By Armond White Unlike David Fincher’s The Social Network, which burnished the legend of Mark Zuckerberg founding Facebook while glamourizing the modern derangement of social values and personal relations, Chen Kaige gets directly to the social, spiritual point in his masterly new film Caught in the Web. Chen balances a …
By Armond White Funny how The Hunger Games franchise pretends to deal with political demogoguery but really just gives audiences dumbed-down Bread-and-Circuses–the standard millennial trap. By the time Philip Seymour Hoffman enters The Hunger Games: Catching Fire with his usual post-Oscar smugness, viewers are so worn out from the brackish …
By Armond White How do you tell Ron Woodroof’s story so that it is both informative and enlightening? Woodroof, a not-altruistic Texas shitkicker who drank, drugged, chased tail and conned people, contracted AIDS in the mid-80s then became a self-made entrepreneur. He rejected the prescribed drug AZT (a prophetic decision), …
By Armond White If Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte opened today, it would be the best film of 2013–and the most relevant. Though originally released in 1962, Antonioni’s masterpiece speaks to the crisis of affluence and license that also describes our contemporary social conundrum where the acceptance of capitalist privilege (and …
By Armond White Novelist Cormac McCarthy must have been a fan of Breaking Bad since he steals its byzantine plot–its essence–for The Counselor, the film billed as his “first original screenplay.” The combination cynicism-and-pretense that motivates this crime film about a lawyer (Michael Fassbender) who gains wealth from assisting clients …
By Armond White In a third of the time it took Olivier Assayas to turn 70s terrorism into a epic hipster rave (replete with post-punk soundtrack) in Carlos, Costa-Gavras exposes the nature of social and financial compromise–moral terrorism–in Capital. This timely story of how Phenix Bank, a French financial institution, …
By Armond White The New York Film Festival’s presentation of Blue is the Warmest Color repeats the Cannes slate along with such repulsive Festival-circuit fare like Jia Zhangke’s odious A Touch of Sin. Now we know what Spielberg, Hollywood director par excellence, was up against. Here’s how I suss out …
By Armond White One of the major Academy Award bloopers occurred in 1974 when Robert Redford was nominated Best Actor for The Sting and not The Way We Were (both were released in 1973). He seemed miscast and distant in the former but movie-star idolized and emotionally committed in the …
By Armond White It was impossible for Kimberly Peirce to direct a remake of Carrie that could live up to Brian DePalma’s 1976 original. Two cultural events got in the way. First, political correctness so dominates our culture that the mythological aspects in Carrie’s reverse-Cinderella story (a repressed, unpopular high …
By Armond White Brutality, violence and misery get confused with history in 12 Years a Slave, British director Steve McQueen’s adaptation of the 1853 American slave narrative by Solomon Northup, who claims that in 1841, away from his home in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., he was kidnapped and taken South where …
