HollywoodandFine.com “Passion” isn’t Brian De Palma’s first remake, but it may be his worst: an over-inflated, melodramatically hot-blooded version of what was a cool French thriller. The French film, 2010’s “Love Crimes” from Alain Corneau, starred Ludivine Sagnier as the ambitious but mild-mannered No. 2 to a snaky executive played …
HollywoodandFine.com The paranoia that a terrorist attack – and the resultant media clusterpluck – creates is palpable. Don’t believe it? Hello – the Patriot Act? An overreaching NSA? So John Crowley’s “Closed Circuit,” arriving in the wake of the Bradley Manning decision and the ongoing Edward Snowden affair, is more …
By Armond White During one of the intricately-edited fight scenes of Wong Kar-Wai’s The Grandmaster, his first feature in six years, I recalled asking Wong in 2008 if it was true that he was actually going to do a remake of Orson Welles’ 1946 The Lady From Shanghai? He replied …
By Armond White “Bluebloods!” Simon Pegg and Nick Frost shout, standing beneath the bright light of realization in The World’s End. At the climax of their pub crawl over “the Golden Mile” of their hometown Newton Haven, these British lads Gary King (Pegg) and Andy (Frost) retrace their youth along …
from Yahoo! Movies www.movies.yahoo.com Like a bastard love child of Terrence Malick and Robert Altman, David Lowery’s crime drama shuffles to its own drummer. Either you dance to it or you can skip away, but the latter would be a mistake in an era of cookie cutter genre pics. The …
By Armond White “You are creating from Steve Jobs a Moses, a Jesus, a Mohammad,” Mohsen Makhmalbaf cautioned his atheist, technology-worshipping son in The Gardener. The worship continues in the movie Jobs, a drab biography of the Apple Computer magnate who is popularly praised for “changing the way we live.” …
By Armond White “The room should feel empty when you’re in it,” says Clarence Williams III, instructing his waiter-trainee on the etiquette of black servitude in Lee Daniels’ The Butler. It’s a funny line for this film since director Lee (Precious) Daniels always makes a big noise when he enters …
HollywoodandFine.com So many films today seem to carry the same references to earlier work, indicating the influences that shaped the filmmaker in his work. But references are one thing; using those references for fresh inspiration is something else, and that’s what David Lowery has done with “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints.” …
HollywoodandFine.com There’s nothing that terrible about Joshua Michael Stern’s “jOBS,” a skimpy, often overly specific film biography about the late Apple inventor, Steve Jobs. Still, it would be interesting to see this film with another actor playing Jobs. While Ashton Kutcher looks the part (actually, his face is rounder than …
By Armond White “That man is not your maker,“ Robin Thicke teases in the hit song “Blurred Lines.” For a more politically conscious era (as opposed to our politically polarized one), Thicke’s double-entendre would be immediately appreciated for its anti-patriarch joke; instead, it reveals today’s gender confusion for a generation …
