Reminds me of Woody Allen in so many ways. I just watched Armageddon Time and i really liked it. Jeremy Strongs performance in Succession got me in to it.
James you are a great director and I love your opinions about cinema. Don't let your silly political biases ruin and politicize your movie making. The USA was going down the toilet under Jimmy Carter and thank God the greatest President of my lifetime was elected in 1980. If it were not for Reagan, the Berlin Wall would still be standing and the evil Soviet/Russian empire would still be crushing the freedoms of millions of people. By the way I despise Trump as well and I will vote against him in 2024 no matter what. But I get tired of Trump Derangement Syndrome from people who never have found a single fault from the Democrats.
I can literally see why James Grey's latest film Armageddon Time TANKED at the box office. It was literally one of the most BORING films I have ever seen! He's literally whining because he's upset that he doesn't make as much money as other people, and he's whining about white entitlement when he's own parents raised him in a. upper middle class home and sent him to an expensive private school, plus I highly doubt that Fred Trump literally acted all high and mighty at his school as he claims he did, and I say that as someone who deeply despises Donald Trump. He claims his film is based on his childhood, but I really think his latest film is a piece of entire fiction based on his looney liberal politics which just led to the GOP retaking the House earlier this month. New. York was a crime infested city all the way to 1994, when Rudy Guiliani because mayor and literally ended the CRACK epidemic of the early 1990s.
Not you again... copying and pasting your comment on all of Gray's interviews, liking your own comments too. Your personal life must be twice as boring as you claim the film to be.
I thought it was good. The ending was abrupt and left the film empty. Why he picked on Fred Trump was really unnecessary. There was also one line about white privilege that was also unnecessary.
I think the title and the promotion of the film (poster, lack of hook, etc.) did not help this film connect with a larger audience. The title sounds like a superhero action film. Doing a story about your own life, your parents and relatives is very difficult to get right. You are generally too close to the material to be objective and to see it the way an audience will so I give Gray huge credit for doing as well as he did. This is a unique film because he wasn't afraid to keep it small and intimate. I get what you are saying about 'upper middle class privilege' but the core of this story is about that point early in your life when you find out that you don't get to be whatever you want. I thought it dramatized the end of childhood very well in that regard. He layered the death of childhood dreams with the death of cultural progress and 'hippie dreams' with the election of Reagan. The character being forced to hide his Judaism in the private school is something that many audience members will not relate to. I like that he did not overplay that (as Fabelmans did). Over the last 7 years I have gotten better at ignoring TDS among my peers. I'm sick of it but used to it. If some people want to make EVERYTHING about Trump and lose all perspective, that is their problem; not mine. That said, this is Gray's personal film and like the antisemitism, I feel he got it in there without being bombastic, cartoonish or simplistic about it. Unlike with some of my neighbors, Fred Trump really WAS directly in this guy's life and haunts him a generation and 36 years later. At its core this film did a great job of encapsulating a universal conflict we all face about challenges to our integrity and living with our life-choices.
