A site of the Oklahoma Film Critics Circle, the state's professional association of film critics.
It’s a rare thing when a movie achieves the psychological depth of a novel (though many try). Movies need not do so to be great, certainly, but when they do the result is absorbing. The American is one such rarity, and is so by not using any literary tricks at all.
(Part 1 began a look at Hollywood’s long-running love affair with the legend of Billy the Kid, whose brief and grubby real-life career came to an abrupt end at the hands of New Mexico sheriff Pat Garrett. The mythmaking continues:)
Howard Hughes’ “The Outlaw” had gone into production in 1941 and was briefly released in 1943, but censorship troubles kept it out of most theaters until 1946. Less a Billy the Kid picture than an inept sex comedy, it managed to insert Doc Holliday (played by Walter Huston) into the proceedings by making him an old pal of Pat Garrett (Thomas Mitchell). A waste of talent and an insult to the intelligence, “The Outlaw” depicts the tubercular Holliday as hale and hearty, Garrett as an impotent boob who kills Doc in a fit of jealousy over his friendship with the Kid, and Billy (Jack Beutel) as a cold-blooded killer who’s a devil with the ladies. (Imagine the real Billy so much as getting the time of day from star Jane Russell).
With its structure borrowed largely from the eighties slasher films that came after 1978’s “Piranha,” Aja’s remake comes across as equal parts morality tale and Grand Guignol, far more interested in punishing its characters’ sexual exploits and displaying Greg Nicotero’s amazingly gory special effects make-up than frightening anyone.
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With Piranha 3D, director Alexandre Aja takes the guilty pleasure 1977 original and puts it on steroids in this gloriously gratuitous, completely trashy ode to its exploitive Roger Corman roots.
Not many horror movies get under my skin anymore, but with The Human Centipede, Six not only got under my skin, he made me want to crawl right out of it. There’s really no other way to say this: The Human Centipede is depraved.
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But I don’t want to sound like I’m getting too down on The Killer Inside Me because it is so well crafted, and it does capture much of the tone of its source, even if the emotional impact seems muted. Adapting a writer as fiendishly good as Jim Thompson means you’re swinging for the fences, and Winterbottom brings a lot to the batter’s box.
Based on a series of graphic novels by Bryan Lee O’Malley, “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” is a movie with ADD and a lapsed Ritalin prescription.
The emotional voids of wealthy white Americans who can afford to take a year off from life and see the world evoke no sympathy from me. Suffice it to say, Eat Pray Love is a complete crock.
Coming-of-age stories are pretty much by definition also getting-over-yourself stories, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is a prime example of both.
After a legendary run on Saturday Night Live and subsequent instant classics on the big screen, Will Ferrell became the breakout comic star of the past decade. Recent efforts, however, have offered diminishing returns and his latest continues that decline.
The standard Angelina Jolie summer action flick is a generic retread of better work from waning genres, and Salt is no different. This Manchurian Candidate meets The Fugitive isn’t so much a throwback to a Cold War thriller as it is a relic.
