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 …
HollywoodandFine.com Here’s the best thing I can say about “The Avengers” (and no, I will NOT refer to it as “Marvel’s The Avengers,” because the branding is implicit): It offers a couple of the biggest laughs in recent memory, including a slapstick gag worthy of Chuck Jones in his “Looney …
HollywoodandFine.com Don’t trust the trailers for Anne Renton’s “The Perfect Family.” They make it look like an irreverent, iconoclastic satire, one that attacks hypocrisy among the pious – like something from the Farrelly brothers or, perhaps, John Waters. Oh wait – Waters already made that movie with Turner and called …
HollywoodandFine.com An all-star comedy in the same vein as such crowd-pleasers as “The Full Monty,” “Calendar Girls” and other British charmers, John Madden’s “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” is the kind of movie they seldom make anymore – except in England. When they try to do it in America, you …
HollywoodandFine.com Boaz Yakin’s “Safe” is high-octane silliness, a movie whose individual parts are greater than their sum. The plot, in a script Yakin wrote, pulls in strands of everything from cage fighting to the Russian mob. And then it sets Jason Statham loose in a world where he is the …
HollywoodandFine.com “The Five-Year Engagement” wrings a slightly different change on the old boy-meets-girl formula – and finds enough big laughs to make the whole thing enjoyable, even if it’s never particularly fresh. Written by Jason Segel and Nick Stoller (who also directed), “Engagement” brings together the same mix of the …
HollywoodandFine.com Richard Linklater has made a career of defying expectations, making everything from “The Bad News Bears” and “School of Rock” to “A Scanner Darkly” and now “Bernie.” “Bernie” might be his most unexpected film yet. Based on a true story about events and people in a small Texas town …
HollywoodandFine.com Bob Marley was a seminal figure in popular music in the post-Beatles era: not the first person to introduce reggae to the radio but the first reggae superstar – and one of the first superstars to emerge from the Third World. So “Marley” is a welcome documentary, one that …
HollywoodandFine.com It says something about the state of romantic comedies today that the ideas in a movie like “Think Like a Man” – or in books like Steve Harvey’s “Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man,” on which it’s based – will come as news to anyone. Not that …
