It’s a common occurrence within urban sprawl: Historically thriving neighborhoods succumb to Father Time as new developments arise, businesses relocate and the activity of city-dwellers inevitably shifts from one area to another. Until recently, Oklahoma City’s Plaza District — the mile-long strip along 16th Street between Classen Boulevard and Pennsylvania Avenue — was merely another […]
entertainment
Posted inArts & Culture
Flying Fists of Kung Fu / Kickin’ It Shaolin Style
After about the third or fourth film I watched — either 5 Pattern Dragon Claws or 18 Fatal Strikes, I can’t be sure — I noticed how similar the movies were to another. I wasn’t exactly surprised, having digesting so many of these cheap chopsocky efforts over the years, but never in such close proximity. Basically, each […]
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The Tower
Set on Christmas Eve (thereby also making it akin to Die Hard), the film takes place at Tower Sky, a twin-towered luxury apartment building of some 1,700 units and 108 floors. The towers connect via a shivers-inducing “sky bridge” with see-through floor. If that makes your stomach do flip-flops, perhaps it can be settled with […]
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The Best Film You’ve Never Seen: 35 Directors Champion the Forgotten or Critically Savaged Movies They Love — Robert K. Elder
Luckily for Elder and his readers, there’s plenty more. A companion of sorts to Elder’s 2011 book The Film That Changed My Life, the Chicago Review Press paperback operates on several levels, from learning tool to reference guide to Netflix queue-filler. As with the earlier work, the author leans on 35 directors to build its […]
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Anatomy / Anatomy 2
As Paula quickly discovers through her studies, there exists a crazy, frat-like organization on campus whose members like to perform autopsies. What’s so crazy about that? The surgeons of this secret society like to perform said autopsies on live humans. Naturally, that results in danger for her and creepy imagery for us. Slick, sick and […]
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Nice Guys Don’t Work in Hollywood: The Adventures of an Aesthete in the Movie Business — Curtis Harrington
Unlike so many Tinseltown true tales, Nice Guys Don’t Work in Hollywood doesn’t begin with a tumultuous childhood. Although the only child grew up in the throes of the Great Depression, Harrington’s upbringing was happy. He found escape (and influence) in the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, the pages of Esquire magazine and the flicker […]
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OkC pride Week!
A host of activities this week celebrate OKC’s annual Pride Week, including: —OKC Pride Block Party, from 7 to 11 p.m. Friday at the N.W. 39th Street Strip, featuring entertainment, music and a crawfish boil; —the family-friendly OKC Pride Festival, from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday at downtown’s Film Row, featuring entertainment, food and […]
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Flash Gordon: The Complete Series
Now that I’ve seen its long-delayed DVD set from Mill Creek Entertainment, I can say that, to my surprise, it’s not. Oh, it’s still not “good,” but it’s watchable in a minimal-investment, entertainment-as-wallpaper way. The first step for interested parties is to remove any hopes that this small-screen Flash Gordon will be anything like the […]
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Suddenly
Especially for generations who were introduced to Ol’ Blue Eyes via Cannonball Run II, it’s easy to forget Sinatra could act, and in Suddenly, he does that quite well as John Baron, an assassin for hire who takes over a nice family’s home in the small town of the title in order to whack the […]
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Halloween II / Halloween III: Season of the Witch / Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers / Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers
And if there weren’t, why do the sequels keep being re-released? The first four recently were — yet again, but with valid reason to upgrade and/or double-dip. Modest theatrical hits in 1988 and 1989, respectively, Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers and Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers make Blu-ray debuts courtesy of […]