And that’s fine with me. 42 — the number Robinson wore on his uniform — tells an important story that, almost inconceivably, has eluded big-screen treatment since Robinson himself starred in 1950’s The Jackie Robinson Story. Relative unknown Chadwick Boseman (TV’s Persons Unknown) gives a stirring, if uncomplicated, performance as the supremely gifted ballplayer who […]
Phil Bacharach
Posted inArts & Culture
The Company You Keep
The Company You Keep, which opens Friday at AMC Quail Springs Mall 24, 2501 W. Memorial, is boomer meditation disguised as political drama. Directed by and starring Robert Redford, it pretends to be ambivalent about the 1960s counterculture, but the reverence of the treatment suggests otherwise. Last seen onscreen in 2007’s Lions for Lambs, Redford […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Monster mash
The Phantom of the Opera7:30 p.m. Thursday Lon Chaney’s name is forever associated with 1925’s The Phantom of the Opera, and for good reason: It’s one of the great performances in silent films. I don’t care how old you are or how many times you’ve seen it: When Christine (Mary Philbin) unmasks the Phantom 38 […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Happy People: A Year in the Taiga / The Gatekeepers
Happy People: A Year in the Taiga Love a good documentary? If so, you’re in luck, since two excellent, if decidedly different, ones are in town this week. Werner Herzog is easily among the most singular of documentary makers, having made such elegantly strange works as Grizzly Man and Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Still, fans […]
Posted inNews
For sale: KFOR
KFOR and its sister station, KAUT Channel 43, are among 21 stations up on the block by Oak Hill Capital Partners, the parent company of Local TV LLC. “I can’t say anything about it. All I can tell you is we’re for sale,” said Joe Kozlowski, KFOR’s creative services director. A spokesman for Local TV, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Zero Dark Thirty
Some, including Republican Sen. John McCain, accused director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, who last collaborated on The Hurt Locker, of falsely suggesting that intel gleaned through torture is what led the CIA to bin Laden. The ensuing controversy hit fever pitch. Is ZDT a nearly journalistic work? Is it morally repugnant propaganda? Mostly, […]
Posted inMusic
Webb fluid
Few songwriters have reached the stratospheric heights as that of Jimmy Webb. By age 16, he was working for Motown Records. At age 20, he wrote “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” which later was a smash for Glen Campbell and would become one of the most recorded songs of the 20th century. With […]
Posted inArts & Culture
West of Memphis
It says something about the horrific saga of the West Memphis Three that their experience still manages to be so shocking. One might have thought that three HBO documentaries, the Paradise Lost films of Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, would have been sufficient to tell this story. But West of Memphis, which opens Friday exclusively […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Argo
It’s a testament to the skills of the filmmakers that Argo delivers a deluge of suspense even when its ending is never in doubt. Up for seven Oscars on Sunday, it was released earlier this week on Blu-ray and DVD. There’s no way the movie industry could have resisted this stranger-than-fiction yarn. The film chronicles […]
Posted inNews
Up in smoke
On a 6-2 vote, the Senate General Government Committee rejected Senate Bill 36, which sought to repeal the state pre-emption law that supersedes local governments. SB 36 was referred to that panel after Sen. Brian Crain, R-Tulsa, chair of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee, had declined to grant a hearing on the legislation. […]