By Armond White The Cinemascope frame stretches just wide enough to contain Alain Resnais’s abundant ideas about memory, imagination, love, art, death and life in You Ain‘t Seen Nothin’ Yet. Taking full measure of that vaudeville phrase (also the title of Andrew Sarris’ essay collection containing his superb monograph on …
By Armond White When Jean-Luc Godard showcased his great, long lateral-pan supermarket sequence in 1970’s Tout Va Bien, the metaphor provided an undeniable satire of the consumerist habit that typifies modern middle-class life even though no previous filmmaker had perceived the depth of such banality. Who could imagine that Godard’s …
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By Armond White Sofia Coppola has finally made an interesting movie. The Bling Ring circles around Sofia’s typical poor-little-rich-girl subject by dramatizing that infamous group of Southern California high-school housebreakers who were fixated on such tabloid celebrities as Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan whom they idolize, envy and then burglarize. …
By Armond White Filming a modern version of Shakespeare is nothing compared to Peter Bogdanovich’s essay on themes from Ernst Lubitsch in the 1975 At Long Last Love, now finally reissued on DVD from Fox Home Video. At the height of his fame and popularity, Bogdanovich embarked on his most …
By Armond White As a teenager discovering the pleasures of widescreen Hollywood spectaculars, MacKenna’s Gold (1969) has always been a thrill. It is still is (showing on TCM right now). J. Lee Thompson, the underrated action director who made fascinating late-era Charles Bronson vehicles (like the remarkable The White Buffalo), …
By Armond White In his essential book Subculture: The Meaning of Style, professor Dick Hebdige remarked that “the history of post-war British youth culture must be reinterpreted as a succession of differential responses to the black immigrant presence in Britain from the 1950s onward.” This appears to be Julian Temple’s …
By Armond White Boys without fathers are the target audience for Will Smith’s After Earth. Its story of a boy Kitai Raige (Jaden Smith) trying to live up to his father Cypher Raige’s (Will Smith) survivalist code is a potential blockbuster, combing futuristic whimsy with street hardness (and its opposite: …
By Armond White The Tribeca Film Festival gave a good headstart to this year’s summer movie releases. Tribeca’s best offerings previewed what to look forward to, taking the guess work out of Hollywood blockbusters and art house fare. Fact is, some of summer’s most exciting and challenging films got their …
By Armond White From the actors’ perspective, Behind the Candelabra looks like a compassionate portrayal of the pianist and singer Liberace‘s relationship with Scott Thorson. The older established celebrity’s involvement with a younger man, masked for the public from 1977 to Liberace’s death in 1987, gets exposed here as an …
By Armond White Filmed under the working title “The Controversy,” Margarethe von Trotta’s bio-pic Hannah Arendt (now at Film Forum), about the renown German Jewish critic and philosopher, combines gossipy insight into the New York literary society of the 1960s with a more serious story of political morality. Those seemingly …
Why won’t Linklater, Hawkes and Delpy shut up? By Armond White Following Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004), Before Midnight’s ongoing chronicle of an aging, talkative, narcissistic couple Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy (he’s author of two books This Time and That Time; she’s artistic) threatens to become the …
By Armond White In light of Michael bay’s Pain & Gain, it’s time to take another look one of its influences: Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 Zabriskie Point finally passes the test of time. Antonioni’s aestheticized vision of ‘60s political and spiritual turmoil was originally scoffed at as disingenuous and “unrealistic”–accusing the …
By Armond White You might laugh at The Hangover Part III but you won’t laugh as hard as Todd Phillips, the film’s pecuniary director and co-screenwriter, who laffs all the way to his offshore Cayman Island account. The Hangover Part III continues what’s advertised as “The Wolfpack Trilogy”–kinda reminiscent of …
