Author: Armond White

2012’s best s-far and Sarris remembered By Armond White This year I want to do the Mid-Year Reckoning differently, as a tribute to film critic Andrew Sarris’ recent passing. It was Sarris, during my grad school years at Columbia, who wisely advised that the percentage of good movies has not …

An Oliver Stone Retrospective in Savages By Armond White Oliver Stone’s cinematic command turns Savages, his 19th film, into a reconsideration of his entire previous oeurve. Its story of three white California-carefree young adults progeny whose post-hippie, post-yuppie initiative into the drug trade conflicts with a Mexican cartel recalls Stone’s …

Unforgivable by Armond White Cherubina, the nickname given to Judith (Carole Bouquet) in Unforgivables, comes from the love trickster in Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro. Judith, a former model with a bisexual past, now sells real estate, brokering a villa in Venice to the macho novelist Francis (Andre Dussollier) …

Beefcake with Arty Frosting Channing Tatum hides behind Magic Mike By Armond White So what if Channing Tatum started as a stripper? The problem with Magic Mike, the semi-autobiographical melodrama he co-produced, is that he couldn’t find a filmmaker to properly translate that beefcake experience to the screen. Whatever Tatum …

That’s My Boy Exposes a Conspiracy By Armond White If you didn’t get the Memo to hate Adam Sandler, his new movie That’s My Boy would seem another likable, if minor, entry in his continuing series of unexpectedly challenging human comedies. The anti-Sandler Memo is a follow-the-leader pact–not literally a …

The Duplass Gang Humps Again The Indie film movement may have some high points (your call) but it also commits innumerable disasters such as Your Sister’s Sister and Peace, Love and Misunderstanding. Each plot is undistinguished but Your Sister’s Sister’s plot is so poor it exposes how the Indie movement’s …

Zombie Mantra: Solondz abhors irony in Dark Horse By Armond White In answer to contemporary culture’s manic competition for fame, Todd Solondz offers Dark Horse, a film about Abe (Jordan Gelber), a 35-year-old Jewish man, overweight, living with his parents, employed in his father’s real estate business yet still playing …

A Noxious Burp: Ridley Scott Hiccups Alien Fumes in Prometheus By Armond White Now the Alien franchise becomes a Quintilogy–a purely market-drive neologism following the recent Blu-Ray boxset that labeled the first four Alien films not as a “Quartet” but a “Quadrilogy.” Prometheus is made with the same contempt for …

Wes Anderson Looks at Life Twice in Moonrise Kingdom By Armond White Will Anderson ever return to the blunt sexuality of the Hotel Chevalier overture to The Darjeeling Limited? His new film Moonrise Kingdom’s mannerist style suggests an adieu to childhood innocence. It’s a remarkable childhood memory (co-created with talented …