HollywoodandFine.com Writer-director Taika Waititi may be the founder of his own school of humor: call it “cruel-reality” comedy, Kiwi division, as practiced in his film, “Eagle vs. Shark,” and now his semi-autobiographical “Boy.” Told from the first-person perspective of the title character, “Boy” is the story of what happens one …
HollywoodandFine.com It’s unfortunate but understandable that they had to change the name of Nick Flynn’s memoir, “Another Bullshit Night in Suck City,” to the more TV-ready title “Being Flynn.” If only they could have made it into an interesting tale, instead of a movie about miserable people making each other …
Marino Waxes, Rudd Wanes in Wanderlust By Armond White Wanderlust starts with an idea borrowed from Albert Brooks’ 1986 Lost in America–a yuppie couple respond to career setbacks by embarking on a cross-country journey that tests their mettle. Here, George (Paul Rudd) and Linda (Jennifer Aniston) leave their tiny, expensive …
HollywoodandFine.com You know that feeling when a comedy has just elicited an unexpected howl of laughter from you? The kind that has you momentarily breathless from the sheer pleasurable violence of it? Well, that’s not something you’ll experience while watching David Wain’s “Wanderlust,” a movie that really wants to make …
HollywoodandFine.com Does heroism translate from real-life to the big screen? Not really, as it turns out. Oh sure, Johnny Weismuller was an Olympic hero – and he turned that into big-screen career playing Tarzan. On the other hand, Audie Murphy, a real-life World War II hero, played a civil-war soldier …
Heavy Metal Gothic Dek: Ghost Rider Redeems and Critiques By Armond White If the filmmaking team Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor wrote out their thoughts on how contemporary pop has traduced fun, warped thrills, debased energy in the art form they love, it would be a great provocative piece of …
HollywoodandFine.com Films remind us of how far we’ve come as a society – as well as the opposite. We are, after all, in the 21st century, a time of virtually instant communication and any manner of futuristic devices that differentiate us from, say, our ancestors in the Middle Ages, or …
By Armond White This exclusive CityArts series will chart recent releases that failed to to get Oscar nominations. Yet, just like the Oscar-nominated fare, these movies are not a part of film culture; but exist outside what moviegoers care about and talk about. Their staggered release delays the effects of …
HollywoodandFine.com There’s nothing wrong with “This Means War” that a humor-transplant couldn’t cure. Granted, romantic comedy is the hardest kind of comedy to pull off, especially when that romcom also wants to be an action-thriller. But director McG – who is like a less grandiose version of Michael Bay – …
HollywoodandFine.com An Oscar nominee as best documentary, “Undefeated” is a sports film that’s less about football than it is about a coach, his players and the journey they take together. And it’s a terrific trip. Their team is the Manassas Tigers, a high school football squad in North Memphis, in …
HollywoodandFine.com The pickings among American animated features are so slim this year that they’ve allowed foreign-language animated films to slip into the category. But unlike American animated films, these aren’t kiddie cartoons. Instead, they’re adult works of cinematic art like “Chico & Rita,” a love story that covers decades and …
HollywoodandFine.com At some point in the future, when they assemble a festival of films devoted to the still-rippling effects of George W. Bush’s unnecessary war in Iraq, you can add Liza Johnson’s film “Return” to the list of movies that deserve to be seen. Like Neil Burger’s “The Lucky Ones” …
Denzel Goes Rogue By Armond White Safe House, an espionage chase film set in South Africa, is rotten enough to be a sequel to District 9 where South African racial issues were treated to a dumb sci-fi alien allegory. Here, the alien is Denzel Washington who first appears walking down …
HollywoodandFine.com I found it instructive that, when I told my soon-to-be-25-year-old son that I’d seen “Safe House” and that it reminded me of “Three Days of the Condor,” he replied, “That reference would be relevant if I knew what ‘Three Days of the Condor’ was.” (He also said, “…and if …