They both approach a childish genre like adults — and that’s what annoys the Marvel kids...

>They both approach a childish genre like adults — and that’s what annoys the Marvel kids, whose bad rap on Suicide Squad has already gone viral. If DC is the conservative comic-book universe to Marvel’s pseudo-progressivism, it couldn’t be more unpopular among kids who enjoyed the ludicrous platitudes of Avengers: Age of Ultron.
The King of Sup Forums dropping another truth bomb

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I don't like that whenever a new superhero movie comes out Armond is used as an attack-dog by whichever side agrees with him and then shelved by the majority of Sup Forums until the next one.

Le contrarian nigger strikes again, trying to force a political "us vs them" narrative into a film that just exists to try and make as much money as possible

>Yes, even comic-book franchises promote ideology. This may come as a shock to consumers still stuck on the idea that Hollywood wants to entertain more than indoctrinate. Even normally sophisticated folks who are unschooled in recognizing hegemony or realizing how the culture system functions today prove susceptible to the lure of apparently innocuous entertainment. They hold onto adolescent consumerist gullibility, and this is the ideology that Suicide Squad’s producer, Zack Snyder, is up against.
another truth bomb just for you

I love him so much.

Nu-males on Sup Forums blown the FUCK out.

Based Armond is right, grow a fucking pair you cucks'.

...

...

>tfw Armond hasn't seen a single capeshit in his life

Daily Reminder Armond wrote an entire review about how horrible Heath Ledger was in TDK

This is your god DCucks?

If Armond thought he was shit he probably had a point 2bh

>DC is the conservative comic-book
Suicide squad is a degenerate diversity circle jerk of thugs.

this is just political bitching, its not an argument for the quality of the film itself

this desu. liberals love glamorizing nigger criminals which is exactly what this movie does

Armond is based and completely right about this.

just a nigga with a dictionary

>They hold onto adolescent consumerist gullibility, and this is the ideology that Suicide Squad’s producer, Zack Snyder, is up against.
>Zack Snyder
>up against adolescent consumerism

Which is why Marvel is the true patrician's capekino. While DC is pedaling thugs as role models, Marvel is giving kids positive role models.

>Marvel is giving kids positive role models.
this is an over18 board

He's pointing to an unforeseen political subtext to the film and scrutinizing it because that's what critics do. Are you retarded?

Which is why we're discussing which company is better suited for our children. Thank you for reiterating my point.

>role models
>marvel films
Aren't all those films for the 11 year olds and above crowd?
the kids seeking role models are 5 years plus

Fuck off with this nigger.

This is the same man who thought Transformers was good.

I'll pass.

Transformers did nothing wrong.

are you implying transformers was bad

>implying children stop being influenced by media once they reach their preteens

There's a reason all these young dipshits bump "Watch me Whip, Watch me Nae Nae" and it's not because of a grassroots viral sensation carried by preteens.

Yes. Anything after the first film was garbage.

Transformers 2. Should've been more specific. Anyways, Transformers 2 is utter trash desu.

The first one was

Thank you for bringing Armond White's The Dark Knight review to my attention. It's a masterpiece. Armond has certainly calmed down a bit since then but he wasn't aggressive towards any individuals and Ledger only got a little bit of a mention.

nypress.com/knight-to-remember/


Knight to Remember
Armond White
Published Jul 23, 2008 at 6:01 am (Updated Feb 17, 2015)

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The Dark Knight Directed by Christopher Nolan Every generation has a right to its own Batman. Every generation also has the right-no, obligation-to question a pop-entertainment that diminishes universal ideas of good, evil, social purpose and pleasure. And Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, is a highly questionable pop enterprise. Forty-two-year-old movie lovers can't tell 21-year-old movie lovers why; 21 can only know by getting to be 42. But I'll try. After announcing his new comics interpretation with 2005's oppressively grim Batman Begins, Nolan continues the intellectual squalor popularized in his pseudo-existential hit Memento. Appealing to adolescent jadedness and boredom, Nolan revamps millionaire Bruce Wayne's transformation into the crime-fighter Batman (played by indie-zombie Christian Bale), by making him a twisted icon, what the kids call "sick." The Dark Knight is not an adventure movie with a driven protagonist; it's a goddamn psychodrama in which Batman/Bruce Wayne's neuroses compete with two alter-egos: Gotham City's law-and-order District Attorney, Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), and master criminal The Joker (Heath Ledger)-all three personifying the contemporary distrust of virtue.

We're way beyond film noir here. The Dark Knight has no black-and-white moral shading. Everything is dark, the tone glibly nihilistic (hip) due to The Joker's rampage that brings Gotham City to its knees-exhausting the D.A. and nearly wearing-out Batman's arsenal of expensive gizmos. Nolan isn't interested in providing James Bond?style gadgetry for its own ingenious wonder; rather, these crime battle accoutrements evoke Zodiac-style "process" (part of the futility and dread exemplified by the constantly outwitted police). This pessimism links Batman to our post-9/11 anxiety by escalating the violence quotient, evoking terrorist threat and urban helplessness. And though the film's violence is hard, loud and constant, it is never realistic-it fabricates disaster simply to tease millennial death wish and psychosis. Watching psychic volleys between Batman, Dent and The Joker (there's even a love quadrangle that includes Maggie Gyllenhaal's slouchy Assistant D.A., Rachel Dawes) is as fraught and unpleasurable as There Will Be Blood with bat wings. This sociological bloodsport shouldn't be acceptable to any thinking generation. There hasn't been so much pressure to like a Batman movie since street vendors were selling bootleg Batman T-shirts in 1989. If blurbs like "The Dark Knight creates a place where good and evil-expected to do battle-decide instead to get it on and dance" sound desperate, it's due to the awful tendency to convert criticism into ad copy-constantly pandering to Hollywood's teen demographic. This not only revamps ideas of escapist entertainment; like Nolan, it corrupts them. Remember how Tim Burton's 1989 interpretation of the comics superhero wasn't quite good enough? Yet Burton attempted something dazzling: a balance of scary/satirical mood (which he nearly perfected in the 1992 Batman Returns) that gave substance to a pop-culture totem, enhancing it without sacrificing its delight.

Those nigger lips of his look like they've sucked a lot of dick.

Burton didn't need to repeat the tongue-in-cheek 1960s TV series; being romantically in touch with Catwoman, Bruce Wayne and The Penguin's loneliness was richer. Burton's pop-geek specialty is to humorously explicate childhood nightmare. But Nolan's The Dark Knight has one note: gloom. For Nolan, making Batman somber is the same as making it serious. This is not a triumph of comics culture commanding the mainstream: It's giving in to bleakness. Ever since Frank Miller's 1986 graphic-novel reinvention, The Dark Knight Returns, pop consumers have rejected traditional moral verities as corny. That might be the ultimate capitalist deception. A bleak Batman entraps us in a commercial mechanism, not art. There's none of Burton's satirical detachment from the crime-and-punishment theme. In Nolan's view, crime is never punished or expunged. ("I am an agent of chaos!" boasts The Joker.) The generation of consumers who swallow this pessimistic sentiment can't see past the product to its debased morality. Instead, their excitement about The Dark Knight's dread (that teenage thrall with subversion) inspires their fealty to product. Ironically, Nolan's aggressive style won't be slagged "manipulative" because it doesn't require viewers to feel those discredited virtues, "hope" and "faith." Like Hellboy II, this kind of sci-fi or horror or comics-whatever obviates morality. It trashes belief systems and encourages childish fantasies of absurd macho potency and fabulous grotesqueries. That's how Nolan could take the fun out of Batman and still be acclaimed hip. As in Memento, Nolan shows rudimentary craft; his zeitgeist filmmaking-morose, obsessive, fussily executed yet emotionally unsatisfying-will only impress anyone who hasn't seen De Palma's genuinely, politically serious crime-fighter movie, The Black Dahlia.

Aaron Eckhart's cop role in The Black Dahlia humanized the complexity of crime and morality. But as Harvey Dent, sorrow transforms him into the vengeful Two-Face, another Armageddon freak in Nolan's sideshow. The idea is that Dent proves heroism is improbable or unlikely in this life. Dent says, "You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain." What kind of crap is that to teach our children, or swallow ourselves? Such illogic sums up hipster nihilism, just like Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World. Putting that crap in a Batman movie panders to the naiveté of those who have not outgrown the moral simplifications of old comics but relish cynicism as smartness. That's the point of The Joker telling Batman, "You complete me." Tim Burton might have ridiculed that Jerry Maguire canard, but Nolan means it-his hero is as sick as his villain. Man's struggle to be good isn't news. The difficulty only scares children-which was the original, sophisticated point of Jack Nicholson's '89 Joker. Nicholson's disfigurement abstracted psychosis, being sufficiently hideous without confusing our sympathy. Ledger's Joker (sweaty clown's make-up to cover his Black Dahlia?style facial scar) descends from the serial killer clichés of Hannibal Lecter and Anton Chigurh-fashionable icons of modern irrational fear.

The Joker's escalation of urban chaos and destruction is accompanied by booming sound effects and sirens-to spook excitable kids. Ledger's already-overrated performance consists of a Ratso Rizzo voice and lots of lip-licking. But how great of an actor was Ledger to accept this trite material in the first place? Unlike Nicholson's multileveled characterization, Ledger reduces The Joker to one-note ham-acting and trite symbolism. If you fell for the evil-versus-evil antagonism of There Will Be Blood, then The Dark Knight should be the movie of your wretched dreams. Nolan's unvaried direction drives home the depressing similarities between Batman and his nemeses. Nolan's single trick is to torment viewers with relentless action montages; distracting ellipses that create narrative frustration and paranoia. Delayed resolution. Fake tension. Such effects used to be called cheap. Cheap like The Joker's psychobabble: "Madness, as you know, is like gravity-all it takes is a little push." The Dark Knight is the sentinel of our cultural abyss. All it takes is a push.
Is that not one of the most beautiful things you've ever read? White seems to be the only critic in the world who stands up to movies trying to make edgy emptiness trendy. How can anybody disagree with the man?
>inb4 15 one word replies of 'contrarian'

Nice, nice. Very good, Armond.
So. How was the movie?

>10/10 2 thumbs up Batman's suit looked fukken SIIIIICK and there was this part where him and Bane were punching each other and the music went BWAAAARGHGHGHGHGHGH

What the fuck do you want from him? If you want to know what the movie's like watch it. Are you asking for a plot summary?

>pseudo-progressivism

What did he mean by this?

appearing progressive but not really

How can Sup Forums ever recover?

I'm just asking you how was the movie, Armond. Why are you so upset? Just tell me how was the movie.

Exactly 7.8/10

Damnnnn

TOLD STATUS:
[ ] NOT TOLD
[ ] TOLD
[x] THE 40 YEAR TOLD VIRGIN

I just read his piece of The Dark Knight Rises and the Aurora Theater Shooting that happened when it was premiering and the points he raised where incredibly sharp. He doesn't talk just about Nolan, but Hollywood in general. Here's the end of it.

>Before entertainment media became politically slanted, the issue of violence was discussed honestly. Back during the controversies surrounding Bonnie & Clyde, The Wild Bunch, Dirty Harry, A Clockwork Orange, The French Connection, Straw Dogs, Death Wish, Walking Tall, Taxi Driver, the aesthetics of film violence were openly debated. Since then, in the Tarantino years, violence has simply been accepted as another Hollywood excess we blithely accept and that critics automatically promote. Nolan’s Batman movies differ from controversial films like Taxi Driver that drew clear moral lines between its protagonist’s deranged behavior and the public good. Even Scorsese’s shades-of-gray gangster-movie follow-ups, while being sensationalistic, were clear-cut.

>With aesthetic argument now crushed like a rotten tomato, Nolan’s drab, sadistic, numbing approach to dystopia and death becomes validated as a hipster’s vision. If we don’t learn from this how culture defines us, then the Colorado debacle won’t even be a turning point, just another catastrophe like The Social Network premiering to hosannas the same week that Tyler Clementi was bullied to death on Facebook.

>Most critics today are too “sophisticated” to care about the effect cinema has on the world beyond the box-office. Inured to movie violence, they consider themselves saner than James Holmes, they no longer expect movies to “put the sting back in death” as Pauline Kael once said about Bonnie & Clyde. Hollywood, where is thy sting? In Aurora.

How many Obamas did he give?