Saturday 25 May
OKG Newsletter
Phil Bacharach
At Any Price
A gifted filmmaker takes a detour with a farmland melodrama.
Drama
Phil Bacharach
Ramin Bahrani has directed three extraordinary, independently produced films about characters living on the margins on society. That trio — Man Push Cart (2005), Chop Shop (2007) and Goodbye Solo (2008) — rightly earned him scads of critical acclaim and excitement about his future projects.
Exhausted exams
In the wake of glitches with online standardized testing, some school districts and state lawmakers question the validity of the exams.
News
Phil Bacharach
Nothing gets people testy like test-taking, especially when accessing the test becomes a sort of test in itself. That was the case last month for 9,100 Oklahoma students in sixth through 12 grade whose scores on online tests were invalidated because of a technological snafu.
To the Wonder
Drama
Phil Bacharach
To the Wonder
7:30 p.m. Thursday, 5:30 and 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday
Oklahoma City Museum of Art
415 Couch
okcmoa.com
236-3100
$6-$8
The Place Beyond the Pines
The route of ‘The Place Beyond the Pines’ is great to good.
Thriller
Phil Bacharach
The Place Beyond the Pines is two-thirds of a great movie. Director Derek Cianfrance’s follow-up to 2010’s Oscar-nominated Blue Valentine is a tense, powerful crime thriller with some weighty stuff on its mind. It speaks to the filmmaker’s know-how that not even a crazily contrived third act can damper its haunting power.
The Company You Keep
Old radicals don't learn new tricks.
Thriller
Phil Bacharach
Baby boomers can be their own worst enemy. The generation that was going to change the world instead settled on thinking the world of themselves. Youthful idealism, aging and compromised idealism, pining for that youthful idealism — nothing fuels anti-boomer sentiment like boomer sentimentality.
42
This Jackie Robinson biopic is a solid hit.
Drama
Phil Bacharach
In chronicling the real-life tale of Jackie Robinson, who broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier in 1947 when he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers, 42 is schmaltzy, sentimental and shameless. There is no dabbling in highfalutin niceties like subtext or nuance. Writer-director Brian Helgeland, who penned the hardly simplistic L.A. Confidential, keeps his focus simple and is content to let his hero worship fly.
Happy People: A Year in the Taiga / The Gatekeepers
Two new documentaries have little in common in subject, but share excellence in quality.
Documentary
Phil Bacharach
Happy People: A Year in the Taiga
7:30 p.m. Thursday, 5:30 and 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday
Oklahoma City Museum of Art
415 Couch
okcmoa.com
236-3100
$6-$8
The Gatekeepers
daily, ongoing
AMC Quail Springs Mall 24
2501 W. Memorial
755-2466
amctheatres.com
For sale: KFOR
Webb fluid
Songwriting just comes naturally to Jimmy Webb, an Oklahoma native who penned several of the 20th century’s pop classics.
Zero Dark Thirty
The real torture is its incredible tension.
Drama
Phil Bacharach
Don’t trust the viewers.
Trusting them appears to be the cardinal sin of Zero Dark Thirty, a masterful, absorbing film dramatizing the CIA's 10-year hunt for Osama bin Laden. It has been at the center of controversy for its depiction of U.S. intelligence agents using “enhanced interrogation techniques,” otherwise known as torture.
West of Memphis
The documentary chronicles a shocking and sickening miscarriage of justice.
Documentary
Phil Bacharach
Critics of our criminal justice system don’t have to search far for nightmare scenarios of wrongful convictions. From cases of false confessions to exonerations through DNA testing, the past few decades are rife with tales of injustice that would give even Kafka the willies.
Argo
2012's presumed Best Picture winner hits home video.
Thriller
Phil Bacharach
Generating suspense from a story that is a matter of historical record is no easy thing. That was the primary challenge facing Ben Affleck and Chris Terrio, the director-star and writer, respectively, of Argo, a thriller inspired by a real-life covert operation that helped rescue six U.S. embassy workers out of Iran during the 1979 hostage crisis.
Up in smoke
State legislators kill a bill that would have allowed local governments to establish strong tobacco restrictions.
News
Phil Bacharach
A state Senate committee today snuffed out a bill that would have allowed local governments to establish anti-tobacco ordinances more restrictive than what's currently set by the state.
Amour
The Oscar-nominated drama is cold-blooded, yet remarkable.
Drama
Phil Bacharach
Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke isn't the obvious choice for a movie about love at its weightiest and most profound. In previous works like Funny Games, The Piano Teacher, The White Ribbon and Caché, he has crafted cinematic nipple twists that tweak audiences while examining humankind at its cruelest.
Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel
An icon of fashion takes the spotlight.
Documentary
Phil Bacharach
You might not know it, but chances are Diana Vreeland has a great deal to do with what you think when it comes to fashion, style and design. As fashion editor for Harper’s Bazaar and, later, editor of Vogue, she injected post-World War II America with an almost revolutionary sense of, as she put it, “pizzazz.”
