Author: Armond White

By Armond White The false politics of film culture 2013 (films exploiting race, class, sexual politics) paralleled the continued diminishment of cinephilia that has subordinated movies to TV, shifting cinema from a popular art form into political soccer games for media’s power elite. Lots of good film but also lots …

By Armond White It was a rich year for new theatrical releases but the DVD releases have also been extraordinary. Film History lessons begin here: Nashville (Criterion) Following Disney’s years-ahead lead packaging Blu-Ray discs with digital copies of new releases, Criterion finally begins offer movies-worth packages of classic films. No …

By Armond White DeNiro and Stallone’s first face-off was at the Oscars 36 years ago when Rocky won the Best Picture Academy Award over Taxi Driver. Turns out that was a defining moment for pop culture: Feel-good entertainment defeated thought-provoking art cinema and the challenge of serious life-reflection represented by …

By Armond White The Wolf of Wall Street and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty share the same misfortune. Both films deal with the ambition of working-class protagonists: Scorsese’s three-hour epic about a kid from The Bronx who becomes a Wall Street titan (Leonardo DiCaprio) charts his aggression through mind-altering …

By Armond White Idris Elba is such a fine figure of a movie star that only racism (its practice and its expectations) can explain why his Black British suave masculinity prevented him from being the new century’s James Bond. Nelson Mandela will have to suffice and in Mandela: Long Walk …

By Armond White Two Parisian domestic tales take different approaches to modern morality. In the comedy What’s In a Name? several couples clash over dinner about the connotations behind the proposed name for an expected child. In the drama The Past, a love triangle falls apart when a woman and …

By Armond White David O. Russell goes to the 1970s to satirize contemporary Americana in American Hustle. If the title sounds both plain and pretentious, it takes a sense of humor like Russell’s to get over those hurdles and he does it with his new stock company of actors–great talents …

By Armond White When an apparition of Bob Dylan appears in Inside Llewyn Davis, it underscores the Coen Brothers’ abiding ambivalence about their Jewishness. Dylan, the oracular pop-star-prophet -outsider from Minnesota (like the Coens) represents an advance on mainstream culture and power that troubles the Coen Brothers’ fascination with American …

By Armond White By shooting his new film Nebraska in black and white, writer-director Alexander Payne reveals his phoniness. The contemporary-set story about an old man, Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) who travels from Montana to claim a Publisher’s Clearing House prize in the neighboring state Nebraska, has that stark, sad …

By Armond White As a filmmaker, professor and community leader, Spike Lee sends a rotten message to audiences, students, parents, etc. in Oldboy, his remake of Park Chan Wook’s 2003 horror fantasy. It’s the story of a man held prisoner in a charnel house/hotel then released, seeking ironic revenge for …

By Armond White Unlike David Fincher’s The Social Network, which burnished the legend of Mark Zuckerberg founding Facebook while glamourizing the modern derangement of social values and personal relations, Chen Kaige gets directly to the social, spiritual point in his masterly new film Caught in the Web. Chen balances a …

By Armond White Funny how The Hunger Games franchise pretends to deal with political demogoguery but really just gives audiences dumbed-down Bread-and-Circuses–the standard millennial trap. By the time Philip Seymour Hoffman enters The Hunger Games: Catching Fire with his usual post-Oscar smugness, viewers are so worn out from the brackish …

By Armond White How do you tell Ron Woodroof’s story so that it is both informative and enlightening? Woodroof, a not-altruistic Texas shitkicker who drank, drugged, chased tail and conned people, contracted AIDS in the mid-80s then became a self-made entrepreneur. He rejected the prescribed drug AZT (a prophetic decision), …