>It’s baffling how often moviegoers who consider themselves

File: armondwhite090223_250.jpg (12KB, 250x375px) Image search: [Google]

12KB, 250x375px

>Okja isn’t really a family movie (unless you’ve raised Red Diaper babies). Bong’s specialty is converting trendy social values into genre pastiche. His 2012 The Host used a sea monster for a Greenpeace PSA. His Snowpiercer remade Kurosawa’s Runaway Train into an Orwellian allegory. These nonsensical genre mash-ups have been acclaimed by viewers who are unaware that once upon a time action movies could offer a moral about human behavior without dispensing blatant agitprop.

>Last year, Stephen Chow’s wondrous The Mermaid became the most financially successful film in China’s history but barely caused a ripple in the U.S. Chow took the alien thesis of his 2008 CJ7 (which was an expansion on E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial) and made a human-based, adult comic fantasy about threats to cultural heritage within modern China’s class-divided society. Chow’s populism demonstrated the advance that has so far eluded Steven Spielberg’s recently politicized filmmaking. Now Bong shows Spielberg and Chow how to pander, with Okja’s unabashed mix of ridicule and sentimentality.

>The best scenes in Okja belong to Swinton, part of her latest twin-twit routine (as in Hail, Caesar!) as rival daughters of a tyrannical tycoon. In Okja, her ruthless but insecure Lucy Mirando wears a Gwyneth bob, while her twin sister Nancy Mirando wears a Hillary bob. Swinton spoofs her own art-chic with Lucy’s pink, blonde, girlish couture and bucktoothed lisp (her pronunciation of “morons” is worthy of Lily Tomlin). Lucy’s rant against the New York Times and Slate shows that Bong and co-writer Jon Ronson grasp the connection between corporate and media inanity. There’s also savvy satire of the ALF, whose leader (comically pious Paul Dano) claims: “We inflict economic damage on those who harm animals. We never harm animals or non-animals, that is our credo.” Yet, in true Millennial fashion, he never recoils from violence.

File: 180px-Armond_art_400x400.png (176KB, 400x400px) Image search: [Google]

176KB, 400x400px

>While Bong sides with the judgmental vegan-anarchists, he also exposes their malice. But this edgy ambivalence doesn’t last long. Bong’s seriousness becomes maudlin and freakish when Jake Gyllenhaal as a mad scientist has Okja drugged and monstrously violated. There’s even a concentration camp metaphor and a Sophie’s Choice moment for extra maudlin flavor. The outrageousness peaks during a promotional street parade in which the crowd of consumer-idiots observes the eco-terrorists’ attack on Okja and Lucy’s ad campaign — the gawkers just stand by like the dupable public in Stephen Colbert–Jimmy Kimmel audiences. The film’s mix of childhood sentiment, action-film violence, business satire, animal-rights fervor, and progressive sarcasm comes full circle.

>Bong wants us to get worked up — both snuggly and agitated — about a Genetically Modified Organism, but Okja’s plot itself is modified for people who don’t know they’re watching propaganda so long as it pushes their buttons and makes them feel virtuous.

File: PopAye_Full_poster.jpg (2MB, 2000x2966px) Image search: [Google]

2MB, 2000x2966px

>"If it’s cheap, they’ll eat it,” says Giancarlo Esposito as the double-dealing liaison between Lucy and Nancy in Okja. That line also defines the mixed-up cynicism and sentimentality of Pop Aye (at Film Forum), by Thai director Kirsten Tan. She uses the cornball image of a little man (architect Thana, played by Thaneth Warakulnukroh) walking alongside the pet elephant from his childhood in search of lost ideals. We’re way past the gorgeous emotionalism of the Walt Disney masterpiece Dumbo (1942) but not yet beyond the self-pity of feeling outcast and marginal. With its brief allusion to that iconic, indefatigable cartoon sailor, Pop Aye is a children’s movie for childish adults. No amount of outsider cuteness makes up for Tan’s dry storytelling. Is she discreet or just Sofia Coppola–inept? Thana and his big beast are on a long slog, encountering other marginal types, en route toward a narcissistic Aesop’s Fable.

>>84454359
It's a real shame that Armond White isn't a better writer. He just isn't careful or rigorous enough.

>Chow’s populism demonstrated the advance that has so far eluded Steven Spielberg’s recently politicized filmmaking.

What does this even mean?

The Host was 2006 not 2012

>>84454430
That Stephen Chow is doing better then Spielberg recently
They've both made political movies recently but Chow's at least had an audience

I really want there to be a black conservative critic worth reading, who makes points as astute as those of the best progressive critics. White doesn't deliver. Instead, we get shit like this:

> the gawkers just stand by like the dupable public in Stephen Colbert–Jimmy Kimmel audiences.

Stop eating dogs

>>84454430
Steven Spielberg's politicized filmmaking is not influenced by populism yet, despite it being a trend now?

>>84454489
>>84454430
That Reddit libcuck samefag.

>>Elmo (either the plush toy or the cartoon fish)
>cartoon fish
wait

wot

Truly, his Fedora is Maximum.

>>84454478
Even bearing that in mind, I still don't see what he thinks it proves. He reviews successful movies he hates all the time. What does a hit in China but not the US prove about films whose themes probably don't interest the Chinese? Slack writing and thinking.

>>84454495
Note how totally different your interpretation is from this guy's >>84454478. White, using a vague noun with positive connotations because it's easier than being specific, ends up making you wonder where the subject and object are. That's bad writing.

Finding Elmo

>>84454528
Posting twice in the same thread isn't samefagging, and I'm neither a liberal nor a reddit member. White sucks - taking him seriously because his politics are the right color is the kind of thinking liberals are rightly mocked for.

>Bong

Is this movie gonna make me cry, if not its 0/10 shit

Only good gook director is Park Chan Wook and don't you forget it

Tilda Swinton's apparent loss of all discernment in choosing projects is sad to behold. Three movies each for Bong and that I Am Love cocksucker.

>>84454590
Spielberg used to be a very populist director
But even his pandering movies like Lincoln and Bridge of Spies are becoming less what an actual moviegoing crowd wants to see. Same thing with lauded "art" indie movies that get oscars and critical acclaim but make no waves whatsoever in the real world. Populist movies are both good and profitable. Chow is currently making those, Spielberg's lost his knack.

>>84454860
Why are you trying to explain Spielberg's life story to me? Isn't it perfectly clear to you that I was talking about White's shitty writing?

You're using the word "populist" to mean "popular". Spielberg is still populist, he just isn't popular. I suspect White is using "populist" in a political sense as well, if he even knows what it is he's saying.

Populist movies can be good and profitable, but they are not neccesarily either. Learn how to use the English language.

>>84454449
Was gonna post this

What a fucking retarded nigger kek

>>84454333
>Elmo (either the plush toy or the cartoon fish)
Kek.

>>84454542
>>84454632
Is he actually retarded he obviously meant Nemo but called him Elmo

File: Elmopilotfish.jpg (24KB, 526x350px) Image search: [Google]

24KB, 526x350px

>>84454963
>>84454959

he probably watched this one episode of elmos world and thought elmo was a fidh

File: Capture+_2017-06-30-07-30-35.png (50KB, 685x572px) Image search: [Google]

50KB, 685x572px

Do you think he will respond?

>>84454489

He literally just take whatever things are popular and liberal/millennial and then relate the movie to those things. Waiting on him to mention fidget spinners in his spiderman review.

Disappointing. The Host was a satire on America's imperialism, not a Greenpeace PSA. And it's really rather obvious considering they showed footage from Iraq while talking about a virus that was never there in the first place (an obvious reference to Iraq's WMD fiasco).