Why is Everyone so Mad at Armond White!? (again)
Controversial film critic Armond White has done it again. He has half the film community (or more) up in arms because of a review that is in stark contrast to other critics. A while back he angered the film world when his lone negative review of “Toy Story 3” prevented the film from having a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. This week, he’s on the other end of the spectrum– his positive review of the Adam Sandler comedy “Jack and Jill” moved the tomato meter from 0% to a 3%.
Here are two excerpts of his review published in City Arts Magazine:
Adam Sandler’s comedies are not “dumb fun”; maybe that’s why they’re not in critics’ favor. Sandler’s hilarious new film Jack and Jill (in which he portrays both male and female fraternal twins), brings to mind the great line that Ernst Lubitsch’s classic 1946 female plumber comedy Cluny Brown “upset people who didn’t like to admit they have plumbing.”
and
Sandler’s willingness to appear “dumb” is what makes his films so cathartic. He thrives on being unembarrassed—the key to classic comedy going back to the Greeks.
Meanwhile, the rest of the critical community seems to be in a contest to write the absolutely worst thing possible about ‘Jack and Jill.’ Time Magazine collected the harshest of the bunch. Read the rest of their story here.
- “Sandler ought to join Lindsay Lohan at the morgue for this one. Watching him bathe corpses would be more amusing.” — David Edelstein, New York Magazine
- “Picture Tootsie if everyone in the cast had a head injury. That’s Jack and Jill.” — Drew McWeeny, HitFix
- “Sandler […] will likely one day sneeze out a movie inspired by his skills as a cinematic con artist. He will name the character ‘Poop Masterson,’ and it will make $100 million.” — Matt Pais, RedEye Chicago
- “Jack and Jill even gives fart jokes a bad name.” — Jake Coyle, Associated Press
- “Future generations will study this film and ask, ‘How can something like this happen?’” — Mike Ryan, Moviefone
- “More than 24 hours has passed since I watched the new Adam Sandler movie Jack and Jill and I am still dead inside.” — Mary Pols, TIME
- “Suddenly, sitting through The Human Centipede again doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.” — Rene Rodriguez, McClatchy
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In case you haven’t seen it, here’s the trailer for Jack and Jill.
