Cloud Atlas disgraces Griffith’s legacy By Armond White The Lana and Andy Wachowski siblings have teamed up with German director Tom Tykwer to film Cloud Atlas, a nearly three-hour adaptation of the novel by David Mitchell. This filmmaking super group’s one movie feels like six bad movies. Six stupid–as in …
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 At this point in Ben Affleck’s directing career, I’d rather have him back simply as an actor (provided he’s well directed). Affleck the auteur chooses worst material than Affleck the actor. And he lacks the skill and seriousness to make the stories believable. Argo, Affleck’s newest job, …
Won’t Back Down contributes to the education crisis By Armond White A dyslexic child looks into the camera at the end of Won‘t Back Down and correctly pronounces a word she had previously stumbled over: “Hope.” Thank God for the smart-aleck in the audience who loudly responded: “Boo!” Whether or …
Atrocity Exhibition By Armond White Harvey Weinstein called for a summit meeting on movie violence soon after the Dark Knight Rises massacre. It hasn’t happened yet but Harvey’s word is movie law. So, instead, The Weinstein Company this week releases John Hillcoat’s Lawless, the most promiscuously violent movie since The …
Hit & Run flattens the road movie By Armond White Dax Shepard, the lead actor, co-writer (with David Palmer) and co-director of Hit & Run, aims for the bleachers. He’s made a lowest common denominator comedy with a road movie premise about Charlie, a guy who leaves his witness protection …
History Shines in Whitney Houston’s Sparkle By Armond White When Whitney Houston sings “His Eye is on the Sparrow” in Sparkle, her good gospel performance is unexpectedly stirring. Playing the mother of three talented daughters who have formed a singing group that unravels the family, Houston’s heartbroken recitation also seems …
Stallone creates a new genre in The Expendables 2 By Armond White Sylvester Stallone has created a new genre: Self-Camp. The Expendables 2 reunites the same over-the-hill gang of big screen hooligans as in the first installment but this time with a better, almost polished, sense of humor. (“Rest in …
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Born Cynical By Armond White Already obsolete, last decade’s financially successful Bourne trilogy–The Bourne Identity (2002), The Bourne Supremacy, (2004), The Bourne Ultimatum, (2007)–needed re-booting to suit the new administration’s political pragmatism (the persistence of foreign policies and espionage strategies once deemed unpopular). But the series’ awful rote cynicism (characterizing …
