That’s My Boy Exposes a Conspiracy By Armond White If you didn’t get the Memo to hate Adam Sandler, his new movie That’s My Boy would seem another likable, if minor, entry in his continuing series of unexpectedly challenging human comedies. The anti-Sandler Memo is a follow-the-leader pact–not literally a …
The Duplass Gang Humps Again The Indie film movement may have some high points (your call) but it also commits innumerable disasters such as Your Sister’s Sister and Peace, Love and Misunderstanding. Each plot is undistinguished but Your Sister’s Sister’s plot is so poor it exposes how the Indie movement’s …
Zombie Mantra: Solondz abhors irony in Dark Horse By Armond White In answer to contemporary culture’s manic competition for fame, Todd Solondz offers Dark Horse, a film about Abe (Jordan Gelber), a 35-year-old Jewish man, overweight, living with his parents, employed in his father’s real estate business yet still playing …
A Noxious Burp: Ridley Scott Hiccups Alien Fumes in Prometheus By Armond White Now the Alien franchise becomes a Quintilogy–a purely market-drive neologism following the recent Blu-Ray boxset that labeled the first four Alien films not as a “Quartet” but a “Quadrilogy.” Prometheus is made with the same contempt for …
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 …
Wes Anderson Looks at Life Twice in Moonrise Kingdom By Armond White Will Anderson ever return to the blunt sexuality of the Hotel Chevalier overture to The Darjeeling Limited? His new film Moonrise Kingdom’s mannerist style suggests an adieu to childhood innocence. It’s a remarkable childhood memory (co-created with talented …
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 …
