Author Archive

Mumblehattan

Written by Armond White on . Posted in Arts our town, Arts our town downtown, Arts west side spirit, Our Town, Our Town Downtown, West Side Spirit

Decoding Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha Frances Ha runs a very long 84 minutes. It offers an obnoxiously self-satisfied portrait of a young white New Yorker — played by Greta Gerwig — running out her parent’s stipend, roommating with other New York hipsters, sometimes skipping the pond to Paris, all the time pursuing her goal to
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From Zoom to Whoosh

Written by Armond White on . Posted in Arts our town, Arts our town downtown, Arts west side spirit, Our Town, Our Town Downtown, West Side Spirit

Baz Luhrmann’s Gatsby is not Great The ad campaign for Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby is pretty snazzy, the movie itself not so much. The poster’s anachronistic Art Deco silver letters on a black grid evoke the chrome of shiny old Dusenberg’s plus the velvet casing of jewelry boxes. It’s about luxury and that’s what
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Spielberg’s Shortcomings

Written by Armond White on . Posted in Arts our town, Arts our town downtown, Arts west side spirit, Our Town, Our Town Downtown, West Side Spirit

Media short sides with American aristocracy—and dishonesty The worst Steven Spielberg production ever is, without doubt, his Barack Obama homage, Steven Spielberg’s Obama. Unlike his disingenuous Obama-in-disguise campaign feature film, Lincoln, this two-minute second satirical short looks artless and slapdash; it was made for last weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner—an annual event for fatcats that
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Recall and Response

Written by Armond White on . Posted in Arts our town, Arts our town downtown, Arts west side spirit, Our Town, Our Town Downtown, West Side Spirit

Cicely Tyson brings realness to The Trip to Bountiful Broadway’s new Black (or non-traditional cast) production of The Trip to Bountiful comes alive when Cicely Tyson as Carrie Watts, an elderly Texas widow longing to return to her titular hometown, stands up and sings a church hymn in a desolate bus station. It is the
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Burnished Boldness

Written by Armond White on . Posted in Arts our town, Arts west side spirit, Our Town, West Side Spirit

The saga of Kon-Tiki for a new era Unmistakably, Pal Sverre Hagan’s appearance in Kon-Tiki as Norwegian explorer Thor Heyedahl is modeled after Peter O’Toole’s T.E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia. Not just tall, blue-eyed with burnished blond hair, Hagan also conveys obsessive determination like O’Toole’s Lawrence, making Heyerdahl’s decision to build a balsa-wood raft
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When Barbra Met Louis and Chaplin

Written by Armond White on . Posted in Arts our town, Arts our town downtown, Arts west side spirit, Our Town, Our Town Downtown, West Side Spirit

Lincoln Center Honors a home girl Funny that the Film Society of Lincoln Center paid tribute to Barbra Streisand last week with its 40-year-old Chaplin Award — even though Streisand’s movies are not the kind typically shown in Film Society programming. As a fundraiser, it was unparalleled. Co-chair of the event, Ann Tenenbaum announced that
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Toy Storytelling

Written by Armond White on . Posted in Arts our town, Arts our town downtown, Arts west side spirit, Our Town, Our Town Downtown, West Side Spirit

Ozon critiques filmmaking, class and desire  Sloppy storytelling has become so standard for American filmmakers (Side Effects, The House Behind the Pines) that Francois Ozon’s new trifle In the House feels especially pleasurable. Storytelling is its subject in the same sense as Todd Solondz’s 2001 Storytelling. Ozon plays with his increasing filmmaking skill to illustrate
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A Legacy Is Born

Written by Armond White on . Posted in Arts our town, Arts our town downtown, Arts west side spirit, Our Town, Our Town Downtown, West Side Spirit

Broadway’s Motown means more than it can say Barry Gordy, founder of the legendary record label Motown had to do something. His landmark artistic venture had some of its historic stature stolen by the lame-brain drama and trifling music of Dreamgirls (which traduced the story of Motown group The Supremes for a cliché-ridden yet widely-promoted
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Superego Negro

Written by Armond White on . Posted in Arts our town, Arts our town downtown, Arts west side spirit, Our Town, Our Town Downtown, West Side Spirit

Shirley Clarke’s infamous doc puts race in a boho mirror  The difference between Antonio Fargas playing a pathetic black queen based on Jason Holliday in Next Stop Greenwich Village and Jason Holliday playing himself in Portrait of Jason is crucial. Fargas, a real actor, conveyed the multiple and paradoxical meanings in a dramatized character; Holliday,
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Road To the Wonder

Written by Armond White on . Posted in Arts our town, Arts our town downtown, Arts west side spirit, Our Town, Our Town Downtown, West Side Spirit

Terrence Malick’s Christian cinema quest The affecting if imperfect Les Miserable was cruelly mocked because its essentially Christian story of forgiveness and redemption was out of sync with modern movie nihilism. It takes a cult figure like Terrence Malick to challenge this intolerance in his boldly Christian new film To the Wonder. Critics who prefer
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