Posts tagged Bar Paly
Million Dollar Arm “Thousand Dollar Movie”
May 22nd
(“Thousand Dollar Movie”)
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
MILLION DOLLAR ARM is a comedy about sports, and it is about an underdog who eventually achieves success.
It is also a Disney movie, and so you might think it could practically write itself, but it didn’t, because it is based on a true story.
Jon Hamm plays JB Bernstein, a sports agent who along with his partner, Aash, have been on their own for three years, and they can’t manage to sign a new client.
In fact, all their good clients are retired.
At the beginning of the movie, JB is trying to sign a professional football player named Popo, but Popo says that he wants a $1 million bonus in cash up front.
JB tells Popo, “What? I can’t do that. No one can do that.”
The agency’s situation is so bad that Aash says he doesn’t think he can keep doing it.
So, one night JB is bored and flipping through the television channels when he comes across a cricket match and “Britain’s got Talent,” in which Susan Boyle amazed Great Britain with her singing.
JB gets the idea of combining the two concepts and that leads him to going to India and conducting a talent competition in the hopes of finding a cricket player who can be trained to pitch a baseball and eventually become a professional baseball player in the United States.
And the first half of the movie is about JB in India trying to find two pitchers to bring back to the U.S. to be trained and be good enough to get a tryout with a professional baseball team through the competition he created called “Million Dollar Arm,” promising $1 million to whoever wins and succeeds.
So, the second half of the movie is about the two leading contenders, Rinku and Dinesh, being trained in Los Angeles in a sport they know nothing about.
You see, JB believes that if he is successful, he will have created a market with a billion new fans of American baseball in India rooting for their homeboy.
Alan Arkin is also in the movie playing the same cranky oldtimer that he seems to always play these days, and Lake Bell is also in it as a potential love interest for JB.
MILLION DOLLAR ARM is not much more than just a thousand dollar movie.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
Million Dollar Arm – Movie Trailer
May 21st
Based on a true story, Disney’s “Million Dollar Arm” follows JB Bernstein, a once-successful sports agent who now finds himself edged out by bigger, slicker competitors. He and his partner Aash (Aasif Mandvi) will have to close their business down for good if JB doesn’t come up with something fast. Late one night, while watching cricket being played in India on TV, JB comes up with an idea so radical it just might work. Why not go to there and find the next baseball pitching sensation? Setting off for Mumbai with nothing but a gifted but cantankerous scout (Alan Arkin) in tow, JB stages a televised, nationwide competition called “Million Dollar Arm” where 40,000 hopefuls compete before two 18-year-old finalists, Rinku and Dinesh (Suraj Sharma, Madhur Mittal), emerge as winners. JB brings them back to the United States to train with legendary pitching coach Tom House (Bill Paxton). The goal: get the boys signed to a major league team. Not only is the game itself difficult to master, but life in the U.S. with a committed bachelor makes things even more complicated-for all of them. While Rinku and Dinesh learn the finer points of baseball and American culture, they in turn teach JB the true meaning of teamwork and commitment. Ultimately, what began as a purely commercial venture becomes something more and leads JB to find the one thing he was never looking for at all-a family.
“Non-Stop” The Name Says It All
Mar 5th
“Name Says It All”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
NON-STOP stars Liam Neeson as Bill Marks, a U.S. Federal air marshal assigned to an overnight flight from New York to London.
I know what you’re thinking. What could possibly happen on an airline flight that could keep the audience’s attention for a whole movie, right?
Well, how about a threat that someone on the airplane is going to die every 20 minutes unless a ransom is paid, people do start dying, and then finally a bomb is discovered. Does that get your attention?
The movie begins with Marks waiting at the curb of JFK Airport before boarding his flight to have a cigarette, and a man approaches him to ask for a light.
Without being asked anything, the man says, “I’m headed to Amsterdam.”
Once he is on the airplane, Marks is constantly looking around, checking out all the passengers, and evaluating them for any possible trouble they might cause.
He comforts a little girl on the airplane who is flying by herself for the first time and is a little bit frightened. Then he calls someone on his cellphone and says that he can’t stay in London for three days and whoever he is talking to has to get him back to New York on the first plane available.
A woman named Jen, played by Julianne Moore, gets the man sitting next to Marks in the window seat to trade seats with her, and Jen and Marks start talking to one another.
Even though Marks flies all the time for his job, he hates flying and especially has trouble during takeoffs.
Then Marks gets a text message on his cellphone over the secure line on the airplane, and the message says that in exactly 20 minutes someone on the plane is going to die unless $150 million is transferred into a particular bank account, and if it isn’t confirmed, someone dies again in the next 20 minutes.
Sure enough, someone does die from unnatural circumstances, and now Marks has to find whoever is sending him the messages, prevent the next death, and use the help of only two people on the plane he can trust, Jen and a flight attendant he knows from previous flights, Nancy, played by Michelle Dockery, who plays Lady Mary in the “Downton Abbey” TV series.
NON-STOP lives up to its name.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
