HollywoodandFine.com Akiva Goldsman’s track record is a spotty one, chockablock with commercially successful films full of formulaic writing and manipulatively sentimentalized emotion. Or just plain hogwash: “Batman & Robin,” anyone? Sure, he won an Oscar for Ron Howard’s “A Beautiful Mind,” as middlebrow a choice as you could get in …
HollywoodandFine.com It’s interesting to see the way filmmakers stake out certain emotional territory as their own over the course of a career. Steven Spielberg is consumed with the notion of wonder, though he obviously has more arrows than that in his quiver. Martin Scorsese, in his own heaven/hell construct, seems …
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” – …
By Armond White The worst Steven Spielberg production ever is, without doubt, his Obama homage, Steven Spielberg’s Obama. Unlike his disingenuous Obama-in-disguise campaign feature film, Lincoln, this two-minute satirical short looks artless and slapdash; it was made for last weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner–an annual event for fatcats that contradicts …
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 …
HollywoodandFine.com At this point in his career, is there anything Quentin Tarantino can do to surprise us? Absolutely. I was floored by 2009’s “Inglourious Basterds” – not by the violence or the outrageousness of some of the action, but by Tarantino’s command of suspense, his ability to crank the tension …
Kathryn Bigelow’s war drama Zero Dark Thirty, about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, was named Best Picture from this year’s vote. The film also won two other awards for Best Director (Bigelow) and Best Cinematographer (Greig Fraser). Steven Spielberg’s historical drama Lincoln, picked up three awards, including Best Actor …
HollywoodandFine.com Don’t know much about history – but you don’t have to in order to be captivated by Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln.” Instead of making a conventional biopic, Spielberg and writer Tony Kushner chose to use a single month of Lincoln’s presidency – January, 1865 – to examine the character, power …
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 …
HollywoodandFine.com It’s unusual to have Steven Spielberg competing with himself at the box office this holiday weekend, but there he is – with “The Adventures of Tintin” and now with “War Horse.” Based on the popular children’s book that inspired the Tony-winning Broadway production, “War Horse” is exactly what it …
HollywoodandFine.com Herge’s “Tintin” comics have been huge in France since they were first published in 1929, but have never quite translated to American popularity. In the 1990s, an animated version of Tintin stories showed up on American TV, on Nickelodeon – which was the go-to channel for my kids in …
