>Ghostbusters and Café Society seek identity in gimmicks.
>‘That’s not who we are,” a familiar presidential entreaty, came to mind after watching Woody Allen’s Café Society and the new Ghostbusters. Each film offers a comical view of American types, but enjoyment may depend on whether one feels the characters are credible. They aren’t. The Jewish-Americans of Café Society recall Allen’s boilerplate self-deprecation, while Ghostbusters has been rebooted, mostly with Saturday Night Live performers as urban caricatures. The gimmick in each film is to appease the current diversity craze.
>These failed attempts to find humor in social identity (using such contrivances as Café Society’s Jewish-run amusement industries or Ghostbusters’ exaggerated personal peculiarities and trafficking in the supernatural) follow the president’s frequent allusions to Americans’ basic nature — always a non-specific, cure-all remedy to the latest social crisis. Politicians know such distraction is demagoguery; Hollywood calls it entertainment. Allen’s 1930s characters fumble with issues of prosperity, infidelity, and murder, while the contemporary lady ghostbusters use femininity to laugh off literal manifestations of evil. They’re all superficial constructs. Each movie is an exercise in moral evasion — entertainment as brainwashing.
Evan Watson
>Let’s analyze this by looking specifically at two contrasting portrayals: Leslie Jones’s in Ghostbusters and Blake Lively’s in Café Society. Black actress Jones and white actress Lively both play minor characters, yet they can be seen to represent who we, as a nation, think we are: the working-class black woman being the least among us in terms of plot significance and the leisure-class white woman being the most among us in terms of social privilege.
>Jones’s Patty Tolan is the friendliest subway-booth clerk in New York City history. She lacks the education of the three white ghostbusters, who unite as professionals of paranormal science, but she has the gumption to join up out of the same fealty known from black domestics in early Hollywood films. Jones is the tallest of all the Ghostbusters actresses (the others being Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, and Kate McKinnon), and at 48 years old she also suggests the longest career struggle, now finally receiving late acceptance from the showbiz mainstream. (For sentient viewers, this social fact is not unrelated to the actual role of Patty.) What appears “progressive” about Jones’s casting is American business-as-usual: Patty is described as the niece of the character that black actor Ernie Hudson portrayed as an aide to the white leads, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Harold Ramis, in the original 1984 Ghostbusters.
Jack Long
>A feminist Gunga Din, Jones’s Patty makes it possible for the SNL white pukka sahibs to feel good about repeating Ghostbusters’ Eighties line-up — as if exhibiting generous social equality. That’s how escapist entertainment works: It disguises Hollywood’s entrenched biased hegemony as happily inclusive fun for all. Director Paul Feig, who saw no need to diversify the cast of his deplorable but lucrative Bridesmaids, perpetuates the same ol’ Ghostbuster tokenism. His cast of romantic dingaling (Wiig), plus-size clown (McCarthy), butch brainiac (McKinnon), and black sidekick (Jones) presumes to update the original film’s nonsense by virtue of representing Obama-era parity (which includes Chris Hemsworth as an unfunny beefcake version of Old Hollywood cheesecake), but Feig forgets that Reagan-era liberals felt no need to demonstrate equality; enjoying white privilege showed who they were, and filmgoers laughed while acquiescing.
>Similar cultural stagnation occurs in Café Society. Woody Allen celebrates the vaunted era of New York’s segregated 1930s nightlife — and its West Coast counterpart in Hollywood. The story of Bobby Stern (Jesse Eisenberg), the brother of a New York gangster and nephew of a high-powered Hollywood agent, centers on his falling in love with non-Jewish women — a Los Angeles secretary, Vonnie (Kristen Stewart), and an East Coast divorcee, Veronica (Blake Lively). But Allen glosses over the cross-ethnic infatuations as well as instances of ethnically restricted businesses. (The décor of Bobby’s nightclub evokes the infamously segregated El Morocco.) Like Feig in Ghostbusters, Allen uses comedy to avoid serious contemplation of the social inequities that accompany class advancement. (Café Society’s unoriginal dialogue, including Allen’s mumbly, gravelly narration, sounds hackneyed. It’s worse when Allen trots out his usual harangue that life is “meaningless.”)
Xavier Cook
>Allen satirizes Jewish working-class ambition, paranoia, and class pretenses, whether in the luxe of Hollywood studios or the grime of New York racketeering. He romanticizes go-getter Bobby by imitating those Great Gatsby interpretations that read Jay Gatsby as Jewish. But while Allen emphasizes ethnic difference (mocking Bobby and family for their non-Orthodox behavior and occasional reversion to Yiddish-speaking type) he avoids exploring it. That Allen is no ethnicity-buster becomes clear when Lively enters the film. She’s a counterpart to the dark-haired Vonnie, yet she personifies a blonde, blue-eyed shiksa. “I think Jews are exotic,” Veronica tells Bobby, adding “I wouldn’t mind if you had horns.”
>While parodying one-way racism, Allen’s shallow portrayal of Stern’s cross-cultural attraction refuses to acknowledge it as a complex part of “who we are.” The racist standards of film-industry practices go unexamined — both in Lively’s WASPy idealization and in the blonde hooker whom Stern rejects when he realizes she’s Jewish. The way Allen lingers on close-ups of WASP love-objects Vonnie and Veronica correlates with Feig’s using Jones’s stereotypical rambunctious black as comic relief in Ghostbusters.
>Both films offer empty characterizations with superficial ethnic identities. The accusation lodged against Bobby’s uncle (“He’s not a [real] Jewish man!”) is surprisingly blunt given Café Society’s sentimental sociology. Similarly, in Ghostbusters, the peripheral status Patty inherits from her uncle is unexpectedly sentimentalized as a social advance.
Jordan Ward
>Hollywood’s pretense about “who we are” can be seen in the contrast between Lively and Jones — the one’s Caucasian elegance and the other’s comical blackness. Each film exemplifies modern Hollywood’s social complacency and lazy imagination. That also explains why Ghostbusters reduces ideas about the supernatural to 3D F/X gimmickry and Café Society wastes the great cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who provides color schemes similar to those in his legendary Bertolucci films (The Conformist, 1900, Little Buddha), but without dramatic vibrancy, without vision.
>Allen doesn’t bother fleshing out characters in Café Society. They’re concepts still stuck in his head. Feig plays off bogus feminism (women who joke about their “cracks”) as before. These are identity-crisis movies — revealing who the filmmakers really are while pandering to our expectations about ourselves.
Carson Hughes
based
Gavin Davis
tl;dr
Christopher Jenkins
>called it out for what it is based Armond
Joshua Bell
The King.
Chase Watson
based Armond.
Jason Martin
>it's a Sup Forums worships a loathsome uncle tom episode
Alexander Russell
*takes a bow
Xavier Wright
Post your favorite Armond quotes
>“Steve O’s Super Cocktail Bungee routine in a feces-filled port-a-john utilizes distance and trajectory in a way that recalls the great waterslide joke in Norbit (and should help rehabilitate that wonderful film’s unfair reputation).”
Charles Bailey
tl;dr guy here
I decided to read it through in its entirety and I regret nothing, he truly is the hero that film deserves AND needs right now.
Adam King
absolutely destroyed.
Angel Flores
Regardless of what he says I'll torrent Allen's movie: Lively and Kstew in a movie is a good reason on its own.
Ian Rogers
sticky when?
Julian Barnes
why? they aren't very good actresses oh you're one of those twats that watches something just because someone you find attractive(for whatever reason)is in it
Camden Anderson
whoa whoa wtf are you doin nigga why are you naming the jew
Rip vmr white
Charles King
lmao look at this try hard loser that thinks hes better than people well let me tell you something..... you are not
Daniel Foster
Yes that's the reason.
Do you think I watched Regression because I studied econometrics or because I like Emma Watson?
Same goes for American Ultra and many other shitty or mediocre movies.
Sebastian Bell
if it was 2013 id agree with you.
they've both managed to go from terrible to shockingly competent these last few years though. you should watch more movies. i still don't fully believe it either, but (surprise) sometimes actors get better, just like people in any other profession. to be fair, usually they don't, and sometimes they get worse, or are just horribly inconsistent, but yea, duh, just rambling at this point..
James Foster
>feminist Gunga Din, Jones’s Patty makes it possible for the SNL white pukka sahibs
I thought this article was supposed to be in English.
Easton Carter
>that's the reason
Your absolutely abysmal taste in women and abject loneliness have made it so your life and mind are both shit-clogged toilets.
lol@your life
Jace Murphy
>Each movie is an exercise in moral evasion — entertainment as brainwashing.
Best line 2bh.
Thomas Cox
found the faggot
Jeremiah Perry
I thought people who speak English were supposed to be at least mildly educated.
>A feminist Gunga Din, Jones’s Patty makes it possible for the SNL white pukka sahibs to feel good about repeating Ghostbusters’ Eighties line-up — as if exhibiting generous social equality. Armond is incredible. I love this fucking guy.
Liam Harris
I don't know if a agree with him.
It just seems like he's put on the "everything's a racist stereotype" glasses and my questions is, why bitch about wit now.
The reason ghostbusters is fucking awful has nothing to do with feminism or racism, and everything to do with that it resorts to fucking fart jokes to try and get a laugh out of the audience. It's just like an Adam sandler movie, at no point did I believe any of them were scientists or that patty actually worked in a subway.
The characterization was terrible, the jokes were terrible, the effects were terrible and had way too many "3D shot" parts. Nothing to discuss the social-political issues with this is as pointless as discussing the social issues of a seagal movie, or any b rate direct-to-DVD crap.
Jaxon Evans
Just go watch some porn ya 12 year old faggot
Levi Baker
I had to look up pukka sahibs. It was stupid to use that term, even if it is (barely) part of English slang. Threw me out of the article.
Jeremiah Brooks
“I think Jews are exotic,” Veronica tells Bobby, adding “I wouldn’t mind if you had horns.”
This is just so pathetic. Old senile man writing fanfiction tier wish-fulfillment harem stories. Dude WASP women can't resist the TWC!!11 It's like like dressed up blacked.com, but with Jews instead.
Landon Allen
>slang for 'true gentleman' >Armond's way of calling the SNL cadre fedora tippers I thought it was brilliant.
Connor King
Except it doesn't mean this.
Carter Miller
>not understanding the tongue-in-cheek connotations I guess it's a British thing.
Hudson Gomez
>Allen doesn’t bother fleshing out characters in Café Society. They’re concepts still stuck in his head. Feig plays off bogus feminism (women who joke about their “cracks”) as before. These are identity-crisis movies — revealing who the filmmakers really are while pandering to our expectations about ourselves.
based
Connor Young
Favourite Armond quote:
>Love of Star Wars is not love of film, merely consumerist habit
Armond White's review of Star Wars: The Force Awakens is a masterpiece. Every other critic went into braindead shill mode with "made me laugh, cry and cheer all over again" being all you could see but Armond cut right through it and called the movie out, and even all of Star Wars, for what it is.
James Fisher
Well you know he likes some of the adam sandler movies that use those same jokes
Jonathan Sanders
>white pukka sahibs
The man has no chill
James Nguyen
>at no point did I believe any of them were scientists or that patty actually worked in a subway "Dude, totally killed my immersion."
You don't deserve Armond White.
Noah Turner
They're not the same jokes in essence and he emphasizes that fact and explains his reasoning well.
>Sandler’s real dare is to defend ethnicity–not piously but through comedy that has social and political effect: When Jack’s WASP assistant (Nick Swardson) boasts that he’s almost Jewish because “I’m an atheist,” Jack looks nonplussed. Yet, Sandler isn’t. His comic introspection has a moral core.
Chase Morales
Yeh boi #BlackLivesMatter
every nigga ought to act 100% like a chimpanzee at all times or else he acting white
Anthony Sanchez
>uncle tom please die
Jose Clark
>The gimmick in each film is to appease the current diversity craze.
