I wish “Blood on the Highway” were a short, because it took maybe two minutes before I wanted to see its three leads dead. It makes the similar, recent “Stan Helsing” look as sophisticated as Woody Allen. Those leads are friends Bone (Deva George), Carrie (Robin Gierhart) and Sam (Nate Rubin), en route to a […]
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Don McKay
It’s tough to figure out whether “Don McKay” wants to be a noir thriller, a black comedy or both. Just when it heads one way, something happens to suggest the other. This constant push-and-pull process keeps the indie film from being a true gem, although it’s certainly worth a viewing. Behind the blah, generic title […]
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Control Alt Delete
When I first got an iMac in 1999, I told my friend Chris I loved it so much that I wanted to have sex with it. I was just kidding, of course, but Lewis, the protagonist of the comedy “Control Alt Delete,” isn’t. Played by Tyler Labine (TV’s “Reaper“), Lewis is a computer programmer who’s […]
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Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Complete Seventh Season
By now, the template of Larry David’s HBO series, “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” has become so familiar that the ways in which seemingly unconnected events converge and conspire to embarrass him in the end no longer surprise. This in no way, shape or form, however, suggests that the anti-sitcom has lost its coarse, corrosive sense of […]
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Burn Notice: Season Three
Even if the third season of “Burn Notice” isn’t quite up to the standards of its older brothers, it remains one of the most purely entertaining shows on television. During original broadcast on USA, these 16 episodes were broken up into two clumps, aired nearly half a year apart from one another; it’s far more […]
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From Paris with Love
The boys are back in town, only this time, the boys are John Travolta and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, and the town is Paris. Yes, we get to see the Eiffel Tower again, but at least this time, no one blows it up or knocks it down. In the world of thrillers, that passes for realism, […]
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The 41-Year-Old Virgin Who Knocked Up Sarah Marshall and Felt Superbad About It
Bryan Callen has the unfortunate distinction of starring in one of the best comedies of the decade (“The Hangover“) … and now, one of its worst, in “The 41-Year-Old Virgin Who Knocked Up Sarah Marshall and Felt Superbad About It.” There’s not a single laugh to be found. As the title suggests, it’s a parody. […]
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The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu
<iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=oklahgazet-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B003NTUOGU&fc1=000000&IS2=1 Barring Nicolas Cage’s cameo in “Grindhouse,” the Sax Rohmer character of evil genius Dr. Fu Manchu hasn’t graced the silver screen since Peter Sellers played him in the 1980 parody, “The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu.” The movie is a failure, but a noble one. Now available through the burn-on-demand Warner Archive […]
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Daybreakers
<iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=oklahgazet-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B002ZG97CO&fc1=000000&IS2=1 Imagine a near future where a plague has turned most everyone into a vampire, or just let “Daybreakers” do it for you. In the film from brothers Michael and Peter Spierig (“Undead“), Ethan Hawke is Edward Dalton, a vampire who works as a hematologist for a large pharmaceutical corporation headed by the greedy […]
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Death Race 2000
Throughout elementary school, 1975’s “Death Race 2000” was one of those fabled movies I’d hear about on the playground and think that it couldn’t possibly be true. A race where people mow down pedestrians for points? No way! Yes way, as I finally discovered via a rental in the late 1980s. Although Paul Bartel’s film […]