Blondie co-founder Chris Stein hears traces of his band in a lot of contemporary rock and pop, from Garbage to Lady Gaga. It’s an impressive range of influence for an outfit once considered the ugly duckling of New Wave acts toiling in the sweaty, steamy environs of New York’s CBGB back in the 1970s. “Assuming […]
Phil Bacharach
Posted inArts & Culture
Killer Joe
The second collaboration between director William Friedkin (The Exorcist, The French Connection) and Tulsa-born playwright Tracy Letts — their first being 2006’s Bug — this work serves up trailer-trash noir as savage as it is savagely funny. Not that all audiences will get the joke. Letts’ first play rolls around in the muck, and Friedkin […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Bill W.
Bill Wilson didn’t seem like the hero type. The product of a broken home in a time when that was rare, he was a businessman of middling success and a drunkard of considerable excess. But as the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, Wilson has saved innumerable lives with a 12-step program that has since been emulated […]
Posted inNews
The hell you say
Just ask Kaitlin Nootbaar, the last academic year’s valedictorian of Prague High School. Her reference of Hades’ hangout in her valedictory address last May so irritated school administrators that they’ve withheld her diploma until she writes letters of apology to everyone short of the school’s janitorial staff. Kaitlin’s father, David Nootbaar, said he and his […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Bourne Legacy
Director Tony Gilroy, who penned the previous Bourne films and wrote this one with his brother Dan, jump-starts the series by beginning — sorta — where 2007’s The Bourne Ultimatum left off. The events of that film have prompted U.S. intelligence honchos to scrap a super-clandestine spy program by way of killing off a small […]
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Elena
Moral bankruptcy looms over Elena, a noir-ish Russian-language drama that screens Thursday through Sunday at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, but director Andrey Zvyagintsev (The Return) would have us withhold judgment of the dreary, compromised characters he presents. In lengthy, often static shots, Zvyagintsev urges his audience to study every inch of the bleak […]
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Secret paroles?
“We were thinking this can’t be right,” Sharp recalled. “What was going on behind the scenes to even get her a chance to talk to the parole board? We thought [at the time of the 2008 trial] that we had eight years before we had to relive this, and all of a sudden, we had […]
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Self-defense
Irven Box, the former attorney for an Oklahoma City pharmacist convicted of murder, said his ex-client is likely feeding his current appeals lawyer inaccurate information prompting that attorney, Doug Friesen, to suggest Box’s representation was incompetent and unethical. The battle between defense attorneys heated up earlier this week, when Friesen said Box never told Jerome […]
Posted inMusic
Sugar sugar
Few things can be more terrifying than an out-of-control mob at a rock concert — especially when that mob hasn’t had a nap. Chris Wiser of kiddie-rock duo the Sugar Free Allstars nearly shudders at the memory of one such show, when he and his fellow Allstar, Rob Martin, faced a crowd of unruly children […]
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The Dark Knight Rises
Christian Bale returns as Gotham’s masked protector. Eight years — at least in movie time — have elapsed since the events of 2008’s The Dark Knight, and both Batman and his real-life identity, billionaire Bruce Wayne, have gone into seclusion. But the Batman is coerced back into action when an evil masked man named Bane (Tom […]