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Dexter: The Seventh Season

There's no way to discuss the seventh and penultimate season of Showtime's hit Dexter without acknowledging how the previous year ended. Therefore, if you haven't finished the sixth season, stop reading now. You've got work to do.
05/21/2013 | Comments 0

Nightfall

As Simon Lam gets older, he gets better. The veteran actor has appeared in such in seminal HK action films of the 1990s as Once Upon a Time in China (opposite Jet Li) and Bullet in the Head (directed by John Woo); in the aughts, he graced audience and critical favorites Election and Ip Man.
05/20/2013 | Comments 0

Grand Duel

Lee Van Cleef enjoyed a secondary career in Italy cranking out spaghetti Westerns, with little regard to quality. However, 1972’s Grand Duel — aka The Big Showdown — is deserving of its Grand label. No wonder Quentin Tarantino borrowed its sweeping theme song by Luis Bacalov for Kill Bill; you'll recognize it in two notes.
05/20/2013 | Comments 0

The Last Stand

Early in The Last Stand, the small-town sheriff played by Arnold Schwarzenegger says, "It's my day off. Should be a quiet weekend." That's the new way of saying, "I've got one week to retirement," because it signals — with flashing neon and everything — that life is going to royally upend those plans.
05/17/2013 | Comments 0

Texas Chainsaw

One of the most inconsistent franchises in movie history is the one beget by Tobe Hooper's 1974 classic, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. How does one follow all those less-than-beloved sequels? Lionsgate's latest in the series — the seventh — has a solution: Ignore 'em.
05/17/2013 | Comments 0
Home · Articles · Movies · Documentary · Page One: Inside the New...
Documentary

Page One: Inside the New York Times


All the news that’s fit to print becomes fit to watch, in the arresting documentary ‘Page One: Inside The New York Times.’

Rod Lott August 3rd, 2011  

Page One: Inside The New York Times
5:30 and 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday
Oklahoma City Museum of Art
415 Couch
okcmoa.com
236-3100
$8

Startling admission: As a career-long journalist in one form or another, it is difficult for me to be truly objective about the documentary “Page One: Inside The New York Times.” No such problem exists with the Times’ own Michael Kinsley, who panned it as “a mess,” but don’t listen to him — I’m guessing most Oklahomans pay no mind to NYT, anyway — because it’s an enormously entertaining work.

“Page One” played the deadCENTER Film Festival in June to a sold-out crowd at Oklahoma City Museum of Art and rapturous applause at the end; OKCMOA now brings it back for five showings between Friday and Sunday.

As the title suggests, this is a flyon-the-wall look at the inner workings of what is arguably the fourth estate’s most respected American newspaper, whose influence is felt far beyond the five boroughs.

With a heavy concentration on its news and media desks, we follow its editors, reporters and other staffers for a year. Director Andrew Rossi (“Le Cirque: A Table in Heaven”) lucked out with a meaty one: a time at which the world inside the Times building was shaking up as unpredictably as the one outside it.

While the paper reports on WikiLeaks — not yet a household name — and the war in Afghanistan, it also feels the prickly end of the “new media” shift, primarily in layoffs of valuable, productive, longtime employees.

If anyone is to benefit from participating in Rossi’s 12-month exercise — and he already has — it is David Carr. Having clawed back into the paper chase from a crack addiction, the curmudgeonly reporter takes BS from absolutely no one. His gravel-strewn voice is intimidating alone, but his questions and comebacks sting like a whip. In one of the film’s greatest scenes, the guys behind Vice magazine learn this the hard way. Carr’s personality is so unique, so vibrant, he’d be worthy of Oscar consideration ... if only it were a performance.

Refreshingly, the documentary includes instances of Times execs owning up to mistakes of the past. This not only helps alleviate notions that the work is inherently biased, but makes me feel better that it happens to the best of us.

But don’t think only journalists can enjoy the workplace drama that unfolds within the Times’ walls; many more people than detectives and advertising execs watch any given episode of “The Killing” and “Mad Men,” respectively, and “Page One” is fraught with no less emotion.

 
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