Many a Sam Peckinpah fan and especially admirers of the wild and woolly director’s 1971 version of “Straw Dogs” rolled their eyes at the news that film critic-turned-filmmaker Rod Lurie (“The Contender”) had had the audacity to attempt a remake of this controversial story of savage survival instinct awakened in the soul of a pacifist.

The original, co-written by Peckinpah and David Zelag Goodman from a novel by Gordon Williams, centered on peace-loving American mathematician David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman) and his restless British wife, Amy (Susan George), who move to her hometown and face increasingly vicious harassment from working-class locals, led by one of her ex-boyfriends.

Critics and moviegoers alike were polarized by the film’s excessive and graphic violence, and detractors labeled Peckinpah a “merciless misogynist” for making the Amy character a submissive, teasing, immature young woman who becomes aroused in the midst of being raped. In writer-director Lurie’s update, Oklahoma City-born actor James Marsden’s David is a nonviolent screenwriter and Kate Bosworth’s Amy is a strong, assertive film actress. Her small hometown is Blackwater, Miss., and the couple travel there to prepare her rural family home for sale after her father’s death.

Once there, conflicts emerge with local rednecks, including Amy’s old ex-high school football hero boyfriend (Alexander Skarsgard) and his sadistic ex-coach turned town troublemaker and drunk (a well-cast James Woods), and tensions slowly build to an eruption of  wanton and life-threatening mayhem, eventually forcing both David and Amy to turn as brutal and deadly as their tormentors. 

While Peckinpah’s classic study in blood lust and what really constitutes rape brought accusations raining down upon him of galloping misogyny and shameless pandering to his audience’s baser instincts (as lamost all of his films did), Lurie’s new slant attempts to pose thoughtful questions about the moral price paid for loosing the killer inside.

Like the original, Lurie’s is a corker of a thriller. It just doesn’t bring the visceral gusto of  “Bloody” Sam’s double-barreled slamdance, which offers the rare opportunity of watching Dustin Hoffman turn bad-ass. 

DVD extras: “Courting Controversy: Remaking a Classic,” “The Dynamics of Power: The Ensemble,” “Inside the Siege: The Ultimate Showdown,” “Commentary with Writer/Director Rod Lurie.”

— Gene Triplett

Ruben Fleischer

NEW YORK – A quirky bank robbery and tire-screeching car chases play key roles in “30 Minutes or Less,” a black comedy in which a pizza deliveryman and his hapless pal are coerced into pulling off a bumbling holdup by a pair knuckleheaded masterminds.

So it stands to reason that the movie’s four stars and its director – Jesse Eisenberg, Aziz Ansari, Danny McBride and Nick Swardson, plus helmer Ruben Fleischer (“Zombieland”) – would have their own rosters of favorite, go-to heist movies and car-chase pictures to inspire them.

They were each asked to list their favorites during a pre-release press conference staged by Columbia Pictures. Here’s what they said.

Nick Swardson (Travis): “I love ‘Point Break.’ It’s one of my favorite movies of all time. I was obsessed with that movie for a long time. Car chase films – I love all the car stuff in ‘Ronin,’ there’s some great car chase stuff in that and in …umm, ‘Fried Green Tomatoes.’”

Danny McBride (Dwayne): “‘Dog Day Afternoon,’ is probably my favorite bank heist film, and ‘Bullitt’ has my favorite car chases.”

Jesse Eisenberg (Nick the pizza guy): “Yeah, I also like ‘Dog Day Afternoon,’ and I watched some of the ‘Lethal Weapon’ movies because my character referenced it and I’d never seen it. It was interesting to see the way our characters think of themselves as being like Danny Glover and Mel Gibson when we run into the bank.”

Aziz Ansari (Chet): “Like Ruben said, we had a big folder of all the bank robbery movies. And the day we filmed the bank robbery I just kept watching the one from ‘Heat’ over and over again. I love that one and also ‘Point Break.’ And one movie I watched that I hadn’t seen before was ‘The Killing’ by Stanley Kubrick that had one of the coolest endings. And – let’s see – the car chases in ‘Steel Magnolias’ are really awesome.”

Ruben Fleischer: “My favorite car chase is from ‘The Blues Brothers,’ just because I think it’s be best version of a comedy car chase and the massive scale of the cars in it is incredible. And I love all the heist movies that the cast mentioned. But a movie that I’d never seen before that a producer introduced me to was called ‘Straight Time,’ that Dustin Hoffman stars in. That has a couple of really good heists, both a bank and a jewelry store. And I tried to get a line from that in our movie but they wouldn’t say it. It was like, ‘what, are you in love with me? Then stop looking at me,’ or something like that. I kept trying to feed that line to Aziz but he just wouldn’t say it.”

Ansari: “I was like, three people total are going hear that and think, ‘Oh, cool, that’s from ‘Straight Time.’”

- Dennis King

Most people would guess that an historical accounting of cinema shot in the Sooner State would just about fill a pamphlet, but John Wooley has filled a revelatory and richly readable 309-page book with facts about rolling film in red dirt country.

“Shot in Oklahoma: A Century of Sooner State Cinema” reveals a long record of movies filmed in the Land of the Red Man, dating as far back as 1904. That was the year inventor Thomas Edison himself, the American movie studio pioneer, sent a film crew to Oklahoma’s 101 Ranch near Ponca City, seeking to capture authentic Western atmosphere on celluloid.

Many people who’ve lived in Oklahoma for any significant length of time might recall that Francis Ford Coppola brought young unknown actors such as Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon, Mickey Rourke and Diane Lane to Tulsa to film “The Outsiders” and “Rumblefish” (both released in 1983), based on novels by Oklahoma author S.E. Hinton. They might also be aware that director Barry Levinson brought Cruise back to Oklahoma, along with Dustin Hoffman, to shoot scenes for the Oscar-winning “Rain Man” in 1988, and that the big-budget disaster movie “Twister” (1996), with Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt, was shot in Wakita, Guthrie and several other state locations. And that’s about all that most folks know.

Fascinating details

But meticulously researched details of many older and/or lesser-known features shot in the Sooner state make for fascinating and informative reading, especially for film buffs and movie trivia fans who live here.

The book’s cover, for example, is taken from a poster hawking a low-budget 1950 Western called “Rock Island Trail,” a Republic picture shot mostly in Hollywood, with some outdoor action scenes filmed along a stretch of abandoned railroad track near McAlester. Its star, Forrest Tucker, is pictured leaping from the front of a locomotive with a six-gun in his hand and a savage look on his face. Great cover. Enhances the book’s title perfectly.

Roy Rogers and Dale Evans filmed 1946′s “Home in Oklahoma” around the Arbuckle Mountains, and Roy and Dale actually came back to the Sooner State and got married on a cattle ranch in the area the very next year.

I was intrigued that a Western project called “Osage,” starring, among others, Tulsa Western swing ace Johnnie Lee Wills and actress Noel Neill, who would later play Lois Lane on the first “Superman” TV series, was shot in part around Pawhuska, but never completed.

I was surprised to learn that parts of the wildcat oil boom drama “Tulsa” (1949), starring Robert Preston and Susan Hayward, were shot on the outskirts of Oklahoma City, and even a small bit of John Ford’s 1940 film version of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” — a book vehemently denounced by Sooner citizens and politicians alike for its depiction of Dust Bowl Okies — was quietly filmed around the Beckham County courthouse in Sayre.

Fun stuff from Wooley, one of the most prolific and popular of Oklahoma writers, a former Tulsa World entertainment writer, novelist and author of many music- and movie-related books and articles rooted in Okie culture. “Shot in Oklahoma” is published in paperback by the University of Oklahoma Press with a list price of $16.95.

— Gene Triplett

A key reason why “All the President’s Men” is one of the most powerful political thrillers of all time is, of course, that it’s an incredible true story that literally unfolded before millions of astonished newspaper-reading Americans as two young, lower-rung reporters on the staff of The Washington Post managed to uncover a story of corruption and deceit that brought down a U.S. president.

Other factors contributing to the film’s greatness were William Goldman’s clarifying adaptation of the Bob Woodward-Carl Bernstein book about their complex probe of Richard Nixon’s Watergate and Alan J. Pakula’s brilliant direction, which, with the help of Gordon Willis’ noirish cinematography, turned it all into a taut, suspenseful, gripping drama, even though moviegoers knew the ending in advance.

Then consider the top-gun leads, with Robert Redford as conservative WASP Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Jewish liberal Bernstein, playing off each other perfectly as polar opposites who come together as a well-oiled journalistic machine, with Jason Robards Jr. rock solid as boss Ben Bradlee, and Jack Warden, Jane Alexander, Martin Balsam and shadowy “Deep Throat” Hal Holbrook rounding out a super roster of supporting players.

The Blu-ray package includes such revelatory extras as the vintage featurette “Pressure and the Press: The Making of ‘All the President’s Men,’” “Telling the Truth About Lies: The Making of ‘All the President’s Men,’” “Woodward and Bernstein: Lighting the Fire” and a 40-page book with an investigative timeline.

Here is a must-see, or must-see-again about a crowning moment in the history of investigative print journalism that probably couldn’t happen again in a new age of crackpot Internet misinformation overload.

— Gene Triplett

Silly names have been a staple of comedy since the early days of vaudeville, and when old burlesque performers eventually moved in front of Hollywood’s rolling cameras their outlandish sobriquets, garish noms de plume, goofy monikers and loopy pseudonyms came along with them

And so pioneers of comedy traipsed across Nickelodeon screens in the guise of characters such as Egbert Souse, Cuthbert J. Twillie, Larson E. Whipsnide, T. Frothingill Bellows, Rollo La Rue, Elmer Prettywillie and Professor Eustace McGargle (all W.C. Fields inventions), or as Wolf J. Flywheel, Dr. Hugo Z. Hackenbush, Otis B. Driftwood and Prof. Quincy Adams Wagstaff (a.k.a. Groucho Marx).

That va-va-voom vamp Mae West gave us the suggestive Marlo Manners, Flower Belle Lee and Peaches O’Day.

And while the comedy team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy mostly appeared onscreen in their heyday as Stan and Ollie, their earlier screen incarnations, both together and individually, were rich with purple appellations. Stan boasted performances as Ferdinand Finkleberry, Romaine Ricketts, Winchell McSweeney, Rhubarb Vaselino, Gabriel Goober, Dippy Donawho and Magnum Dippytack, while Ollie donned such character names as J. Piedmont Mumblethunder, Sharkey Nye, Oswald Schwartzkopple and Solomon Soopmeat.

Preston Sturges, that master of screwball comedy from the 1930s and ‘40s, wrote into his scripts such distinctively nutty character names as Dr. Zodiac Z. Zippe (“Hotel Haywire”), Charles Poncefort Pike (“The Lady Eve”), Constable Edmund Kockenlocker (“The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek”), Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith and Sgt. Heppelfinger (“Hail the Conquering Hero”), Harold Diddlebock and E.J. Waggleberry (“The Sin of Harold Diddlebock”) and Judge Alfalfa J. O’Toole (“The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend”).

Comic Bob Hope kept close to his vaudeville roots with such movie names as Milford Farnsworth (“Alias Jesse James”), Pippo Popolino (“Casanova’s Big Night”), Hot Lips Barton (“Road to Rio”), Painless Peter Potter (“The Paleface”) and Humphrey “Sorrowful” Jones (“Sorrowful Jones”).

Even sexpot Marilyn Monroe wasn’t immune to a little suggestively silly nicknaming, appearing on screen as such characters as Sugar Kane Kowalczyk (“Some Like It Hot”), Pola Debevoise (“How to Marry a Millionaire”) and Dusky Ledoux (“Right Cross”).

Hollywood he-men generally veered toward macho character names in their movies, but every so often they also got saddled with slightly silly monikers. John Wayne turned in one of his best performances ever as Rooster Cogburn in “True Grit,” and as an early matinee cowpoke the Duke labored under such trumped-up sagebrush pseudonyms as Stony Brooke, Duke Slade, Biff Smith, Dare Rudd and Singin’ Sandy Saunders.

Even big star James Stewart suspended his leading man image to play such whimsically named characters as Mattie Appleyard (“Fools’ Parade”), Elwood P. Dowd (“Harvey”) and Rowdy Dow (“The Gorgeous Hussy”).

Some modern comic actors still hold to that old tradition of silly names, notably Ben Stiller, who has created such amusing screen roles as Gaylord Focker (“Meet the Parents”), Tugg Speedman (“Tropic Thunder”), Derek Zoolander (“Zoolander”), Bwick Elias (“If Lucy Fell”), Garth Motherloving (TV’s “The Simpsons”) and Reuben Feffer (“Along Came Polly”). And Woody Allen has contributed two of the best with nebbishy Fielding Mellish (“Bananas”) and the pseudo-murderous Virgil Starkwell (“Take the Money and Run”).

Of course, the silly name phenomenon isn’t limited to film comedies. Occasionally, goofy character names even show up in heavyweight dramas – note Tom Cruise as Lestat de Lioncourt (“Interview With the Vampire”) or Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle (“Taxi Driver”). The list is endless.

If there were a Silly Name Hall of Fame we’d nominate all of the above, plus the following, for a place of honor:

Tom Cruise again as Cole Trickle (“Days of Thunder”), Honor Blackman as Pussy Galore (“Goldfinger”), Clint Eastwood as Philo Beddoe (“Every Which Way But Loose”), Uma Thurman as Beatrix Kiddo (“Kill Bill Vols. 1 & 2”), Mark Wahlberg as Dirk Diggler (“Boogie Nights”), Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly (“Breakfast at Tiffany’s”), Dustin Hoffman as Ratso Rizzo (“Midnight Cowboy”), Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko (“Wall Street”), Scott B. Morgan (uncredited) as Keyser Soze (“The Usual Suspects”), Harvey Korman as Hedley Lamarr (“Blazing Saddles”), Steve Buscemi as Mr. Pink (“Reservoir Dogs”), Yano Anaya and Zack Ward as Grover Dill and Scut Farkus (“A Christmas Story”), Sally Kellerman as Hot Lips O’Houlihan (“MASH”), Jon Heder as Napoleon Dynamite (“Napoleon Dynamite”), Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched (“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”) and Peter Sellers as President Merkin Muffley (“Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”).

And naturally there’s George Lucas, who stands in a category of his own for silly and sillier names via “Star Wars” – from the mainstays Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Darth Vader to supporting players such as Boba Fett, Mace Windu, Jar Jar Binks, Hermi Odle, Jek Porkins, Kit Fisto, Lak Sivrak, Momaw Nadon, Mon Mothma, Nute Gunray, Ponda Baba, Salacious B. Crumb, Sy Snootles, Sio Bibble, Plo Koon, Dexter Jettster and on and on.

Did we leave any out? Have your own favorites? Send them in to dking@wimgo.com and we’ll include them soon in an updated version of this post.

- Dennis King