Projections Movie Blog

Movie on Oklahoma City bombing planned March 03, 2011 | Comment on this article

BY GENE TRIPLETT The entertainment trade magazine Variety was reporting on Thursday that a feature film about the Oklahoma City bombing is in the works with Barry Levinson set to direct. Levinson’s body of work includes other fact-based films such as “Good Morning, Vietnam,” “Bugsy” and the recent... Read More

‘Tough Without a Gun’ charts Bogie’s rise to Hollywood myth

March 03, 2011 The great crime novelist Raymond Chandler paid one Hollywood star the ultimate compliment when he observed that the actor could be “tough without a gun.” That actor was the iconic man’s man of classic cinema, Humphrey Bogart, whose well-chronicled life on screen and off gets a polished (if not terribly... Read More

‘Mad Men’ star again dons suit, fedora for ‘Adjustment Bureau’ role

March 02, 2011 BY DENNIS KING NEW YORK – These days, John Slattery worries about being too dapper. In a crisply tailored suit and rakish fedora, the slim, prematurely white-haired Boston native cuts a sophisticated figure as the chain-smoking, womanizing boss at the Manhattan ad agency Sterling Cooper in AMC’s hit series,... Read More

Movie review: 'Hall Pass' a predictably raunchy romp

February 28, 2011 The Farrelly brothers are back for another raunchy romp replete with irreverent, outrageous, colossally crude humor in “Hall Pass.” This time they explore the dirty mind of the seven-year-itchy married man with Owen Wilson and Jason Sudeikis (“Saturday Night Live”) as Rick and Fred, respectively, two guys... Read More

Under the Radar DVD of the Week: 'Brenda Starr, Reporter'

February 28, 2011 This week, the oddest DVD to appear on release lists is: “Brenda Starr, Reporter” Ace comic-strip reporter Brenda Starr officially retired from the funny pages in January, but you can revisit some of her earliest on-screen scoops in a new DVD compilation of her 1945 Columbia movie serial, “Brenda Starr,... Read More

'Hall Pass' cast and directors love fun and games

February 28, 2011 BY GENE TRIPLETT BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — To hear the cast and directors of “Hall Pass” tell it, there’s as much hilarity happening off-camera as on when the Farrelly brothers are making a movie. “There were more kind of, like, wrap parties on this movie than normal movies,” Owen Wilson recalled.... Read More

Oscar picks: Critic calls long shot in top feature race

February 26, 2011 BY GENE TRIPLETT Fact is giving fiction a run for its money in this year’s Oscar race, with four of the 10 Best Picture nominees based on true stories and real people. Biopics of a pair of boxing brothers and a canyoneering survivor were good box office bets on critics’ tip sheets in 2010, but true tales of... Read More

Oscar guesses: Anglophilia versus Yankee ingenuity

February 22, 2011 BY DENNIS KING Each year, we begin our obligatory pre-Oscar guessing game with the same disclaimer: In our 20-plus years of babbling about movies in print, we confess to a pretty paltry track record at predicting Oscar winners. The average popcorn Joe predicting in the average Oscar office pool probably has... Read More

The Academy’s dearly departed

February 22, 2011 Morbid as it seems to admit, one of the things we most anticipate about each year’s Oscar telecast is the video montage paying homage to Academy members who’ve died in the past year. But perhaps it’s not such a morbid thing at all. Perhaps it springs from the same impulse that leads us to read newspaper... Read More

Under the Radar DVD of the Week: 'Birdemic: Shock and Terror'

February 21, 2011 This week, the oddest DVD to appear on release lists is: “Birdemic: Shock and Terror” Alfred Hitchcock meets Ed Wood in “Birdemic: Shock and Terror,” the latest addition to the pop-cult library of terrible movies that we love to mock. This glorious stinker, which has enjoyed a robust midnight movie run,... Read More

Bland movie titles: A cinematic rose by any other name

February 17, 2011 If you lived in a cinematic vacuum – free from coming-attractions trailers and blaring movie ads from newspapers, TV, internet and billboards – and you had to choose between these two movies based on titles alone, which would you queue up to buy a ticket for? “Somewhere” or “Rosencrantz &... Read More

Under the Radar DVD of the Week: 'Hoodwinked' Blu-ray/DVD Combo

February 14, 2011 This week, the most interesting DVD to appear on release lists is: “Hoodwinked” Blu-ray/DVD Combo With feature animation becoming ubiquitous and nearly every major studio entering the game, it’s a good time to revisit one of the first modestly budgeted, off-Hollywood cartoon films to lend an irreverent,... Read More

Bieber crashes Depp's press conference in L.A. February 13, 2011 BY GENE TRIPLETT BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Johnny Depp had just been joking with reporters that his kids were much bigger fans of Justin Bieber than their own father’s movies, when the Grammy-nominated pop phenom himself made a disrupting surprise appearance. The scene was a press conference at the posh Four... Read More

Movieoke: For the closet movie star in each of us

February 10, 2011 Karaoke is a godsend for every frustrated pop singer who has ever crooned a favorite tune into a bar of soap in the shower. But what many people might not know is that there’s also a karaoke spinoff for the frustrated movie star in each of us. It’s called Movieoke and it originated in 2003 in a defunct little... Read More

‘Bringing Up Oscar’ details bios of Academy’s founders

February 10, 2011 With all the hype, glamour, opulent wealth and sunny self-congratulations surrounding each year’s Academy Awards presentations, it’s strange to think back to a time when the movie business was a loose assortment of slightly disreputable hustlers scrambling to give their fledgling industry a gloss of... Read More

Enjoy a cinematic box of sweets for Valentine's Day

February 10, 2011 BY GENE TRIPLETT Why spend half of your Valentine’s evening waiting for a table and then standing in a boxoffice line when you can pitch a couple of TV trays in the living room and have your dinner-and-a-movie date in the comfort and privacy of your own love shack? Simply grab some takeout, fire up... Read More

Under the Radar DVD of the Week: 'Bad Day to Go Fishing'

February 07, 2011 If you’re trolling the video shelves for an art house oddity that never made it to local theater screens, check out the weird and strangely compelling “Bad Day to Go Fishing” (due out on DVD Tuesday). Described in Variety as “something like a retro ‘The Wrestler’ by way of the Coen brothers … with... Read More

DVD review: ‘Sherlock Jr.’ does special effects the old-fashioned way

February 04, 2011 In a movie age where special effects have become ubiquitous and computer-generated magic easily makes anything possible on screen, it’s refreshing to look back on the genius of pioneers like Buster Keaton, who created astounding effects on camera the old-fashioned way – through sheer, inventive imagination.... Read More

DVD review: 'A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop'

February 04, 2011 It sets the anticipatory imagination reeling, this idea of Zhang Yimou, gifted Chinese director of “Raise the Red Lantern,” “Hero” and “House of Flying Daggers,” remaking Joel and Ethan Coen’s classic 1984 film noir homage “Blood Simple” in a 19th century Chinese setting. But then he... Read More

Movie review: 'Another Year' feels like an eternity

February 04, 2011 The opening shot of writer-director Mike Leigh’s “Another Year” is a tight close-up of actress Imelda Staunton’s face, frozen in an expression of seemingly terminal hopelessness and despair as she inhabits the role of a middle-class British housewife named Janet, reluctantly submitting herself to the... Read More

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About the writers

Dennis King

Movie Critic

King spent 31 years as an ink-stained wretch working for newspapers in Seminole, Ada, Oklahoma City and Tulsa. He holds a B.A. degree in English from the University of Central Oklahoma and for 16 years served as an adjunct instructor in journalism and English at Tulsa Community College. For 20 years, he was full-time film critic at the Tulsa World.

In 2006, he left Tulsa and along with his wife, Suzan (a retired English professor), moved to a cabin in Dingmans Ferry, PA. There, along the banks for the Delaware River, he chased after two rambunctious Labrador retrievers, fly fished the waters of the Poconos and did his best to become a full-time trout bum. Still scratching a writer’s itch, he freelanced articles for Explorer magazine and Gray’s Sporting Journal and wrote a stage play about classic movies and old movie theaters, titled “Spirits of the Coronado” (after his long-gone boyhood theater at 39th Street and MacArthur Boulevard).

In December, he and Suzan moved into an apartment in upper Manhattan, where they plan to eat bagels for breakfast and street-cart hot dogs for lunch, haunt the Angelika Theater and the Film Forum, go to plays and museums, ride the subways, complain about the subways and generally live like true New Yorkers.

Gene Triplett

Entertainment Editor

Gene Triplett is another Oklahoma newspaper dinosaur who's been cranking out copy for 34 years, first at the upstart, long defunct Oklahoma Journal, covering just about every news beat imaginable, then at The Oklahoman, where's he's bounced back and forth from features to the news side as assistant city editor, city editor and entertainment editor, managing to hold down the latter position for more than 10 years. He holds a B.A. degree in journalism -- also from the University of Central Oklahoma -- and, also like his colleague King, chases after two loony Labrador retrievers. He does not live by a trout-filled river, but he and his wife Carol do own a swimming pool, much to the delight of their dogs.

The Tripletts enjoy gourmet outdoor cooking year-round (rain, sleet or snow), entertaining friends, road trips to scenic wooded parks that rent rustic lakeside cabins, listening to music, watching classic movies and, in the summertime, swimming with their dogs.