Posts tagged Criminals
“The Debt” Truth Is a Luxury
Sep 9th
“Truth Is a Luxury”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
The Debt is a suspense thriller that shifts between different years, different locations, and even different actors playing the same characters, and the suspense and shocking conclusions to various scenes keep the audience’s attention from start to finish.
The story is about a secret mission conducted in the 1960s by three Israeli secret agents and the consequences of that mission which follow them for the rest of their lives.
The three secret agents are Stephan, David, and Rachel, and their mission is to slip into East Berlin, find and identify a suspected Nazi war criminal, capture him, sneak him out of East Berlin, and then take him back to Israel where he will stand trial for the atrocities he committed in a German concentration camp located in Poland.
Rachel is played by Jessica Chastain back in the Sixties during the mission, and when David mentions to her that she is brave, she says, “I’m not brave. I’m terrified.”
Helen Mirren plays Rachel in the present-day scenes, she still has the facial scar that she received during a bloody fight with their prisoner, and once again she is terrific in this role.
Present-day Rachel has a grown-up daughter who is married and has a son. The daughter has also written a book about the mission that has become a success, and Rachel sometimes reads from the book when her daughter is asked to give talks about the book.
However, there is a secret about the mission, which didn’t exactly go as planned, and as Rachel tells Stephan, Rachel cannot tell her daughter the truth, because it would destroy her daughter.
Eventually we see the details of the mission back in the Sixties, and we also learn the truth. The Nazi war criminal that they are after is working under a different name as a doctor, and Rachel and David pretend to be married and having difficulty conceiving a child.
So, Rachel goes to the doctor for help and has to experience the humiliation, embarrassment, and horror of being examined by him while the agents put their plan into action and finally abduct him.
What happens next is the consequences they have to face in the present.
The Debt shows that the truth is a luxury, it plays with the audience, and the shocks keep coming until the very end.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
“The Guard” Funny, but Difficult
Sep 3rd
“Funny, but Difficult”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
The Guard is one of the funniest movies you will see all year, but it is also one of the most difficult to understand, too, because it takes place in Ireland, and although the characters speak English for the most part, their accents are unfamiliar to American ears.
I say “for the most part,” because one scene has characters speaking Gaelic, but it also contains subtitles for the audience’s benefit.
The story takes place in County Galway, in western Ireland, and Brendan Gleeson plays Sgt. Gerry Boyle, who prides himself as being “the last of the independents,” although the criminals in the story call him “unpredictable” and for good reason.
For example, when Sgt. Boyle and his new partner investigate a murder, Sgt. Boyle says that the victim looks like Brendan Foley. But then when the partner remarks that they know who the victim is, Sgt. Boyle says, “I said he looked like Brendan Foley. I didn’t say he was Brendan Foley.”
And then Special Agent Wendell Everett comes to town from the United States. He is played by Don Cheadle, and the authorities have been tracking a ship carrying half-a-billion dollars worth of cocaine on board, which they suspect will dock somewhere in western Ireland to unload the drugs.
The fact that Agent Everett is black gives Sgt. Boyle the opportunity to make some outrageous racist comments, but then Sgt. Boyle makes an excuse by saying that he is Irish and racism is part of his culture.
However, as Agent Everett points out, Sgt. Boyle could very easily be very dumb or very smart.
Eventually we learn that Sgt. Boyle is much smarter than he appears to be and also smarter than he acts.
We also follow the gang of drug traffickers who are waiting for the ship to arrive, and their interaction is just as funny as the interaction among Sgt. Boyle, Agent Everett, and the rest of the police force.
At one point you might think that there are too many side stories going on, but they all tie in together neatly at the end, which involves one of the funniest shoot-outs you will ever see.
The Guard is funny, it is difficult, but it is so good that you just might have to see it more than once to enjoy it all the more.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.