By Armond White In the low-light neo-noir visual scheme of Blue Caprice, dark-skinned actor Isaiah Washington is automatically a silhouette, an emblematic obscure object of both dread and desire–the fear of and attraction toward murderous African American vengeance. Washington portrays John Muhammad, the elder member of the two-man team responsible …
By Armond White The Weinstein Company (formerly Miramax) really knows how to sell its product. They even sell a movie while you’re watching it which is the first problem with Shane Salerno’s Salinger. This bio-doc of the fiction writer J.D. Salinger, who became something of a recluse in the years …
By Armond White Westerns used to be called “shoot ‘em ups”–affectionately by moviegoers and industry insiders who enjoyed the genre’s familiar characters and routines, content that its visceral exercise would satisfy their common anxieties. Those anxieties are denied by today’s CGI, comic book-based spectacles based in juvenile naivete–and juvenile cynicism–that …
What’s missing, what’s visionary and what’s wrong at LGBT film festival By Armond White Why isn’t Julian Hernandez’s new movie I Am Happiness on Earth part of NewFest? The 25th annual showcase of LGBT films (at Lincoln Center, Sept 6 to 11) should be centered on work by world-class filmmakers …
By Armond White After decades of inspired, always modern, genre-revising work, Brian DePalma finally goes derivative in Passion. His remake of Alain Corneau’s 2010 Crime d’amore isn’t up to the level of that well-cast but trashy film. DePalma merely rehashes its plot–moving the story from Paris to Berlin where a …
By Armond White Like molasses in January, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints is a slow-moving, dull cliché, an art cliché. Director David Lowery tediously imitates the style of 1970s American Renaissance movies in this agonizing tale of an outlaw couple Bob (Casey Affleck) and Ruth (Rooney Mara) in 1930s Texas. But …
By Armond White Rappers were always welcomed by the art world–a fact of the downtown avant-garde as captured in Blondie’s 1981 Rapture music video–even before Kanye West and Jay-Z deliberately sought art world approval. Jay-Z’s new music video Picasso Baby not only crosses the Black Curtain of limited, ghettoized knowledge, …
By Armond White During one of the intricately-edited fight scenes of Wong Kar-Wai’s The Grandmaster, his first feature in six years, I recalled asking Wong in 2008 if it was true that he was actually going to do a remake of Orson Welles’ 1946 The Lady From Shanghai? He replied …
By Armond White “Bluebloods!” Simon Pegg and Nick Frost shout, standing beneath the bright light of realization in The World’s End. At the climax of their pub crawl over “the Golden Mile” of their hometown Newton Haven, these British lads Gary King (Pegg) and Andy (Frost) retrace their youth along …
By Armond White “You are creating from Steve Jobs a Moses, a Jesus, a Mohammad,” Mohsen Makhmalbaf cautioned his atheist, technology-worshipping son in The Gardener. The worship continues in the movie Jobs, a drab biography of the Apple Computer magnate who is popularly praised for “changing the way we live.” …
By Armond White “The room should feel empty when you’re in it,” says Clarence Williams III, instructing his waiter-trainee on the etiquette of black servitude in Lee Daniels’ The Butler. It’s a funny line for this film since director Lee (Precious) Daniels always makes a big noise when he enters …
By Armond White “That man is not your maker,“ Robin Thicke teases in the hit song “Blurred Lines.” For a more politically conscious era (as opposed to our politically polarized one), Thicke’s double-entendre would be immediately appreciated for its anti-patriarch joke; instead, it reveals today’s gender confusion for a generation …
By Armond White The secular tendency that dominates today’s movies makes the spiritual inquiry in The Gardener (showing at The Quad) even more remarkable. It is the bold new film by one of the great international moviemakers, Iran’s Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who typically, transcends genre; here mixing the religious feeling of …
By Armond White Hard luck Lindsay Lohan couldn’t have made a worse movie than The Canyons had she directed it herself. As the film’s producer, she made the poor decision to hire Paul Schrader as director, putting herself in the hands of a filmmaker who reduces her to a T&A …
