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[#Phonepunk#]

He is rather infamous on the internet for being a “contrarian“ or a “troll” yet I find a method to his madness. He can write some silly stuff but also occasionally has deep insight not seen elsewhere.

I really liked this recent look back at the film classic “Network”.

Network’s hysteria is irrelevant to today’s climate in which CBS, NBC, and ABC are more blatantly partisan than Chayefsky’s fictitious UBS. Fans of Network who cite the film as a cautionary tale ignore what really accounts for the film’s status: Chayefsky dared to bite the hand that fed him. He wasn’t aiming at some phantom ideology or faceless idiocy, even when putting down a generalized audience of boob-tube addicts. The satire is squarely aimed at powerful people who offended Chayefsky’s personal sense of morality following his early career during the 1950s, the original “golden age” of TV.

Instead of examining politics, the film aims at specific stereotypes — manic news anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch), pompous network news producer Max Schumacher (William Holden), and rapacious entertainment producer Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway). They each represent figures made sacrosanct today, hypocrites who hide behind political correctness.

Another reason Network couldn’t be remade today is that these potentates know how to shield and defend themselves. No matter how much reality TV gluts the airwaves, we’re never shown what goes on behind the scenes of newsrooms. No one takes responsibility for the conspiracy theories that pass for mainstream media perspective — one person’s truth, another person’s “fake news.” Recall the media uproar when Clint Eastwood’s Richard Jewell depicted a newspaper reporter in the style of Dunaway’s Christensen, and then remember the shallow, vengeful harridans of last year’s Bombshell. The masters of media — this would include the contemptuous, censorious hipsters of Silicon Valley — do not allow criticism.

Why They’ll Never Remake Network | National Review

Contemporary journalism is a tragedy, not a Hollywood satire.

www.nationalreview.com

 

[M.W.]

 

[#Phonepunk#]

His review of Rise of Skywalker is so brutal. A film even the ultimate troll thinks is trash. He said it “Heralds the death of cinematic communication”

Viewers relate to Rey and Kylo merely as playground proxies, not as figures who struggle with a moral conflict greater than what a lightsaber can resolve. They’re responding to John Williams’s familiar music theme, nostalgic for its evocation of fatuously dramatized, juvenile dilemma. The Rise of Skywalker culminates the insensitivity created by a series of war movies without pain or consequence (just shallow allegiances). In this eighth sequel since the original film’s release, generations are encouraged to enjoy armchair experience without the pressure of responsibility.

After watching adult film bloggers file into the screening as if paying obeisance, it became obvious that simply concluding that Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is a bad movie would not be enough.

When legions dutifully read the up-tilted, receding perspective of the backward scroll that sets the scene, they’re hit with a second subtitle: “The Dead Speaks.” This week, which saw the passing of Godard’s great muse Anna Karina (whom he idolized in every human aspect), The Rise of Skywalker also says goodbye to articulate cinema in every human aspect. Through J. J. Abrams’s visually inert busyness, it heralds the death of cinematic communication, if not narrative coherence. No amount of social-media squabbling can repair the damage done to poorly served viewers who know nothing about Shakespeare’s Plantagenets, Wagner’s Ring, the Pentateuch, or Godard’s Anna Karina films.

Is Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker a Culmination or the End of Cinema? | National Review

Director J. J. Abrams shows no interest in cinema’s sacred essence or the supernal quality of image and movement.

www.nationalreview.com

 

[bender]

He's got a cool name and the dunking on him is tiresome. Everybody loves a bad movie or two and we often don't see eye to eye on the classics. You'll never convince me that Tank Girl is a bad movie and I'll probably never be able to stay awake during a Blade Runner viewing. Aren't we all just closeted version of Armond White?

 

[teezzy]

Dude is a blowhard. Anyone who alludes to Godard while reviewing Rise of Skywalker can't be considered anything else.

I do love when this guy shits on things people love though. Anyone who stirs the pot is a okay in my book. So, well played overall.

 

[bender]

Dude is a blowhard. Anyone who alludes to Godard while reviewing Rise of Skywalker can't be considered anything else.

I do love when this guy shits on things people love though. Anyone who stirs the pot is a okay in my book. So, well played overall.

I find your Twilight avatar offensive. <3

 

[EviLore]

He's cool by me. What's more important for a film critic than knowing film at depth and being willing to say what you think?

 

[HoodWinked]

i wish i liked him because he's a good critic but i know its actually because he shits on things that the woke cult of critics likes universally.

 

[bender]

He's cool by me. What's more important for a film critic than knowing film at depth and being willing to say what you think?

Sincerity?

 

[AV]

It's a shame that he often feels like he's being a contrarian for the sake of it, because he's an amazing writer.

Though the fact that a gay black man is the reason Beyoncé's Black is King can't hit 100% on RT is hilarious.

 

[#Phonepunk#]

It's a shame that he often feels like he's being a contrarian for the sake of it, because he's an amazing writer.

i kind of disagree imo most of the accusations of “just for the sake of it” or “he’s insincere” are projections from a critical establishment so monolithic and corporate that any conflicting opinions must be ad hominemed away lest it spoil the “great thing we have going”. Plus as Biden points out the corporate establishment thinks all black men think alike and he is a direct threat to that woke racist fantasy.

Armond has been like this for years and years at this point even written books in the style imo it’s safe to say he genuinely thinks this way. It’s important that we accept the reality some people have legit different opinions than us without pretending everything they do is a troll to get a rise out of us (which itself is a form of weird narcissistic paranoia)

Though the fact that a gay black man is the reason Beyoncé's Black is King can't hit 100% on RT is hilarious.

Yeah his is an AMAZING takedown too

Now, Beyoncé encounters no cultural resistance; like her peers LeBron James and Colin Kaepernick, the singer-dancer-songwriter-actress simply follows fads — the “Black Lives Matter” and “Black Girl Magic” fads — without any historical or political foundation. These uninformed “influencers” display a simpleton’s version of ethnic pride, epitomized by Beyoncé’s going full “African” in extravagant costumes, makeup, ethnographic photography, and drumbeats. It’s the same narcissistic excess and contrivance that Robert Downey Jr. warned against in Tropic Thunder when actors go “full retard.”

Black Is King’s assorted daydreams, designs, ethnicities, cosmologies, and polyglot nostrums (“Lost languages flow out of our mouths”) are sold as “a visual album.” It follows the coffee-table-book graphic appropriations of the music video genre’s peak achievements — stealing shamelessly from Hype Williams and Mark Romanek — only to illustrate how disoriented, misguided, and commercialized black identity has become. Black Is King’s faux-politics spring from Beyoncé’s agency (“agency” being a euphemism for “privilege”), yet it is insulting because Beyoncé uses the Disney cartoon The Lion King as the primal, biblical source of her pretend race consciousness.

Black Is King glamorizes class and economic division through an overload of ethnic and hierarchical symbols. Its monarchy sentiment (reminiscent of Eddie Murphy’s Coming to America and Michael Jackson’s Remember the Timemusic video) is employed to ease fragile egos. And Queen B is the new ruler. She already enjoys the royal privilege of submissive fans who don’t seem to care that she is out of touch with what most people are going through and that she now offers a bling show as bread and circuses during COVID. Beyoncé sells Afrocentricity like her husband Jay-Z once bragged about selling drugs (materialism is Jay-Z’s new drug). Unfortunately, the video’s highlight, “Don’t Jealous Me,” doesn’t equal the sequence in John Boorman’s Exorcist II:The Heretic where tribal chieftain James Earl Jones opened his mouth to unfurl a visualized miracle. Instead, Beyoncé’s ersatz-sovereignty derives from the popularity of Marvel’s Black Panther, which confirmed Millennial blacks and whites begging to be treated like children.

Laughing at Beyoncé’s Absolute Monarchy | National Review

The message of Black Is King is “Let them eat bling.”

www.nationalreview.com

 

[AV]

i kind of disagree imo most of the accusations of “just for the sake of it” or “he’s insincere” are projections from a critical establishment so monolithic and corporate that any conflicting opinions must be ad hominemed away lest it spoil the “great thing we have going”. Plus as Biden points out the corporate establishment thinks all black men think alike and he is a direct threat to that woke racist fantasy.

Armond has been like this for years and years at this point even written books in the style imo it’s safe to say he genuinely thinks this way. It’s important that we accept the reality some people have legit different opinions than us without pretending everything they do is a troll to get a rise out of us (which itself is a form of weird narcissistic paranoia)

I don't think it's all the time, or even regularly, I would never presume to call him a troll. He actually rolls with the larger critical consensus most of the time. There's just been a few occasions over the years where it's seemed like he's lauded an unpopular movie for the same reasons he's reviled a universally acclaimed one, though saying that, I can't give you a good example off the top of my head. Perhaps I didn't read into them enough at the time.

 

[Bolivar687]

Love reading his articles and especially empathize with him as a BvS fan:

Snyder’s opening sequences interweave the origin stories of these mythic heroes and their alter egos. What has become overly familiar through years of repetition acquires new dynamism — and new understanding — that particularizes and personalizes each wounded man’s suffering. Not only are these time-shifts audacious (movie marquees announce the 1940 The Mark of Zorro and the 1981 Excalibur — implying the evolution of history), but so is Snyder’s proposition about the nature of heroism and vengeance: Both stem from the way individuals react to and comprehend their experiences. Snyder’s thrillingly intelligent use of interior conflict and political antagonism vastly outclasses Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy: Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises — all noxious — which were bellwethers of our culture’s decline.

Fanboys prefer the Nolan films for their “darkness,” which emphasized the sophomoric, pseudo-tragic elements of the Batman graphic novels. But Snyder’s more adult treatment finds the material’s emotional core. This displeases the fanboy/hipster whose adolescent embarrassment about feelings was exploited through Nolan’s emotionless violence and post–9/11 nihilism. Snyder counters that cultural crisis and (through the script by Chris Terrio and David S. Goyer) visualizes the millennial moral struggle as pop myth. His essential subject is mankind’s struggle to discover compassion as well as common obligation — or dare I use the non-political term: brotherhood?

Batman v Superman Returns Soul to Superheroes | National Review

Zack Snyder dares to infuse the comic-book genre with moral and political substance.

www.nationalreview.com

It's funny, in his Joker review you can read between the lines to see his angst that the Snyder era was over, while Joker was starting something new.

Anyway - if you don't occasionally really like something that everyone else really hated, or vice versa, you're kind of not a real person.

 

[#Phonepunk#]

Armond been on fire lately:

on Lovecraft Country:

Lovecraft Country is Systemic Racism Entertainment

Been thinking about something my brother said,” Jurnee Smollett says on the “Sundown” episode of the HBO series Lovecraft Country. That’s the tip-off that this new TV show is another Smollett-family racial hoax. But the Smollett Effect (begun by the 2019 scandal in which actor Jussie Smollett vilified the city of Chicago and the nation) is part of a larger pattern of Systemic Racism Entertainment™ promoted in our film and TV industries, and it’s the keynote of Lovecraft Country.

Produced by J. J. Abrams and Jordan Peele, the series combines critical race theory (the academic exploration of racism in social institutions, first taught to school students and now to TV viewers) with childish horror fiction (unreasonably popularized in the film Get Out). Race hysteria dominates HBO’s serial story of a black Korean War vet confusedly named Atticus Freeman (Jonathan Majors) who, in PC lingo, “experiences” racism — and otherworldly evil — while searching for his father in the 1950s Jim Crow South. Although based on Matt Ruff’s 2016 pulp novel, Lovecraft Country unites Abrams, Peele, Smollett, and show-runner Misha Green as they follow the same route to Hollywood success that public intellectuals take to university tenure. This gender-equity group (two men, two women; three blacks to one white) employs the shock, offense, and tradition of racism as entertainment. Their unscrupulous ambition confirms that our culture is in a lousy predicament.

Lovecraft Country Is Systemic Racism Entertainment™ | National Review

HBO’s Smollett Effect goes from black exploitation to race manipulation.

www.nationalreview.com

on the passing of Chadwick Boseman:

The Usable Enigma of Chadwick Boseman

To commemorate Boseman as the fictitious T’Challa, king of fantasyland Wakanda, perpetuates the sci-fi comic-book inanity of Black Panther and of childish Afrocentricity. Michelle’s high-five recalled the moment a Nineties hip-hop group naïvely paid tribute to “Miss Jane Pittman” as honoring an actual historical personage. The confusion arising from Black Panther is worse. ABC-Disney’s “Tribute to a King” follows the same monarchic fallacy as Beyoncé’s Black Is King “visual album,” based on the delusion that African Americans descend from royalty and are denied their rightful prominence. (None of the media pallbearers mentioned how Boseman’s name echoes both slave-owner and slave antecedents.)

Marvel’s Black Panther did real damage by detaching history and social awareness from reality, and that insidious form of demagoguery is continued by politicians and media who are desperate to win over voters by appealing to separatist, tribal myths — and, as per ABC-Disney’s televised ceremony, by constantly pandering to black Americans as children. (This infantilization also affects white youths infatuated with Black Lives Matter/Antifa.) It’s no mystery why Boseman’s passing has been stage-managed like an arranged marriage among monarchists; the young theater aspirant born in South Carolina, who studied drama at both Howard and Oxford universities, is now a pawn in the game of election-year politics.

The Usable Enigma of Chadwick Boseman | National Review

His eulogists ignore his creativity and instead use him as an election-year pawn, with race as a political, cultural football.

www.nationalreview.com

on the Oscar diversity standards:

Our Sovietized Oscars

Just like the Soviet Comintern, officials at the Academy Awards have issued guidelines for films nominated in the Best Picture category. Make no mistake; these are also industry guidelines — a way to make Hollywood’s ingrained, essentially unchangeable clubby practices look like progress.

But the ugly, sneaky side of progressivism comes out — its ultimate resolve is to control.

The Oscars lost credibility long ago, yet it’s important to not pretend that the ongoing, self-congratulatory tradition is simply show business. This limit on creative and political freedom suffuses the industry; it is so culture-wide that a Los Angeles Times headline ridiculed actress Kirstie Alley for complaining, “Nobody told Pablo Picasso what to put in his paintings. . . . This is dictatorial.”

Under the Academy’s new dictatorial terms, only propaganda films will be rewarded. And under Hollywood’s current ideology, only propaganda films are possible.

Our Sovietized Oscars | National Review

Hollywood reveals its progressive fascism.

www.nationalreview.com

 

[diffusionx]

It's a shame that he often feels like he's being a contrarian for the sake of it, because he's an amazing writer.

Though the fact that a gay black man is the reason Beyoncé's Black is King can't hit 100% on RT is hilarious.

When it comes to stuff like that, is it even possible for a white or Jewish reviewer to give that (or Black Panther, or Get Out, or whatever) a negative review and keep their job? I’m serious. I really doubt it. And with that, the reviews become meaningless.

 

[Reptars Revenge]

When it comes to stuff like that, is it even possible for a white or Jewish reviewer to give that (or Black Panther, or Get Out, or whatever) a negative review and keep their job? I’m serious. I really doubt it. And with that, the reviews become meaningless.

Looked at the 6 other non black negative reviews for get out. They still reviewing movies

 

[notseqi]

Looked at the 6 other non black negative reviews for get out. They still reviewing movies

For that alone Armond White is a good thing, proven by the fact that he does criticize movies with 'black participation' in the way he does. Necessary, now more than ever.

 

[#Phonepunk#]

Lee finally breaks the fourth wall of Byrne’s theatrical stunt when the show ends with the lousy “Road to Nowhere,” a Stephen Colbert (yuppie scum) idea of rock and roll. (Personal note: I had decamped from the Talking Heads bandwagon with 1983’s Speaking in Tongues and its pseudo-gospel track “Slippery People” yet still regret not buying the Robert Rauschenberg edition when it was cheap.) On this number, Lee shoots a Broadway theater full of middle-aged white folks who are applauding their own annihilation. (“You better believe it!” Byrne yelps.) It’s a horrible art-snob song, not welcoming and spirited like August Darnell/Kid Creole’s “The Lifeboat Party,” but smirky and nihilistic. Partisan Byrne wants Talking Heads’ mostly white fans to apologize for their existence.

I fondly remember a promotional interview in which Byrne, asked about his next project, announced, “I am trying to get rid of the racism instilled in me by society.” But I never imagined this multicultural, ingenious dilettante loner would be so easily swayed by political fashion that he would dismiss the world-changing cultural appropriation of the still-stunning “I Zimbra” and try to pass it off as “nonsense” or that he would fall back on such insipid James Baldwin bromides as “I believe we can do something with this country that hasn’t been done before.” Didn’t the Talking Heads already accomplish that on their spectacular, wimpy yet wondrous cover of Al Green’s “Take Me to the River”?

American Utopia amounts to a tent revival for hipsters who no longer believe in God or America.

David Byrne Stops Making Sense in American Utopia | National Review

Collaborating with Spike Lee has ruined a pop icon.

www.nationalreview.com