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 …
HollywoodandFine.com “Olympus Has Fallen” seemed like a front-runner to top year-end lists as one of 2013’s worst films. While it’s early enough in the year for another film to overtake it in the downhill race, it’s surprising to have that film be the second movie about a terrorist takeover of …
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 …
One of the many interesting discoveries in Whoopi Goldberg’s Moms Mabley biopic, “I’ve Got Somethin’ to Tell You,” which I saw at the Provincetown Town Hall with John Waters in the audience, was Eddie Murphy’s on-camera confession. He said that he fashioned his sassy black grandmother in “The Nutty Professor” …
HollywoodandFine.com Ahhh yes, the zombie apocalypse – that moment when the dead rise and, by biting the living, turn them into zombies as well. Some theorize that Patient Zero was Ronald Reagan. Before long, there’s an unorganized zombie army meandering around the streets, chomping on any unfortunate warm-blooded soul who …
HollywoodandFine.com It always seems niggardly to refer to a Pixar film as a great animated comedy. “Animated” seems almost like a pejorative; at a minimum, it seems to diminish the accomplishment of a comedy because, well, aren’t all cartoons funny? Of course not – you don’t need to be a …
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 …
HollywoodandFine.com “Extraordinary how potent cheap music is,” Noel Coward wrote in his play, “Private Lives.” It certainly makes a difference in Paul Andrew Williams’ “Unfinished Song,” a so-so old-age dramedy that mostly avoids easy laughs but isn’t afraid to use sentimentality to pound its point home. The film is part …
HollywoodandFine.com No one, it is said, knows what goes on in someone else’s marriage. Even more to the point, no one can know what’s going on in another person’s head. Those notions are among many at the crux of Ziad Doueiri’s haunting, provocative “The Attack,” based on the novel by …
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 …
HollywoodandFine.com This was originally going to be a piece about how wrong it was for Will Smith to remake “The Wild Bunch.” But that metastasized into an idea about remakes and reboots in general. So I wound up simply writing an open letter to Smith about “The Wild Bunch” – …
Must-See Movies Beyond the Blockbusters Love her or hate her, Sofia Coppola has cornered the market on the world of privilege and its discontents. And so it goes with the writer-director’s latest movie, “The Bling Ring,” based on a Vanity Fair true-crime-in-the-Hollywood-Hills article. The film, in limited release this weekend …
