to guess, Chazelle was probably on his mind because of the Margot Robbie connection between Barbie and Babylon, which are also perhaps the two most high-profile displays of flamboyant style to come out of Hollywood recently (and for what it's worth, both Chazelle and Gerwig have played up Demy's influence on their work, a White favorite). He will often draw comparisons between his old masters and the new generation (however arbitrarily grouped) in order measure perceived deficiencies in the latter. This is just one of those groupings.

[rrenault]

The Rivette titles Armond says were released by Kino were actually released by Cohen.

[domino harvey]

The Rivette titles Armond says were released by Kino were actually released by Cohen.

They’re distributing them, so he’s not totally wrong. He probably bought them from Kino’s site

[yoloswegmaster]

Here's a 2-for-1 special on some recent Armond White takes:

SpoilerShow

[tenia]

It's so approximative, excessive but yet predictable, it's not even morbidly funny anymore.

[mizo]

I really like the line "the Hollywood equivalent of the Taliban" though. Would he call this site "the internet forum equivalent of the Taliban"?

[bdsweeney]

It's so approximative, excessive but yet predictable, it's not even morbidly funny anymore.

If he were to state “Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before”, I think the answer would be a resounding yes.

[Fiery Angel]

He's back with his better-than list.

[domino harvey]

Thanksgiving > Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon, Barbie

Eli Roth has made the first movie to evoke J6, not shying away from how national chaos was distorted and misunderstood by mainstream corporate media. Brash, hilarious Roth satirizes American self-destruction, leaving Nolan, Scorsese, and Gerwig with moral and ideological blood on their hands.

I get that this only exists to get people like me to quote it and make some sarcastic remark about it, buuuuuuuut

[Mr Sausage]

Thanksgiving isn’t even better than its own fake trailer. Jesus.

[Mr. Deltoid]

He's bang-on in placing Asteroid City over the bewilderingly overpraised Past Lives though.

[TechnicolorAcid]

I’m sorry but why can’t this Article just be like overlooked 2023 gems or even an alternatives to certain films, or something like that. This list kinda feels a bit too negative, nothing against negativity, but there’s this odd nastiness to a list of films he likes. Also don’t like the implication people that like the films he doesn’t, because of mob mentality. People can have different opinions Armond, you know that right?

[swo17]

J6 > all movies

Godard said that cinema is truth 24 frames a second, but the media frames J6's 24,000 truthers as second-class citizens

[The Curious Sofa]

I’m sorry but why can’t this Article just be like overlooked 2023 gems or even an alternatives to certain films, or something like that. This list kinda feels a bit too negative, nothing against negativity, but there’s this odd nastiness to a list of films he likes. Also don’t like the implication people that like the films he doesn’t, because of mob mentality. People can have different opinions Armond, you know that right?

Because Armond White.

[tenia]

White and his readership, to be accurate.

[colinr0380]

I do think that issue of having to force films into a "better than" opposition against each other is unhelpful to any argument he is putting forward in favour of a 'little' film against a 'big' one, that just seems to beg for the "Why can't we have both?" meme image. It seems that every year's list goes from feeling like White is carrying out an intentionally premeditated 'take down' for the first couple of big films that he is particularly angry about, to a middle section of head-scratching pairings that do not really need to be clashing against each other, to eventually the last couple where it feels that he doesn't even particularly hold a grudge one way or the other, such that the brutally blunt 'better than' statement ends up feeling even more inappropriate and like a kind of individual, trademarkable templated quirk more than anything more substantial than that. The structure is the thing that sets Armond White's end of year list apart from every other critic's list, even if it only because nobody else would ever structure a list in that way in the first place! (And ironically its perhaps the ultimate expression of focusing on form over the treated-as-interchangeable content being plugged into that format, to an extent only rivalled by Michael Bay or Wes Anderson movies!)

It is also like Armond White is running up against the whole "Thumbs up/Thumbs down" binary judgement approach that removes any ability to have an a nuanced or ambivalent reaction to a piece of work that Siskel and Ebert ended up feeling so constrained by during their review show, only the 'better than' method appears to be even more constraining than even the thumbs were, due to being so actively negative straight out of the gate!

[Mr Sausage]

Armond does it because he likes to see himself as fighting some kind of culture war, which is why his criticisms are endlessly moralistic and revolve around various hot button political or social issues no matter how irrelevant to the film at hand.

[therewillbeblus]

Yeah, he waited until the eve of Jan 6 for a reason. Provocation is the motivation

[jbeall]

What are the odds that White reads this very thread? Kind of like how Ted Cruz, who is nothing more than a Twitter beef that has assumed human form, ranted about Ketanji Brown Jackson and was then caught checking his Twitter mentions immediately afterward? Like most attention-craving contrarians, White probably puts a lot more time and effort into reading what people say about his work than he does actually watching the films he ostensibly watches.

[low]

He's bang-on in placing Asteroid City over the bewilderingly overpraised Past Lives though.

I’m glad to see Tran Anh Hung’s new picture mentioned, though I won’t get the chance to see The Taste of Things for a couple weeks. I expect it’s another “better-than” he’s not wrong about.