March 2008
50 posts
Doug Bentin on Lon Chaney, part 1: He Who Gets...
April 1, 1883, is the birthday of Lon Chaney, whose stardom in movies puzzles many film lovers. How, they wonder, could a man with average looks, who never won the gal in the last reel, and who specialized in characters who were physically and psychologically repugnant have remained a box office giant for a decade? He was only 47 when he died on August 26, 1930, still at the peak of his powers and...
George Lang Review: 21
Robert Luketic’s “21” tells the mostly true story about young mathematics wizards who formulated a fail-safe way to beat the tables in Las Vegas. It is a fun and exhilarating ride with predictable twists, but great visuals and a solid young cast answering to ringleader Kevin Spacey helps “21” deal out a good story. Click to read the rest of the review …
George Lang Review: Stop-Loss
Kimberly Peirce’s “Stop-Loss” depicts the human side of war. It is an uneven but occasionally searing film about the camaraderie between soldiers, the ingrained rules of battle that can bleed over into the civilian world, and the effects of a semi-obscure regulation that keeps soldiers fighting long after they thought they were home for good. Click to read the rest of the review...
Gene Triplett DVD Review: Bonnie and Clyde
“Bonnie and Clyde” tear down the back roads of the depressed Midwest once again with “the laws” in hot pursuit and blazing away, and the action and graphic violence are more vivid than ever in the newly remastered and restored version available in a two-disc special-edition set. Click to read the rest of the review …
Michael Smith Review: 21
“21,” the movie, has a glossy, bright-lights packaging that Las Vegas itself offers, with a beautiful young cast, loud music, club scenes and Kevin Spacey acting both cool and cryptic. But there’s little entertainment value to this shiny-surface fi lm, a sparkly bauble that leaves you as empty as your pockets on the plane ride back home from Sin City. Click to read the rest of the review …
James Vance Review: Run, Fatboy, Run
Featuring the cult-favorite star of “Shaun of the Dead,” a script co-written by bad boy Michael Ian Black, and a cast of anarchists including Dylan Moran and Hank Azaria, “Run, Fatboy, Run” is filled to the brim with snarky cred. But don’t let that fool you, because at the heart of this very funny blue collar tale is one of the best romantic comedies to come along in some time. Click to read the...
Brandy McDonnell on This Spring's Movies
The sun is getting brighter, the weather is getting warmer, and the choices at movie theaters are getting better. Spring is here. With the summer movie rush starting a little earlier every year, movie studios are preparing to roll out some of their potential blockbusters, from the anticipated big-screen version of “Iron Man” to the fantasy sequel “The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian.” But...
Brandy McDonnell DVD Review: Atonement
The lovely and lyrical collide with the bloody and brutal in the heartbreaking “Atonement.” Director Joe Wright and Keira Knightley of 2005’s “Pride and Prejudice” reteam in this adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel. It is set in 1930s Britain on the cusp of World War II. Click here to read the rest of the review …
Brandy McDonnell Review: Run, Fat Boy, Run
New York-born actor David Schwimmer makes his feature film directorial debut with the entertaining British comedy “Run, Fat Boy, Run.” It sounds weird, but the actor formerly known as Ross from “Friends” proves he has a good eye and fun sense of humor. Click to read the rest of the review …
Doug Bentin on Richard Widmark
There’s a nice piece by Aljean Harmetz in yesterday’s New York Times about Richard Widmark, a fine actor who may be unknown to most young film lovers today. He died on March 24, aged 93. Widmark was never less than terrific in movies that were frequently less memorable than he was, a character specialist who didn’t walk comfortably in a leading man’s shoes. His first movie role was as the...
Cory Cheney Column: Urban Tulsa, 3-26-08
Usually, there’ll be a bad movie and a decent movie in one weekend. Decent means, for the purposes of discussion, something you’d feel alright paying matinee prices to see. Not a bad time, but nothing to text your friends about. But March 2008 will go down in infamy. Click to read the rest of the review …
Doug Bentin on Chico Marx
Prosecutor: Something must be done! War would mean a prohibitive increase in our taxes. Chicolini: Hey, I got an uncle lives in Taxes. Prosecutor: No, I’m talking about taxes - money, dollars! Chicolini: Dollars! There’s-a where my uncle lives! Dollars, Taxes! Not everyone can deliver a joke like that and not be despised for it, but the King of Wince-Making gags, the movies’ all-time...
Phil Bacharach DVD Review: TCM Archives' Forbidden...
TCM Archives - Forbidden Hollywood Collection, Volume 2 is an irresistibly lurid selection of pre-Code yarns that had moviegoers flocking to theaters during the Great Depression. While none of these five flicks quite has the trashy appeal of 1933’s Baby Face, which appeared on TCM’s Volume 1, this collection boasts at least two dynamite potboilers in 3 on a Match and Night Nurse, as...
Kim Brown Review: Drillbit Taylor
A nerd posing as a tough guy posing as a substitute teacher comes to the aid of three actual nerds in “Drillbit Taylor,” a predictably so-so comedy from producer Judd Apatow. But unlike Apatow’s other recent smash successes — “Superbad,” “Knocked Up” and “40-Year-Old Virgin” — this movie packs only a slap instead of its intended...
Brandy McDonnell DVD Review: In the Shadow of the...
British director David Sington recaptures the sense of wonder and danger of the Apollo space missions in his earnest and visually dazzling documentary “In the Shadow of the Moon.” Click to read the rest of the review …
Michael Smith Review: Tyler Perry's Meet the...
Tyler Perry’s gender-bending alter ego is just as big and bombastic as ever in his latest film, while his plots just get thinner and thinner. The boisterous Madea makes only a brief appearance in “Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns,” another of its creator’s faith-based stage plays converted to the screen. Click to read the rest of the review …
Kim Voynar Review: Heavy Metal in Baghdad
Heavy Metal in Baghdad, which had its US premiere at SXSW, follows Acrassicauda, Iraq’s only (yes, only) heavy metal band, as they try to stay alive and keep making music through the fall of Saddam Hussein and the growing insurgency in the aftermath of the Iraq war. This is the kind of film that makes me tremendously grateful to live in a country where I can freely write about film, or pick...
George Lang Review: Drillbit Taylor
Welcome back, John Hughes. The master of mid-’80s teen comedies such as “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” “Sixteen Candles” and “Weird Science” has not directed a film in 17 years, and he hasn’t even collected a story credit since the dawn of the decade. But “Drillbit Taylor,” the shockingly funny teen comedy featuring a story by Hughes (credited to Edmund...
Kim Voynar Review: They Killed Sister Dorothy
On February 12, 2005, Sister Dorothy Stang, a Catholic nun and environmental and social activist, was gunned down in the Brazilian rainforest in which she had lived and worked for over 30 years. The trials of the gunmen and the rancher accused of arranging for her murder sent shockwaves through the environmental community, exposing the politics surrouding the battle over the future of the rain...
Michael Smith Review: 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days
“4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days” is a most remarkable film that takes on a firebrand subject – abortion – and presents it with a rare soulsearching humanity and honesty. Click to read the rest of the review …
Gene Triplett Review: The Band's Visit
A serious cross-cultural gap is bridged in poignant and warmly humorous ways in Israeli writer-director Era Kolirin’s remarkably skilled big-screen debut, “The Band’s Visit.” Click to read the rest of the review …
Jim Chastain Review: Horton Hears a Who!
New at theaters: Horton Hears a Who! In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll tell you upfront that I’m a Dr. Seuss freak. He’s truly on the short list of my life heroes, and this book was one of my favorites growing up. Click to read the rest of the review …
Phil Bacharach Review: Definitely, Maybe
(Oklahoma Gazette, Feb. 20, 2008) It’s never too early to reminisce about the past. At least that appears to be the case with affairs of the heart. In the wake of contemporary romance’s no-frills hookups — eHarmony.com, speed dating and the like — perhaps it’s inevitable that a romantic comedy like “Definitely, Maybe” would turn to the not-so-distant Nineties — that wistful time when the...
Kim Voynar DVD Review: Bee Movie
By now, you no doubt know the storyline of Jerry Seinfeld’s Bee Movie, which opened theatrically last November and released this week on DVD. Seinfeld co-wrote, produced and stars in the film as Barry B. Benson, newly graduated from bee college and pondering his future. Dissatisfied with his singular career prospect — making honey — Barry decides to explore life outside the...
Kim Voynar Review: Frontrunners
Stuyvesant High School in New York City is one of the most prestigious public schools in the country. Only 3% of the 25,000 students who apply there are accepted. Before the screening of Frontrunners, director Caroline Suh told the crowd that one reason she chose Stuyvesant for filming a documentary about a high school election is because the students there are likely, in their adult years, to be...
Cory Cheney Column: Urban Tulsa, 3-19-08
Doomsday is worse than 10,000 B.C., and if you dropped by last week, you know what I thought of that. At least 10,000 B.C. made sense according to its internal logic. Sure, it was dumb as hell, but it was consistent. Doomsday… I’m not even sure I can begin to describe the traffic accident it is. It sort of starts off as 28 Days Later then morphs into Clockwork Orange/Road...
Phil Bacharach DVD Review: In the Valley of Elah
Hollywood learned in 2007 that American audiences aren’t ready to plunk down their hard-earned money to watch a movie about a war they can see on the nightly news. While that reluctance might be understandable, particularly with regard to duds like Rendition or Redacted, it also meant that the exceptional In the Valley of Elah got lost in the shuffle. Click to read the rest of the review...
James Vance Review: Doomsday
Serious cinema purists will be appalled by all the spatter and excess they see on the screen, but really, “Doomsday” isn’t the end of the world. What it is, is an “Indiana Jones” pulp adventure in “Mad Max” drag, an exercise in nostalgia for a generation that grew up with visions of “Thunderdome” and “Day of the Dead”...
Brandy McDonnell Review: Honeydripper
Independent film icon John Sayles weaves an appealing, if overly long, fable about the birth of rock ‘n’ roll in “Honeydripper.” Set in 1950 in the segregated hamlet of Harmony, Ala., the movie focuses on Tyrone “Pine Top” Purvis (Danny Glover), an aging piano player haunted by a past transgression. He owns the Honeydripper Lounge, a live blues club losing...
George Lang Review: Funny Games
German director Michael Haneke’s English-language remake of his 1997 film “Funny Games” purports to be a rebuke of the American public’s complicity in transforming torture-porn splatterfests into bankable franchises. But it commits a high sin of didactic social commentary by becoming more fetid and indefensible than any of the “Saw” or “Hostel” films it allegedly has...
Kim Brown Review: Never Back Down
A rebellious teen moves to a new town and must fit in at a new school with new rules. A group of angry young men find satisfaction in the one thing society tells them to avoid – violence. These are descriptions of “The Karate Kid” and “Fight Club,” respectively, and a fusion of the two is exactly what you get in “Never Back Down,” a movie based on teen rivals engaging in the popular sport of mixed...
Brandy McDonnell Review: Horton Hears a Who!
With their whimsical characters and dictionary-defying turns of phrase, Dr. Seuss’ wildly imaginative children’s books seem like fertile ground for filmmaking. But adapting one of Theodore Geisel’s slim volumes into a feature-length film requires turning the elegantly simple into the outrageously complicated. Blue Sky Studios, the creative team behind the “Ice Age” films,...
James Vance Review: The Bank Job
Director Roger Donaldson has a taste for complex tales that drop his characters in way over their heads, but rarely has he managed to pile on the twists and up the ante as he does in his newest release, “The Bank Job.” Working from a tight and layered script by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, Donaldson has crafted a satisfying if credibility-straining thriller that’s part...
Kim Voynar Review: Mister Lonely
Mister Lonely, directed by Harmony Korine (who previously wrote the screenplay for Larry Clark’s Kids), starts out with a great idea: a Michael Jackson impersonator meets a Marilyn Monroe impersonator who takes him to a remote commune for celebrity impersonators, where she lives with her husband Charlie Chaplin and daughter Shirley Temple, along with the Pope, the Queen of England, James...
Cory Cheney Column: Urban Tulsa, 3-12-08
One person’s garbage is another’s treasure, or so the cliché goes. I’ve mentioned Sturgeon’s Law before — “Ninety percent of everything is crap” — But P.T. Barnum’s century and a half maxim is as true as the day it was pronounced” “There is a sucker born every minute.” Wish that it were not so. Click to read the rest of the...
Doug Bentin on "Cimarron" (1931)
2007 was Oklahoma’s centennial year so I re-visited a movie that explores what it took to carve a state out of some pretty wild country. A shorter version of this essay was originally published on the “Saddlebums” website. The movie I examined was “Cimarron ,” released in 1931 and based on the 1929 bestseller by Edna Ferber . Richard Dix stars as Yancy Cravat, based on the real life Temple...
Phil Bacharach Review: Cloverfield
(Oklahoma Gazette, Jan. 23, 2008) A heady blend of the innovative and the formulaic, “Cloverfield” is an old-fashioned monster movie seemingly kidnapped by guerrilla filmmakers. While not the mindblower promised by its marketing campaign, the flick is hardly a dud, either, fairly reinvigorating a shopworn genre. The story is familiar: Giant monster demolishes major metropolis. But the filmmakers...
Phil Bacharach DVD Review: In the Shadow of the...
It’s been nearly 40 years since Neil Armstrong took that giant leap for mankind, but the sheer wonder and majesty of his first step on the moon has hardly diminished with the passage of time. In the Shadow of the Moon, one of the few documentaries to sufficiently capture the awe of that historic moment, pays tribute to the Apollo astronauts who literally reached beyond the heavens. Click to...
James Vance Review: Honeydripper
After a string of intriguing failures and near-misses in recent years, John Sayles is back in the game with “Honeydripper,” a sweet and lowdown tale of one perfect Saturday night. Click to read the rest of the review …
Michael Smith Review: Nanking
“We had nothing to do at night, so we raped women,” said one old man, recalling his duty as a young Japanese soldier who in 1937 helped invade and occupy the Chinese capital of Nanking. Speaking of the girls ages 10 to 13, who greatly resisted: “Nothing good came of raping them, not unless both of you are into it,” said another man who helped destroy a beautiful city and the innocence of its...
Kim Brown Review: Penelope
Whether it’s a nose or a chin, there’s always going to be something we hate about ourselves. And “Penelope,” a movie about a young woman born with a pig snout, serves as a charming reminder to take it easy on ourselves, already. Click to read the rest of the review …
Phil Bacharach DVD Review: 1968 with Tom Brokaw
In terms of social upheaval, few years in modern American history can rival 1968. It was a year marked by anger, violence, massive protest and assassination, spurring political and cultural reverberations still felt today. 1968 with Tom Brokaw, a History Channel documentary, offers a compact review of a turbulent period that conservative pundit Pat Buchanan, echoing the sentiments of many, calls...
Kim Voynar DVD Review: 101 Dalmatians
I don’t remember how old I was the first time I saw Walt Disney’s 101 Dalmatians, but I do know that I fell in love with the film from the first time I saw it. I didn’t know, as a kid, that the abstract line art and blocks of color used in the film were a ground-breaking departure for Disney’s animation department, or that the film was the first to use a Xerox copier to...
George Lang Review: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
When he wasn’t killing his citizens in cold blood, Nicolae Ceausescu put Romania through a kind of dull, throbbing hell during his reign, enforcing levels of privation and oppression that kept the Romanians portrayed in “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” in a constant state of agitation. Most things worth wanting could be found on the black market, but the things people needed were often...
Cory Cheney Column: Urban Tulsa, 3-5-08
Will someone please ask Will Ferrell to stop making movies? Please? He said in an interview that he didn’t think the “story” was relevant in movie making. Maybe this is because his films are nothing but 90+ minute-long SNL skits. And he does the same character over and over again. Click to read the rest of the column …
George Lang Review: Vantage Point
For all its whiz-bang technique and unabashed love for the “Rashomon” storytelling device, the boilerplate political intrigue of “Vantage Point” generates only mild shocks. It is a film that spends far too much time cribbing from better thrillers, loudly proclaiming its “importance” and assaulting viewers with an annoyingly continuous visual device. Click to read the rest of the...
James Vance Review: Be Kind Rewind
Whatever you’ve heard about “Be Kind Rewind” — even the contradictory stuff — is probably true. It shifts course and becomes at least three different movies during its relatively brief running time. Depending on when you’re watching it, it can fairly be described as funny, painfully stupid, downright annoying and surprisingly sweet. Click to read the...
Brandy McDonnell Review: The Other Boleyn Girl
“The Other Boleyn Girl” whips historical fact, speculation and pure fiction into a frothy frappe of political intrigue, sexual maneuvering and sibling rivalry. The big-screen adaptation of Philippa Gregory’s historical novel has just enough class — a top-notch cast, lavish period costumes and beautiful scenery — to balance out the trash, namely the steamy love scenes and verbal...
Michael Smith Review: In Bruges
Clever and profane and terrifically twisted, “In Bruges” is that moviehouse oddity, a motion picture that can’t be pigeonholed into any mere genre without bleeding into another. That’s in a literal and figurative sense in this violent crime film that plays like Elmore Leonard and Quentin Tarantino meeting the Coen brothers in an alley for a long talk about film styles, followed by a shootout....
Phil Bacharach DVD review: Michael Clayton
When Michael Clayton hit theaters in the fall of 2007, film critics largely had the same reaction. Here was the sort of legal thriller, went the conventional wisdom, that John Grisham movies always promise to be but never are: Smart, complex and suspenseful. In this case, the echo chamber of critical opinion was more than justified. Michael Clayton is just about pitch-perfect, an elegantly crafted...