Polarizing Comedy Exposed in The Dictator By Armond White Lazily titled after Chaplin’s 1940 Hitler-Mussolini satire The Great Dictator, Sacha Baron Cohen‘s new film The Dictator is part of our current political slackness where propaganda is confused with news, parody is confused with satire, principle is confused with bias and …
Spooky or Kooky? Tim Burton’s Campy Dark Shadows By Armond White Gone are the days when Tim Burton films made you laugh first. Now Burton more likely makes you cringe as in Dark Shadows, his new film version of TV’s 1960s daytime soap opera. It retells the story of Barnabas …
Gunnin’ For That #1 Spot Directed by Adam Yauch The Wackness Directed by Jonathan Levine By Armond White Midway through 2008, something surprising has happened: two films with human dimension and artful expression–Adam Yauch’s Gunnin’ For That #1 Spot and Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness–have flushed the toilet of summer movies. …
The Boy Who Played with Dolls Jacques Rivette’s Meta Movie Returns By Armond White Legend says (and an eyewitness confirms) that at the 1974 New York Film Festival press screening of Celine and Julie Go Boating, Pauline Kael walked out in the middle announcing, “I’m going to the movies!” Apparently …
Detention Kahn vs. the World of Pop By Armond White Pop culture moves fast but not as fast as Joseph Kahn’s Detention, a rampage through recent pop history that is so delirious–and so sharp about the cynicism ingrained in commercial pop’s heedless seductions of youth–that it sometimes seems one and …
Being Flynn Gets Human By Armond White Award Season is over and we can try to get back to films as part of our culture and not some meaningless race between vanity (actors), greed (the film industry) and celebrity-worship (the media) competing to see who can run our culture into …
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 …
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 …
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 …
By Armond White Bela Tarr’s The Turin Horse isn’t funny at all but it sure is laughable. A Hungarian farmer with a bum arm Ohlsdorfer (Janos Derzi) lives in a drab, yet limitless cabin with his morose spinster daughter (Erika Bok) who boils potatoes which go half-eaten. This goes on …
By Armond White for CityArts Light Bulb Virtuosity–the quality that lit up the best of arts culture during 2012–turns out to be the quality least appreciated in this transitional period for technology, economics and politics. It’s ironic that artists like Steven Spielberg, Kanye West, Jay Z and Picasso (revived at …
By Armond White Movie-watching can never be same after the double header of Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin, his first animated film, and his live-action War Horse. Each film upgrades the way our imaginations construct the world, the way we see ourselves in the digital age. All art devotes …
Dolly and Latifah Reclaim Glee By Armond White Todd Graff’s Joyful Noise tells the story of a Pacashau, Ga., church choir entering a gospel music competition against better-financed groups. It’s an underdog fable that neatly parallels Graff’s own career since directing his 2001 debut film Camp, the underappreciated–yet secretly influential–pop …
The Sitter Remakes the 80s By Armond White The Sitter confirms director David Gordon Green’s unexpected yet healthy career turn. His 2000 debut George Washington (NYFCC Best First Film prizewinner) about the out-of-reach desires of black and white kids in the modern impoverished South, introduced a sweet yet somber regional …
