Armond White Declares ‘Justice League’ Better Than ‘The Last Jedi’ & More 2017 Hot Takes

Last week, before Hollywood got dressed up to hand out the Golden Globes, Armond “I”m not a contrarian” White dropped his annual Better Than list. Of course, he starts it off with this pretty tasty line — “Ten Best Lists are Fake News and have been for years” [fire emoji!] — and then rolls up his sleeves, and gets right into one increasingly #hottake after another.

You’ll have to go over to National Review to read his full run down, but here are some examples of his shots fired at “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” “Wonder Woman,” and “Phantom Thread“:

Justice League > The Last Jedi
Zack Snyder’s best moments raise comic book sci-fi to eye-widening, soul-stirring art while the unoriginal, interminable Star Wars series trains kids of various IQs to be mindless consumers.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets > Wonder Woman
Luc Besson’s fun vision of future utopian struggle out-dazzles Patty Jenkins’s bland, neo-feminist Hillary fantasy.

Slack Bay > Phantom Thread
Bruno Dumont’s farce pitting rich against poor in moral warfare confounds P. T. Anderson’s thrall with class privilege. An exterminating angel vs. hipster decadence.

Essentially, White’s overriding theme this is year is that European movies are better than Hollywood films, and he calls out the unnamed and so-called “know-nothing gatekeepers” who apparently control film culture (#conspiracy). As always, it’s an interesting read, though don’t sprain your face from the rolling the eyes into the back of your head.