Oklahoma City Council voted 7-0 last Tuesday to defer potential pay hikes for the trio until Dec. 17, but no reason was given for the delay. City councilmen discussed the issue in executive session, which is not open to the public. Couch, Municipal Counselor Kenneth Jordan and City Auditor Jim Williamson were scheduled to receive […]
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Debt ceiling? Global warming? (Internet?) Bah!
For years, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Tulsa) has argued global warming doesn’t exist. It’s fictional and a figment of every scientist’s imagination. According to the good senator, it’s an attack on the energy industry by tree-hugging environmentalists. Now, Oklahoma’s other senator, Tom Coburn (R-Muskogee), contends the nation’s debt ceiling isn’t real and the U.S. won’t default […]
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MAPS threat lingers
Kenneth Jordan Since Slane questioned the validity of the MAPS 3 election two weeks ago, OKC’s lead municipal counselor, Kenneth Jordan, delivered a letter Sept. 3 citing a 2011 state Supreme Court case, Thomas vs. Henry, that he claims validates the ballot language and election results. In the letter to Oklahoma Gazette, Jordan said the […]
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Legal challenge threatened over MAPS 3
Oklahoma City attorney David Slane contended that passage of the 2009 MAPS 3 package was unconstitutional based on a state law that restricts voters from approving multiple projects with a single-ballot question. Slane, known for taking often-unpopular stances on controversial issues, claims the ballot language violated the state’s so-called “single subject” law since it provided […]
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Street Trash
Debuting on Blu-ray in Synapse Films’ “Special Meltdown Edition,” the 1987 skid-row epic centers on an auto junkyard populated by homeless winos. One of them, who looks like famed Torgo from Manos: The Hands of Fate, finds that a decades-old bottle of Tenafly Viper purchased at the local liquor store causes those who drink it […]
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The Kentucky Fried Movie
Nothing more than a collection of roughly two dozen unrelated sketches, The Kentucky Fried Movie succeeds most at skewering its own medium: American commercial cinema. Fake trailers mock the exploitation fads of the era with Cleopatra Schwartz (blaxploitation), That’s Armageddon (disaster movies) and Catholic High School Girls in Trouble (youth sex films); they’re so dead-on, […]
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The Way, Way Back
Fox Searchlight — the studio that brought us Garden State, Juno and Little Miss Sunshine — has a knack for these pleasure centers, and The Way, Way Back is the latest installment in this line of cutesy, sentimental films. It opens Friday. The story follows the 14-year-old Duncan (Liam James, TV’s The Killing), an awkward, […]
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Enter the Dragon: 40th Anniversary Ultimate Collector’s Edition
With this, director Robert Clouse made what is easily Bruce Lee’s finest film (and then proceeded to follow it up with a never-ending string of schlock). While Lee is technically one point of a heroic triangle — with A Nightmare on Elm Street’s John Saxon and blaxploitation icon Jim Kelly being the others — let’s […]
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The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
Its joke is that Burt Wonderstone (Steve Carell, Hope Springs) and Anton Marvelton (Steve Buscemi, TV’s Boardwalk Empire) are improbably coiffed stage magicians in Vegas à la Siegfried & Roy, but without the tigers. As glitzy and showy as they are painfully unhip, the two friends have been working together for 30 years, but a […]
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Southwest’s best
Jim Keffer’s Food for Thought Using sculpture, photography, painting and cardboard, four artists created works to portray their individual perspectives of the American Southwest for JRB Art at The Elms’ current exhibition. Joy Reed Belt, gallery owner and curator, selected artists Shirley Thomson-Smith, Jim Keffer, Jenny Gummersall and Jason Cytacki for the Art of the […]