This week, the most unusual DVD to appear on release lists is:

“Annie Oakley, Volumes 6-9”

Little Rock-born actress Gail Davis was reported to be a crack shot and skilled rider, which made her a natural to star in the 1950s TV series “Annie Oakley,” whose third season is due out on DVD Tuesday.

“Annie Oakley, Volumes 6-9” contains 35 episodes from the show’s final season; the series ran from 1954-56. Davis, ex-wife of former Oklahoma Film Office director Bob Davis of Tulsa, reportedly performed most of her own stunts on the show and displayed a rugged independence that was rare in the socially conservative ’50s. In the intervening years, the show and the late Davis have hailed by supporters of women’s rights for breaking down gender barriers and offering a strong role model for what women can do.

The show presented a fictionalized account of legendary Wild West sharpshooter Oakley and her life in the dusty down of Diablo. There, Annie and her brother Tagg (Jimmy Hawkins) kept an eye on various outlaws and scoundrels who rode into town, with Annie generally being called on to show off her shooting prowess.

In a 1982 interview, Davis said of the character: “Annie Oakley had to deal with the same ruthless characters – rustlers and killers – that the cowboys dealt with. And she did it without ever killing a one of them.”

During its run, the show featured guest appearances by a who’s who of Western character actors, including Lee Van Cleef, Monte Blue, Lyle Talbot, L.Q. Jones, Denver Pyle, Fess Parker, Alan Hale Jr., X Bands, Slim Pickens and others.

Davis, who died in 1997, was inducted into the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in Fort Worth in 2004.

“Annie Oakley, Volumes 6-9” is not rated and contains four discs running a total of 300 minutes. It’s being released by Alpha Home Entertainment.

- Dennis King

Robert Duvall

With the bushy, hillbilly beard and gnarly attitude that Robert Duvall dons in “Get Low,” you might think he were a kissing cousin to ZZ Top, or at least a lesser member of the Soggy Bottom Boys from “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”

His Felix Bush is, as they say in rural parts, a real piece of work. A Depression-era hermit who lives alone in a ramshackle, backwoods house not far from a small Tennessee hamlet, Felix chose long ago to keep civilization – and his neighbors – at bay.

The sign at his front gate reads: “No damn trespassing. Beware of mule.”

Surrounded by his mule, his trusty shotgun, a stock of mason jars filled with home-brewed herbal elixir and a faded photograph of a long lost love, Felix has lived a stubbornly monastic life that gradually achieved mythic proportions among the folks in town. There grew up such a thorny rash of wild rumors attributing black magic and evil deeds to this cantankerous old coot that Felix is now viewed by most townspeople with suspicion and dread. Which is mostly fine with Felix.

Until one day when he receives news of an old acquaintance’s death – delivered by a fearful preacher man (Gerald McRaney). This troubles Felix and sets him to thinking about settling up affairs, and so he gathers a wad of “hermit money” and heads into town with an idea.

Bill Murray

Felix’s idea, which he puts to Frank Quinn (Bill Murray), the city-slicker owner of the town funeral parlor, is to stage his own funeral while he’s still around to partake in the festivities. Frank, always quick to make a buck, takes on the job and assigns his earnest young assistant Buddy (Lucas Black) to chauffeur Felix around and plan details of the event (which includes raffling off a tract of Felix’s land to attract a suitable number of mourners).

As word gets out and Felix comes back into the life of the town, he renews acquaintance with Mattie (Sissy Spacek), a quietly seething old flame. He also makes contact with an itinerate, unforgiving Illinois preacher (a wonderfully funereal Bill Cobbs), who knows a deep, dark secret from Felix’s past for which the old man now seeks atonement.

Roughly based on the true tale of an East Tennessee farmer named Felix Breazeale of the 1930s who staged his own funeral before he died, the screenplay by Chris Provenzano (“Mad Men”) and C. Gaby Mitchell (“Blood Diamond”) is touched with more than a little folksy cornpone. The set-up is too obvious, and it’s easy to figure out Felix’s long-buried tragedy and to see where it all will lead.

But first-time director Aaron Schneider has the wisdom to trust his marvelous cast and to give each actor room to do little character jigs to maximum effect. For Duvall, 80, this role fits like a well-worn pair of bib overalls. As a writer-director himself in 1997’s far more ambitious “The Apostle” (not to mention his turn as Boo Radley in “To Kill a Mockingbird”), Duvall has done his homework on Southern culture and folklore. And it shows here in the ease and vinegary authenticity he brings to his performance.

Murray as the huckster with a heart simply proves that in the right role he’s one of the best character actors around. Black, Spacek and Cobbs deliver performances that are rich in emotional grace notes and honest humanity. This film could serve as an acting master class.

Filled as it is with homespun wisdom, prickly wit, a little weepy poignancy and masterly performances, “Get Low” achieves the feeling of an ageless, autumnal fable. After all, who wouldn’t want a funeral marked by a touching epiphany and the chance to be there to enjoy it?

- Dennis King

“Get Low”

PG-13
1:40
3 stars
Starring: Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Bill Murray, Lucas Black, Bill Cobbs
(Some thematic material and brief, violent content)

The history of America’s finest novelists going to Hollywood and being chewed up and spit out by the crass moviemaking machinery is legend. Greats such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner were famously used, abused and tossed aside by gross studio moguls who cared little about their literary stature.

But Texas novelist Larry McMurtry tells a different story of his own profitable and generally positive encounters with the film industry. In “Hollywood: A Third Memoir” (Simon & Schuster, $24), the author of such literary classics as “Lonesome Dove,” “The Last Picture Show” and “Terms of Endearment” relates an essentially breezy and upbeat narrative of his own unlikely initiation into the fraternity of screenwriters and his subsequent frolics in the land of make-believe that is Tinseltown.

Following up on McMurtry’s previous memoirs of the writer’s life – “Books” and “Literary Life” – this slim volume sports the signature short chapters and sparkling anecdotes that have marked the author to be as sterling a memoirist as he is a novelist.

By all evidence, he’s enjoyed a charmed life in a movie culture that generally views screenwriters as disposable hired hands. As a writer, he’s experienced both sides of the equation – having his novels adapted to the screen by others (“Terms of Endearment,” “Lonesome Dove” and Emmy-nominated “The Murder of Mary Phagan”) and penning his own screenplays (“The Last Picture Show” with Peter Bogdanovich and “Streets of Laredo” and the Oscar-winning “Brokeback Mountain,” both with writing partner Diana Ossana). And with characteristic wryness and absence of sentiment he recounts the triumphs, and occasional failures, that have animated his long movie career.

To hear him tell it, the secret to his success was in keeping his prices reasonable, his expectations in check and his attitude positive.

The adaptation of his first novel, “Horseman, Pass By” into the 1963 film “Hud” earned McMurtry enough money to leave behind a teaching job at Texas Christian University and pursue his passions for fiction writing and book collecting.

“I had nothing to do with the filming of ‘Hud,’” McMurtry writes. “Similarly I had nothing to do with the filming of the fine CBS miniseries of my book ‘Lonesome Dove.’ The same holds true for ‘Terms of Endearment.’ I just wrote the book! The fact that ‘Hud’ was made from my book had one extremely important effect: somehow through the illogic of show business it enabled me to get work on scripts for no better reason than that I was from the West – cowboy country. … I will always be grateful to Hollywood for, well, it’s essentially financed my fiction, my rare book business and, to a huge degree, my adult life.”

McMurtry writes that he was easily seduced by Hollywood’s allure and movie-business perks, such as first-class air travel. He also loved L.A.’s laid-back vibe, its lack of traffic and its good book shops and restaurants.

“I must mention that I liked Hollywood from the moment I first visited it, and I like it still, even though it must be said that the traffic now is a serious problem … As Jack Kerouac aptly said, Los Angeles is still the West Coast’s one and only golden town. Say it’s glitter all you want; at least it’s real glitter, applied at a level that for me never fades.”

Characteristically, McMurtry is in top form in constructing entertaining portraits of celebrities he’s brushed shoulders with along the way. Of super-agent Swifty Lazar (who represented the author) there is enduring affection even in the story of how Lazar’s bungling of a deal may have cost McMurtry $15 million. Equally pithy stories emerge from McMurtry’s encounters with Barbra Streisand (she was such an intimidating tennis partner that he vomited after their match) and Warren Beatty (a million-question man who eventually lost interest in a proposed script about evangelist Billy Sunday). Less than flattering anecdotes illuminate his dealings with actors Cloris Leachman and Ben Johnson, whom the author believes let their success in “The Last Picture Show” go to their heads.

Thin and economically written, “Hollywood: A Third Memoir” is nonetheless a juicy, teeming, entertaining read and a show-business fairy tale that most screenwriters would probably deem a story far too good to be true.

- Dennis King

BY GENE TRIPLETT

Ben Affleck

Open casting calls for actors and extras will be held Saturday and Sunday at Bartlesville High School for a movie being developed for filming in Bartlesville, according to a press release issued this week by Norman-based Freihofer Casting.

“With the support of the Oklahoma Film and Music Office, Freihofer Casting is conducting additional open casting calls for actors and extras to be considered for speaking and non-speaking roles in an upcoming family-oriented Hollywood romantic drama to be filmed in Oklahoma,” casting director Chris Freihofer said in the release.

Film office director Jill Simpson would not confirm recent reports that a movie directed by former Bartlesville resident Terrence Malick and starring Ben Affleck, Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams would be filmed in Bartlesville. Local officials also have declined to comment on the

Terrence Malick

reports.

“Well, we’re scouting a number of films right now and there is a major film slotted for September in the Bartlesville area, and one for October in the Oklahoma City metro, and these are high-quality productions and there’s casting going on and they are coming in, but that’s about all I can say,” Simpson told The Oklahoman on Wednesday.

Rumors about the Bartlesville film project began to spread quickly after Affleck and his wife, actress Jennifer Garner, were spotted Aug. 10 in Broken Arrow’s Bass Pro Shop, buying fishing supplies. The couple signed autographs and posed for photographs for store employees and customers.

Malick, who grew up in Bartlesville, has directed such films as “Badlands,” “Days of Heaven” and the 1998 remake of “The Thin Red Line.”

The current project held its initial casting call last weekend in Tulsa. The Bartlesville casting call will be held from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, and from 1-5 p.m. on Sunday at the high school, located at 1700 Hillcrest Drive in Bartlesville.

The call is open to people of all ethnicities, ages 5 and up, regardless of prior acting experience. For more information, call Freihofer Casting at 310-4391.

Come with us now to those thrilling drive-in days of yesteryear, when the concession stands vended mystery-meat burgers and stale, fake-butter-soaked popcorn, windshields were steamed with passion, and Roger Corman-produced, shoestring-budget celluloid trash filled the screens from dusk to dawn.

Actually, the outdoor cinema was a cultural phenomenon that had long been on the decline when the “King of the B’s” released “Humanoids From the Deep” (aka “Monster”) in 1980, but this creature feature turned out to be one of his best under the direction of Barbara Peeters, who helmed several pics for Corman’s New World Pictures in the ’70s and ’80s before moving to a career directing hit TV series such as “Remington Steele.”

Doug McClure, Ann Turkel, Cindy Weintraub and ever-dependable villain Vic Morrow star in this tale of a sleepy fishing village that’s invaded by fishlike humanoid creatures spawned from mutant DNA that are bent on raping bikinied babes. “They’re not human. But they hunt human women. Not for killing. For mating,” goes the tagline. They also mangle kids, dogs and men in graphically bloody ways. Genuine jolts are in store for horror buffs, and there’s enough bad acting and dialogue and rubber-suited monsters to guarantee some chuckles, but this fare is definitely not for the squeamish. It is, however, one of the last of the great made-for-the-drive-in delights.

This uncut international version, with a haunting score by Academy Award-winning composer James Horner (“Titanic”), also has Leonard Maltin’s amusing interview with Corman, New World trailers, deleted scenes and a making-of documentary.

— Gene Triplett

This week, the most interesting DVD to appear on release lists is:

“The Age of Stupid”

As we twiddle our thumbs and continue a contentious debate over climate change and global warming, a new DVD out Tuesday presents us with a bleak picture of the price of doing nothing now. “The Age of Stupid” is an ambitious documentary-drama-animation hybrid that’s set on a barren, devastated Earth in 2055 and asks the question, “Why didn’t we stop climate change when we still had the chance?”

Starring British actor Pete Postlethwaite (“The Usual Suspects”) as the lone keeper of “The Global Archive,” a vast storage facility protecting all of humanity’s collective achievements, the film uses footage of real people in the years leading up to 2015 before runaway climate change took place.

The archivist sorts through an array of news clips, scientific data and interviews – all issuing dire warnings of the devastating effects of rampant consumption – in an effort to work out why we didn’t change our wasteful and profligate ways.

In the process, he focuses on various prophetic environmental scenarios: a woman barely surviving in a Nigeria depleted by a multinational’s oil extraction; an entrepreneur in India starting a low-cost airline; children exiled from Iraq; a Bedfordshire group blocking a proposed wind farm; a retired oil executive living in New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina. Each shows how tangled the debate and how difficult it is to make a difference in the ongoing arguments over climate change.

“The Age of Stupid” is not rated and runs 92 minutes. A second disc includes extras, such as a 50-minute making-of documentary, extended interviews and commentary, deleted scenes, trailers and eight short climate films. It’s being released by the New Video Group.

- Dennis King

Emma Thompson

While “Nanny McPhee Returns” is suitably supercalifragilistic, it’s not quite as expialidocious as the original.

This twinkly and slightly twee follow-up to 2005’s “Nanny McPhee” leans far more heavily on high-tech, CGI magic than on the old-fashioned storybook kind that made the first film such a quaint, literate charmer. Under the direction of Susanna White, a veteran British TV director making her big-screen debut, the sequel is more sweetly sentimental and cartoonishly antic than the first.

Again, the film posits itself as an antidote to the syrupy goodness of Mary Poppins. Like Miss Poppins – but with a gnarly turnip nose, a wormlike unibrow, two whiskery facial moles and a rabbity snaggle tooth – Nanny McPhee is a British governess with a touch of magic in her pragmatic child-rearing ways.

But whereas Julie Andrews’ sprightly performance as Miss Poppins was offered up with a heaping spoonful of sugar, Emma Thompson’s sly and slightly menacing portrayal of Nanny McPhee comes with a biting spoonful of bitters.
Thompson, who again penned the screenplay inspired by mystery writer Christianna Brand’s trio of “Nurse Matilda” books, is no slouch when it comes to adapting literary material for the screen. She won an Oscar for her sterling 1995 script of Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility.”

This time around, she moves the action to 1940s rural England, where the overwhelmed Mrs. Green (lovely Maggie Gyllenhaal with a finely honed British accent) struggles to keep the family farm afloat while her husband is away at war. Compounding her troubles are three boisterous children whose rustic country life is upended by the arrival of two snooty, spoiled city cousins evacuated from war-torn London.

Naturally, country cousins and city cousins clash amid the barnyard muck (“Greetings, oh covered-in-poo people,” sneers the Woosterish cousin Cyril upon first seeing his grimy country kin). Soon, the children are engaged in all-out war – slinging poo, soiling clothing, breaking china and generally running amuck.

Enter Nanny McPhee, unbidden and unannounced, to throw off sparks from her gnarled walking stick and impose a stern but kindly sense of order among the children.

Naturally, the youngsters resist at first, led by the big-brother earnestness of Norman (Asa Butterfield) and the snotty archness of Cyril (Eros Vlahos).

But Nanny chides them, “When you need me, but do not want me, then I must stay. When you want me but do not need me, then I will have to go.”

Naturally, the rude youngsters are no match for Nanny McPhee, who patiently but firmly instills in them five valuable life lessons: to stop fighting, share nicely, help each other, be brave and have faith.

The film benefits greatly from impressive cameos by stellar friends-of-Emma in Britain’s theater world: Ewan MacGregor and Ralph Fiennes as the off-at-war dads; Bill Bailey as the farmer with a high regard for the intelligence of pigs, and a dottery Maggie Smith, the game grand dame who is not above lowering herself daintily onto a cow patty.

Rhys Ifans makes a fine if nattering villain of the piece as Mrs. Green’s conniving brother-in-law intent on conning her into selling the farm to pay off his overdue gambling debt.

Through it all, Thompson presides calmly over this imaginative little children’s movie with sharp intelligence and unfussy good sense. If only “Nanny McPhee Returns” had reined in its erratic energy and gone lighter on the CGI effects it might have surpassed the odd, eccentric charms of the original.

- Dennis King

“Nanny McPhee Returns”

PG
1:40
2.5 stars
Starring: Emma Thompson, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Rhys Ifans, Maggie Smith
(Rude humor, some language and mild thematic elements)

Jenn Proske and Matt Lanter

Bloody heck! Talk about a couple of jokers setting themselves up to be the butt of their own punchline.

Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, co-writers-directors of the toothless spoof “Vampires Suck,” walk right into a sucker punch with their latest sophomoric parody of movie genres, this one taking on all things “Twilight.” With the level of humor here running to flatulence jokes, groin kicks and high-school smart-aleck cracks, their movie does, indeed, (surely no other critic in the world will be this clever) SUCK!

No surprise, actually, since these two schlockmeisters have built an unlikely career on obvious, low-brow, aggressively mirthless film parodies such as “Date Movie,” “Epic Movie,” “Meet the Spartans” and “Disaster Movie.”  They also pasted together the wildly scattershot scripts for “Spy Hard” and “Scary Movie.”

“Vampires Suck” takes the most obvious path to cheap laughs by riffing, sometimes line-for-line, on the storylines of the obsessively popular “Twilight” and “New Moon” films.

The plot goes like this: After her randy mother abandons her to become a Tiger Woods groupie on the pro golf tour, chaste heroine Becca Crane (newcomer Jenn Proske in a thankless role) shows up in rainy, gloomy Sporks, Washington, to live with her overly protective sheriff father Frank (Diedrich Bader). At her new school, Becca finds herself torn between two hunks – the brooding, pasty-faced Edward Sullen (Matt Lanter), who might be a vampire, and the shaggy Jacob White (Chris Riggi), whose raunchy canine tendencies lead us to suspect that he might be a werewolf.

We’re expected to follow this listless, twisted love triangle as Friedberg-Seltzer clumsily scatter in random pop-culture gags touching on everything from Lady Gaga to the Kardashians and from the Black Eyed Peas to “The Real Housewives of Atlanta.” Along the way there are “jokes” about Becca’s dad sleeping with an inflatable doll and battling a wheelchair-bound American Indian, Jacob chasing cats and urinating on a fire hydrant, Edward juggling a baby and a bowling ball, and so on.

The scattershot formula – mile-a-minute gags, some hitting, many missing – goes all the way back to the “Airplane!” and “Naked Gun” days, except that those movies’ creators, Jim Abrahams and brothers Jerry and David Zucker, knew the difference between parody and pandering. And they usually stayed on the right side of the divide between wit and witlessness.

Friedberg-Selzer gleefully embrace the latter on both those fronts. Lowbrow is too lofty a level for them. For example: In one scene, the moody Edward stands over innocent Becca as she sleeps and wistfully sighs, “Just you breathing is the greatest gift in the world to me.” Cue flatulence. See? Friedberg-Selzer’s writing definitely does suck wind.

- Dennis King

“Vampires Suck”

PG-13
1:20
1/2 star
Starring: Chris Riggi, Matt Lanter, Jenn Proske, Diedrich Bader, Parker Dash
(Crude sexual content, comic violence, language, teen partying)

Noomi Rapace

Fueled by copious jolts of strong coffee and propelled by the chilly – and chilling – Nordic sensibility of its late creator Stieg Larsson, “The Girl Who Played With Fire” delivers an appropriately pulpy if not wholly fulfilling second cinematic chapter in the author’s hugely popular Millennium trilogy.

Not as grippingly seductive or fully creepy as Niels Arden Oplev’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” veteran Swedish TV director Daniel Alfredson’s version of the second book suffers slightly from a middle-child syndrome. It’s not as surprising or startlingly fresh as the first film, yet it leaves us anticipating an exhilarating climax in the third (“The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest,” due up next in American markets).

“The Girl Who Played With Fire” (in Swedish with subtitles) picks up a year after the first film, when Lisbeth Salander (the perfectly cast Noomi Rapace) returns to Stockholm after a year underground. In a tight series of events, this fierce, freaky brainiac with genius hacker skills and zero social graces finds herself implicated in three brutal murders (seems they found her fingerprints on the gun).

So, in essence, the story concerns efforts by her old friend, knight-errant journalist Mikael Blomkvist (appealingly world-weary Michael Nyqvist), to exonerate Lisbeth and in the process uncover a tangled web of sex trafficking and decades-old conspiracy that taps into Lisbeth’s dark, inflammatory history of violence and sexual abuse.

A great deal of the appeal in Larsson’s moody crime writing is in hanging out with this odd pair of crime solvers (his anti Nick and Nora Charles, if you will) – Mikael oblique, noble, virile and bemused; Lisbeth all sharp edges, explosive rage and raw pain.

But unfortunately the two spend little time in each other’s company as this tangled tale unspools and as an exaggerated raft of evil villains strive to impede their progress, and worse.

Certainly Alfredson and screenwriter Jonas Frykberg (who also adapted the trilogy’s third book for Swedish film) do an able job of paring down big blocks of exposition and subplot from the book while still holding on to the essential mystery and icy atmospherics – the endless espressos, the Ikea furnishings – that lend Larsson’s work its distinctive Scandinavian noir style.

At heart, “The Girl Who Played With Fire” feels like a good, polished police procedural of the BBC or “Masterpiece Mystery” ilk (think “Prime Suspect” or better still the “Wallander” mysteries, based on the novels of another best-selling Swedish author, Henning Mankell). It’s more than good enough to satisfy fans of Larsson’s flinty prose and to leave audiences poised for yet another prickly waltz with Lisbeth and Mikael through Stockholm’s bleak, wintry backstreets.

Note: The web keeps buzzing about David Fincher’s English-language adaptation of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” in pre-production for a 2011 release, and it has been announced that Daniel Craig is set to play the role of journalist Mikael Blomkvist. Wild speculation abounds as to who will be cast in the coveted role of Lisbeth Salander, but given the spiky, indelible performance by Noomi Rapace in the Swedish films, whatever ambitious actress lands the role will have some very big combat boots to fill.

- Dennis King

“The Girl Who Played With Fire”

R
2:09
3 stars
Starring: Noomi Rapace, Michael Nyqvist, Lena Endre, Peter Andersson, Annika Hallin
(Brutal violence including a rape, some strong sexual content, nudity and language)

This week, the oddest DVD to appear on release lists is:

“The Good, the Bad, the Weird”

If you still think it a weird cultural warp that Sergio Leone’s classic series of so-called “Spaghetti Westerns” were shot in Italy, check out the South Korean horse opera, “The Good, the Bad, the Weird” coming out on DVD Tuesday.

Popularly billed as a “Kimchee Western” (after the Korean food made with fermented cabbages), the film, said on its 2008 release to be the most expensive movie in Korean cinema history, really puts a cross-cultural twist on the conventions of the classic American sagebrush saga.

Directed by Kim Jee-Woon, maker of the fine films “A Tale of Two Sisters” and
“A Bittersweet Life,” the action is set in 1930s Manchuria, where greed is in the air and a manic outlaw, a nasty holy man and a determined bounty hunter are all in hot pursuit of a treasure map. Add to the mix Chinese gangsters, the Japanese army and other rival factions also in pursuit of the priceless map, and it all comes down to a desert showdown worthy of Leone at his best.

During its theatrical run, “The Good, the Bad, the Weird” won the Asia Pacific Screen Award for its cinematography and the Asian Film Award for Best Supporting Actor (Jung Woo-sung).

The DVD (in Korean with subtitles) is rated R for non-stop violence and some drug use. It is being released by MPI Home Video and runs 130 minutes.

- Dennis King