Film
Casa For 12-Year-Olds
Will Ferrell’s Failed Grindhouse Experiment Because Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby was the funniest movie to come out of the Bush era’s Red State/Blue State divide, I looked forward to Will Ferrell’s Casa de mi Padre, expecting another fresh cultural exploration. Hopes were dashed immediately at the opening credit sequence of fake print...
Class Clowns and Cop Clowns
Jump Street Reboot is Junk By Armond White “You shot him in the dick! I’ve never seen that!” Channing Tatum exclaims as Jenks, a rookie cop partnered with the doughy, uncool Schmidt (Jonah Hill) in 21 Jump Street. The duo have not outgrown their adolescent rivalry or immature sense of amusement that began in high...
Wall-E as a Sequel
John Carter Reveals the George Lucas Syndrome Andrew Stanton’s John Carter fulfills the promise of his previous film Wall-E. The dystopian state of our film culture is apparent in every luckless scene that adapts Edgar Rice Burrroughs’ 1917 adventure novel A Princess of Mars. Burroughs’ boys’ fiction had recognizable influence on pulp cinema landmarks from...
Projections
The return of Terence Davies Terence Davies is certainly an art filmmaker—England’s best since David Lean and Mike Leigh—but that doesn’t mean his movies are esoteric. They certainly are meticulous, though; painstaking recordings of social and emotional details of dailiness and desire that evoke Thornton Wilder’s uncanny line about observing existential life: “I can’t look...
Father + Son = Obligation
Being Flynn Gets Human Award Season is over and we can try to get back to films as part of our culture and not some meaningless race between vanity (actors), greed (the film industry) and celebrity-worship (the media) competing to see who can run our culture into the ground fastest. And Being Flynn, being the...
Occupied Comedy
Marino Waxes, Rudd Wanes in Wanderlust Wanderlust starts with an idea borrowed from Albert Brooks’ 1986 Lost in America–a yuppie couple respond to career setbacks by embarking on a cross-country journey that tests their mettle. Here, George (Paul Rudd) and Linda (Jennifer Aniston) leave their tiny, expensive Manhattan studio apartment and fall in among a...
The Also-Rans: Mommie Artiest: Must We Talk About Kevin?
This exclusive CityArts series will chart the recent peculiar releases that failed to get Oscar nominations. Yet, just like the Oscar-nominated fare, these movies are not a part of film culture but exist outside what moviegoers patronize and talk about. The films’ staggered release from December 2011 to early 2012 delays the effects of film...
Two Acts of War
SEAL team vs. Korean Clichés Taken as a singular feat of selfless will—and war, we’re reminded, is “a country of will”—Act of Valor serves an oblique purpose as a bracing, unspoken homage to Michael Monsoor, awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously for jumping on a live grenade to spare his fellow Navy SEALs and allied...
Dynamiting Stereotypes: Jared Hess puts TV on blast
Fox TV’s new Napoleon Dynamite cartoon confirms Jared Hess’ step up in status from cult director to protean pop auteur. As co-creator of the show (adapted from his 2004 live-action feature film), he has faithfully guided his vision into a new medium, almost to an entirely new idiom. Even with a good deal of the...
Perverse Anticipation: More art movie nihilism in Michael
Not to be confused with Carl Theodor Dreyer’s profound 1924 Michael (Mikaël), the new Michael, by Austrian filmmaker Markus Schleinzer, is far from a masterwork; in fact it is the most revolting new movie since ’s Funny Games. Schleinzer (who was casting director on Haneke’s Children of the Corn-type epic The White Ribbon) plays a...
Heavy Metal Gothic: Ghost Rider Redeems and Critiques
If the filmmaking team Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor wrote out their thoughts on how contemporary pop has traduced fun, warped thrills and debased energy in the art form they love, it would be a great provocative piece of criticism—although few film publications would want such a principled view of the destructive entertainment that’s...
The Also-Rans: Shame on Steve McQueen
This exclusive CityArts series will chart recent releases that failed to get Oscar nominations. Yet, just like the Oscar-nominated fare, these movies are not a part of film culture, but exist outside what moviegoers care about and talk about. Their staggered release delays the effects of film on the public; they don’t want for popular...
Diaspora Story for All: A Biblical Trek in ‘400 Miles’
By Elena Oumano “You don’t look Jewish” (meaning not like the stereotypical hook-nosed European) is not a compliment, no matter what the speaker’s intentions. And what do Jews look like anyway? 400 Miles to Freedom, directed by husband and wife team Avishai and Shari Rothfarb Mekonen, addresses this and other issues of Jewish identity in...
Tiresome Threesome: Movie Star Casualties in ‘This Means War’
In the stultifying Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, British actor Tom Hardy briefly appeared in a romantic subplot as a heartbroken, repentant operative who laments all the impenetrable death and subterfuge simply because it cost him the woman he loved. For a few fleeting moment, Hardy’s alert eyes, sensual lips and magnetic ruddiness broke through film’s...
The Also-Rans: Rampart’s Hipster Cop
This exclusive CityArts series will chart the recent peculiar releases that failed to get Oscar nominations. Yet, just like the Oscar-nominated fare, these movies are not a part of film culture but exist outside what moviegoers patronize and talk about. The films’ staggered release from December 2011 to early 2012 delays the effects of film...
Rihanna’s True Confession: A Pop Star’s Music Video Rebellion
“Trust the tale, not the teller,” D.H. Lawrence’s essential dictum, applies to Rihanna’s recent music video “We Found Love.” Transparently autobiographical in its reference to the 2009 assault incident involving Rihanna and Chris Brown, “We Found Love” answers back to those tellers—in this case gossip-mongers and pundits—whose pontifications reduced Rihanna and Brown to domestic-abuse stereotypes....
Lichtenstein in Motion: Three Surprises on Whitney Screens
By Marsha McCreadie They are in town for a just a few more days, but since the only three films by Roy Lichtenstein, of Pop Art and the comic book style, haven’t been screened since 1971, you don’t have to think twice about catching them. Three Landscapes: A Film Installation by Roy Lichtenstein is at...
Denzel Goes Rogue: Safe House Chases Fake Politics
Safe House, an espionage chase film set in South Africa, is rotten enough to be a sequel to District 9, where South African racial issues were treated to a dumb sci-fi alien allegory. Here, the alien is Denzel Washington, who first appears walking down a Johannesburg street in a Malcolm X beard and fedora. But...
Tarr and Horse Feathers: Art Movie Turns to Glue
Bela Tarr’s The Turin Horse isn’t funny at all but it sure is laughable. A Hungarian farmer with a bum arm, Ohlsdorfer (Janos Derzi), lives in a drab, yet limitless cabin with his morose spinster daughter (Erika Bok), who boils potatoes that go half-eaten. This goes on for two and half hours. What’s laughable are...
Architecture on Screen
This Feb. 3 and Feb. 4, The Center for Architecture and MUSE Film and Television present Architecture on Screen, selections from the 29th Montreal International Festival of Films on Art. The two-day affair will see films about Copenhagen’s city hall (A City Hall for All Occasions), Bauhaus, Le Corbusier and Daniel Burnham, among others, as...
Theory Vs. Practice: A Dazzling Allegory In Chronicle
“Ever hear of Plato’s allegory of the cave?” one teenager asks another in Chronicle. This philosophy quiz was unexpected in the midst of a thrill ride movie but Chronicle is so surprisingly interesting, I wondered if its makers ever saw The Conformist (1971), where Bernardo Bertolucci visualized Plato’s allegory. When it’s good, Chronicle is less...
