Hitchcock, which opens Friday, isn’t a bad movie; it’s just a baffling one. Purportedly about the making of 1960’s Psycho, it winds up a hodgepodge of old-fashioned biopic, bogus psychological thriller and simplistic domestic melodrama. The film, however, is hardly the work of incompetents. Director Sacha Gervasi has an absorbing rockumentary (Anvil: The Story of […]
Phil Bacharach
Posted inArts & Culture
Fred Won’t Move Out
Old age, a spouse suffering with dementia, grown children in the position of caring for their parents — these are tough, complicated themes in Fred Won’t Move Out, which screens Friday through Sunday at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. That might sound like emotionally exhausting stuff, but this small indie has a surprisingly light […]
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Lincoln
As if the subject alone isn’t worthy of adulation, it comes with a towering pedigree: Oscar-winning director Steven Spielberg (Saving Private Ryan), Oscar-winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis (There Will Be Blood) and a script by Pulitzer-winning playwright Tony Kushner. To its credit, Lincoln has lengthy stretches in which it’s as absorbing as it wants to be. […]
Posted inMusic
Wanda Jackson — Unfinished Business
Here she builds on the success of last year’s The Party Ain’t Over, her collaboration with Jack White, but unlike that effort, this album is raw, spare and constructed to showcase the Oklahoma-born-and-bred Jackson’s prodigious gifts. Ample credit goes to Justin Townes Earle, who produced this 10-song collection of blues, country, gospel and soul covers. […]
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Argo
There’s no way the movie industry could have resisted this stranger-than-fiction yarn. The film chronicles how CIA operative Tony Mendez (Affleck) saved the six by establishing a phony cover story that they were a Canadian movie crew scouting locations in Tehran for a science-fiction cheapie titled Argo. Details of that real-life mission would not be […]
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The Perks of Being a Wallflower
That’s what makes The Perks of Being a Wallflower so impressive. It understands the excess of feeling that characterizes being a teenager, and it doesn’t prettify or minimize the trials faced by the shy and socially awkward kid sitting alone in the school cafeteria. Written and directed by Stephen Chbosky, who has done an admirable […]
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Looper
But then something remarkable happens: Looper plays fair with its own mind-bending construct. Balancing muscular action with the intellectual approximation of an M.C. Escher drawing, Johnson delivers on the considerable promise of his previous films, Brick and The Brothers Bloom. We start in 2044, where time travel is about 30 years away, but still figures […]
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Searching for Sugar Man
Take, for example, Searching for Sugar Man. Opening Friday at AMC Quail Springs Mall 24, 2501 W. Memorial, the doc introduces us to the saga of the one-named Rodriguez, a criminally unknown singer-songwriter from the early 1970s whose career sank into obscurity in his native United States, but whose influence proved monumental in, of all […]
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Peace, Love & Misunderstanding
God knows this isn’t the first indie film to fall prey to contrivances, inept predictability and forced quirkiness. But what’s so perplexing is that Peace, now on DVD and Blu-ray after a small theatrical run, is made by such talented people. Its director is the usually dependable Bruce Beresford, whose credits range from Breaker Morant […]
Posted inMusic
Still whipped
Photo: Joshua Dalsimer The planet is heating up, running out of fossil fuel and getting stingy with clean air and water. World nations seem chronically on the verge of global economic collapse. Crazed gunmen and suicide bombers make daily headlines. Literacy is down, obesity is up and Kim Kardashian is a household name. Humanity, meet […]