Posts tagged Brooke Smith
“Labor Day” Soft Spot in Your Heart
Feb 19th
“Soft Spot in Your Heart”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
LABOR DAY is based on the novel by Joyce Maynard, who was involved with reclusive author J. D. Salinger, and adapted and directed by Jason Reitman, whose previous movies have been comedies.
This movie is not a comedy.
The time is 1987 in a small town in New England, and we meet Adele, a divorced mother played by Kate Winslet, and her son Henry, who is 13 years old.
Henry narrates the story, but his voice is that of Tobey Maguire, who plays Henry as an adult at the end of the movie.
Henry makes the curious comment that his father believes that Adele is getting worse, and Henry says that he could feel his mother’s loneliness before he had a name for it.
Adele and Henry leave their house only once a month to go shopping, and we see them go to a store, where a man, Frank, played by Josh Brolin, approaches Henry and asks for his help.
Frank has blood on his stomach, his leg is hurting, and he asks for a ride. When they get into the car and Adele asks Frank where to, he answers, “Your house, just for a few moments to rest my leg.”
Frank says that he hurt his leg jumping out of a window, and he asks to stay with them until nightfall, when he will leave.
Then they learn that Frank is an escaped prisoner, where he was serving 18 years for murder, but he says that it didn’t happen the way it is being reported.
Frank ties Adele to a chair so that after he is gone, she can’t be accused of helping him, and then he prepares dinner and feeds her.
The next day is Friday, but because it is the Labor Day weekend, Frank is disappointed to learn that there will be no trains coming by, on which he planned to catch a ride.
So, Frank fixes their car, washes and waxes the floors in the house, and even teaches Henry how to throw a baseball.
As the weekend goes on, the relationship among the three gets more complicated, and we learn more about Adele’s condition through flashbacks, which make her more sympathetic.
Frank continues to show a more softer side, too.
LABOR DAY can easily find a soft spot in your heart, as well.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
Labor Day – Movie Trailer
Feb 18th
“Labor Day” centers on 13-year-old Henry Wheeler, who struggles to be the man of his house and care for his reclusive mother Adele while confronting all the pangs of adolescence. On a back-to-school shopping trip, Henry and his mother encounter Frank Chambers, a man both intimidating and clearly in need of help, who convinces them to take him into their home and later is revealed to be an escaped convict. The events of this long Labor Day weekend will shape them for the rest of their lives.
Fair Game – Movie Trailer
Nov 18th
The Bourne Identity director Doug Liman teams with screenwriters Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth to streamline Joseph Wilson’s and Valerie Plame’s books detailing the explosive outing of undercover CIA agent Plame into a tense docudrama thriller starring Naomi Watts and Sean Penn. At the time her cover was blown by the George W. Bush administration, Plame (Watts) was combing Iraq for evidence of weapons of mass destruction as part of the CIA’s Counter-Proliferation Division. Her husband, American diplomat Joe Wilson was attempting to verify a claim that the Iraqis had recently purchased enriched uranium from Niger when the White House began beating the war drums before any solid evidence had been gathered. When Joe penned an editorial in The New York Times decrying the hasty call to war, a prolific Washington, D.C. journalist took the opportunity to reveal Plame’s identity as a CIA operative, an act that not only put her career in jeopardy, but also left her various contacts overseas in a precarious position. Years later, a jobless and publicly disgraced Plame wages a vicious fight to clear her name, set the record straight, and keep her family from falling apart.
