A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop
By Armond White
The Hollywood precedent for one great director remaking another’s work starts with Fritz Lang refashioning both Jean Renoir’s La Chienne and La Bête Humaine into, respectively, Scarlet Street and Human Desire—turning art into entertainment. Now Zhang Yimou remakes the Coen Brothers’ debut film Blood Simple into A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop, turning pop into art. Read more
Takers
By Armond White
Takers has a Brother vibe that only partly has to do with most of its dapper bank robber cast being African American. Co-producing rap artists and stars, Tip “T.I.” Harris and Chris Brown, make vivid use of the crime movie genre’s social significance, which lackadaisical film commentators have mostly ignored. Takers accents the genre’s bonhomie: its exercise of the same working-class frustrations young black artists articulated in hip-hop music and music videos under the influence of ’70s blaxploitation movies. But Takers is not a cultish parody like Machete from Robert Rodriguez. It is—to redeem a police blotter phrase—a Saturday Night Special, excitingly executed. Read more
Centurion
By Armond White
Why make a genre movie—any movie, really—without inspiration? Neil Marshall, the director of the horror film The Descent, now comes up with another late genre entry: his imagination evident in the redundant antiquity battle tale’s title, Centurion. Shadowed by Zack Snyder’s fascinating 300, Marshall adds nothing new to the basic plot, least of all the kind of genre delight Snyder evidenced and not the revisionist intelligence behind Walter Hill’s 1979 neo-gladiator movie The Warriors. Read more
Mesrine: Killer Instinct & Public Enemy No. 1
By Armond White
Killer Instinct, the first of the two-part French gangster film Mesrine, finally opens in the U.S. following a highly praised home turf reception. But it also has the misfortune of coming right after the Anthology Film Archives’ compelling William Lustig program of crime movies and what Variety calls “actioners,” where zero-prestige works by Larry Cohen, Henri Verneuil and Giuliano Montaldo raised the B-movie crime film to insightful or, at least, pleasurable and personally-expressive heights. Mesrine doesn’t measure up. Read more
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 the Lumière brothers demonstrate the astonishing clarity of the earliest motion picture film stock. Read more
The Tillman Story
By Armond White
“Fratricide” is the word used in Amir Bar-Lev’s doc The Tillman Story to describe the 4/22/04 incident in which Pvt. George Tillman was killed while on duty in Afghanistan. It is a sign of Bar-Lev’s political bias that his film favors that moralizing term over the military designation “friendly fire” to describe gunfire discharged by allies and colleagues. Bar-Lev wants the tragic implications of a taboo act and is not above structuring this investigation into exactly how Tillman became a celebrated casualty of the Afghan campaign into lurid melodrama. The Tillman Story is really about the chicanery of the U.S. Military—first in covering up the facts, then presenting a version to the media who used it to promote the war to the public. The Tillman Story is another example of how contemporary journalism and documentary-making have lost credibility. Read more
The Sign of Rohmer
By Armond White
The late Eric Rohmer is not known for his audacity—but he should be. The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s complete retrospective of the director’s quietly masterful career, “The Sign of Rohmer” (Aug. 18-Sept. 3), confirms his daring. This is an irresistible opportunity to see his experimental musical The Tree, The Mayor and the Mediatheque, plus the erotic, psychological WWII drama Triple Agent (both previously unreleased in the U.S.) and his final exquisite classical myth The Romance of Astrea and Celedon. Read more
The Expendables
By Armond White
Past meets present in The Expendables, Sylvester Stallone’s not-so-sly exploitation of action-movie aficionados that unites 1980s action heroes—the incongruously named Sly (himself), Bruce (Willis) and Arnold (Schwarzenegger)—with a few contemporary action-figure he-men: Jason Statham, Jet Li and the wrestling world’s Steve Austin and Randy Couture. But proof that Stallone is living in the past isn’t the HGH vascularity or his stretched, tightened face. The real sign is that The Losers and The A-Team already preempted his concept. The Expendables repeats the same gang-of-rogues plotline. Read more
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 screenplay (based on graphic novels by Bryan Lee O’Malley), is also a social satirist. Read more
Sarli and Hawks
Remembering a time when actresses still had curves and eroticism could work both ways
By Armond White
I first saw Carne, a showcase for Argentinian sex symbol Isabel Sarli, at a San Sebastian Film Festival revival of that 1968 film while in the company of John Waters and his assistant Pat Moran. The duo provided expert commentary on the camp quality of Sarli’s overpowering voluptuousness. Waters took the right, knowing approach to Carne’s auteur, the late director Armando Bo. The film’s title means flesh, and Bo appreciated Sarli’s virtues and her showgirl enthusiasm similar to the way Waters celebrated his own cast of eccentrics. Read more
