By Armond White And it was hell tryin’ to bail to the ovaries With nothin’ but the Lord lookin’ over me I was white with a tail But when I reached the Finish Line— YOUNG BLACK MALE! –Ice Cube’s “The Product” Young Black males rarely get such a smoothly beautiful …
HollywoodandFine.com In some ways, movies are about our childhood: about the dreams, fantasies, fears and hopes we saw reflected from our own lives on a big screen when we were at an impressionable age. So how much you enjoy Guillermo del Toro’s sprawling, exciting and exceptionally imaginative “Pacific Rim” may …
HollywoodandFine.com For years, I’ve read about the so-called “Black List” of screenplays: allegedly great scripts which, for some reason, Hollywood ignores because it would rather make dumb crap like “The Lone Ranger.” Then I see a movie like “Killing Season,” written by Evan Daugherty, a script billed as one of …
By Armond White That Kanye West’s outdoors projection New Slaves was the most exciting cinematic event of the first half of 2013 sets a high standard. But it’s been an exceptionally fine movie year so far which makes the mid-year reckoning full of excellence, an interconnected story of good cinema …
By Armond White Go back to Dziga Vertov’s 1929 Man with a Movie Camera, the still striking montage experiment (available on Kino Lorber Home Video) to find the root concept of two recent art movies, Jem Cohen’s Museum Hours and Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color. Museum Hours is eccentric for an …
By Armond White Pity Sandra Bullock rehashing her straight-laced shtick from many years and one Oscar ago as FBI agent Ashburn in The Heat. Instead of graduating to mature, sophisticated comic fare, the likable Bullock falls victim to Hollywood’s box-office sexism, the New McCarthyism. Bullock’s desperate, unfunny routines in The …
By Armond White One story isn’t enough for Neil Jordan. Byzantium is full of twists and turns, memories and revelations that zigzag through the tortured history of men, women, birth, death, sexuality as well as the history of Irish and English literature and Catholic guilt. Two female vampires, teenage Eleanor …
HollywoodandFine.com “Olympus Has Fallen” seemed like a front-runner to top year-end lists as one of 2013’s worst films. While it’s early enough in the year for another film to overtake it in the downhill race, it’s surprising to have that film be the second movie about a terrorist takeover of …
By Armond White World War Z ends with Brad Pitt’s voiceover cautioning “The war has just begun.” That could also be a disgruntled producer-star warning about the current state of film culture which has found a new low level of gullibility. Add the disaster of World War Z to complaints …
One of the many interesting discoveries in Whoopi Goldberg’s Moms Mabley biopic, “I’ve Got Somethin’ to Tell You,” which I saw at the Provincetown Town Hall with John Waters in the audience, was Eddie Murphy’s on-camera confession. He said that he fashioned his sassy black grandmother in “The Nutty Professor” …
