While Okie Shorts provided some great works this year (such as the comedy sketch My Own Prometheus about morning coffee and multiple morning identities, or the much talked about faux-documentary Faith Healer, who’s documented protagonists leaving a project reveals less about the film than the metaphor for audience and film-subject relationship), my interest was in two shorts that made analyses of Oklahoma a primary part of their structure. Read on…

In preparation for this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, I cozied up with a copy of Tetsuo: The Iron Man, director Shinya Tsukamoto’s 1989 sci-fi mindfuck. The film holds its own as a low budget visual masterpiece, sporting only a handful of dialogue, impressive prosthetics and a phenomenal, pounding soundtrack. With the third film in the series, Tetsuo: The Bullet Man, Tsukamoto keeps the material anything but stale, but his form has suffered gravely over the years. While the film’s concept is solid (man turns into gun) there is far too much time wasted on narrative, an odd complaint to say the least.

In general, I deride films for poor narrative structure (a festival disease, if you ask me), but the thing about the original Tetsuo is that the story is told so vividly through the visuals, that things like character and plot development rightfully fall to the wayside. Fantastic, horrific events just occur in front of you, inexplicably. There was an arc, but it manifested itself in the amount of iron that sprung out of the hero’s body. Read on…

Much like the film’s protagonist, Spork is a movie with a serious identity crisis. A veritable mashup of Napoleon Dynamite and Strictly Ballroom, director J.B. Ghuman, Jr. riffs on style but forgets to add the substance in this story a frizzy haired hermaphrodite who comes of age on the dance floor. It’s not quite a musical, a dance film or a hipster treasure trove, but instead a watered down version of all three at once.

Spork (Savannah Stehlin), so nicknamed because she isn’t quite a spoon or a fork (get it?), lives in a trailer park with her older brother. Her father left long ago and her mother is buried in the yard. Her best pal, Tootsie Roll (Sydney Park), lives in the trailer next door. Tootsie’s got a big mouth and the dance moves to back it up, but she rolls with a crowd of fly girls, which leaves Spork on her own once they get to school. Read on…

The statues are all distributed, the corks are all popped, and now it is time to talk about the 82^nd Academy Awards in the past tense. We’ll get to who won, but first off I’d like to talk about who lost: the viewing audience. This has to be one of the worst awards broadcasts in recent memory. Overlong and underwhelming, the only thing interesting in the show was actually finding out who won, which is weird because that often takes a backseat to the rest of the spectacle.

Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin were charming, albeit neutered, hosts. They farmed the opening number out to Neil Patrick Harris, which was predictably fine, but it seemed like a complete redux of his bouts as Tony and Emmy host. On paper it sounds poignant, but in practice it felt stale. I long for the days when Billy Crystal would superimpose himself into the top nominated films. I can understand the new hosts wanting to move forward with an original spin, only this felt like a step backwards. Read on…

Precious. Intimate. Immediate. Privileged. These are the ways we can describe the various moments that occur in Spike Jonze’s adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. These terms, which any frosh film student should recognize, are generally associated with documentary cinema. They have become applicable here, however, because Mr. Jonze rightly decided to let the pomp and circumstance that comes with any major studio children’s film fall away, focusing this film on the rambunctious perspective of a child in flux.

Hyperactive and creative Max is a boy with seemingly no friends but his mother. Always looking for an adventure to go on, he is stuck in a life of suburban boredom and Oedipal rage (aren’t we all?). There are a bevy of Freudian signifiers which lead to Max’s escape from his home on a journey to the ends of the earth. There he meets the folks we lovingly call “the wild things” (Buber, anyone?) who take him in as their king. At home with the beasts, our young ruffian slowly finds that even life in his own private utopia can get complicated. Read on…

Oscars in tow, Joel and Ethan Coen don’t seem to know the meaning of a slow period. Their latest project, A Serious Man, just like Burn After Reading before it, is a small film with big ambitions. It is a family drama; it is a memoir of the golden age of American suburban rabbinic Judaism; it is a study of the intellect’s struggle with the belief (or disbelief) in a higher power. Acerbically funny and virtuously moody, this film is yet another feather in the cap of the brothers Coen.

In a landscape littered with cinematic imposters, A Serious Man features a main character who can accurately be described as a classic “schlemiel”. Larry Gopnik, played with remarkable sincerity by Michael Stuhlbarg, is a man who never asked for anything from God in his life, but when he is faced with trial upon trial, Mr. Gopnik finds his latent bent to the point of imminent breakage. A Physics professor at the local university, Larry is an impotent, small man who gets trampled from every angle. His wife is leaving him, a student is stong-arming him into a getting a better grade, his pothead son’s Bar Mitzvah is approaching amid mounting financial pressure, and his awkward brother takes up the only remaining space in his home. Read on…

As the explody, franchise-licious summer wanes and awards-chasing fare creeps up on us, it is nice to know that movies like Extract still get made amidst our modern state of Hollywood sameness. Simple, funny and only lewd enough to make your grandma shudder, Mike Judge’s new film is a formulaic comedy for the set who think they are over formulaic comedy.

Jason Bateman, who in my opinion is often the saving grace of otherwise clunky films (see: Juno, The Kingdom, Hancock; one can only hope for Couples Retreat), plays Joel, a sexually frustrated owner of a flavor extract manufacturing plant. Having invented a better way to make concentrated flavors (the film’s eponymous extract), he has found a way to turn a decent enough profit to get a big house, a fast car and a big TV for his wife to watch while he wanks away in the bathroom. Seemingly idyllic, everything from the annoying neighbor to his nagging employees make Joel long for his bartending days, when life was simple. Read on…

The Ugly Truth is a romantic comedy that is meant to be a vehicle for Katherine Heigl’s comedic talents. Unfortunately, she is grossly upstagesd by Gerard Butler’s deft skill in the laughs department. Instead of driving this pony, she is more often (literally) the butt of every joke. The film follows Heigl as Abby, an uptight control freak television producer, who meets her match in Mr. Butler as Mike, a misogynistic slob who lands a position on her show. Believe it or not, this boring redux of every other rom com you’ve ever seen is actually an attempt at a smarter kind of comedy. Going out on a limb, the film keeps the dirt in to earn an R rating, rendering this a raunchy sex-comedy tailor made for proper ladies. We know that boys will go see R-rated romps, but will women? Yes, but they’re going to need something a little more substantial than The Ugly Truth.

Written by veterans Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith as well as newcomer Nicole Eastman, the script saves almost all of the good lines for Mr. Butler’s chauvinist pig. I can only imagine how they must have relished banging out lines like “Well thank your pussy for me” for the British beefcake. On the other hand, they handed Ms. Heigl the word “cock” and asked her to run with it. As the slick Mike dips behind a couch before Abby answers her door in her new My-Fair-Lady-ed skin, he calls her back at the last second, only to smack her ass for an uproarious laugh. He is the power broker here, he is the funny one. Read on…