>In Get Out, just as Obama did, Peele exploits racial discomfort, irresponsibly playing racial grief and racist relief off against each other, subjecting imagination and identification to political sway. Get Out’s routines — Chris identifying with a wounded deer, Chris being introduced to clueless, suspicious, patronizing, dishonest, and rapacious whites — paint a limited, doomed picture of race relations. Like a double-dealing demagogue’s speech, there’s just enough pity to satisfy black grievance and just enough platitudes (Rose back-talking a white cop) to make whites feel superior. When an Asian party guest asks Chris “Is African-American experience an advantage or disadvantage?” it reveals Peele’s own biracial anxiety. > That question is too heavy for a film so lightweight. Peele depicts Chris’s sense of isolation, of “living in a sunken place.” (After Rose’s mother hypnotizes Chris, he’s shown adrift in a limbo without any attachment to the real world except a sorrowful memory of his parents’ death.) Chris’s detachment from real-world social status brings to mind the cluelessness of the Hope & Change generation, in dire need of a reality check; instead, Millennials rely on the Obama era’s civil-rights bromides and social-justice aphorisms.
I still think him shitting on Moonlight, La La Land, Ghostbusters and Civil War were my favorite reviews this year
Ayden Gutierrez
Given all the bullshit hollywood is putting out now his reviews keep getting better and better.
My favorite is him btfo Meryl Streep oscar nomination.
2017 will be armond kino year.
Jack Hill
>It’s no accident that the very best movies of 2016 challenged the mainstream and were not from Hollywood. Too many American filmmakers have lost the ability to look at human experience without cheapening our responses to it. Our most urgent issues as human beings, and our most sensitive needs as people who think and feel, are betrayed by a culture committed to childish escapism produced to shore up fatuous, fashionable tenets — which then get endorsed by media shills.
>The year’s Better-Than List has expanded because film culture has exploded beyond homogenous tastes and interests; multimedia competition has only exacerbated our fragmentation. But the point of the Better-Than List is always to inspire critical thinking and encourage personal response against the conformist hive-mind that aims to tame our diverse tastes. The best movies reward cultural courage, making it easier to reject the garbage.
>The President > Southside with You >Mohsen Mahkmalbaf’s epic parable about modern-day revolution in a country resembling Iran offers unexpected insight into the effects of despotism on a ruler and his subjects. Makhmalbaf’s insistence on shared humanity — a leader’s obligation to forgive his public and vice versa — furnishes the humanist critique that American media have avoided for the past eight years. Richard Tanne, instead, dished up another fatuous Obama-origin myth for political sycophants.
>Being 17 > Moonlight >André Téchiné’s exhilarating observation of French and Algerian teens in love anticipates New Europe’s complicated future; Barry Jenkins reduced the black gay American protagonist in his movie to an identity-politics martyr. A humane, visionary work vs. condescending, politically correct propaganda.
Julian Phillips
>King Armond BTFO the plebs yet again
He can't be stopped. Based Almond.
Jaxson Campbell
Don't forget BvS
Carter Sanders
>Sunset Song > Manchester by the Sea >Terence Davies’s deeply empathetic Scottish drama (from Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s novel) finds national and ethnic awareness in a woman’s life struggle, while Kenneth Lonergan’s male weepie forgoes empathy for melodramatic clichés that never rise above self-pity.
>Wiener-Dog > The Lobster >Todd Solondz’s symbolic dachshund traverses three tales of human will, observing fragmentation nationwide with breathtaking boldness and humor; Yorgos Lanthimos’s self-congratulatory Kubrick-derivative nihilism mocks civilization.
>Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk > La La Land >Ang Lee’s moving 3-D vision of post-9/11 stress shows Americans loving one another as citizens and as soul mates — unlike Damien Chazelle’s childish ode to showbiz vanity. Lee transcends genre to remind Americans of what connects them; Chazelle distorts genre into idiotic escapism then deadens it.
>Beautiful Something > Moonlight >Joseph Graham’s intimate, multi-character cityscape follows the spiritual journey of several Philadelphia gay men, while Moonlight (yes, that con job again) exploits “minority” status to sentimentalize victimization. The personal vs. the pseudo-political.
>Batman v Superman > Deadpool >Zack Snyder continues to find depth in pop myths, making comic-book archetypes reveal our souls. But Tim Miller’s Edgar Wright–lite comic-book sarcasm defies and denies serious fun.
>Hacksaw Ridge, Knight of Cups, Voyage of Time > Silence >Mel Gibson professes faith the difficult way, by defending a conscientious objector’s war experience. Terrence Malick searches for faith in Hollywood (fiction) and throughout history (nonfiction). But Martin Scorsese’s latest protracted remake replaces their conviction and originality with a lapse of cinematic faith.
Austin Taylor
Trump needs to make Armond King of Art or "Secretary of Culture" or whatever the proper position would be called. It could foster a wave of Kino like man has never witnessed. Hollywood garbage absolutely BTFO for decades.
Make Kino Great Again.
William Mitchell
>Eisenstein in Guanajuato > Cameraperson >Peter Greenaway’s outrageous bio-pic about Sergei Eisenstein, whose impact on cinema is still felt, pairs compassion for the Russian exile’s private life with respect for his art. Kirsten Johnson confuses her résumé as a photographer on PC docs with artistic expression. Genius vs. narcissism.
>Miles Ahead > The Birth of a Nation >Don Cheadle finds inspiration and invention in Miles Davis’s genius, while Nate Parker misunderstands Nat Turner’s insurrection as instruction. History is to teach not repeat.
>Valley of Love, Don’t Call Me Son > Toni Erdmann >France’s Guillaume Nicloux and Brazil’s Anna Muylaert both treat family dysfunction as serious business in two innovative films about the difficulty of parenting gay children, while Germany’s Maren Ade sees parental foibles and inherited perversity as a berserk sitcom. Nicloux and Muylaert go deep; Ade goes too far.
>Will You Dance with Me? > The 13th >Derek Jarman’s previously unreleased record of one night at a London disco in the 1980s survives as a document of assorted human desires unified by popular culture. Ava DuVernay uses the documentary form to showcase today’s race-hustling elites who promote social division through black victimization. Jarman’s joyous, personal interpretation of dance culture makes history; DuVernay’s dubious misinterpretation of the Constitution’s 13th Amendment violates it.
>Sully > Rogue One >Clint Eastwood celebrates true American heroism while reevaluating the cynical disbelief that has infected post-9/11 culture; Garth Edwards depicts the miasma of war as a dull Star Wars episode. An edifying entertainment for adults vs. ends-justifies-the-means propaganda for children of all ages.
Levi Ortiz
>The Mermaid > The BFG >Stephen Chow’s action-fantasy just happens to make ecological points while defending the ethics of the forgotten working class. Spielberg’s political parable is a transparent valedictory salute to Obama’s ruling-class elitism, normalized as childhood fantasy. The most popular film in China’s history vs. an American election-year flop.
>Kubo and the Two Strings > Finding Dory, Sausage Party >Travis Knight responds to the crisis of our rotted pop culture with this fable about the sustenance a boy receives from family memory and hand-fashioned art. It’s far superior to another fishy piece of Pixar sentimentality and Seth Rogen’s millennial update of Animal House raunchiness.
>Standing Tall > Fences >Emmanuelle Bercot’s story of a lost urban white kid in Paris gives an updated view of how society fails then rescues its own. It bests the theatrical and political clichés of August Wilson’s black Pittsburgh family drama. Contemporary humanism vs. cornball politics.
>Patriots Day, The Finest Hours > Manchester by the Sea >Peter Berg’s and Craig Gillespie’s true-life New England adventures feature ethnic sensitivity that redefines American character and the action-history genre. But Manchester by the Sea (yes, that con job again) peddles ethnic smugness. Two classic B-movies vs. indie pseudo-art.
>Hidden Figures > Elle >Theodore Melfi’s pre-feminist heroic trio outperform Paul Verhoeven’s Euro-trash post-feminist heroine. In the former, the personal humanizes politics, while the personal is shallowly politicized in the latter.
>Love & Friendship > 20th Century Women >Whit Stillman satirizes modern morality in Jane Austen drag, while Mike Mills drags viewers through a Sundance reeducation course in “feminism.”
>Rules Don’t Apply > La La Land >Warren Beatty’s misconceived whatzit briefly confesses the sex-and-business wonderland of his early days in L.A. It’s far more credible and fascinating than Chazelle’s clumsy, priggish, neo-yuppie “musical” (yes, that con job again).
>Aferim! > Captain America: Civil War >Radu Jude’s profane Romanian folktale is also an epic satire (in majestic black-and-white) of how a debased culture rationalizes terrorism, pain, and inhumanity. Marvel attempts the same with its superhero franchise, trivializing the concept of “civil war” the same way Bernie Sanders trivializes the concept of “revolution.
>When it comes to visualizing fantasy landscapes in a matter-of-fact way, few rivals can touch him, and his knack for balancing menace, mayhem, slapstick and sentiment within a single sequence rivals Hitchcock, Spielberg and Kurosawa. Yet his set pieces often do little to advance his stories and themes. (Consider the pod race in The Phantom Menace—one of the most intricately imagined action scenes ever filmed, yet barely relevant to the plot; for that matter, consider Sith's opening starship battle, which seems to go on for days.) With actors, he's King Midas in reverse, and his dialogue ranges from competent to cruddy. The mix of A+ technique and C- dramaturgy is nearly unique in American cinema; Lucas is the directorial equivalent of a prophesied sci-fi man-child who can levitate whole cities but can't master a knife and fork. Sith is an infuriating, electrifying movie—a savant's masterpiece.
>The Christopher Nolan Batman movies are not exactly life affirming, so why do pundits refuse to connect those films to last week’s Aurora, Colorado, massacre at the midnight showing of Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises? Instead, the problem of the films themselves has been swept away by a torrent of political distraction over gun control. After this clash of cinema and reality, have we forgotten that culture either dooms or defines us? Over-smart responses to the shooting resemble the mindless state of most contemporary cultural commentary. It takes escapism–whether in movies or journalism–to a maniacal extreme by uniformly ignoring the causal relationship between the Christopher Nolan franchise and the murderous actions of James Egan Holmes (12 deaths and 70 injured persons) whose disguise resembled the role that Heath Ledger played in 2008’s The Dark Knight; even referring to himself as Ledger’s character, The Joker.
John Allen
Once again proving this is the worst board.
Chase Hernandez
>No movie is ahead of its time, just ahead of cultural gatekeepers. Sam Fuller knew this better than any other filmmaker after his 1982 White Dog waited almost ten years to get a theatrical release. Despite Fuller’s career-long penchant for giving controversial subjects a punchy, exploitation-movie spin, White Dog (his twenty-first feature) was the first to suffer outright suppression. Due to the film’s impudent premise, in which a Los Angeles actress, Julie Sawyer (Kristy McNichol), innocently discovers a guard dog trained to attack African Americans—a metaphor for socially indoctrinated racism—Fuller met with extraordinary industry and public resistance. His deliberate provocation, indicting social naïveté as well as film industry routine, worked too well. The film couldn’t slip under Paramount’s radar like earlier Fuller outrages, since B-movie exhibition no longer existed by the 1980s. Instead, White Dog was dumped in a television graveyard, before it was eventually released to theaters as a specialty art movie in 1991.
>Paramount had quietly shelved the film after the Beverly Hills–Hollywood branch of the NAACP objected to its inflammatory subject matter and content. NAACP spokesperson Collette Wood protested, “We’re against the whole thrust of the film and what it says about racism, especially with the rise of the Klan, which always occurs during bad economic times.” That was enough to scare off an unenthusiastic distributor. Paramount was launching a box-office armada—American Gigolo, Urban Cowboy, An Officer and a Gentleman, 48 Hrs., Flashdance—and Fuller’s complex sociological moral tale didn’t fit into its widely touted High Concept formula for success.
Nicholas Cox
>In Get Out, just as Obama did
Cool, I love forced political commentary in my movie reviews.
Sebastian Jackson
>As always, Fuller counted on the culture’s political awareness. White Dog required that viewers make the leap from historical memory and social consciousness to cinematic imagination—the same license Fuller had enjoyed when his movies were part of a studio’s broad release slate (although, even then, The Steel Helmet, Pickup on South Street, and China Gate had encountered bureaucratic opposition, the first two from the FBI, for being unpatriotic, the last from a French government offended by his view of the Indochina crisis). In the early eighties, Fuller’s views on race didn’t fit pop fashion; the previous decade of blaxploitation movies that took zealous, defensive positions on racism had recently concluded. Audiences were moving on, while Fuller still enjoyed his venerable pulp-didactic mode.
>In White Dog, Fuller views social problems with as much commitment as in his fifties and sixties movies, but the anachronistic uniqueness of the film’s polemical thrust was confirmed by the range of incomprehension shown by Paramount and the NAACP. Fuller’s sense of social responsibility was both disregarded and misunderstood. He wasn’t exploiting racism but defining its least suspected characteristics (highlighting such seemingly harmless activities as pet care and the casual passing on of attitudes to children) and imagining what happens when conscientious people seek to end it. Fuller typically confronts/assaults mainstream political naïveté. In this sense, neither Paramount nor the NAACP was being censorial, just practical.
Ryder Cox
Anything people dislike.
Nicholas Nguyen
>It is crucial to remember how Fuller’s idiosyncratic approach to the social-protest film (very different from that of the equally earnest mainstream lecturer Stanley Kramer) had inspired a movement of underground pulp sensationalism that flourished in the late sixties and early seventies as exploitation movies. This was the period when Fuller’s B-movie peer Phil Karlson had a late-career comeback with the vigilante tale Walking Tall, which became a box-office hit concurrently with the popularity of Fuller’s spiritual heir, the satirist Larry Cohen, who was fitting social and economic critique into the blaxploitation genre with Black Caesar, Bone, and Hell up in Harlem. These films were not far from Fuller’s agitpulp, fulfilling his longtime aim of message and medium achieving a seamless mergence.
>But by the 1980s, such political sensationalism was out of sync with popular taste. Film culture no longer evinced the ethical fervor that made Fuller’s Korean War drama The Steel Helmet so timely and evocative. White Dog faced an audience that was being weaned on escapism. How could that audience grasp Fuller’s eccentric sensibility, which intentionally juxtaposed the perfidies of war playing on a TV set with a young woman fighting for her life during a home invasion?
Leo Anderson
>With White Dog, Fuller moved his investigation of man’s inhumanity to man from the blood-soaked battlefield and dank underworld to the everyday—specifically, the Hollywood Hills and Hollywood soundstages. Never afraid to explore social anxieties, Fuller used these innocuous locations to show how racism erupts irrationally into ordinary life, making viewers confront both the fears that create racism and the paranoia that racism effects upon perpetrators and victims: Julie’s canine affection and comfortable cinematic employment are shattered by the specter of social hatred. Fuller had matter-of-factly dramatized a mixed-race Army patrol in The Steel Helmet to address the way racial attitudes operated within the U.S. military, but that film was also a prescient vision of America’s coming social protest. In White Dog, Fuller observed society after the sixties’ Voting Rights Act, urban riots, white suburban flight, and the seventies’ urban paranoia. He traced the roots of racism, using a profound cultural image: the attack dog that southern white bigots sicced on civil rights protestors during sit-ins, student protests, and demonstrations of the 1960s. Fuller utilized the legendary figure of the attack dog in order to expose racism and its casual, deliberate indoctrination.
I saw "Rogue One" "civil war" and "star trek beyond"
they were pretty bad
Ian Perry
That's the one review where his inexplicable bashing of "the Obama era" is actually accurate. The movie really feeds into those liberal (mis)conceptions about race in the dullest, most unfunny way.
Zachary Butler
I really liked Billy Lynn's
Aiden Campbell
I thought White Dog was pretty fucking good.
Why must armond alternate from being insightful and a dumb nigger so much
Christopher Hill
>dumb nigger
What did he mean by this?
Grayson Bennett
I feel like this guy judges movies based on their moral content rather than the quality of communicating that moral content
which has to be one of the most pleb outlooks on film criticism
Parker Sanders
When do you interpret him as "dumb nigger"? When you disagree with him?
Leo Russell
Someday a madman on Sup Forums will try to refute any of Armond's arguments. You're on this board every day. Why don't you take a crack at it?
Aaron Gray
>BFG >Being this much of a Spielbergerfag
Jonathan Miller
Well one of the things he does that I like that most critics don't is compare films against the film as a whole. They don't exactly exist in a vacuum, and when someone is making a film, even just to the way they are shooting a certain scene they are deciding what to endorse and condemn onscreen and what values they find important. I find it interesting with how very few people actually criticize what people are saying is important/good and what is unimportant/bad alongside the filmmaking.
He regularly criticizes movies that LOOK like shit as well. He was one of the only critics who looked at the Iron Man movie that kicked off the MCU and said "This is a dull-brown mess." and the entire "cinematic" universe since, disregarding Guardians and a few parts of Ant-Man, has been just the ugliest fucking franchise in existence.
Eli Hall
>implying he didn't see that tasty 100% tomato-meter--tears welling in his eyes out of antcipation--and abused the shit out of a thesaurus to write a non-review at least he beat Cole Smithy to the punch
Ryan Thompson
seen this movie, that scene when the dog almost spots a black kid was tense as fuck
Jason Gutierrez
Burump
Carter Johnson
depends on the movie. I can tell you off the bat that Norbit, Thousand Words, and whatever other garbage eddie murphy made are not masterpieces.
same goes for BvS, the legit worst time I've ever had at a movie theater
Hudson Lopez
You must not have seen many movies in the theater if BvS was the worst time you've had in a theater
Ian Hall
liked BFG?.
But thats wrong. He shat on that movie.
For him this are Spielberg hack years.
Jordan Bailey
>I find it interesting with how very few people actually criticize what people are saying is important/good and what is unimportant/bad alongside the filmmaking. Why should a film critic be a moral guide?
It's such a narrow why to look at a film. Just because a film doesn't agree with your moral idea of "right" doesn't means it's bad. And just because a film touts good morality doesn't mean it's good. It's not useful to anybody reading the review because most people will differ on ideas of right and wrong.
Tyler Bailey
>libcucks
Nathaniel Young
>Armond still shits on Obama even though he hasn't been in office for months I can see why Sup Forums feels he's our guy
Carson Garcia
Has he not posted his review on RT yet?
Nathaniel Nguyen
i imagine armond's eyes lighting up whenever he sees a 100% score on rotten tomatoes
Nicholas Butler
I agree.
Landon Ortiz
bump for answer on this
kek
William Barnes
reminder that this idiot unironically likes norbit
Adam Lewis
RATE IT IN RT ALREADY ARMOND GODDAMMIT
Grayson Perez
Rt only allows approved shill reviews for their circle jerk.
Charles Edwards
But he's posted RT reviews before.
Matthew Phillips
I thought they banned this guy from rotten tomatoes.
Connor Green
But he looks at it with that AND its place as a piece of filmmaking. He hardly has a narrow view when he takes into account hundreds and hundreds of films he's seen to compare with.
People who review a film just on whether it "entertained" are looking at the medium in the narrowest way possible. A couple of drunks slogging it out in Worldstar can be "entertaining". Did the movie leave you feeling anything? Did it present something interesting or pleasurable aesthetically? Were its sensibilities/politics/whathaveyou interesting and nuanced or simplistic and childish?
These are the things he criticizes. Hardly a narrow view.
Mason Jones
>he didn't realize the movie is satirical and actually agreeing with his viewpoints
