Oklahoma Film Critics Circle

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

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 07:03:00 -0600

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

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 09:06:43 -0600

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

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 07:13:19 -0600

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

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 07:09:51 -0600

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

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 07:08:53 -0600

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

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 07:07:21 -0600

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

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 07:06:25 -0600

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

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 00:14:07 -0600

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

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 00:12:33 -0600

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

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 08:15:00 -0600

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

Michael Smith Review: The Last Station

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 07:35:40 -0600

A film centered on the life of Russian author Leo Tolstoy might sound beyond literary to many, perhaps even ponderous. But “The Last Station” is unlike any Tolstoy story previously told, closer to a laugh-a-minute Leo for the short-attention-span age.

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George Lang Review: Cop Out

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 07:32:48 -0600

Kevin Smith spent his early teenage years in the era of “Beverly Hills Cop,” “Fletch” and “Lethal Weapon,” movies that melded smartly stupid comedy with blood-and-guts action. This is a specific subgenre that opened a gushing sewer of bad buddy flicks, but Smith’s “Cop Out” is about as close as any director has gotten to “Beverly Hills Cop” in a long time. It’s so close it has to be homage, or as Tracy Morgan’s Paul Hodges insists on pronouncing it, “hommidge.”

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Brandy McDonnell Review: The Last Station

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 07:32:02 -0600

The war and not peace that filled Russian author Leo Tolstoy’s final year of life has the epic pull of one of his novels in “The Last Station.

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Michael Smith Review: Shutter Island

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 06:28:00 -0600

The basic synopsis for “Shutter Island” is that a pair of detectives arrive at an island facility that houses criminally insane patients, one of whom has recently escaped. At least, that’s what filmmaker Martin Scorsese wants you to think is happening.

By the time that this twisty mystery unfolds its ideas of how the past haunts people, how guilt consumes and how memories shape our mind’s machinery, the result is elegant, creepy, fantastic cinema.

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Joe Wertz Review: In the Loop

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 06:26:05 -0600

A British satire of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, “In the Loop” is irreverent, inappropriate and probably spot-on.

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Coming Soon to a TV Near You, Feb. 22 - 28, 2010

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 11:20:00 -0600

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (TCM, Thursday, Feb. 25 9pm)

Among John Ford’s final pictures, 1962’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance reveals the legendary filmmaker poking a stick at the Old West mythologies he helped create. It’s unmistakably a Ford Western, exploring the tensions between the rugged individualism of the West and its inevitable transformation into orderly society. But the elegiac tone is darker and sadder than most works in the director’s canon.

Aging U.S. Senator Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) and his wife, Hallie (Vera Miles), return to the small town of Shinbone to bury Tom (John Wayne), an old friend of theirs who has died a pauper. Stoddard is cornered by a nosy newspaper editor demanding to know why the august senator would come all the way to this godforsaken town to bury a forgotten old drunk. What unfolds is Ranse’s recounting of how he came to know Tom Doniphon and how the men’s fates became inexorably linked through the famed slaying of vicious baddie Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin in a role that put him on the Hollywood map).

The movie is a fascinating, moving, irony-laden portrait of the debate between diplomacy and violent response, between truth and legend. In The Western Films of John Ford, author J.A. Place calls Liberty Valance “Ford’s clearest expression of the current of nostalgia and regret that runs through his work, isolated in this film from the compensating forces of the grandeur of the outdoors and the purifying effect of Ford’s visual beauty.”

It’s a masterpiece, one well worth seeking out. - Phil Bacharach

The Third Man (TCM, Wednesday, Feb 25 10:30am)

While Orson Welles is best known for creating Citizen Kane, a movie lauded by many as the greatest film of all time, it is this Carol Reed thriller that provides us with his greatest onscreen contributions.

Joseph Cotten is Holly Martins, a straight man travelling to Vienna to meet up with his old friend Harry Lime (Welles). When he arrives, he learns Lime has died and finds himself in the middle of a police investigation into the matter. When he looks out his window one night and sees Harry standing in the shadows across the street, he ends up a pawn in the middle of this great noir thriller.

While Cotten is great as the misbegotten Holly and Carol Reed’s Oscar-nominated directing is excellent, it is Welles as the devious Harry Lime who steals the show. The entire monologue at the Ferris wheel is the stuff of legend.

“Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love — they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

The Third Man is one of, if not the, best film noirs of the era. - Shawn S. Lealos

Touching the Void (ICF, Sunday, Feb. 28, 8:35 a.m.; Monday, March 1, 4:05 a.m.)

Since Robert Flaherty filmed the story of an Inuit in 1922 and created the first documentary to be called by that name, Nanook of the North, the genre of nonfiction film has been often misunderstood. What many don’t understand is that included in documentary film’s conventions from the beginning were truths but not always facts: Nanook’s real name was the much less crowd-friendly Allakariallak; his photogenic wife in the film wasn’t his wife in real life; and the seal that seemed about to pull Nanook into an icy grave was already dead. Nanook’s off-camera friends were doing the tugging.

Errol Morris brought reenactments front and center as a tool in the documentary filmmaker’s box in 1988’s The Thin Blue Line, as he presented obvious reenactment after obvious reenactment of the murder of a Dallas policeman, each from a different point of view. The film led to the release of the man sent to prison for a heinous crime he didn’t commit. Fictional tools showed that truth wasn’t as solidly absolute as we might like to think. Rashomon, anyone?

Kevin Macdonald’s 2003 thriller, Touching the Void, makes tangible the truth that recountings of experiences — a talking-heads staple convention of all documentary films — are, when you think about it, verbal reenactments. In this film, talking heads Joe Simpson and Simon Yates recount their experiences during a 1985 climb of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. Calamity struck these two experienced climbers on their descent. As each spins the story of impossibly difficult decisions and improbably courageous and strong behaviors, actors Brendan Mackey as Simpson and Nicholas Aaron as Yates reenact what the two real mountaineers are telling us brilliantly in settings that make what we see almost impossible to accept as less than the real thing.

Maybe, ultimately, it isn’t. This film is a very smart hybrid of documentary and docudrama. Don’t miss it. — Kathryn Jenson White

Shawn S. Lealos Review: Shutter Island

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 03:54:03 -0600

When Shutter Island ended, I sat there for a moment awe struck at what I had seen. I will admit up front, I walked into the theater spoiled to the ending so instead of being blindsided by the eventual reveal I was looking to piece together the clues throughout the movie. I think that knowledge helps me appreciate the movie more than others. There was an older couple sitting next to me who was visibly disappointed at the ending because it was not what they wanted to see. They wanted to see a more straightforward thriller with clear cut good guys and bad guys and felt cheated at the way the film played out. My wife had a more interesting take on the film…

click here to read the full review…

George Lang Review: Shutter Island

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 06:56:28 -0600

Crime novelist Dennis Lehane’s stated intent with his critically lauded 2003 novel “Shutter Island” was to make a modern Gothic novel in the vein of the Bronte sisters, a “Wuthering Heights” set in a spooky Massachusetts insane asylum. From a literary standpoint, it was a wild pitch from one of the best crime novelists.

Director Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of “Shutter Island” stands out just as starkly in his filmography, mainly because “Shutter Island” plays like Scorsese’s high-gloss tribute to the 1973 cult horror classic, “The Wicker Man.”

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Coming Soon to a TV Near You, Feb. 15 - 21, 2010

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 22:36:49 -0600

Metropolitan (Sundance Channel, Friday, Feb. 19, 9:30 am, 2:45 pm)

Whit Stillman’s 1990 confection of young and affluent New York intelligentsia is so delightfully ludicrous, what with its F. Scott Fitzgerald-meets-J.D. Salinger vibe, that in lesser hands the whole soiree would have evaporated like cheap champagne.

But Stillman’s gift for solipsistic blowhards and the hermetically sealed environs where they live – a talent that, by the way, predates Wes Anderson – is rich and engaging. The result is a quirky tale of specious sophisticates, good-hearted dandies and literary-minded populists (although one such poseur freely admits he confines his reading to the reviews published in The New York Times Review of Books).

In this close-knit world of collegiate East Coast snobbery, top-drawer gin and debauchery at the Hamptons, writer-director Stillman and his characters find plenty of fodder for wit and idiosyncrasy. Occasionally cloying but generally sparkling, Metropolitan breaks a seemingly cardinal rule by making the spoiled rich ne’er-do-wells look like they’re having a mighty swell time. – Phil Bacharach

Michael Smith Review: The Wolfman

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 07:41:49 -0600

“The Wolfman” has more decapitated heads than a French Revolution documentary, more missing arms and legs than “Jaws.” This new take on the classic tale of half-man, half-beast is missing a lot of other things, too, like a brain. Special effects, however, it has in spades.

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