dx23 wrote:The Better-Than list is the most moronic thing I've ever seen. He compares apples to condoms, because there is no other way of making any logic or seeing any common sense in the movies he compares in that list.
Agreed. There's a reason why he's the only critic with the audacity to make a list like that.
I have some ideas for lists like that, should i be a movie critic too?
I actually got the chance to sit next to Armond during a film screening and talk to him some before the show started, and he surprised me by being a kind, gracious, engaged human being.
That said, none of those adjectives are even in long orbit around his written persona. I think those Better Than/Worse Than year-end reviews are a perfect match for the guy: He can gleefully knock down popular and critical favorites while maintaining that same bizarre fetish for comparison that led him to discuss Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon in his review for Up. Seriously, just because two movies have balloons in them doesn't give you license to put them in a boxing ring together. And I get the feeling that even the producers of Gentlemen Broncos would feel it'd be too ridiculous to put "the 2001 of 2009" on their DVD box.
Was the "2001 of 2009" a compliment? The Kubrick film seems like exactly the kind of classic that Armond would slag off just to get a rise out of people.
Wear the Hat wrote:I actually got the chance to sit next to Armond during a film screening and talk to him some before the show started, and he surprised me by being a kind, gracious, engaged human being.
Wear the Hat wrote:I actually got the chance to sit next to Armond during a film screening and talk to him some before the show started, and he surprised me by being a kind, gracious, engaged human being.
Giddily succinct in ways literal-minded folk will not appreciate, From Paris With Love is an object lesson in the realities of what the Obama administration once euphemized as “man-made disaster.”
The other thing i noticed in his review is that he throwing shit at the Hurt Locker, even though he gave a positive review of the film. Apparently, now that the film has earned Academy Award nominations and was liked by almost every critic, the film now is shit and overrated to Armond. What a tool.
Fiery Angel wrote:I'm almost embarrassed that I thought "Everlasting Moments" was by far the best film of 2009, because that puts me in AW territory.
I know...the wife and I saw over a dozen films at a festival last summer and that was easily my favorite of the festival - and it turns out the year - and I cringed when I saw he similarly hailed it.
However, did anyone catch how he flip flopped on Hurt Locker once it got popular? Probably the clearest example of what a trolling shit he is...back in June he wrote a review singing its praises as one of the best Iraq movies yet, but in his 'better than' end of the year list, he had to jab at it and basically call it vacuous....all style and no substance and Bigelow sucks. glancing at the comments it appears a couple of people called him on it, but it's just so pathetically obvious that he couldn't stand the fact that he praised an oscar nominee. How on earth can he be a victimized pariah if that happens?!?!!??!
Fiery Angel wrote:I'm almost embarrassed that I thought "Everlasting Moments" was by far the best film of 2009, because that puts me in AW territory.
I know...the wife and I saw over a dozen films at a festival last summer and that was easily my favorite of the festival - and it turns out the year - and I cringed when I saw he similarly hailed it.
However, did anyone catch how he flip flopped on Hurt Locker once it got popular? Probably the clearest example of what a trolling shit he is...back in June he wrote a review singing its praises as one of the best Iraq movies yet, but in his 'better than' end of the year list, he had to jab at it and basically call it vacuous....all style and no substance and Bigelow sucks. glancing at the comments it appears a couple of people called him on it, but it's just so pathetically obvious that he couldn't stand the fact that he praised an oscar nominee. How on earth can he be a victimized pariah if that happens?!?!!??!
So is Luc Besson the Spielberg of the War on Terror? He seems to have a tremendous hard-on for Mr. Besson too. And i've parsed the above quoted bit - "Giddily succinct in ways literal-minded folk will not appreciate" - and still can't decipher what that even means. That seems to be his greatest skill: arranging words in a way that sounds intimidatingly brilliant, but is ultimately meaningless drivel.
HistoryProf wrote:So is Luc Besson the Spielberg of the War on Terror? He seems to have a tremendous hard-on for Mr. Besson too. And i've parsed the above quoted bit - "Giddily succinct in ways literal-minded folk will not appreciate" - and still can't decipher what that even means. That seems to be his greatest skill: arranging words in a way that sounds intimidatingly brilliant, but is ultimately meaningless drivel.
Definitely the first time that I've ever heard someone say being succinct is not a literal activity (or is it only when you're giddy that succinctness stops being literal?). Who knew that trying to cut down the number of words in a sentence was such a figurative thing to do.
Audiard’s fancy camera and music mannerisms are as trashy and superfluous as a Michael Mann movie: using “Mack the Knife” as a theme doesn’t match Brecht but reveals Audiard’s essential lack of interest in Malik’s culture. This faux pas makes Audiard’s entire conceit bogus—unlike the sophisticated balance of first and third world empathies in Luc Besson’s urban-racial thrillers.
I'm racking my brains trying to think which Luc Besson films (plural) he can possibly be referring to. Subway springs to mind, but claiming that that exercise in superficial flashiness has "a sophisticated balance of first and third world empathies" - sophisticated anything, in fact - is a stretch even for Armond. So it must be something else - but what?
MichaelB wrote:I'm racking my brains trying to think which Luc Besson films (plural) he can possibly be referring to. Subway springs to mind, but claiming that that exercise in superficial flashiness has "a sophisticated balance of first and third world empathies" - sophisticated anything, in fact - is a stretch even for Armond. So it must be something else - but what?
I'm guessing Armond is referring to the various Besson-scripted and/or -produced titles. He's previously gone giddy over the Transporter movies and everything Pierre Morel has helmed. Most recently From Paris With Love has been getting the, er, love.
A Besson 'enthusiastic' I know (they exist!) made me watch Kiss of the Dragon and Danny the Dog. Unbearable tripe. I suppose knocking off Hong Kong movies and casting Jet Li accounts for the 'racial' part of the equation, but the rest is definitely bullshit.
Audiard’s fancy camera and music mannerisms are as trashy and superfluous as a Michael Mann movie: using “Mack the Knife” as a theme doesn’t match Brecht but reveals Audiard’s essential lack of interest in Malik’s culture. This faux pas makes Audiard’s entire conceit bogus—unlike the sophisticated balance of first and third world empathies in Luc Besson’s urban-racial thrillers.
I'm racking my brains trying to think which Luc Besson films (plural) he can possibly be referring to. Subway springs to mind, but claiming that that exercise in superficial flashiness has "a sophisticated balance of first and third world empathies" - sophisticated anything, in fact - is a stretch even for Armond. So it must be something else - but what?
he takes every opportunity he can contrive to work in praise for the Transporter franchise...having not seen them I don't know exactly what he's referring to, but i'm guessing the Transporter dude ends up in seedy places as he, uhm, transports stuff.
otherwise, maybe he's riffing on Taken? who knows really...Besson has risen quite a bit in his odd pantheon of greatness, though will never of course eclipse Sir Spielberg.
Shockingly, A Prophet has been mistaken for something else; its Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix validates Audiard’s urban clichés as an important view of Europe’s immigrant crisis. In this way it’s as specious as Laurent Cantet’s The Class, another haughty presentation of France’s post-colonial confusion. Bourgeois ethnic guilt mutates into genre excitation; that’s how liberals get to project their fears and simultaneously jack themselves off.
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Utter and complete nonsense, but it won't stop him from pandering to brain dead Beckites to try and gain a reader or two
zedz wrote:A Besson 'enthusiastic' I know (they exist!) made me watch Kiss of the Dragon and Danny the Dog. Unbearable tripe. I suppose knocking off Hong Kong movies and casting Jet Li accounts for the 'racial' part of the equation, but the rest is definitely bullshit.
I'll admit to enjoying Danny the Dog, mostly for its ridiculousness though. Armond's probably referring to B13 though.
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