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The Art-Movieness of Fat Girl Is Preferable to the Maudlinity of Riding in Cars with Boys

Written by Armond White on . Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Fat Girl Directed by Catherine Breillat What Riding in Cars with Boys and Fat Girl have in common shows how utterly different Hollywood and Art movies can be. Both films are sentimental fantasies about female entitlement, featuring the feminist awareness of emotional abuse girls suffer within family and social structures. Pregnant at age 15, Beverly
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With Waking Life, Richard Linklater’s Finally Made a Visually Interesting Movie

Written by Armond White on . Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Directed by Richard Linklater "Hominid," a word most people haven’t heard–or spoken–since college, might perfectly describe the cartoon people in Waking Life. They’re supposed to be "characters," but with an emphasis on caricatured eccentricity, actually they are no more than Gap ad hominids–idealizations of middlebrow Americans unaware of their own solipsism. The gray-haired, bespectacled professor
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Chereau’s Intimacy Is an Emotional Spectacular; Training Day Is Insidious Entertainment Built of Racist Presumptions

Written by Armond White on . Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

directed by Patrice Chereau Last Tango in Paris casts a shadow over Patrice Chereau’s Intimacy. It’s the emotional honesty that naive audiences who were suckered by When Harry Met Sally, Chasing Amy or the new insipid Serendipity would like to deny. As successive generations of artists and life adventurers newly, fearfully discover the world of
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Find Solace in Techine’s Wild Reeds or Renoir’s The River, but Stay Away from Glitter

Written by Armond White on . Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

"The hardest thing is that life goes on," one friend says to another in Wild Reeds, the finest European film of the 1990s and an epitaph for everyone’s innocence. That line could be taken cynically or optimistically, but its ambiguous truth resounded–repeatedly–over the past two weeks. I’ll spare you more cheap musings on the meanings
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Open-Hearted Pauline Kael Would’ve Liked Two Can Play That Game

Written by Armond White on . Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

After Pauline Kael’s death there’s one less person in the world who understands what matters. I felt that most painfully after a press screening of Two Can Play That Game where most of the white reviewers stared in stony silence at this charming romantic comedy about African-American dating habits. Whatever social gap was evident from
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L.I.E. Has Three Memorable Moments of Truth; Bravo, Vengo

Written by Armond White on . Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Three scenes keep L.I.E. off the trash pile. Here are two of them: First, when high school student Howie Blitzer (Paul Franklin Dano) finally susses out the sentimental weakness of local pedophile Big John (Brian Cox), recites a Walt Whitman poem to him, takes an outdoor piss–making sure John is watching–and then walks away. Second,
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Bubble Boy Is the Happiest Comedy Surprise of the Season; Rat Race Gives It a Run for Its Money

Written by Armond White on . Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

What makes us laugh might–for a minute–liberate us. That’s my defense of the already controversial Bubble Boy. Some detractors don’t even like the concept, but it’s one of the rare original comedies to be produced by a Hollywood studio. Director Blair Hayes and his screenwriters Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio have fun with the story
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Armond Swats Us All with a Late-Summer Honor Roll

Written by Armond White on . Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Once again it’s worthwhile, at the year’s two-thirds point, to set the culture on a sensible track by counting down the best movies so far. Doing so requires you to recall through the summer swelter those terrific films that didn’t get much favorable press because critics were busy toadying to the marketplace. It is, of
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The Best of Roxy Music Shows Ferry’s Talent for Exploring Pop While Creating It

Written by Armond White on . Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

The Best of Roxy Music Roxy Music (Virgin) Waltzing from Roxy’s latest-to-earliest history, this new collection’s revealing spin starts with still-chic cover art. Who, besides Ferry, would think of featuring an emerald crystal ball to look back into the past? Perhaps to make us green with envy of old glories, wishing to relive them. Every
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Godard’s Band of Outsiders Is No Longer Pop, but NSYNC Sure Are

Written by Armond White on . Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Band of Outsiders Directed by Jean-Luc Godard Although Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 Band of Outsiders is back, it is no longer pop. It’s being shown at Film Forum starting Friday as a classic, reviving an era worth remembering, a cultural philosophy worth knowing. NSYNC, however, are pop. And their new music video, simply and epically titled
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