ARMOND WHITE SETS THE RECORD STRAIGHT

Why “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” was Better Than “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”

Armond White: It’s a way of looking at the entire year of film and giving people an overview of what the films were attempting and what other films achieved. I looked at The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo– the David Fincher version as a remake, so I contrasted it with Rise of the Planet of the Apes which was also a remake but a far superior remake. Certainly a less pretentious piece of film making, also, not a hateful illustration of human ugliness. It’s a movie that’s kind of a wild vision of contemporary frustration which I think is more helpful than the brutality that was on display with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. So on two levels– as a remake there was something better than The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and also as a movie dealing with contemporary concerns there was a better film than that one. Which happened to be Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

Armond Explains Why “Jack and Jill” is Better Than “The Descendants”

Armond White:  I will defend Jack and Jill. I get a kick out of the things Adam Sandler does. And one of the things that he does, and he does it explicitly in Jack and Jill, is that he deals with ethnicity. And he deals with family pride and family shame. These are the same subjects as The Descendants except it kind of glosses it over and uses superficial tv drama and morbidity to disguise the fact that its story is actually about ethnicity. It’s actually about how white folks came to Hawaii and took over and owned the land. And so it’s cast primarily with European descendants. And I’m watching the movie and thinking where are the indigenous Hawaiians? And this might be so in many cases but the film doesn’t deal with it. It’s just a superficial soap opera about the travails of the middle class and I was not interested in that. See Jack and Jill. It was all about ethnicity and what it is about ethnicity that we all have in common. And it can be tragic but Adam Sandler finds the humor in it. And it’s wonderful.

More at the link.

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UPCOMING BLU-RAY /DVD RELEASES: AWESOME BOND COLLECTION

Bond 50: James Bond celebrates fifty incredible years with golden anniversary Blu-ray collection.  The world’s most successful secret agent meets the world’s best home entertainment experience available for worldwide pre-order starting today.

In celebration of James Bond’s monumental golden anniversary, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios and Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment today unveiled BOND 50,  a collectible box-set  featuring all 22 James Bond films on Blu-ray Disc for the first time in one complete offering. The longest running film franchise of all time, the Bond 50 collection marks the debut of nine James Bond films previously unavailable in high definition Blu-ray.  Fans around the world can pre-order now with participating online retailers.

Fantastic trailer for the set here.

ARMOND WHITE’S AWESOME BETTER-THAN LIST

I used to think White said he what said for the attention, but even if you disagree with his reviews, the thinking behind them is sound. He’s also a rarity in the entertainment media, someone willing to stick his finger in the eye of the Hollywood establishment:

Colombiana>The Help

Winnie the Pooh>Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

The Iron Lady>J. Edgar, My Week with Marilyn

Jack and Jill>The Descendants — Adam Sandler’s affectionate, very broad, ethnic satire defies Alexander Payne’s smug denial of America’s ethnic history. Humility vs. Sanctimony

Real Steel>Moneyball — Shawn Levy explores fatherhood and masculinity in professional competition while Bennett Miller and Brad Pitt take the fun out of baseball. Entertainment vs. Sophistry.

According to a witness, this happened at the BYFCC Awards:

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PIRATES DOWNLOAD FLOPS, IGNORE HITS

If Hollywood despised child rapists and terrorists as much as they do the 99%-ers who steal from movies and music from the 1%, the world would be a much better place.

PAGING ARMOND WHITE: ‘GROWN UPS’ SEQUEL PLANNED

This makes Armond White and me very happy. And if you’re looking for Armond these days, he’s writing over at City Arts. His “Week With Marilyn” review is a must-read: “A Giant Played By a Midget.”

[Michelle] Williams lacks the personality and lush physicality for successful prurience; she’s more Renée Zellweger than Monroe.

I don’t know what “prurience” means, but I sure wish I’d written that.

Anyway, “Grown Ups” made $271 million thanks to an amusing, easygoing story and a cast that blended together perfectly thanks to a chemistry that should serve a sequel quite well.

SO WHAT DOES DISNEY HAVE IN STORE FOR THE MUPPETS IN 2012?

Well, they’ve already attacked Big Oil and told us Newt Gingrich is “from the swamp,” so I’m guessing it will have something to do with helping to reelect President FailureTeleprompter.

THE 15 BEST SHOWS ON NETFLIX INSTANT

Doesn’t anyone write about popular culture anymore who was born before 1989? There are some perfectly fine choices on this list but the oldest listed is probably “Scrubs.” Where are “Gunsmoke,” “Columbo,” “Andy Griffith,” and “Mission: Impossible”? Where are “Wagon Train,” “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” and “Thriller”? One of the pleasures of writing about Hollywood is having the opportunity to introduce or re-introduce the classics. And I’m not that old. I’m only 45, and many of these shows that I’ve managed to discover were well before my time.

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Patrick Goldstein, the Minister of Hollywood Disinformation at the L.A. Times, is obsessed with convincing you that leftist dominance of Hollywood is a whiny conservative myth. Big Hollywood’s indefatigable John Nolte, among others, has taken down Goldstein in numerous columns on this topic, but like an ideological Terminator, Goldstein keeps coming back.

But this time he ratcheted things up a few notches. His first column immediately following the most recent Oscars telecast was not just another pooh-poohing of the liberal bias stereotype, but an assertion that the Oscars actually proves the reverse.

Patrick Goldstein

Witness his eyebrow-raising title: “‘The King’s Speech’: The Triumph of Hollywood Conservative Values.” Wow. Not only is conservative griping about Hollywood unjustified, but we have in fact triumphed. Culture war over, people. In your face, Matt Damon! Don’t let the screen door hit you on your way out, Sean Penn!

The article begins, “[I]t’s become an article of faith in Conservative America that Hollywood is a ‘collection of hopeless la-la-land liberals — or worse, an elitist gaggle of heartland-bashing snobs.’” Notice how Goldstein refers to it as an “article of faith,” as if this perception of Hollywood is not based on evidence but is as insubstantial and unprovable as the existence of God. After all, how else could Conservative America possibly have ever gotten such an impression? (more…)

If you don’t know who Armond White is, you’re missing out.  Dubbed the “Internet Troll” of movie critics, the eloquent and controversial critic for the New York Press recently received mainstream attention after his performance as the host for the New York critics award ceremony.  White was called out by other publications like EW and the Village Voice for his performance, where he brought his controversial opinions on the films being award on stage with him.

White rose to prominence, and Internet infamy, when he became the only critic to give a big “thumbs down” to “Toy Story 3.”  That act of blasphemy inspired people to look at his other reviews.  When they did, they were shocked, shocked I tell you, to see that he had given the critical whipping boy “Jonah Hex” a glowing, and introspective review.  Intrigued by the controversy, I decided to read through dozens of White’s reviews.  You see, I don’t take the media at face value.  Decades of being lied to have taught me to research on my own and develop my own, educated opinions.  Is White simply an Internet troll, purposely dissing what others praise in an attempt to gain attention?  Or is he something more, a critic not only of film, but of the entire media?  And, in what is truly relevant to Big Hollywood, what do White’s reviews and media criticisms tell us about the ingrained leftist thought in the Hollywood/Media complex?

My research revealed that White may be the last, best hope for real, intellectual film criticism left in the age of the Internet.  We’ve talked at length on this site about how relevant film critics are nowadays.  Everyone has a voice online, and for the low cost of $50/month, some free time, and a free website template, anyone can be Roger Ebert.  But film criticism, true film criticism, is much more than that.  When we think of film critics, we think of Ebert, or Leonard Maltin, or Pete Travers.  At best, these guys are “populist” critics, giving their opinion like a sort of Consumer Reports for movies.  Is it worth your $10 bucks?  But true film criticism, practiced by the likes of Pauline Kael, Andre Bazin and Francois Truffaut is an entirely different animal.  It is an educated pursuit, one that examines film like a literary text, pulling it apart and analyzing individual films on multiple levels.

White’s writings ask many questions.  Should our opinion of a film be colored by it’s marketing approach?  Should how much a film costs affect our expectation of its quality?  Just because a film comes out of Sundance, should we consider it an “art” film when it may not be worthy of the title?  Likewise, can a B horror movie actually contain more substance than the latest winner of the IFP spirit awards?  Should we consider a film to be “adult” or “intellectual” simply because it has a coded style that differentiates it from television or other studio films?  And politically, should we accept leftist film as “truth” without examining how well or effective the film makes its case based on its own narrative and internal logic? (more…)

“The Social Network” opens everywhere Friday. Currently the David Fincher directed, Aaron Sorkin scripted drama sits at a very impressive 100%  fresh on the Tomatometer – and we say very impressive because 52 reviews have already been filed.  

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John Nolte’s review will post tomorrow.

Because the reviews are all uniformly glowing, there’s only one contrarian to leave you with and that’s the always predictably contrarian Armond White. We wish there were a less predictable contrarian, but for now he’s all we got:

The Social Network glamorizes a new paradigm: How the Internet’s basic disconnect characterizes contemporary public discourse. Director David Fincher’s lustrous video images make instant, stylish mythology out of the way Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg re-popularized the Internet by founding the Facebook in 2003. This brainy, insular 19-year-old pinpointed the Internet as a personal, rather than formal, means of communication and thus became the nation’s youngest billionaire. TV’s Aaron Sorkin concocted a script that pretends to assess Zuckerberg’s sea-change, but it’s Fincher’s mythmaking (his usual yellow-green color scheme, more burnished than ever) that uncannily combines moral confusion, social decline and empire building—although leaving out such crucial details as where the money comes from and the moral consequences of all that glorified disconnection. …

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With an 82% fresh rating, most all the Usual Suspects are gushing over ‘Avatar,’ but everyone knows that when you trash America you can bank the glowing reviews. So here are some contrarian voices not on Big Hollywood — others who had many of the same problems we did with the dull, cliched story and, in some cases, with the over-hyped visuals [Nolte review here; Kozlowski review here]: 

Nerve.com:

“If Cameron wasn’t going to make a great movie with his rumored half-billion dollar budget, he could have at least given us an entertaining train wreck. But Avatar, which plods on for a punishing two hours and forty-two minutes, is more boring than bad. There’s no denying that the motion-capture 3D visuals are some kind of technical achievement, but after spending a while in the aquarium-like world of Pandora, I started to feel like I was staring at the world’s most expensive screensaver. The New Age-y rituals of the Na’vi put me in mind of dancing Ewoks, and the big battle scenes looked like outtakes from Attack of the Clones. Maybe that’s a little too harsh, but certainly Cameron does nothing with digital warfare that Peter Jackson didn’t do better in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Your mileage may vary, but to these eyes, Avatar looks like the emperor’s new clothes — and the King of the World is naked.” (more…)