Author Archive

Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World Is as Charmingâeuro;”and Limitedâeuro;”as Zine Art

Written by Armond White on August 2, 2001. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Terry Zwigoff’s first fiction film, Ghost World, has the charm and limitations of zine art. That’s clearly what he’s after, adapting a graphic novel by Daniel Clowes (his co-screenwriter). Zwigoff, also an aficionado of obscure blues records (his actual first film was the blues documentary Louie Bluie), seeks out the esoteric and idiosyncratic. Ghost World
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Summer in the Noir City

Written by Armond White on July 31, 2001. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Summer songs can come to you on a breeze or an ill wind. The airwaves aren’t safe. The Lovin’ Spoonful’s "Summer in the City" first etched its sweaty, ragged lustiness after a late-night July 14, 1966, news broadcast. Lying on cool sheets, listening to Detroit’s WKNR (Keener 13) with the lights out, I focused on
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See The Score for Brando and De Niro; Don’t See Made at All; Hedwig’s Not Quite as Bad

Written by Armond White on July 26, 2001. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Brando and De Niro always promise creativity, definitive emotion, complex naturalism. Only a fool would prefer to take up offers by the week’s other teams Kitano and Epps in Brother or Favreau and Vaughn in Made. Yet The Score is just as unoriginal as those other films; only the prospect of seeing Brando and De
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Bully’s Viewers Should Cry, “How Fake!”

Written by Armond White on July 19, 2001. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

"Don’t give up on me, sir!" was s&m gay porn code spoken in American Beauty as a teenager, knocked to the floor by his father, licked blood off his lip. Lots of similar sexual dishonesty describes Bully, Larry Clark’s latest tawdry voyeuristic fantasy. While the new film The Adventures of Felix presents being gay as
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Intelligence Quotient: Reactions to A.I. Reveal the Esthetic IQs of Movie-Lovers and Critics

Written by Armond White on July 10, 2001. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

"Miraculous?" someone asked me about last week’s review of A.I. "Yes!" I insisted, because Spielberg has achieved a breakthrough–a breakthrough no one could have expected: raising fairytales to the level of great art. He also resurrects movie art, though you wouldn’t know it from the clueless, defensive reviews. "Fascinating wreck," "It needs to be faster,
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Spielberg’s A.I. Dares Viewers to Remember and Accept the Part of Themselves that Is Capable of Feeling

Written by Armond White on July 4, 2001. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Back to the womb in A.I., Artificial Intelligence, Steven Spielberg probes affections that get callused over with age, forgetfulness and cultural habit. It’s the most profound treatment of a child’s life since Terence Davies’ The Long Day Closes. More than Spielberg’s other films, it dares viewers to remember and accept the part of themselves that
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Celebs Bow Down in Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures; Stephanie Black’s Life and Debt Is Almost Heroic

Written by Armond White on June 28, 2001. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

The cult of personality works so routinely against certain filmmakers that you start to resent when it favors filmmakers with established hip cred. This video documentary’s sorriest example comes from Woody Allen: "I had problems with some of the acting and the writing [in Dr. Strangelove] but everything wonderful about that movie was the way
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Avoiding Tough-Guy Cliches, Sexy Beast Shows Up The Sopranos

Written by Armond White on June 21, 2001. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

The Sopranos blamed Mom, and analysands nationwide (posing as journalists) fell for it, running to their word processors to type out feebleminded, hype-induced hosannas. The makers of Sexy Beast know better than to use a simplistic Oedipal explanation for the problem and intrigue of crime. This new British gangster-horror film makes the arresting insinuation that
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REM’s Imitation of Life: A Chance to do Something Different; One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich Rediscovers the Essence of Cinema

Written by Armond White on June 13, 2001. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Has tv won? Every disaster from Armageddon to Pearl Harbor, every con job from Dogma 95 to Darren Aronofsky’s visual static, suggests that the overfamiliarity of stimuli, an incessant habit of watching insignificant images, has finally left viewers and filmmakers esthetically deadened. Audiences today respond to movie images as casually as if watching television. The
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Moulin Rouge Offers Techno Gimmicks and Cultural Mishmash as New Thrills; See Zhang Yimou’s The Road Home Instead

Written by Armond White on June 6, 2001. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Prevailing non-wisdom says that the movie musical is dead. But that can only be so for critics who haven’t noticed the genre’s rebirth over the past two decades as the music video. Maybe that’s why so many have fallen for Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge. Media muckers have acclaimed Moulin Rouge with a blind enthusiasm tantamount
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