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 We are fortunate to be spared Spike Lee’s take on the Jackie Robinson story, which surely would have been spiteful: emphatic about race grievance and loaded with numerous Spikey tangents. But Brian Helgeland has fashioned 42, a superbly watchable tale, from Robinson’s groundbreaking desegregation of professional baseball …
Alex Cross and Detropia zombify a city By Armond White Detroit’s old magnificent Michigan Theater was one of the country’s finest cinema edifices. A palace of dreams, its vaulted ceiling rose up nine stories–as high as one’s imagination could rise. It had a grand staircase that one ascended on the …
By Armond White Why should we be watching commercials director Rupert Sanders’ film Snow White and the Huntsman when Romain Gavras’ No Church in the Wild music video for Kanye West begs our attention? Whatever unrest Kanye artfully evokes with Gavras’ references to insurrection and political strife is truer to …
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 …
