By Armond White As I sat down at the AMC Empire Cinemas in Times Square for that evening’s all-media screening, I could smell a dead rat–and then The Wolverine confirmed it. It wasn’t the first time that an all-media screening took place in that filthy, Crossroads-of-Consumerism flea pit (very recently …
By Armond White Cate Blanchett’s singularly obnoxious character in Blue Jasmine blocks our empathy. First because she’s such a phony–having changed her name from the mundane Jeanette to the pretentious Jasmine (“My mother’s favorite flower”), next because she embodies superciliousness (comically indifferent to everyone’s interest besides her own love of …
Only God Forgives is a decadent drag act Ryan Gosling plays DiCaprio to Nicolas Winding Refn’s Scorsese–acting out an adolescent idea of manliness in Drive and now Only God Forgives. But sulky Gosling lacks DiCaprio’s hammy brio just as Refn lacks Scorsese’s flamboyance, so he mopes and broods; practicing a …
By Armond White Whatever else is going on in Andrew Bujalski’s Computer Chess (now playing at Film Forum), it is also–unmistakably–a satire on film culture’s extinction. The weird weekend gathering of chess and computer geeks at an early 80s conference (they’re testing whether a machine can outplay a human being) …
Why Kanye West’s New Slaves matters as cinema By Armond White Performance Art is dead. At least it felt that way until Kanye West’s New Slaves–an in situ projection that played in 66 cities around the world. Kanye’s single-take recitation of his song “New Slaves” stared back at its spectators, …
By Armond White Two visions of America compete in Grown Ups 2 and Pawn Shop Chronicles–each different, each impressive. Adam Sandler’s follow-up to his 2010 hit continues the celebration of friendship and community while director Wayne Kramer’s film confronts the hostility and hysteria that define the era’s dissatisfaction. Both movies …
By Armond White After Zack Snyder‘s Man of Steel brought visual ingenuity, emotion and moral gravity to the sci-fi spectacular, it’s hard to settle for over-the-top childishness like Pacific Rim. Director Guillermo del Toro favors frivolous exaggeration–the world under attack by Kaiju, gargantuan sea monsters. Mankind fights back by building …
By Armond White And it was hell tryin’ to bail to the ovaries With nothin’ but the Lord lookin’ over me I was white with a tail But when I reached the Finish Line— YOUNG BLACK MALE! –Ice Cube’s “The Product” Young Black males rarely get such a smoothly beautiful …
By Armond White That Kanye West’s outdoors projection New Slaves was the most exciting cinematic event of the first half of 2013 sets a high standard. But it’s been an exceptionally fine movie year so far which makes the mid-year reckoning full of excellence, an interconnected story of good cinema …
By Armond White Go back to Dziga Vertov’s 1929 Man with a Movie Camera, the still striking montage experiment (available on Kino Lorber Home Video) to find the root concept of two recent art movies, Jem Cohen’s Museum Hours and Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color. Museum Hours is eccentric for an …
By Armond White Pity Sandra Bullock rehashing her straight-laced shtick from many years and one Oscar ago as FBI agent Ashburn in The Heat. Instead of graduating to mature, sophisticated comic fare, the likable Bullock falls victim to Hollywood’s box-office sexism, the New McCarthyism. Bullock’s desperate, unfunny routines in The …
By Armond White One story isn’t enough for Neil Jordan. Byzantium is full of twists and turns, memories and revelations that zigzag through the tortured history of men, women, birth, death, sexuality as well as the history of Irish and English literature and Catholic guilt. Two female vampires, teenage Eleanor …
By Armond White World War Z ends with Brad Pitt’s voiceover cautioning “The war has just begun.” That could also be a disgruntled producer-star warning about the current state of film culture which has found a new low level of gullibility. Add the disaster of World War Z to complaints …
By Armond White In Greil Marcus’ original review of the Rolling Stones’ 1969 “Gimme Shelter,” he wrote about “women who can shout like Mary [sic] Clayton–gutty, strong, and tougher than any of the delightful leering figures that are jumping out of the old Stones’ orgy. She can stand up to …
