Doodads with Armond

Those are some delicious-looking macadamia nuts.

Just wanted to fill you in on some of Armond's latest nutty pronouncements.

1. He says that Gigi, a charming little 1958 musical which I've loved since I was a little kid (you just might know it for Maurice Chevalier's performance of the unfortunately titled "Thank Heaven for Little Girls*"), deserved its Best Picture nod over such universally venerated film school classics as Orson Welles's Touch of Evil and Hitchcock's Vertigo, the latter of which Armond derides as 1958's "consensus 'masterpiece' for wannabe cognoscenti." Like I say, I love Gigi, but there are 15-second sequences in the other two movies that are far more famous than Gigi is in its entirety, and justly so.

2. In the same article, he complains both that the new DVD edition of the Godfather Trilogy is "superfluous" (not at all, the thing looks a million times better, although some new special features would've been nice), and that "the continued dismissal of Coppola's Third Opus... not only diminishes the whole but all who go along with it." Yes, you, my readers, are diminished as men (and women?) for dismissing Godfather III, probably the crappiest sequel ever made. Apparently this insanity isn't new to Armond; here, he can be found saying that Coppola's daughter "gave a great performance in Godfather III, which I defend, seriously." Sofia, of course, gave maybe the worst performance of all time in that movie. You can see better acting in soap operas. And here he says that forgetting about 3 is like "amputating a segment of Aeschylus' The Oresteia." Aeschylus being the ancient Greek playwright, The Oresteia being a great trilogy he wrote. You know, there's a reason those plays have lasted 2500 years and Godfather 3 has been more or less forgotten about in less than twenty. (And ironically, there was actually a fourth play in the Orseteia that's been lost, probably because it wasn't good enough to pass down.)

3. Armond hates Revolutionary Road, and good for him. It's one of those movies you don't need to see to know that it will suck. (It's another "the suburbs are very very bad" movie, brought to you by the director of American Beauty - that's all you need to know.) But did he really just say that the problem with Rev. Road is that it's the opposite of Spielberg's latest Indiana Jones movie, which apparently explored various "ambivalent attitudes" of 50s America, such as "capitalism communism = the Cold War; individualism family = society"? Does Armond scribble down his reviews on napkins? How do his editors let him publish gibberish like that? Seriously, what the fuck. He also complains that the movie lacks "the eroticism and spirit that makes Ibsen, Strindberg and O’Neill the standard for marital/social insight" - the first two being great late 19th-century Scandinavian playwrights, begging the question, why didn't Armond just write "Revolutionary Road - not seeing Shakespeare" - and that Leo and Kate don't have a "Catch Me If You Can good time." Then, he bitches that the "James Bond plays a militant Holocaust victim" movie could use some of "Spielberg's sophistication." (Hilarious headline: "Edward Zwick’s badass title, Defiance, implies a Holocaust film where the Jews fight back—but it doesn’t top Spielberg.") Yeah, or maybe it could just use some better casting choices. Spielberg might want to consider getting a restraining order against this fanboy.

* It even has creepy lines like "little girls get bigger everyday" and "they grow up in the most delightful way."