Posts Tagged ‘Armond White’

How Unique Got Ordinary

Written by admin on . Posted in Arts & Film, Film

Hugo is Scorsese’s fantasy autobiography By Armond White As a children’s film, Martin Scorsese’s Hugo is overwrought and under-thought. Its story of Hugo (Asa Butterfield), an orphaned boy who lives in a Paris train station where he surreptitiously maintains the clock mechanisms, suggests a fantasy autobiography. He wants to think of himself as a child
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Quotidian Perfection

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Foreign-language art films like Jerichow, by German writer-director Christian Petzold, Three Monkeys by Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Cary Fukunaga’s Sin Nombre come pre-sold with film festival approval. That only means they appeal to the personal preferences of our cultural gatekeepers who predictably dismiss a pop-culture surprise like Next Day Air. Opening without fanfare
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SCHOOLYARD NERD TO HIP HIP STAR

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Not long after The Notorious B.I.G. (aka Christopher Wallace) was killed in 1997, a grieving Voletta Wallace made this candid admission about her late son’s hip-hop records: “He used filthy language because the stories he was telling were filthy.” But Notorious, a new biopic about the late rapper, does not share the ambivalence of a
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CHERRY BLOSSOMS

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Doris Dorrie is best known for the 1985 German film Men, a modest feminist comedy taking on sexual hierarchies. Its praise made Dorrie the Sofia Coppola of her day, celebrated as a standard-bearing female director. But unlike Coppola, Dorrie actually examined her characters social and psychological circumstances—perhaps because she had a fundamental connection to feminist
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MADE IN THE U.S.A

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In grad school at Columbia, we were able to study a private print of Jean-Luc Godard’s Made in U.S.A. Never theatrically released in America, its scarcity made it special, so I watched it repeatedly. It was one of the experiences that made me unafraid of movie art; drawn-in by Godard’s dense narrative and thrilled by
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SILENT LIGHT (STELLET LICHT)

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Mexico’s critically overrated Carlos Reygadas is unlikely to breakthrough to popular acclaim with his latest film, Stellet Licht, while Mexico’s highly publicized “Three Amigos”—Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro Gonzáles Iñáritu and Guillermo del Toro—are just that: commercial clowns. Between these camps stands Julián Hernández, Mexico’s finest filmmaker with the greatest human touch—which may be why his masterpieces
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