Armond White's 2013 Better Than List

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Johnny Guitar
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Re: Armond White's 2013 Better Than List

Post by Johnny Guitar »

Self-promotion is definitely a strong point for both of them, that's true!

I used to read the Fablog on a kind of regular basis. And he's all over my friends' FB threads (though I've never friended him).
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Re: Armond White's 2013 Better Than List

Post by Eric »

They both demonstrate a knack for self-promotion, that much is undeniable.
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Re: Armond White's 2013 Better Than List

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Johnny Guitar wrote:Ehrenstein, though a gadfly and contrarian, is more intelligent and also politically on the left. He also has a much broader understanding of cinema than White.
This is true, JG. I’ve read some interesting things on his blog here and there (his, albeit quite poorly formatted blog – he doesn’t really believe in paragraphs). I was just remembering his infamous "Friday night meltdowns" which used to be a weekly staple on Datalounge (a gay-oriented website that I haunt). He is a very volatile, unhinged person with an incredibly high opinion of himself and has favorite actors and actresses about whom he will not tolerate a single unfavorable word (which, as you can imagine, led to a lot of “bait-posting” by some of the regulars there). He also responds all over Facebook to other people’s comments and links with simply a link taking you directly to his blog.

But, he's intelligent. I will give him that.
Last edited by flipp525 on Thu Jan 09, 2014 12:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Armond White's 2013 Better Than List

Post by Johnny Guitar »

flipp525 wrote:Are Armond White and that psychotic drunk David Ehrenstein the same person? They sure seem like it.
Ehrenstein, though a gadfly and contrarian, is more intelligent and also politically on the left. He also has a much broader understanding of cinema than White.

Armond White, after the 9/11 terrorism attacks, has just become a right-wing nutjob whose only remaining liberal issues are his dedication to queer & race politics ... but even then he's sort of weird on these. The guy was interesting well over a decade ago. Now he's just a parody of himself, making clickbait rather than writing criticism.
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Re: Armond White's 2013 Better Than List

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Are Armond White and that psychotic drunk David Ehrenstein the same person? They sure seem like it.
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Re: Armond White's 2013 Better Than List

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Armond White likes David O. Russell. He called Three Kings one of his unranked Top Ten Films of 1999. I think he likes Flirting with Disaster and I Heart Huckabee's, and he was a fan of The Fighter and Silver Linings Playbook (if memory serves) because they ultimately endorse family togetherness.
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Re: Armond White's 2013 Better Than List

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1) He compares Michael Bay to Martin Scorsese and chooses Michael Bay...even in regard to a lesser film in Wolf that's kooky talk
2) He compares Johnny Knoxville to basically any filmmaker (in this case a multi Oscar nominee) and chooses Jackass...I laughed aloud
3) I haven't been all that impressed with the top of the line candidates either so it sure ain't no surprise he hates 12 Years, Gravity, the recent Woody, the recent Coens, the Jonze stunt, the Polley stunt, the Luhrmann stunt, Meryl's disaster, and everything McConaughey did in 2013, etc....

But he basically loved American Hustle???? I've never been more flabbergasted with his populist, critics raved, awards whoring choice than this in my life...maybe I've missed past love for Russell and this isn't surprising, but I basically follow the guy only as far as these type threads and his "anticipated" better than list each year...and I'm shocked he dug that film.
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Re: Armond White's 2013 Better Than List

Post by Eric »

Half technically "right," half technically wrong, 100 percent not pertinent.
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Re: Armond White's 2013 Better Than List

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God, what a fucking tool.
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Re: Armond White's 2013 Better Than List

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Salieri > Mozart
"What the hell?"
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Armond White's 2013 Better Than List

Post by Sabin »

It's his world. We're only trolling in it. To be fair, there are only three listings here that boggled my mind as only a true Armond White "Better Than" List can.

See the year’s best films, reject the overrated
By Armond "Whitey Bear" White

The false politics of film culture 2013 (films exploiting race, class, sexual politics) paralleled the continued diminishment of cinephilia that has subordinated movies to TV, shifting cinema from a popular art form into political soccer games for media’s power elite. Lots of good film but also lots of not-so-hidden-agendas without depth, imagination or feeling. Values from the humanities persist yet struggle for attention over narcissism, nihilism, greed and retrograde esthetics. Only adventurous moviegoers saw the best films, everyone else saw hype. After a year of gross offenses and deep beauty, the Better-Than List knows the difference.



The We and the I> Short Term 12

Michel Gondry’s inventory of basic youth experience (a bildungsroman on wheels) cut through Destin Cretton’s patronizing, maudlin sociology. Gondry’s nearly miraculous feat, as good-natured as it was sensitive and inventive, may be the best film ever made about America by a non-American. A triumph of universality, plus the most profound, insightful, democratic title in years.

Man of Steel > Gravity

Zack Snyder’s powerful visionary re-imagining of the spiritual potential in comix (???) trounces Alfonso Cuaron’s second-rate Kubrick-DePalma rip-off.

Pain & Gain > The Wolf of Wall Street

Michael Bay satirizes American ambition in imagery so bright and exhilarating it exposes the core of spiritual dislocation and rot that Scorsese turns into another self-pleased, overlong gangster epic.

Yossi > Blue is the Warmest Color

Eytan Fox updates Mann’s Death in Venice to L’chaim in Israel; his radiant view of gay humanity rejects Abdellatif Kechiche’s smutty girl-on-girl ode to lovelessness.

Caught in the Web> A Touch of Sin

Chen Kaige’s digital-era farce interwove love stories at cross-purposes with technology while Jia Zhangke smirkingly celebrated China’s moral decline.

The Grandmaster > The Great Gatsby

Wong Kar Wai investigates Chinese spiritual identity through an exquisite, romantic martial arts history but Baz Luhrmann’s latest mess got everything about sex, America, cinema (and F. Scott Fitzgerald) wrong.

Byzantium > Her

Neil Jordan’s ultimate pop-genre revue chose life, unleashing the power of femininity upon its restrictions in British literary and social tradition while Spike Jones dehumanized femininity–and love–as a po-mo joke.

Bullet to the Head > Mud

Walter Hill’s dynamic comeback further analyzed masculinity but in fresh New Millennium context while Jeff Nichols fell further back with ersatz corn-pone juvenilia, the year’s sorriest American movie.

American Hustle > August: Osage Country, The Place Beyond the Pines

David O. Russell’s acting class throwdown shows America to itself as a 70s costume party more exuberant and perceptive than dysfunctional clichés from derivative Broadway product and uninspired Sundance-indie formula made only to collect prizes.

42 > 12 Years a Slave, Lee Daniels’ The Butler

Brian Helgeland interlaced two sides (Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey) of America’s civil rights revolution, making the familiar intense, warm and radiant as Myth. Race-hustler Steve McQueen overplayed the guilt card and Lee Daniels mortgaged his pride in lieu of skill (NOTE: WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?!?)

Our Nixon > Stories We Tell

Penny Lane’s remarkable act of documentary compassion (using home-movie proof that Watergate was the result of people as human as us) was deliberately misread as more character assassination while Sarah Polley egotistically exploited trite family history.

The Gardener > The Act of Killing

Moshen Makhamalbaf’s brilliant father-to-son survey of belief systems linked by Love contrasts Joshua Oppenheimer’s repugnant, fraudulent vaudeville about Indonesia’s death squads–smart-ass political porn.

You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet > Computer Chess

Alain Resnais’ continually astonishing, estheticized exploration of memory and emotion hits a new theatrical-cinema-dream peak that embarrasses Andrew Bujalski’s intentional (yet unintentionally crude) denial of cinema as an esthetic pleasure.

New Slaves > Inside Llewyn Davis

Kanye West’s one-man cinema revival (music video as drive-in movie) was attached to musical/cultural innovation while the Coen Brothers’ Dylanology retreated into hoary yuppie nostalgia. Punk vs. The Establishment (NOTE: DON'T LET HIM GET IN HIS ZOOOOONE!)

Bad Grandpa > Nebraska

Same premise, different result. Jackass auteur Jeff Tremaine’s road movie found common, if derisive humanity while Alexander Payne merely derided unsophisticated Middle Americans on his road to Hatersville.

Camille Claudel 1915, Hannah Arendt, Byzantium, Mental, American Hustle > Blue Jasmine

Binoche, Sukowa, Arterton, Adams, Lawrence, Collette gave a year of revelatory female performances through inspired auteurs, all ignored for Cate Blanchett’s dreadful, facetious embodiment of another foul Woody Allen conceit. The problem with contemporary film culture–in skirts.
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