Posts tagged changes
Nightcrawler “Good and Creepy”
Nov 12th
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
NIGHTCRAWLER is a fascinating and dark movie that affects you the way passing an accident on the highway does: You want to look at it, but you feel a little bit guilty in doing so.
Jake Gyllenhaal stars as Louis Bloom, a petty thief who does come across an automobile accident in Los Angeles, and the experience changes his life so much that he becomes a different man because of it.
It is the middle of the night, Lou stops his car to observe what is happening at the scene, he watches a videographer record footage for morning news programs, and when he sees the footage on television, Lou decides that he can do that, and so he buys himself a camcorder and a police scanner and sets out to become a freelance videographer specializing in accidents and crime scenes that happen in the middle of the night.
Lou makes his first sale for $250, and when the news director tells him he has a good eye, Lou says, “I’m a very, very quick learner; you’ll be seeing me again.”
A carjacking crime wave going on in the city causes business to be so good for Lou that he hires a young homeless man for $30 a night to be his assistant.
Rick’s job is to ride shotgun, watch the traffic, give directions, and handle a second camera for different angles at the scenes.
Well, one night Lou and Rick come onto a crime scene that will change their lives.
It involves shootings during a home invasion, and because Lou and Rick arrive on the scene before the police do, they see the shooters leave the house, and Lou even records them.
Then Lou goes inside the house to get exclusive footage of the victims while Rick stays outside and stands watch.
Lou has no compunction against moving evidence inside the house for better camera angles before the police arrive and gets away with it.
For now.
Lou establishes a business relationship with the news director of one of the TV stations, who is Nina, played by Rene Russo, but he would like their relationship to be more than just business.
Rick wants more money, the police question Lou, and then all hell breaks loose.
NIGHTCRAWLER is fascinating to watch, very good, but very very very very creepy.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
“Mud” Just Another Mysterious Stranger Movie
Jun 15th
“Another Mysterious Stranger”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
Mud stars Matthew McConaughey, he has received praise for his performance in this film, but once again he does what he seems to do in all of his films, and that is to take his shirt off.
The story takes place in Arkansas along the Arkansas River near the Mississippi River, and it is basically another in a long line of movies about coming of age.
It begins in the middle of the night when a boy named Ellis, who is 14 years old, sneaks out of his parents’ houseboat and meets his best friend, Neckbone, where they take a boat out onto the river and motor downstream to the Mississippi, where they beach their boat on the shore of an island.
They walk inland for a while, come to a tall tree, and one of them says, “There it is.”
“It” is a boat in pretty good condition stuck high up in the tree from some previous time when flood conditions caused it to get stuck up there.
Although they claim the boat as theirs, they soon discover that someone is living in the boat, and he shows up telling them that the boat is his, because he is living in it.
The man tells them to call him Mud, says that he grew up around there, and he will trade them the boat for food.
Mud is waiting for someone, a woman named Juniper, and when she shows up, they will leave and the boys can have the boat.
Back home, Ellis’s mother tells him to be home that evening by 7, so they can have a sit-down dinner and talk.
Then while he is in town, Ellis sees an older boy picking on a girl Ellis knows named May Pearl, and Ellis punches the boy to get him to stop.
Ellis and Neckbone also see a pretty woman in town they had never seen before, who turns out to be Juniper, played by Reese Witherspoon.
Later, Ellis learns that his parents want to separate, his mother wants to move back into town, and they will lose the houseboat.
And this is all just the beginning of the story, which has too many parallels and is not original.
Mud is just another movie about a mysterious stranger who shows up and changes the lives of others.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”