Posts Tagged ‘Entertainment’

Monsters

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

By Armond White Monsters is a love story between two shallow, annoying people, Sam (Whitney Able) and Andrew (Scoot McNairy), who resemble Cameron Diaz and Ethan Coen wannabes, the kind of hipsters you see at the Independent Film Awards. They’re stuck in Mexico when an extraterrestrial invasion attacks Earth. Crisis brings out the couple’s foolishness
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Inspector Bellamy

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

By Armond White After Claude Chabrol’s death Sept. 12, 2010, the French New Wave continues to pass into history even though the best films by Nouvelle Vague directors—Chabrol, Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Rivette and others—stay amazingly vital. Chabrol’s final film, Inspector Bellamy, is a good example: Chabrol re-imagines the detective genre in the course of practicing
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Hereafter

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By Armond White Too bad the trailer for Hereafter doesn’t reveal how grindingly torpid this movie is. It opens with a CGI action scene in which Marie (Cécile de France), a French woman vacationing in South East Asia, is killed when her resort is swamped by a tidal wave. After she revives, the death experience
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Jackass 3D

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By Armond White In 2002, the New York Film Critics Circle came close to naming Jackass the year’s Best Non-Fiction Film until more traditional-minded members (after some audible grumbling) pushed the vote to the since-forgotten Standing in the Shadows of Motown. (Some might call that a cop-out.) Now, Jackass 3D continues the prankster series that
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Inside Job

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By Armond White For those who missed that unexpected satirical graphics lecture on the current recession that capped Adam McKay’s The Other Guys, Inside Job is the next best thing. With entertaining clarity, writer-director Charles Ferguson explains what caused the recession that began September 15, 2008. Not a comic like McKay, Ferguson seriously chronicles the
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Carlos

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By Armond White Politics don’t matter to directors David Fincher, Steven Soderbergh and Olivier Assayas, whose Carlos, a lavish, gracefully-paced depiction of the terrorist Ilich “Carlos” Ramirez is strangely apolitical, even amoral. It’s part of the new affectless style—derived from hipster cool and leftist guilt that condemns the capitalist West for its culpability in colonialism and
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Life as We Know It

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By Armond White We can’t pretend that anything is more important in film culture than the Internet humiliation-death of Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi taking place the same week as the media hype for The Social Network. After that human tragedy, the media’s celebration of the Facebook movie (a cinematic calamity) shows an alarming disregard
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Let Me In

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By Armond White Let Me In ought to be rated NC-17 due to the problematic nature of its vague concept: Spooky Abby (Chloe Grace Moretz), a child vampire, encourages her wimpy neighbor Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee) to emulate some of her bloodthirsty rage in response to his school bullies. It’s a morbidly grim Afterschool Special. Yet
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The Social Network

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By Armond White The Social Network glamorizes a new paradigm: How the Internet’s basic disconnect characterizes contemporary public discourse. Director David Fincher’s lustrous video images make instant, stylish mythology out of the way Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg re-popularized the Internet by founding the Facebook in 2003. This brainy, insular 19-year-old pinpointed the Internet as a
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Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

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By Armond White Not a zeitgeist filmmaker, Oliver Stone is, rather, our swiftest, most politically responsive filmmaker, and those attributes make Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps dazzling. It’s less a sequel to the 1987 stock-trading drama Wall Street (where Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko articulated the 1980s mantra “Greed is Good”) than it is a
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