By Armond White What’s derisive in the American title A Pig Across Paris (now playing at Film Forum) drives home the bitterness hidden in the original French title La Traversee de Paris (Crossing Paris). This 1956 release hasn’t been shown in the U.S. in more than 50 years probably because …
How Fast & Furious 6 crushes Iron Man 3 By Armond White The cynicism that makes Iron Man 3 so lousy is defied by the good-time camaraderie of Fast & Furious 6. Dominic Toretto and Brian O’Connor (Vin Diesel and Paul Walker) are more likable than Robert Downey’s snarky Tony …
By Armond White Frances Ha runs a very long 84 minutes. It offers an obnoxiously self-satisfied portrait of a young white New Yorker–played by Greta Gerwig–running out her parent’s stipend, roommating with other New York hipsters, sometimes skipping the pond to Paris, all the time pursuing her goal to be …
By Armond White Julianne Moore has unintentionally foundered her acting career in insufferable films like Savage Beauty, HBO’s Game Change, The Kids Are Alright, Crazy Stupid Love, Chloe, Blindness, Children of Men, I’m Not There, Freedomland, Hannibal, The Hours–why go further? It’s been a long time since Moore challenged Meryl …
By Armond White Frances Ha runs a very long 84 minutes. It offers an obnoxiously self-satisfied portrait of a young white New Yorker–played by Greta Gerwig–running out her parent’s stipend, roommating with other New York hipsters, sometimes skipping the pond to Paris, all the time pursuing her goal to be …
By Armond White The ad campaign for Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby is pretty snazzy, the movie itself is a mess. The poster’s anachronistic Art Deco silver-gold letters on a black grid evoke the chrome of shiny old Dusenbergs plus the velvet casing of jewelry boxes. It’s about luxury and …
By Armond White Why waste spleen on Michael Bay? He’s a real visionary–perhaps mindless in some way (he‘s never bothered filming a good script), but Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen is more proof he has a great eye for scale and a gift for visceral amazement. Bay’s ability to …
By Armond White Michael Bay sees like an ad-man gone wild— glorifying everything–a vision that corresponds to the age’s consumerist sensibility: greed and the need for speed. In Pain & Gain this style—and it is a genuine style, not fake flashiness like Trance or Side Effects—expresses the lusty and acquisitive …
By Armond White The worst Steven Spielberg production ever is, without doubt, his Obama homage, Steven Spielberg’s Obama. Unlike his disingenuous Obama-in-disguise campaign feature film, Lincoln, this two-minute satirical short looks artless and slapdash; it was made for last weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner–an annual event for fatcats that contradicts …
By Armond White Unmistakably Pal Sverre Hagan’s appearance in Kon-Tiki as Norwegian explorer Thor Heyedahl is modeled after Peter O’Toole’s T.E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia. Not just tall, blue-eyed with burnished blond hair, Hagan also conveys obsessive determination like O’Toole’s Lawrence, making Heyerdahl’s decision to build a balsa-wood raft …
By Armond White Funny that the Film Society of Lincoln Center paid tribute to Barbra Streisand on April 22 with its 40-year-old Chaplin Award even though Streisand’s movies are not the kind typically shown in Film Society programming. As a fundraiser, it was unparalleled. Co-chair of the event, Ann Tenenbaum …
By Armond White Sloppy storytelling has become so standard for American filmmakers (Side Effects, The Place Behind the Pines) that Francois Ozon’s new trifle In the House feels especially pleasurable. Storytelling is its subject in the same sense as Todd Solondz’s 2001 Storytelling. Ozon plays with his increasing filmmaking skill …
By Armond White The difference between Antonio Fargas playing a pathetic Black queen based on Jason Holliday in Next Stop Greenwich Village and Jason Holliday playing himself in Portrait of Jason is crucial. Fargas, a real actor, conveyed the multiple and paradoxical meanings in a dramatized character; Holliday, as an …
By Armond White Comedian Chris Rock embarrassed himself at this year’s New York Film Critic Circle dinner when presenting a prize to the Ken Burns film The Central Park Five. The black, Brooklyn-born Rock declared “It makes you think I was wrong. Burns shows we were all wrong!” about the …
