She plays Laura, a dental hygienist who all but ignores her only child, Dennis (Daniel Yelsky, “Meet Monica Velour“), with her overworked hubby (Chris O’Donnell, TV’s “NCIS: Los Angeles”), with whom she argues who checked out of their marriage first. Doesn’t matter, because he dies of a heart attack while on the receiving end of […]
drama
Posted inArts & Culture
From tusk till brawn
Somewhere on your Google machines, you can find a Top 10 list of the best arm-wrestling movies of all time. Perched at No. 4 is “Over the Top,” Sylvester Stallone’s 1987 flop opus about the sport. And the other nine spots are completely blank. I’d like to think that even if the chart weren’t a […]
Posted inNews
Not OK in OKC?
New York Daily News scribe Mitch Lawrence, a longtime NBA reporter, wrote Sept. 17 that head coach Scott Brooks chafes at the meddling of General Manager Sam Presti, but that’s not all Thunder fans should be worried about. It has something to do with its center easing up on its point guard a tad bit. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Mr. Nice
Here, the switch from mere Oxford student to corrupt bad boy is flipped with one look at the stunner Elsa Pataky (“Fast Five“) and a taste of cannabis. From there, the path of Marks (Rhys Ifans, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1”) is marked with marriage, divorce, the IRA, MI-6, LSD, hashish, arrests, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Restless
As limp as overcooked spaghetti noodles, this drama has to be a low point in the ever-wavering, oftexperimental directorial career of Gus Van Sant (“Milk”), because it feels as if it were created by tweens rather than grown men. Van Sant has recruited actors who play their teenaged characters as if they were half that […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Beaver
Try to separate Mel Gibson the actor from Mel Gibson the potentially crazy man who hurls epithets and anti-Semitic remarks in equal measure. Trust me: If you ignored the work of every Hollywood performer whose offscreen life is effed-up, or whose views don’t align with yours, all you could watch would be a test pattern. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Meet Monica Velour
A self-described dork at age 17, Tobe (Dustin Ingram) escapes his friendless existence by obsessing over his favorite porn star of the 1970s, Monica Velour, whose work include such hardcore skin flicks as “Saturday Night Beaver,” “M*U*F*F” and “Pork’n Mindy.” When Tobe notices the now-middle-aged Velour (Kim Cattrall) will be making an appearance at a […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Beginners
They range from the witty (Mae West’s “You’re never too old to become younger”) to the philosophical (Seneca’s “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end”). Writer/director Mike Mills’ “Beginners,” a sweet if sometimes irritatingly twee film playing exclusively at AMC Quail Springs Mall 24, encompasses that same range. It doesn’t always succeed in […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Haunted Summer
To combat this, producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus made the occasional stab at respectability, like 1988’s “Haunted Summer.” Directed by Ivan Passer (“Loves of a Blonde”), it’s a dramatization of the wild week in 1816 amid a summer Switzerland paradise when horror fiction practically was born overnight. Mind you, it’s not too high-minded; a […]
Posted inMusic
Go Witt the flow
Why? The redheaded thesp, perhaps best known for her work in “Urban Legend,” “Mr. Holland’s Opus” and TV’s “Cybill,” is also an accomplished singer/songwriter and classically trained pianist. Having spent the last three years performing songs of her own creation in venues nationwide, she’ll do the same at The Blue Door, 2805 N. McKinley. In […]