The stories and music of Les Gilliam
KOSU and the Oklahoma Arts Council have launched a new monthly feature called State of the Arts, profiling Oklahoma musicians and artists. This month, KOSU profiles the state Balladeer, Les Gilliam.
‘Machete’: Out Of The ‘Grindhouse,’ Trailer First
In 2007, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse, a loving homage to violent, low-budget exploitation cinema, was met with box-office indifference. Most moviegoers couldn’t get excited about seeing a big-budget recreation of obscure, amateurish cult films they’d likely never encountered much in the first place. Why spend over three hours in a theater watching a [...]
‘Noodle Shop’: A Coen Brothers Tale Goes East
Chinese director Zhang Yimou makes films of epic sweep (Hero) and tragic depth (Raise the Red Lantern). He’s not known for laughs, so learning that Zhang might remake Joel and Ethan Coen’s 1984 debut film, Blood Simple, might strike some as a bit like reading that Martin Scorsese will direct the next Transformers flick. Scorsese [...]
A Family Torn Asunder Takes The ‘Last Train Home’
A sea of colorful umbrellas surges towards a train station at the beginning of Last Train Home, Lixin Fan’s heartbreaking documentary about Chinese migrant workers. The stunning beauty of this opening panorama disguises the ugliness beneath: Each year in February, 130 million of these laborers return en masse to their rural villages for the Chinese [...]
‘Public Enemy’ Wraps Up A Criminally Good Saga
Neither director Jean-Francois Richet’s style nor gangster Jacques Mesrine’s swagger falters in Public Enemy Number One, the exhilarating followup to Mesrine: Killer Instinct. With its shoot-outs, prison breaks and wild flights of ego, the saga’s second half was sure to be watchable. But it’s also smart, funny and incisive — both about Mesrine and about [...]
Where’s The Beef? One Man’s Search For ‘Steak’
Each year, on his birthday, my mother asks my father where he wants to eat. “The Chan,” my father usually replies, the smile already spreading across his face. He’s referring to House of Chan, a red-lantern Chinese restaurant turned high-end steakhouse in Toronto, famous for thick cuts of tender beef, broiled, buttered and brought to [...]
‘White Wedding’ Celebrates Love, South African-Style
Ever since the movie Wedding Crashers turned into a summer blockbuster a few years ago, hot weather has been a time for cineplex nuptials. Two years ago, producers sent Mamma Mia marching down the theater aisle in July. Last summer it was The Hangover in June. And now, with Hollywood taking a marital breather, South [...]
‘The American’: An Abstract, Angst-Filled Art Thriller
The paranoid thriller The American is spare, solemn, uninflected. It’s like Camus’ The Stranger and all of the pulp novels in the ’50s and ’60s, French and American, that cribbed its existential outlook. The movie has an amoral hero with no ties who moves from country to country, sheds past lives, and either kills for [...]
Three Books For The Self-Help Skeptic
You’re probably a little skeptical about people who read self-help books. But I see these missives a little differently: After all, if I don’t help myself, who will? Once upon a time, I was in a rut — the same negative thoughts every day, the same disorganized mess at home, problems that never got solved. [...]
‘The American’: A Domestic Bond, Drawn In Miniature
George Clooney is no stranger to big summer blockbusters, but here it is early fall, and he’s appearing in a very different kind of film. The American is a bleak and atmospheric art-house thriller that’s more of an aesthetic experience than an emotional one. If Robert Bresson, the austere French minimalist, had directed a James [...]
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