HollywoodandFine.com Here are some of the names that came to mind as I watched “Mad Max: Fury Road”: Federico Fellini. David Lynch. Pieter Bruegel. Ralph Steadman. Stanley Kubrick. There are images that bring each of those artists to mind, whether for a moment or an extended sequence. At times it gets …
HollywoodandFine.com I wrote a long piece a couple years ago, about why I refused to review the third “Transformers” movie: because the first two sucked, because Michael Bay is the Antichrist, because life is too short to spend watching make-believe computer-animated robots fight each other. I could go on and …
HollywoodandFine.com In some ways, movies are about our childhood: about the dreams, fantasies, fears and hopes we saw reflected from our own lives on a big screen when we were at an impressionable age. So how much you enjoy Guillermo del Toro’s sprawling, exciting and exceptionally imaginative “Pacific Rim” may …
HollywoodandFine.com For years, I’ve read about the so-called “Black List” of screenplays: allegedly great scripts which, for some reason, Hollywood ignores because it would rather make dumb crap like “The Lone Ranger.” Then I see a movie like “Killing Season,” written by Evan Daugherty, a script billed as one of …
HollywoodandFine.com I want to applaud Joss Whedon’s “Much Ado About Nothing” for all the things it does right, and I will. But Whedon’s side project – between his various TV and Marvel-related entertainments – gets one thing unfortunately wrong: It’s never very funny. Much of that has to do with …
By Armond White In light of Michael bay’s Pain & Gain, it’s time to take another look one of its influences: Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 Zabriskie Point finally passes the test of time. Antonioni’s aestheticized vision of ‘60s political and spiritual turmoil was originally scoffed at as disingenuous and “unrealistic”–accusing the …
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 …
HollywoodandFine.com Over the years, I’ve developed what I refer to as the 20-minute rule. It basically says that a movie that hasn’t hooked me in the first 20 minutes probably isn’t going to. I tend to apply it most forcefully when I’m watching films at festivals or when I’m sorting …
HollywoodandFine.com Now that his first comeback movie has seriously bombed, what’s next for Arnold Schwarzenegger? I’m here to suggest that, in fact, “The Last Stand,” which opened to slim box office in the U.S. a couple of weeks ago, is actually a step in the right direction for the aging …
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 – …
