Author Archive

Armond White: Ridley Scott Hiccups Alien Fumes in Prometheus

Written by Armond White on . Posted in Arts & Film

Now the Alien franchise becomes a Quintilogy–a purely market-driven neologism following the recent Blu-Ray boxset that labeled the first four Alien films not as a “Quartet” but a “Quadrilogy.” Prometheus is made with the same contempt for the public–as if anyone wanted or needed another repackaging of the sci-fi horror tale. Even the 1979 original
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Armond White: How Tony are the Tony Awards?

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

  ‘Clybourne Park’ questions American and theater history by Armond White If the award for Best Play goes to Clybourne Park at the June 10 Tony Awards ceremony, will it put the Tonys on “the right side of history”? That particular aphorism entered popular speech during the 2008 presidential campaign (in a rare Obama reference
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Armond White: New Snow White disconnects culture

Written by Armond White on . Posted in Arts & Film, Film

Why should we be watching commercials director Rupert Sanders’ film Snow White and the Huntsman when Romain Gavras’ No Church in the Wild music video for Kanye West begs our attention? Whatever unrest Kanye artfully evokes with Gavras’ references to insurrection and political strife is truer to the temper of modern living than this over-extravagant
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Armond White: Director Todd Solondz Leaves Irony Behind in New Movie

Written by Armond White on . Posted in Arts & Film

In an answer to contemporary culture’s manic competition for fame, Todd Solondz offers Dark Horse, a film about Abe (Jordan Gelber), a 35-year-old Jewish man—overweight, living with his parents, employed in his father’s real estate business yet still playing with toys, desperate to begin his life and enjoy the culture’s empty cheer. Abe’s not a
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Summer Reading—At the Movies

Written by Armond White on . Posted in Arts & Film, Arts our town, Arts our town downtown, Arts west side spirit, Books, Film, Our Town, Our Town Downtown, Special Sections, Summer Guide, West Side Spirit

Taking reading and movie-watching literally Summer used to be the time people caught up on the reading they had always meant to do. In Goodbye, Columbus, Philip Roth parodied the ritual pulling out of Tolstoy’s War and Peace around the pool or on the beach. Roth observed an ideal situation—not beach fiction but great fiction
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Armond White: Wes Anderson looks at life twice in Moonrise Kingdom

Written by Armond White on . Posted in Arts & Film

Will Wes Anderson ever return to the blunt sexuality of the Hotel Chevalier overture to The Darjeeling Limited? The mannered style of his new film, Moonrise Kingdom, suggests, perhaps, an adieu to innocence. It’s a remarkable fantasy creation at the same time that it knowingly presents a sophisticated deconstruction of prelapsarian innocence. Moonrise Kingdom is
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Armond White: Political Pollutant

Written by Armond White on . Posted in Arts & Film, Film

Polarizing Comedy Exposed in The Dictator Lazily titled after Chaplin’s 1940 Hitler-Mussolini satire The Great Dictator, Sacha Baron Cohen‘s new film The Dictator is part of our current political slackness where propaganda is confused with news, parody is confused with satire, principle is confused with bias and mob-mentality is confused with democracy. Cohen mocks an
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Armond White: Tennessee’s Quiet Storm

Written by Armond White on . Posted in Arts & Film

Transforming the Classic ‘Streetcar’ Nicole Ari Parker has a triumph in A Streetcar Named Desire that our mainstream media and the cli-quish Tony Awards are ill-equipped to handle. Parker’s ravishing, statuesque presence and intelligent skill make the play what it always ought to have been: a genuine contest between America’s sexual and political hypocrisies; social
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