Most people play in their first band sometime in high school. But recent high school graduate Scottie Noonan — chief songwriter, singer and guitarist of Enid acoustic-pop act The Fossil Youth — is already an old pro, with half a decade of experience behind him. “It’s helped me progress a lot quicker. A lot of […]
dvd
Posted inArts & Culture
ParaNorman
But while Coraline sustained a masterful level of Grimm-like creepiness, ParaNorman is only fitfully brilliant. The premise is promising. Eleven-year-old Norman Babcock (voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee, Let Me In) has a familiar problem: He sees dead people. Lots of ’em, actually, which makes him something of a pariah in the hamlet of Blithe Hollow, Mass. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Headhunters
Compared to the continent of Europe, the rate of death by guns in America is six times higher. You wouldn’t know it based on the current wave of crime films from that half of the globe. Arguably kicked off by the worldwide success of Sweden’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy, the movies of […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Elena
Moral bankruptcy looms over Elena, a noir-ish Russian-language drama that screens Thursday through Sunday at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, but director Andrey Zvyagintsev (The Return) would have us withhold judgment of the dreary, compromised characters he presents. In lengthy, often static shots, Zvyagintsev urges his audience to study every inch of the bleak […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Ruby Sparks
This changes when, at the urging of his shrink (Elliott Gould), Calvin writes about the young woman who wanders in and out of his slumber. The girl of his dreams literally becomes the girl of his dreams when she appears in his waking life, in his kitchen, as if they’re already a devoted couple. Her […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Hunger Games
I also found it disappointing — not as a near-billion-dollar grosser, but as a movie purported to be both action and science fiction. It’s too inert for the former and not imaginative enough for the latter. The title references a brutal annual competition staged by the government of a dystopian future, of which this film’s […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Kill List
The less you know beforehand, the better, but know that Jay (Neil Maskell, Atonement, Doghouse) is stricken by immense stress. Struggling under the grips of the recession has placed his marriage to Shel (MyAnna Buring, The Descent, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 1) on shaky ground, and their verbal disagreements dampen the spirits […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Cool Breeze
To get this right out of the way: Shaft, it is not. Heck, it’s not even Shaft in Africa. But it’s good enough for a temporary kick, like a mild beer buzz. Per its trailer, “Cool Breeze is cold business.” To continue the Shaft math, Thalmus Rasulala (whose other blaxploitation forays included roles in — […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Peter Gabriel: Secret World Live
Secret World finds the Genesis founder fully entrenched in his world-music phase — still ongoing today — but still playing his solo hits, such as the never-not-excellent “Solsbury Hill” and the John Cusack’s boom box-co-opted “In Your Eyes,” which becomes an epic encore. All are sung with passion, with backup (and occasional duet duties, i.e. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Raid: Redemption
About to hit — and I do mean hit — Blu-ray and DVD after a limited but lauded theatrical release in April, the film carries the barest of plots. For 10 years, a much-feared mobster in a 15th-floor compound has ruled over a decrepit apartment building housing not only his narcotic enterprise, but also the dregs […]