Weak Celebrity Bio of Marilyn My Week with Marilyn By Armond White Art critics cite Andy Warhol’s 1962 Gold Marilyn Monroe (a tinted print using a Niagara movie still) to exemplify the movie star’s “infinitely reproducible” image. Movie critics simply yell “Oscar!” at Michelle Williams’ image of Monroe in My …
Scorsese’s Fantasy Autobiography By Armond White As a children’s film, Martin Scorsese’s Hugo is overwrought and under thought. Its story of Hugo (Asa Butterfield), an orphaned boy who lives in a Paris train station where he surreptitiously maintains the clock mechanisms, suggests a fantasy autobiography. He wants to think of …
Sandler’s Jack, Jill and Tyler Perry By Armond White Adam Sandler’s comedies are not “dumb fun,” maybe that’s why they’re not in critics’ favor. Sandler’s hilarious new film Jack and Jill (in which he portrays both male and female fraternal twins), brings to mind the great line that Ernst Lubitsch’s …
Thud of Recognition: Payne’s Cynicism Ruins Descendants By Armond White “We Didn’t do anything to own this land. It was entrusted to us,” says George Clooney as Matt King, the mixed-race Hawaii-born lawyer in Alexander Payne’s The Descendants. King’s pronouncement lands with a thud, exposing Payne’s sentimental cynicism. This serio-comedy …
Puss in Boots Reviewed By Armond White for CityArts In those terrible Shrek movies, Antonio Banderas’ Puss in Boots was the only consistently satirical character. Banderas’ used his Spanish accent to make Puss a romantic, swashbuckling scoundrel (a banal jest, unlike the poignancy with which Banderas undercut the satire of …
The Rum Diary review By Armond White for CityArts.info Johnny Depp‘s Hunter Thompson persona is no different from his pirate Jack Sparrow–another intoxicated hipster whose antisocial bravado is backed by multi-million dollar Hollywood privilege. Depp is so infatuated with Hunter Thompson’s hipster cool that his new production of The Rum …
Pauline Kael, Criticism’s Last Icon By Armond White Pauline Kael’s reputation as America’s most distinguished film critic is secure. She’s defended by high-placed friends fighting the misogynists and elites who spent the past ten years since her death trying to erase her influence on film culture. Several new books maintain …
Moneyball Directed by Bennett Miller By Armond White Five decades after Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, we still suffer the delusion that men who play professional baseball enjoy the sport. Bennett Miller’s Moneyball exists to prove that America’s favorite pastime is subject to the same greed, envy, anguish and disappointment as …
Restless Directed by Gus Van Sant Reviewed in CityArts By Armond White All that keeps the death-infatuated Restless from being laughably dismissed like last year’s Charlie St. Cloud is that it’s signed by Gus Van Sant. No mere sentimentalist who would employ a tween heartthrob like Zac Efron, Van Sant …
Pekinpah As Pop, Peckinpah As Classic. Think of Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 Straw Dogs as a pop myth, not some vulgar expiation of unruly, anti-feminist temper—or Hollywood exploitation of same. Its story, by now a notorious legend, digs into a primal event: a modern, civilized man forced to use brute cunning to protect his home and property. Peckinpah’s dismantling of social custom comes from an era unlike today when popular filmmakers, through personal intelligence and experience, believed art had a serious purpose. The new remake of Straw Dogs trashes that precept and the disaster should resound throughout the art world. Anyone who cares about art in any form should rise up against this foul remake.