Freudian Slips
Hookers and shrinks mirror one another in ‘Special Treatment&rsquo
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Posts Tagged ‘Film review’
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
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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You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
By Armond White “There’s not a spiritual bone in his body. How could he write books!” an exasperated woman says of her loutish son-in-law in Woody Allen’s You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. The same could be said of Allen, who has yet to show any sign of spiritual sensitivity, only that peculiar New
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I'm Here & Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'hoole
By Armond White Almost a hundred years ago, short story paragon O. Henry wrote “The Gift of the Magi,” a poignant and penetrating love story that was as much a religious allegory as a penetrating commentary on industrial age values. Spike Jonze’s new short film “I’m Here” joins that tradition. Its romance between robots quirkily
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Consumed by Youth
Two new films—Never Let Me Go and Easy A—both incorrectly translate adolescence to the screen By Armond White As long as Never Let Me Go focuses on the adolescent yearnings of boarding school mates Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Tommy (Andrew Garfield) and Ruth (Keira Knightley), it seems a uniquely sensitive coming-of-age fable. The trio’s innocent confusion
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Young Man with a Silent Horn
By Donald Sosin There is a conceit among some young creators of silent films, trying on the genre as a prelude to their big sound feature. They think that silents should look old, faded, out of focus and scratchy. But the new digital restorations that premiered in Bologna last month of the first films by
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Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
By Armond White Midway through grinning at Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, I realized: This elation must be what Tarantino fans want to feel when watching one of his pop culture marathons. The difference is that Tarantino’s pop-referencing movies extract all social and political contexts, while Edgar Wright, who directed Scott Pilgrim and co-wrote its
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Get Low
By Armond White Faking Americana, Get Low tells the tale of a 1920s backwoods loner named Bush (Robert Duvall) who seeks a funeral (“It’s time to get low”) before he dies. Director Aaron Schneider’s feature debut is so naive about small-town life and rural habits that he misses the humor in this premise. It seems
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Russellmania
By Armond White Why isn’t Whore, the 1991 Theresa Russell vehicle directed by Ken Russell, part of “Russellmania,” the long overdue Ken Russell retrospective at Film Society of Lincoln Center? Although Russell’s provocative filmography deserves re-consideration, this series (July 30-Aug. 5) concentrates only on his infamous 1970s films, which does a disservice to the arc
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Salt
Celebrity matriarch Angelina Jolie teaches war and treason like a melancholy drag queen in Salt By Armond White Here’s three lessons supermom Angelina Jolie teaches her Benetton brood—and by extension, the global movie audience—in Salt: 1. The United States is an overweening superpower more inept than its enemies from Russia, Korea and the Middle East;
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