Oklahoma Film Critics Circle

Coming Soon to a TV Near You, March 8 - 14, 2010

Paranoid Park (IFC, Sunday, March 14, 4:15am, 9:30am, 3:30pm)

Disaffected youth is the métier of Gus Van Sant. Beginning with his 1989 feature-length debut, Drugstore Cowboy, and continuing through 2003’s Elephant, the Portland, Oregon-based filmmaker has poked and prodded teen dispirit. Paranoid Park, a Van Sant ode to callow young people, is a sort of Crime and Punishment for skaters. Artsy and emotionally remote on occasion, the film is not for all tastes — but viewers with a more eclectic bent are likely to find it strangely spellbinding.

The title refers to a renegade skate park underneath a Portland bridge, but it could just as easily describe the state of mind of Alex (Gabe Nevins), the film’s protagonist. The troubled teen harbors a terrible secret, one that revolves around the skate park. Van Sant builds tensions slowly, releasing dribbles and drips of information alluding to the horror that this sullen teen has bottled up. Alex explains to us in voiceover — his narration is taken from a journal he keeps - that he is introduced to Paranoid Park by an older friend (Jake Miller) and immediately feels a kinship with the dead-end kids who hang there. “No matter how bad your family life was,” Alex recounts blandly, “these guys had it much worse.” Then something happens one rainy night when Alex visits the park by himself. What transpires is as gruesome as it is tragic.

Van Sant’s work in recent years has become increasingly oblique, but the off-kilter, hypnotic tone of Paranoid Park feels somehow appropriate. It jumps around in time, its fractured nonlinear narrative mimicking the itinerant moves and twists of a skateboarder. — Phil Bacharach

Joshua Blevins Peck talks Oscar 2010

I have a confession to make: Every year in March, I partake in something that makes me hate myself. When it is over, I feel ashamed and dirty.

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Rod Lott DVD Review: We Live in Public

Josh Harris is “the greatest Internet pioneer you’ve never heard of.” That’s true, despite the sheer amount of press he received in all his ventures, both online and off. That says a lot about how fleeting fame can be when tied to the Web, and the 2009 documentary “We Live in Public” explores the degrees and dangers of that visibility.

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George Lang Review: Alice in Wonderland

To quote Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat, buying into Tim Burton’s vision of “Alice in Wonderland” “depends a good deal on where you want to get to.” Burton might seem like the perfect guide down the rabbit hole, but in the end, there’s not an atom of meaning in it.

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George Lang Review: Brooklyn's Finest

In the context of its sad, slightly interlocking stories, the title of Antoine Fuqua’s “Brooklyn’s Finest” registers with dark irony and even a world-weary sneer. These are cop stories in which redemption is not a reasonable expectation, and if it does come, it will be the paltry, take-what-you-can-get variety. And there is not much point to it all, unless “Brooklyn’s Finest” is designed to empty police academies of all but the most steadfast recruits.

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Michael Smith Review: Alice in Wonderland

Let’s be clear, no speaking in riddles: Tim Burton’s new film is a head trip into blunderland.

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Michael Smith Review: The Crazies

The most surprising quality about “The Crazies” is its sanity. This virus-run-amok chiller works in almost every way.

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Shawn S. Lealos Review: Alice in Wonderland

Leaving the screening of Alice in Wonderland, one of my only thoughts was that no one but Tim Burton could have made this movie. I am not a huge fan of the 1951 Disney animated classic, it is a bit too strange although I understand that was the entire point of the story to begin with. I often thought that the animators and writers had to be on some serious drugs to make that movie. Well, that entire thought process fits in well with Burton’s style of filmmaking and, if nothing else, the movie is almost a “Tim Burton’s Greatest Hits” film.

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Shawn S. Lealos Review: Brooklyn's Finest

When I reviewed Street Kings last year, I complained about the lack of the script’s originality. With the release of Brooklyn’s Finest, my complaints are even harsher. This is not only an unoriginal idea but a rehash of a number of better films and situations, thrown together in one giant anthology of a movie reeking strongly of an overreliance on coincidence. Never once in this movie did I feel a part of the story. And that crime is just as bad as the ones perpetrated in this film.

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Coming Soon to a TV Near You, March 1 - 7, 2010

The Namesake (IFC, Thursday, March 4, 6:30 am, 1:05 pm)

Director Mira Nair’s tale of two generations of an Indian-American family explores the ever-slippery divide between cultural identity and assimilation, but The Namesake is hardly a polemic. Instead, it offers complex, richly drawn characters who earn our interest and empathy.

The film begins in 1977 Calcutta and the arranged marriage between two young people who scarcely know one another. Ashoke Gangali (Irfan Khan) is quiet and scholarly; his betrothed, Ashima (Tabu), is beautiful and prepared to move with Ashoke to the adventurous new world of the United States. Once the couple arrives in New York, however, Ashima learns the harsh realities of being a cultural outsider with a husband who is always away at work. Ashima and Ashoke are virtual strangers to each other, but they persevere through patience and sensitivity, and a loving bond develops over time.

Ashima gives birth to a boy whom they name after the 19th century Russian writer Nicolai Gogol. The reason: a life-changing experience earlier in Ashoke’s life involved one of the author’s works. But the thoroughly Americanized child named Gogol grows up to loathe the name he has been given. Gogol the man (Kal Penn) chalks it up as another indignity foisted upon him by the Bengali parents he views as hopelessly old-fashioned.

Incorporating two generations of a family and all the births, deaths, marriages and divorces that come with them, The Namesake has the depth and scope of a good novel. It occasionally strains to shoehorn in a bit too much — particularly in a clumsily handled subplot involving Gogol’s marriage — but the characters pulsate with all the ambivalence of life.

It helps, too, that director Nair has such strong actors at her disposal. Khan and Tabu, both of whom are Bollywood superstars not well-known to western audiences, turn in delicately rendered performances. And Kal Penn captures the vagaries of a young man caught trying to make sense of the shame and reverence he feels about his heritage.

Nair is sensitive to letting the characters evolve along to the rhythms of life. There are no easy epiphanies or answers in The Namesake. Early on in the movie, Ashima slips her feet into the shoes of her husband-to-be, a lovely moment that is later repeated by another character. It is that eagerness to experience the world from a different perspective that gives The Namesake a lasting emotional resonance. — Phil Bacharach