September 2008
43 posts
Cory Cheney Column: Urban Tulsa, 9-24-08
My Best Friend’s Girl — one of those dumb romantic comedies they release about every two months hoping to catch the date crowd. It’s also the only thing they’ll let Dane Cook do.
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Brandy McDonnell DVD Review: Speed Racer
Writer-directors Larry and Andy Wachowski’s faithfulness to their source material stands out among the best and worst aspects of their big-screen adaptation of “Speed Racer.”
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Brandy McDonnell Review: Eagle Eye
Between Shia LaBeouf’s now-standard likable loser role and D.J. Caruso’s bombastic direction, “Eagle Eye” feels so much like a Michael Bay production that I kept waiting for a cameo from Optimus Prime.
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Michael Smith Review: Elegy
Say what you will about Philip Roth’s writings — and it’s all been said for more than 40 years, such as sexist and somber to describe early works like “Goodbye, Columbus” and “Portnoy’s Complaint” and later offerings turned into films like “The Human Stain.” But think about the touching, brilliant and lament-filled “Elegy” this...
James Vance Review: Baghead
Though “Baghead” can’t make up its mind as to what kind of film it is, most of the time its barely joined parts are pretty entertaining.
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James Vance Review: Miracle at St. Anna
The “miracle” part is a bit of a muddle, but there’s still plenty to appreciate in Spike Lee’s ambitious WWII drama “Miracle at St. Anna.”
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Kim Brown Review: Nights in Rodanthe
When you’re dealing with best-selling author Nicholas Sparks, there’s just no getting around the crying. His novels are full of romance, melodrama, and yes, plenty of emotion. Sometimes a tearjerker can be fulfilling, and sometimes they’re just plain depressing. In the case of the latest adaptation, “Nights in Rodanthe,” the verdict unfortunately leans toward the...
Phil Bacharach DVD Review: Reprise
The remarkable Norwegian film Reprise zeroes in on a very specific time in a young man’s life — and it scores a bull’s eye. In his feature-film debut, director Joachim Trier captures that dizzying and dynamic period when books, movies, music and ideas take on paramount importance, when the future appears to pulsate with possibility, when late-night discussions at coffeehouses and...
George Lang Review: Nights in Rodanthe
“Nights in Rodanthe” reunites Diane Lane and Richard Gere as two people brought together at a point when both face hard, life-changing decisions. While those averse to having heartstrings pulled should avoid all routes to “Rodanthe,” it is a fine showcase for Lane, whose luminous performance shows her gift for emotional depth and grace.
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George Lang Review: Choke
Chuck Palahniuk’s fans waited a decade after “Fight Club” for another run at the transgressive novelist’s deviant world of danger freaks and group therapy abusers. And thanks to writer-director Clark Gregg’s raw, darkly funny approach and a pitch-perfect performance by Sam Rockwell, “Choke” gets it down.
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James Vance Column: The B Western Front
As if dealing with rustlers, train robbers, and ubiquitous big-screen owlhoot Roy Barcroft weren’t bad enough, the B-movie cowboys of the early 1940s crawled out of their bedrolls one day to find sieg-heiling storm troopers and fifth columnists lurking behind every cactus. World War II had erupted all over the silver screen sagebrush, and while the conflict only occupied those six-gun heroes for a...
Rod Lott’s Classic DVD Picks for the 2008 Holidays
We’re nearing the holidays, which means gift-giving season gets into full swing. Consider snapping up these DVDs for the classic-film lover on your list (and yes, that includes you):
THE GODFATHER: THE COPPOLA RESTORATION
At the apex of Francis Ford Coppola’s work stands 1972’s “The Godfather” and 1974’s “The Godfather: Part II.” Yeah, “The Godfather: Part III” from 1990 rounds out the trilogy,...
Phil Bacharach Review: Vicky Christina Barcelona
(Oklahoma Gazette, Aug. 20, 2008)
Woody Allen fans know that the past two decades haven’t been easy. One of the finest American filmmakers of the last half of the 20th century, his last great work, “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” was nearly 20 years ago. Since then, his efforts have spiraled from flawed to embarrassing, like a doddering old uncle who repeats the same tired anecdotes every time you see...
Phil Bacharach DVD Review: Bright Lights, Big City
Alfred Hitchcock mused that he preferred making movies adapted from marginal novels instead of top-shelf literature. The latter, he reasoned, had already been defined in a medium that didn’t necessarily translate so well to a visual sensibility. It’s a truism worth remembering with Jay McInerney’s debut novel Bright Lights, Big City. While the 1984 book certainly falls short of...
Michael Smith Review: Igor
The Frankenstein complex — horrific-looking on the outside, pure and good on the inside if given a chance — is taken to cartoon extremes in “Igor,” an amiable animated film cobbled together from old-movie graveyard cliches.
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Kim Brown Review: My Best Friend's Girl
Here’s a shocker: “My Best Friend’s Girl” isn’t at all what it’s advertised to be. In the trailer, it looks like the typical R-rated romantic comedy of late. Filled with dirty jokes and preposterous situations, it often takes a lot of movie magic to make these films worthwhile. But thanks to a good cast and consistently funny material by screenwriter Jordan...
James Vance Review: Ghost Town
Based on the ad campaign, it would be easy to pigeonhole “Ghost Town” as another romantic comedy with a twist, but it’s much more and much better than that.
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George Lang Review: Lakeview Terrace
The underlying layers of racism lurking in modern suburban life provide the essential grist of Neil LaBute’s “Lakeview Terrace,” in which an idyllic cul-de-sac in the San Fernando Valley becomes ground zero in one man’s battle against the steady march of progress. But LaBute’s effort to address societal ills gets sidelined when the film downshifts into familiar thriller...
Brandy McDonell Review: Frozen River
The independent film “Frozen River” offers the emotional resonance of a finely crafted drama, the bristling tension of a perfectly paced thriller, and Melissa Leo’s effortlessly Oscar-worthy performance in her first lead role.
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Michael Smith Review: Frozen River
The purity and power of the maternal instinct has rarely been captured as bluntly and honestly as in “Frozen River,” in which two seemingly inconsequential women, with little at stake, are fighting for their lives.
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Phil Bacharach DVD Review: Snow Angels
A movie capable of surprise is no small feat. Snow Angels is one of those all-too-rare films, a tale that gives its sad, complicated characters room to breathe, act and — most impressively — confound expectations. This reviewer has not always been enamored with the self-consciously lyrical filmmaking of indie phenom David Gordon Green, but here, in his first adaptation of someone...
Gene Triplett Review: Ghost Town
Writer-director David Koepp breathes new life into the old pesky poltergeist plot gimmick with “Ghost Town,” a hilarious and surprisingly poignant comedy about a man who is haunted by heartbreak, and how he handles a chance to exorcize his demons and rejoin the human race.
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George Lang DVD Review: The Visitor
In Thomas McCarthy’s “The Visitor,” a sleepwalking man gets a jolt that shocks him back to life. Walter Vale, played with uncommon grace by Richard Jenkins of “Six Feet Under,” is a widowed social sciences professor whose life has slowed to a crawl. When Walter is asked to deliver a paper at a conference, he reluctantly goes to New York and learns that his Greenwich Village...
Phil Bacharach's Top 10 Rock 'n' Roll Movies
Recently I had the opportunity to serve on a state advisory panel tasked with nominating Oklahoma’s top 10 rock ‘n’ roll songs of all time (admittedly not the most weighty of missions, but if you’re game, please vote online at oklahomarocksong.org for your top selection). At any rate, it got me thinking about my love for rock music and film, and hence, my top rock...
Evan Derrick Review: What We Do Is Secret
Jon Paul Beahm, aka Bobby Pyn, aka Darby Crash, was the lead singer for The Germs, a ragtag band that came to dominate the L.A. punk scene in the late 70s. On the eve of John Lennon’s assassination, Crash finally made good on the suicide he had been promising for years, but his death was overshadowed and underreported due to omnipresent coverage of the Beatle icon’s murder. Before this film, I had...
Phil Bacharach Review: American Teen
(Oklahoma Gazette, Aug. 13, 2008)
They say youth is wasted on the young. That might be true, but high school is one rite of passage for which young people definitely earn their Purple Hearts.
With its unforgiving caste system, peer pressures and never-ending crises, high school could reduce even the most hard-bitten survivalist into a knock-kneed mess. Regardless of your own high school...
Phil Bacharach Review: Pineapple Express
(Oklahoma Gazette, Aug, 7, 2008)
A stoner comedy/action hybrid from the Judd Apatow juggernaut, “Pineapple Express” begins, promisingly enough, with a black-and-white prologue. It imagines a Thirties military experiment on the effects of marijuana. Oklahoma native Bill Hader (“Superbad,” TV’s “Saturday Night Live”) portrays the test subject, a supremely high Army private who proclaims to his...
Happy 80th Birthday, Circle Cinema.... from...
You have to look beyond the obvious when you physically look at the Circle Cinema from the outside. Come on, she’s 80 years old.
Don’t we all know that it’s what’s on the inside that matters? When you enter Tulsa’s oldest standing theater, you are going on a journey. When it comes to film, the Circle Cinema offers audiences the world.
This is the neighborhood theater with the worldwide screen,...
Kim Brown Review: Tyler Perry's The Family that...
“Tyler Perry’s The Family That Preys,” takes an intense look at two Southern families whose outward appearances initially seem to be as different as night and day. But in filmmaker Perry’s latest feature, he exposes these families for what they are: murky beneath the surface and deeply flawed.
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Gene Triplett Review: Righteous Kill
Two of the greatest film actors of the past four decades are paired a second time in John Avnet’s “Righteous Kill,” and the dramatic bullets fly fast and true whenever Robert De Niro and Al Pacino share a scene.
But it’s a crime the stars couldn’t find a script and a director as good as they had on “Heat,” the dynamite 1995 cops-and-robbers epic that was written and...
Jim Chastain Review: The Dark Knight
The Dark Knight isn’t a masterpiece, but it is exceptional, heads above most movies made and near the very top of the ever growing catalogue of superhero films. It makes Ironman look like a clunker and Hancock look like an even bigger embarrassment than it is.
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George Lang Review: The Women
Clare Boothe Luce’s “The Women” became a hit on stage and screen in the 1930s for its blistering satire and stiletto-sharp female characters. Seven decades later, “Murphy Brown” creator Diane English’s modern retelling gets blunted by hackneyed plot devices that feel compromised and safe as milk compared to the original’s toxic Manhattans or even “Sex and the...
Brandy McDonnell DVD Review: The Fall
Director/co-writer Tarsem delivers his masterwork with the strangely beautiful dark fantasy “The Fall.”
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Gene Triplett Review: Burn After Reading
Following the bleak badlands drama of “No Country for Old Men,” Joel and Ethan Coen’s latest foray into the dark side of human folly plays like a lighthearted screwball farce that just happens to include rampant adultery, covert cover-ups and a couple of bloody deaths.
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Michael Smith Review: Burn After Reading
I enjoyed “Burn After Reading” a good deal, as much for spotting Joel and Ethan Coen’s devices from their other films as for the skilled filmmaking. An adult comedy with a bitter aftertaste, it’s both clever and amusing, but rarely laugh-out-loud, which they have accomplished so many times before.
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Kim Brown Review: The Women
At a time when women are front and center on the political stage comes a clever comedy tailor-made for female audiences that will keep men on their toes, too. Be it coincidence or not, the timing is perfect for “The Women” — a remake of George Cukor’s 1939 classic that starred Norma Shearer, Rosalind Russell and Joan Crawford.
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Evan Derrick Review: Burn After Reading
“Coen Brothers” is a certifiable genre, even if there are only 2 people who can make films in it. Whether screwball comedy or neo-noir or gangster or stoner or western, each of their genre-bending films managed to retain the unique Coen hallmarks: quirky characters, idiosyncratic dialogue, vivid regionalism, and a hyper-sensitive balance between comedy and tragedy. Their consistency of vision,...
Phil Bacharach DVD Review: Married Life
The disconnect between what we know and what we think we know forms the crux of Married Life, a smart little cinematic cocktail that is one jigger domestic melodrama, one jigger film noir and two jiggers smooth dark comedy. Based on a 1953 pulp novel by John Bingham, the film wrings pathos and humor from its deeply flawed people, yet writer-director Ira Sachs is not cruel to his characters. They...
Kim Brown Review: College
For all the kids planning to go to “College” this weekend, here’s a piece of advice: you’re better off staying at home.
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James Vance Review: Babylon A.D.
Some movies work best if you turn your brain off before the lights go down, and “Babylon A.D.” is definitely grey matter-optional. In fact, you may find that the best way to enjoy it is to shut down your vital systems altogether.
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George Lang Review: Transsiberian
Brad Anderson’s “Transsiberian” is a dark ride filled with the elements of great thrillers: protagonists who are out of their element, a claustrophobic setting, strangers who cannot be as nice as they seem and moments of weakness that could doom the hero.
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Evan Derrick Review: Henry Poole Is Here
Roger Ebert famously said that “A movie is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about it.” That is an important observation worth dwelling on, for both film critics and casual filmgoers alike, but it’s one that I am unable to always embrace. There are times when the ‘what’ overshadows the ‘how’ to such an extraordinary degree that it cannot be ignored, as in the example of Sin...
Evan Derrick Review: Encounters at the End of the...
Werner Herzog doesn’t make “normal” movies, and while that is a gross generalization, it’s also completely true in his case. The German auteur’s filmmography reads like an issue of Bizarre magazine (yes, it exists): violently manic actors, set pieces that almost killed large swaths of crewmembers, short films where he boils and eats his own footwear, and Bruno S., a mentally unbalanced street...