[PLEASUREMAN]

Let's first confront the insulting shortcut of the "tomatometer", the nerd metric that Rotten Tomatoes uses to track movie popularity. It's essentially just a meter for critical conformity, as the number cannot communicate which critics liked a movie and why--everyone is lumped together, from Rex Reed to Roger Ebert, and the spectrum of voices is pretty much that, the full range of thoughtless, idea-less review hackery.

What this tells us is that 94% of these libarts blowhards loved the movie The Kids Are All Right, another Hollywood effort to cram imaginary gay normalcy down the throats of the SWPL crowd. When the appetite is this ravenous, the main problem is generating enough material. Hence the critical gushing, almost unanimous, over this overweening take on lesbian parenting.

James Rocchi:

Cholodenko's film stands as one of the best American films of the year precisely because it's willing to look at what love truly gives, and what it truly takes.

Ty Burr:

Movies like The Kids Are All Right -- beautifully written, impeccably played, funny and randy and true -- don’t come along very often

Pete Hammond:

It would be criminal if, come Oscar time, Annette Bening and Julianne Moore are not competing for a Best Actress award.

Colin Covert:

The Kids Are All Right is a smart, cheerful, character-driven relationship comedy. In other words, it's a miracle.

Thelma Adams:

Directing from the tart, laugh-out-loud script she cowrote, Lisa Cholodenko (Laurel Canyon) has crafted an honest, generous portrait of the challenges of American family life -- gay or straight.

Dave White:

If you liked The Cosby Show and don't reflexively hate gay people then you're pretty much going to dig this movie because it's that show's R-rated lesbian equivalent.

It would be senseless, and indeed needlessly abusive, to go on. The major offenses here include:

• being cheap dates for undemanding melodrama
  
• taking indecent pleasure in having one's own prejudices comfortingly stroked
  
• overstating even their own easily obtained approval

For without a doubt none of these critics will be talking about this movie a year from now, five years from now, ten...The Kids Are All Right will simply drop into the bottomless abyss of mediocre SWPL circlejerks, along with such movies as American Beauty and Meg Ryan's entire career. No one is going to be studying the glib Cholodenko alongside Resnais or Welles, or for that matter alongside Nora Ephron. She is just another infatuee of the moment, the lotion necessary for our elites' furious masturbation. And like all masturbatory exercises, once it is done it is forgotten forever.

After torturing you with this catalogue of meaningless, half-assed encomium, it is only right to apply a balm for the pain, in the form of Armond White.

Armond White:

The Kids Are All Right seems market-tested, like the pilot episode of a TV series. Annette Bening and Julianne Moore play Jules and Nic, a lesbian couple in Los Angeles. One’s a doctor, the other’s an artist, each has given birth and their teenage children, Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and Laser (Josh Hutcherson), now seek out their common father, Paul (Mark Ruffalo), who has never been involved in their lives. He was a sperm-donor during his wild ’80s youth (“It was more fun than giving blood”). Cue laff-track, applause sign and awards.

White knows the crowd this trash is meant for, down to their very brainwaves:

Armond White:

No doubt the reason for Paul’s segregation is to illustrate the self-sufficiency of the lesbian home. Cholodenko’s films always falter through their obvious, self-congratulatory point-making. Jules and Nic make a perfectly PC couple. Their gropings and needlings are sitcom funny (“I love you, Chicken;” “I love you, Pony”), yet not satirical-funny like the lesbian couple featured in Q. Allan Brocka’s wonderful animated TV series Rick & Steve: The Happiest Gay Couple in All the World (especially the “Labor Pains” sperm-donor episode). But Cholodenko’s live-action lesbians have eccentricities designed to make them endearing—“just like us”—in that privileged sense always reserved for empowered white middle-class characters. Jules and Nic might as well be heterosexual, so unexcitingly “normal” are their work lives, partnership negotiations and parental maneuvers.

Cholodenko’s political correctness even ignores the casualties of unorthodox home lives: Jules and Nic personify the state of domesticity outside marriage but none of the drawbacks (while their kids suffer only temporarily). They’re role models for sexual freedom and feminist triumph; that they are transparently so is what makes the movie slick and thin. The script by Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg is too declarative, spelling out sensitivity as when Jules and Paul bond over Joni Mitchell songs then act-out their consequences; that’s the influence of TV blatancy on contemporary Hollywood characterizations. This is particularly damaging when Nic apologizes before her family: Cholodenko hauls out easy remorse and healing is immediate, with no weight of anticipation or fear in Nic’s contrition. A real work of emotional art would offer quirks of personality that disturb a smooth surface—like the father’s unforgettable gripe in Resnais’ Wild Grass: “My son decided not to have children. I understand that. To reproduce what?”

"A real work of emotional art would offer quirks of personality that disturb a smooth surface"--here White identifies exactly what makes this form of filmmaking an expression of spiritual disease. There is no desire to delve inward to emotions and realities that disrupt our fantasies, there is only the compulsion to stroke and tickle the surface flesh, mistaking arousal for emotion, to keep the fantasy alive.

White also points to the "TV blatancy" which hollows out such movies of any artistic truth, providing superficial gratification instead--movies today are more like commercials in their effort to produce cheerful story arcs that approve of us with insincere magnanimity. (With all the product placement, many of them really are commercials.)

The pleasure of reading Armond White's reviews is that he, almost entirely alone now, holds up the standard for movies as art and thus uses the language of adult criticism in examining them. He asks more of them than they are currently prepared to give, therefore he is an unpopular critic with the SWPL set that is always opposed to growth and maturity (as their lives demonstrate). But he does not ask more than film has given in the past, and in his memories of that past one finds some solace.

[Stage]

Armond White pretty much has the only movie reviews worth reading. Its pretty telling that nerds spam his reviews with links to their meaningless online petition to ban Armond White from rottentomatoes (how can people give a fuck that their favourite kids movie is at 99% instead of 100% on the tomato-meter).

These people are so choked up by the meaningless tomatometer stats that they write about how they've contacted the critics circle that Armond White is a part of and complained about him and tryed to get him to lose his job so that his reviews would no longer be counted among all the other reviews. To them the only reviews that matter are the ones that merely reiterate a movie's plot without giving away too many spoilers and where the reviewer trys to step in line with general public consensus as closely as possible. Because, surely the critic who agrees the most with the tomatometer is the best critic - not the most mediocre.

[Jeff Fries]

PLEASUREMAN, 16 July 2010 - 02:21 AM:

For without a doubt none of these critics will be talking about this movie a year from now, five years from now, ten...The Kids Are All Right will simply drop into the bottomless abyss of mediocre SWPL circlejerks, along with such movies as American Beauty and Meg Ryan's entire career.

Too brief and too kind, here's a short list:

The Family Stone
XX/XY
We Don't Live Here Anymore (see above)
Home for the Holidays
What's Cooking
Little Children
You Can Count On Me
In the Bedroom
The films of Christopher Guest
Pieces of April
The Savages
The Visitor
The Hours

They tend to fall into the subgenres of Horrible Holidays and Elegant Adultery, so it's significant that the newer ones like The Kids and The Visitor are direct dramatizations of SWPL politics. If anyone has any doubt about the role of these films as disposable class indicators, consider that there is a parallel cinema for blacks which very clearly serves that function:

This Christmas
Not Easily Broken
Soul Food
Hav Plenty
Love Jones
The Brothers
Brown Sugar
etc.

The best thing about Tyler Perry is that his enormous popularity is proving that there is an audience for the above films but they're not going, which is driving the Huxters to compulsively reference SWPL films to make it absolutely clear which side of the gap they're on.

[miles]

I watched one of the trailers at IMBD, http://www.imdb.com/...db/vi381421337/


I think its been said in the thread, but the verbiage "SWPL-lifestyle-commercial" comes to mind.

There is a fantasy element to this also. Those kids are 18, so we are to subtract 18 years from Julianne Moore and Annette Benning, which would have put them right in the middle of their hawt years. How many lesbian couples have not one, but two lipstick lesbian femme-fatales? Usually they are two butches, or one butch and one femme who is about average. An Annette Benning and Julianne Moore of 20 years ago would be two sexy, feminine women.

[sassafras]

Uh Armond White is a troll. Just take a look at this list: http://www.flickfilo...eisntinsane.jpg

Transformers 2 > Transformers 1? Not that either one is any good, but one can say that unironically without being legally insane.

He probably does have good taste but it seems like he very rarely reviews the movies he actually has high regard for (for instance he wrote an essay for the criterion collection edition of "George Washington," nice little meditative flick by David Gordon Green).

edit: for reference here's that essay: http://www.criterion...orge-washington
the film's worth checking out imo, really nice cinematography, but you guys might be all "lol black people"

This post has been edited by sassafras: 16 July 2010 - 07:23 PM

[PLEASUREMAN]

sassafras, 16 July 2010 - 08:18 PM:

Uh Armond White is a troll. Just take a look at this list: http://www.flickfilo...eisntinsane.jpg

Transformers 2 > Transformers 1? Not that either one is any good, but one can say that unironically without being legally insane.

He probably does have good taste but it seems like he very rarely reviews the movies he actually has high regard for (for instance he wrote an essay for the criterion collection edition of "George Washington," nice little meditative flick by David Gordon Green).

edit: for reference here's that essay: http://www.criterion...orge-washington
the film's worth checking out imo, really nice cinematography, but you guys might be all "lol black people"

White obviously has a blind spot for black culture (although he still has more interesting thoughts about that than any white media personality), but the list is missing the point of why he is worth reading. It's because he has interesting things to say, well thought out views that can contribute to how deeply you experience films. It is a mistake to say "he voted thumbs up on a movie I hated, therefore he sucks"; that is judging the critic only on the axis of whether the end result of his thinking matches yours, which is an unedifying and defensive way of approaching film or any other criticism.

By the way back when I wrote film reviews on Udolpho, the rare feedback I got was people accusing me of always being negative...so I counted it up and the reviews were split almost down the middle, 50/50 good and bad. The truth is, people only remember the time you disagreed with them about a movie they adored for some (usually stupid) reason. White looks for whatever he looks for--no one looks for the same things, except the SWPL conformists, who in reality don't look for anything--they regard film as a flattering mirror. But White doesn't have to look for the same things as me; if he did he would be that much less interesting to read.

I think Armond White is admired because he brings a valuable and intelligent persepctive, even if he ultimately arrives at a different conclusion about a given movie's strengths and weaknesses. This is just never true of White's media colleagues, who only offer shallow approval/disapproval of movies without even understanding their own reactions to it. Believe me, coming to the same "thumbs up/down" status as Roger Ebert or David Edelstein or A.O.Scott does not make their reviews any more readable or insightful.

That list by the way was compiled by angry nerds so you shouldn't take it at face value (as if a real critic's thoughts can be adequately summed up by thumbs up/down). Obviously the criteria for popcorn or genre movies is different than art movies, many of which are unbearable yet critically hailed. And just look at the list, most of the bad movies are forgettable failures that have already disappeared down the aforementioned abyss: Julie and Julia, Milk, Michael Clayton, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Funny People, every single Pixar film, etc. These movies were never that good, they were only appreciated because they flattered the sensibility of the moment and delivered cheap comfort to the SWPL set.

[PLEASUREMAN]

Another critic who evoked similar reactions was John Simon, an erudite theater and film critic who had a gift for thoughtful and surprising analysis as well, and generally got abuse from thin-skinned creatives for it. This was before the Internet, but Simon also would have made nerds angry, although he probably would never have reviewed a movie like Transformers. It was uncommon for me to hold the same conclusion about a film as Simon, but I always got a great deal out of his reviews.

National Review published him for a long time, although Simon was by no means a conservative his reviews were well-suited to the magazine before it was taken over by neocons. A friend and I would look forward to reading them and the inevitable discussion that resulted--has anyone ever had an intelligent discussion sparked by a Dana Stevens review? If so, it must have been an accident.