Oklahoma Film Critics Circle

Jeffrey Huston Review: The American

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 09:08:48 -0500

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.

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James Vance: Billy the Kid On Screen (Pt. 2)

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 16:58:00 -0500

(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).

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James Cooper Review: Piranha 3D

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 14:46:01 -0500

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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Joe O'Shansky Review: Piranha 3D/The Human Centipede

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 22:24:08 -0500

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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Joe O'Shansky Review: The Killer Inside Me

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 13:18:40 -0500

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.

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Phil Bacharach Review: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 06:37:27 -0500

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.

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Jeffrey Huston Review: Eat Pray Love

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 10:25:45 -0500

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.

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James Vance Review: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 21:41:50 -0500

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.

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Jeffrey Huston Review: The Other Guys

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 12:11:36 -0500

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.

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Jeffrey Huston Review: Salt

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 16:28:29 -0500

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.

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James Vance: Billy the Kid On Screen (Pt. 1)

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 11:53:52 -0500

He’s been called everything from a homicidal moron to a cowboy Robin Hood – but whoever and whatever Billy the Kid really was, his brief and bloody career earned him an enduring place in the American imagination…and created a virtual cottage industry in Hollywood, where his legend has been mined, refined and reshaped in more than 60 motion pictures.

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Shawn S. Lealos Review: Dinner for Schmucks

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 15:32:50 -0500

Dinner for Schmucks is one of the most ridiculous movies I have seen in a long time. The movie is a series of sight gags leading to more sight gags. Steve Carell plays a complete idiot and Paul Rudd does not fare much better as the straight man.

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Phil Bacharach Review: Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 07:09:00 -0500

It would have been easy for the makers of “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work” to take a by-the-numbers approach to their subject. Among the pioneers of edgy stand-up comedy — she joked about “putting out” and abortions long before such topics became fodder for female comedians — Rivers was instrumental in paving the way for a generation of funny ladies. “Piece” could have slapped together archival footage, grabbed some obligatory “she’s an icon” interviews with Rivers’ contemporaries and imitators, and called it a day.

But Rivers is a workhorse, and so is this extraordinary movie.

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Shawn S. Lealos Review: Salt

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 22:30:24 -0500

Salt is a tale of two movies. For the first hour, the film races along at a blistering pace with Angelina Jolie’s Salt running for her life from the U.S. Government agencies who have decided she is a traitor. The last half of the movie switches gears completely, allowing us to see exactly who is who and becomes a callback to the classic calculating cold war thrillers of the seventies and eighties.

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Joe O'Shansky Review: The Sorcerer's Apprentice

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 15:35:44 -0500

If only The Sorcerer’s Apprentice could inspire enough of an emotion in me to hate it or love it. It’s just so … there. That’s what happens when a team of writers buffs away all the edges from a script.

But I guess it is a Disney film. Where Sommers would blow past the faults in a script with oodles of eye-candy, athletic camera work and tons of bloodless violence (see G.I. Joe for Sommers in peak form), Turteltaub dials it back into family-friendly smoothness, much as he did with the National Treasure flicks.

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James Cooper Review: Inception

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 22:04:06 -0500

Not quite the masterpiece that many critics and internet bloggers claim it to be, “Inception” is that rare summer blockbuster with as much philosophical waxing to spare as it has awesome explosions.

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Jeffrey Huston Review: Cyrus

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 10:29:52 -0500

Cyrus is a peculiar mixed bag. To say it’s a complete failure would be unfairly reductive, though it doesn’t fully succeed either. There’s something very interesting going on here—both in moments and even on the whole—that can’t be denied, yet neither can the sense that it fails to form into a complete whole. I’ll put it this way: the actors seem to know exactly what they’re doing, and succeed, but the directors don’t.

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Shawn S. Lealos Review: Despicable Me

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 23:53:21 -0500

Despicable Me made me laugh on numerous occasions and bears a sweetness that makes it a success despite problems in pacing and some clunky character development.

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Joe O'Shansky Review: Micmacs

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 10:29:59 -0500

Micmacs isn’t without something to say. This tale of a slacker named Bazil (Dany Boon), who lost his father to a landmine and his video store job to the bullet lodged in his head — both manufactured by competing arms companies — is at once satirizing corporate hegemony, government corruption and capitalist waste. But it does so with such an unrelentingly chipper tone that the inherent darkness of its themes is almost completely subverted.

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Phil Bacharach Review: Despicable Me

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 10:13:39 -0500

Among the pop-culture treasures of Mad magazine is its venerable “Spy vs. Spy” series. With its two saboteurs hell-bent on doing each other in, the comic strip is a wry send-up of dastardly high-tech espionage. “Despicable Me,” a new computer-generated, 3-D animated movie that involves a pair of adversarial supervillains, is at its best when seeking to replicate that scrappy vibe.

But “Despicable Me” is about 90 minutes longer than it would take most Mad connoisseurs to buzz through a page.

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