Kulturkampf

[Polident]

https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/01/obamas-latest-movie-decree/

There’s a connection between four years of the Biden administration, abetted by legacy media, misleading the nation and the suspiciously hasty way that film reviewers and institutions rushed to ratify the 2024 movie year before the year was actually over, leaving many releases unseen (such as Robbie Williams’s amazing Better Man). Add to that propaganda Barack Obama’s annual culture-czar decree on the year’s best movies.

For any sentient citizen, these are examples of how media are used to influence or persuade the populace — to further an agenda or encourage a particular, biased perception. For purely political purposes, these movie lists oppose rational and aesthetic responses. Anyone who believes them demonstrates “the self-deception that believes the lie,” as lyricist Lorenz Hart wrote. This hardcore credulousness first began when Obama issued a favorite TV and sci-fi movie list in 2016 to maintain his grip on the minds of gullible followers.

It’s a contemptible media strategy, comparable to when Lenin declared in 1919, “The cinema for us is the most important of the arts.” Lenin encouraged the nationalization of the Soviet film industry, and Obama’s recommendations flatter film culture’s already established socialist principles. Early year-end movie lists show the activist media at their most calculating and pernicious.

Armond White truly is the last real film critic.

Didi might indeed be better than Nickel Boys, but Anora as better than La Cocina, Conclave as better than Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara, Wicked as better than Rebel Moon: The Scargiver — these are all unlikely propositions

I like how he left the best for last. I'm a bit of Snyderhead and I didn't like Wicket at all, but the Rebel Moon movies are absolute garbage

Armond actually felt betrayed by it

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/08/hollywoods-dilemma-politics-or-art/

But as Snyder retooled his cinephile concept for binge-watching, he gave way to Hollywood’s typical progressive ideology.

The rebels joining Kora’s resistance evoke trouble spots of Western imperialism: The reformed, now-sober African, General Titus (Djimon Hounsou), repeats the social-activist phrase “Giving voice to the voiceless.” Dreads-coiffed Devra Bloodaxe (Cleopatra Coleman) alludes to black revolutionaries. In the round-table sequence, Kora’s multicultural warriors flash back to each of their war-torn histories: Chinese Nemesis (Bae Doona), Taiwanese Aris (Sky Yang), Arabic Tarak (Staz Nair), and transgender Milius (Elise Duffy) rouse a jumbled mythology of resistance — all victims shadowed by Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Khomeini, Milošević. A global audience must view these allies (and the evil Admiral Noble’s “ethnic impurity” slur) with a sense of guilt. That sentimental identification is every bit as stereotypical as the Jugendstil in Leni Riefensthahl’s mountain movies that inspired Snyder’s ambivalent Aryan and neo-Nazi iconography. (It’s Snyder’s diversity, inclusion, and equity (DIE) video game.)

His review of Wicked is also quite something

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/11/the-weaponization-of-wicked/

Unlike the 1978 Diana Ross–Michael Jackson musical film The Wiz, a sane and tuneful negritude interpretation of Baum in which songs specifically addressed black endeavors, Wicked offers the validation of dangerous, incoherent ideas, a culmination of the social and sexual grooming that Disneyfied culture has indulged since the show’s première in 2003. Only an idiot would take a girl-child to see Wicked and be indoctrinated into its cult of race and gender rebellion that completely perverts what it means to be human.