Here’s what I think about Upstream Color nearly three weeks after seeing it: I’m unsure. I’ve not yet finished processing it. I can’t even explain the title. Screening Thursday through Sunday at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, the self-distributed film marks the belated sophomore effort of writer/director/producer/actor/editor/ composer/cinematographer/camera operator Shane Carruth, who became an […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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Watching history
“The addition of television news archives is extremely valuable in helping us preserve and share the history of our state,” said Bob Blackburn, executive director of the Oklahoma Historical Society. The collection includes more than 34,000 tapes with real-time, eyewitness accounts depicting historical events from the 1950s through the 1990s. The videos, films and other […]
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Boxy, but good
Fill a box with 18 random items. Give it to a team of employees from local businesses. See what happens. Science Museum Oklahoma has done just that with its second Out of the Box exhibition, featuring the creations of 11 local businesses whose task was to take those random items — such as springs, hinges, […]
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Banned in the USA
O. Louis Guglielmi’s Subway Exit (1946) When the topic of artistic censorship is raised, odds are that works cited include Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ or just about anything by Robert Mapplethorpe. The United States government, however, in that golden era of anti-Commie paranoia, arguably did the best job of it by the disbanding and dismantling […]
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The sounds of Science
Jerrod Smith and Phil Danner’s Contextual Relations As director of Science Museum Oklahoma’s Satellite Galleries, Scott Henderson wants to take art in Oklahoma City into a whole new dimension. Eschewing the typical “pictures on the wall” or “sculpture on the floor” style of exhibition, he wanted to create something that would be a total sensory […]
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Big Jim
From Jim Halsey’s collection are guitars signed by Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney. You may never have heard of Jim Halsey, but surely you’ve heard of the acts he’s discovered, managed or guided the careers of: Wanda Jackson, Roy Clark, Hank Thompson and The Oak Ridge Boys, to name just a few. Chances are, without […]
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Wuthering Heights
Costume dramas are not my thing. That goes double when they’re staged with an epic sweep — true tests of patience and bladder resolve. So there’s something admirable about directors tackling oft-adapted material with a decidedly different approach, which could account for two such pictures making many a critic’s 2012 best list: Joe Wright’s Anna […]
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The Loneliest Planet
It’s curious that the Internet Movie Database has classified The Loneliest Planet as a “thriller,” since the film forgoes not just all that genre’s trappings, but narrative altogether. Forty-nine minutes pass before an act of what passes for conflict occurs. Ironically, doing so further slows a glacial pace. The existential Western Meek’s Cutoff looks like […]