I don’t really read Armond White, but I do like to read about someone who is uncompromising and drives mainstream critics nuts. (On the other hand, he thinks Spielberg is America’s Greatest Director. (Really?)) I was interested in his statement here:
“We always went to the movies, every Saturday at least,” White says. “I used to love to see stuff like The Long, Hot Summer and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. To me, this was a window into the adult world. Now people watch movies so they can stay kids, which proves how infantilized the culture is. I wanted to see how grown-ups acted, in CinemaScope. Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor, the most beautiful people ever, on that giant image: It filled my head … Detroit was a great movie town then. We got Canadian TV, so I got to see stuff like La Dolce Vita, Jacques Demy’s Lola, 8½, all of them dubbed. Boccaccio ’70—these shorts by Fellini, De Sica, and Visconti—I must have seen that one twenty times.
One of our problems as a culture is that a lot of our movies are made by men (mostly) who haven’t grown up. That’s why we have a lot of crappy superhero films and big-budget B-movies, but it’s hard to find films about what life is actually like for most of us these days. (On the other hand, I liked “Iron Man.”)
