Posts tagged Ben Foster
Lone Survivor – Movie Trailer
Feb 1st
LONE SURVIVOR, starring Mark Wahlberg, tells the story of four Navy SEALs on an ill-fated covert mission to neutralize a high-level Taliban operative who are ambushed by enemy forces in the Hindu Kush region of Afghanistan. Based on The New York Times bestseller, this story of heroism, courage and survival directed by Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights) also stars Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch, Ben Foster and Eric Bana.
“Lone Survivor” Interesting and Exhausting
Jan 22nd
“Interesting and Exhausting”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
LONE SURVIVOR is based on the true story of a military operation in 2005 in Afghanistan that went terribly wrong.
Mark Wahlberg stars as Chief Petty Officer Marcus Luttrell, a member of Navy SEAL Team 10, which took part in the operation after which Luttrell wrote a best-selling book about his experience.
The film and the story also have a Colorado connection, as one member of the SEAL team on the ground, Danny Dietz, played by Emile Hirsch, grew up in the Denver area.
The team was charged with capturing or killing a top Taliban leader named Ahmad Shah, who was known to be responsible for the deaths of many Americans in the military.
So, a team of four men are dropped on the ground in Afghanistan, and we hear the radio signal from the command plane above them say, “We’ll be with you for the next six hours; have a nice walk.”
Unfortunately, events begin to go wrong almost immediately when they get into position and an old man and two boys herding some goats stumble upon their location.
The team captures the goatherders, but their rules of engagement prevent them from harming unarmed prisoners, and when the team can’t communicate with their commanding officer back at base camp about what to do, after some disagreement among themselves, they let the three prisoners go unharmed, and now that the operation is compromised, they head for higher ground.
Then an army of Taliban soldiers finds them and engages them in a firefight that essentially is the rest of the movie.
There is an attempt to break up the nonstop bloody action with a couple of side stories about an Arabian horse wanted as a wedding present and the harassment of a new member back at base camp, but essentially the movie consists of the combat fighting between the team and the Taliban as the team is cut down to its title character.
How he survives after the fighting is over on the mountain is of interest and points out a culture clash, but at this point the audience is probably exhausted from everything that leads up to it.
As a story, the movie is interesting, but as a movie, it is exhausting.
LONE SURVIVOR leaves it up to the audience to decide whether to be interested or exhausted.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
“Kill Your Darlings” Is Full of Oddities
Dec 22nd
“Full of Oddities”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
Kill Your Darlings is an odd little movie starring Daniel Radcliffe as Allen Ginsberg that tells a story about him and other writers of the Beat Generation in 1943 in New York City.
For those of you in the audience who are too young to know and those of you who are old enough but might have forgotten, Ginsberg was an American poet best known for writing “Howl,” a 1956 long poem attacking American values who later in life was associated with Naropa University in Boulder.
The title refers to advice sometimes given to writers to eliminate the parts of their work they are most in love with, because those parts are probably the most self-indulgent, but in the movie it can also refer to an actual murder.
The movie begins when Ginsberg is 19 years old, and he is accepted to Columbia University, where he will meet other writers with whom he will get in and out of trouble, such as William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and others who didn’t become as famous.
We also see some of Ginsberg’s home life with his father, who was also a poet, and his mother, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, who was a very troubled woman.
Ginsberg becomes friends with Lucien Carr, and through him he meets David at a weird party at David’s apartment, where David says about Ginsberg, “Under the right circumstances, even he might change the world.”
Remember, this was 70 years ago at a time when writers were serious, and they believed that their writing could change the world, which they hoped would be for the better.
If it also made them successful and famous, then that was better, too.
Ginsberg and his fellow writers also have a saying, “First thought, best thought,” which they believe to be performed and useful in their writing, but if you know anything about serious writing, such an idea would probably fall into that category of darlings which should be killed.
The movie is full of disjointed scenes, and the audience might have trouble keeping the story line straight and also keeping track of who all the characters are.
Of course, homosexuality plays a big role in the story, and this was at a time when homosexuality was illegal in numerous places.
Kill Your Darlings is full of many oddities.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
