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Given the voluminous amount of arguments for and objections against from people who are not Armond White, I don't think it's as "clear" as you claim

I’m not talking about the debates about BoaN’s techinal merit or cinematic place. There are plenty of arguments there. I am talking about the message of the film, which is crystal clear. I’ve read extensively on the film. If someone credible has an interpretation of the film as something other than a white supremacist manifesto, I am certainly interested in reading it, and would appreciate pointers to any such material.

I wonder if writing for a very conservative magazine means White has to write this way e.g. he's just a paid hack, or he's just this odd?

I'd argue that since he's relatively famous, if he wasn't adhering to all the stuff he wrote, he would have been able to find another place to write for in which he doesn't have to criticize movies in ways he doesn't want to.
I mean, he's done a ton of articles like this, so many it's hard not to think he's very much OK with what he wrote.

"Cannes Film Festival, a site of progressive film culture where anti-Americanism has recently ruled" ?
This isn't even the end of the first paragraph and I already don't know anymore what White is writing about.
I also strongly wonder if White at least researched the real story that the movie is about, because it doesn't seem to.
And I wonder how one can expect BlacKkKlansman to "evoke the fun of Dolemite and The Human Tornado". For someone who rants about, basically, how the movie refers in a superficial way to blaxploitation movie, this looks like a very superficial comparison.

DeprongMori wrote: Tue Aug 14, 2018 1:16 am I’m not talking about the debates about BoaN’s techinal merit or cinematic place. There are plenty of arguments there. I am talking about the message of the film, which is crystal clear. I’ve read extensively on the film. If someone credible has an interpretation of the film as something other than a white supremacist manifesto, I am certainly interested in reading it, and would appreciate pointers to any such material.

On the matter of degree there certainly has been debate, though your larger point about it being racist is not to be qualified.

This is a wild list, some of which I'm surprised to find actually makes sense, and some of which is so audacious that I sort of admire it if I turn my head and squint a little.

Some of these are quite obvious in their quality gaps, though, but it's probably "The 15:17 to Paris > A Quiet Place" that made laugh most.

I usually kind of enjoy these annual lists from him, but this one is incoherent to me from start to finish. Dude’s lost his edge.

Armond White wrote:It was the most politicized movie year since World War II. Hollywood confused propaganda with entertainment, and filmgoers were offered little choice between indoctrination and discovery.

Was there another year in recent memory that he didn't repeatedly hammer away at the same point? Now he's making it a defining feature of the past year?

The only great films were the re-releases of Visconti’s 1973 Ludwig and Cocteau’s 1949 Les Parents Terribles, beacons from a more stable past.

Right, that more stable year 1973, when the U.S. had a major political scandal that would lead to the president resigning, and the country was reeling from the debacle of the Vietnam War. The U.S. continued to bomb Cambodia. Democracy in Chile was overthrown in a military coup, followed by massive repression and murder, with many forced into exile. Lebanon devolved into worsening violence and ultimately civil war. The October Arab-Israeli war... Huge strikes in Britain... on and on. Remember those good old days of greater stability? White's a fraud.

I liked A Star Is Born, but good on him for this:

Vox Lux > A Star Is Born

Director Brady Corbet and star Natalie Portman present the personal horror within millennial pop spectacle, investigating spiritual trauma — Ludwig for the millennium. while Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga root for idiotic celebrity worship in a cliché-ridden, big-screen version of The Voice for losers without a voice.

You know what they say about broken clocks.

Les Parents Terribles

I watched this via Cohen's recent Blu-ray only a month ago and I already barely remember it. He's right to like L'amant double, but even without having seen Mary Poppins I know perfectly well the two have nothing in common

Two mentions of First Reformed and BlackKKlansman. We know Armond has the knives out for Spike, and Schrader seems to be his latest victim of crusade. Even his golden boy, Spielberg, has become a scapegoat after being nice to President Obama.

And yet, this guy has his own thread here so I guess whatever works.

Brian C wrote: Mon Aug 13, 2018 7:34 pmBut this is just a jumbled, incoherent mess.

This, from a while back, is really all that ever need be said about Armond White's writing.

Dead or Deader wrote: Tue Jan 08, 2019 8:50 pm Two mentions of First Reformed and BlackKKlansman. We know Armond has the knives out for Spike, and Schrader seems to be his latest victim of crusade. Even his golden boy, Spielberg, has become a scapegoat after being nice to President Obama.

I was just thinking that Spielberg was his golden boy, and wanted to ask what became of that. Didn’t have to!

I thought LINCOLN was what actually made White turn.

He loved DePalma too until REDACTED.

I've remarked this before, but the man does knows how to write . Though I disagree with him 99% of the time (especially politically), I find unfiltered Armond White still more fun than unfiltered Johnathan Rosenbaum who just comes off as another self-loving boomer. I'm surprised he was able to pull a vaguely right-wing message out of the film with a slant toward Islamophobia, which seems to be as distant from Godard's politics as I could imagine, but White did it.

The most paranoid/batty review I've seen from him in a while was his Mary Poppins Returns one, trying to pass the movie off as a socialist screed. He reaches so far to inject politics into it that he interprets a song about balloons and hope as Stalinist because of a line about letting go of past troubles and looking to the future. The menacing Soviet erasure of history apparently is contained entirely in a line late in the song: "Let the past take a bow / The Forever is now" (huh?). Never mind that earlier in the song the lyrics explicitly address the importance of historical memory: "The past is the past / It lives on as history / And that's an important thing." (White omitted that last line from his quote because it negates his thesis, so he's actually the one practicing ideological erasure.

The headline of the piece screams that the film carries a subtext that endorses socialism, but then we get only an aside about how admittedly "minor characters" play out the socialist subtext by "campaigning for underpaid workers"—horrors! So by using that description, White himself acknowledges that the workers are underpaid, but an organization advocating for their rights is of course evidence of some kind of socialist evil. Funny how that works.

He also makes a weak head-scratcher of a joke about Emily Blunt's name (was she "named after a truncheon?") and complains that she performed the nanny as being too "asexual," because of course a nanny in a PG Disney movie should be expected to project a certain degree of sexuality, right? But his censuring the mindless happy balloon song as an example of damnatio memoriae is the best thing of all here.

I laughed at the line about Netflix being Obama’s boss