Posts tagged Deirdre O’Connell
St. Vincent “Big Rewards”
Oct 29th
Posted by Channel 1 Networks in Hotshots Movie Reviews
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
ST. VINCENT is the latest film starring Bill Murray, and that is all you need to know to make you want to see it, and you will be pleased you did. Murray plays Vincent, who is the furthest thing you can imagine being a saint at the beginning of the movie.
Vincent lives in a run-down house in Brooklyn, he drinks, he gambles, and he has a so-called “friend,” who is a pregnant Russian stripper and hooker named Daka, who is played by Naomi Watts.
Well, one day some new neighbors move in next door, and things get off to a bad start when the moving truck breaks a branch off a tree in Vincent’s front yard, which falls onto Vincent’s car parked in his driveway and damages it.
The car, not the driveway.
The truck also runs over Vincent’s fence, and he wants the new neighbor to pay for that, too, although we have already seen Vincent run over the fence himself while driving his car into the driveway drunk and backwards.
The new neighbors are Maggie, a woman going through a divorce played by Melissa McCarthy in a surprisingly and thankfully toned-down performance, and her young son Oliver, who says when he is told about Vincent, “It’s gonna be a long life.”
Maggie has a new job at a hospital, and Oliver starts a new school, which happens to be Catholic, although he is not, nor are many of the kids in his class, as the teacher finds out when he introduces Oliver to the class.
The teacher, Brother Geraghty, is played by Chris O’Dowd.
On his first day at school, Oliver gets picked on by some bullies, and his clothes are stolen, and so when he gets home he is locked out of the house and goes next door to use Vincent’s phone in order to call Maggie.
When Oliver tries to explain why he wants to use Vinent’s telephone, Vincent says, “I don’t need to hear the whole story,” which Vincent will say more than once in this movie.
When Maggie gets home, she anticipates future needs to use Vincent, and so they agree that Vincent will babysit Oliver for a small wage whenever necessary.
Well, you can see where this arrangement is headed, can’t you?
ST. VINCENT pays off with big rewards.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
St. Vincent – Movie Trailer
Oct 24th
Posted by Channel 1 Networks in Movie Trailers
Maggie (McCarthy), a single mother, moves into a new home in Brooklyn with her 12-year old son, Oliver (Lieberher). Forced to work long hours, she has no choice but to leave Oliver in the care of their new neighbor, Vincent (Murray), a retired curmudgeon with a penchant for alcohol and gambling. An odd friendship soon blossoms between the improbable pair. Together with a pregnant stripper named Daka (Watts), Vincent brings Oliver along on all the stops that make up his daily routine – the race track, a strip club, and the local dive bar. Vincent helps Oliver grow to become a man, while Oliver begins to see in Vincent something that no one else is able to: a misunderstood man with a good heart.
“Synecdoche, New York” Magnificent Failure
Nov 27th
Posted by Channel 1 Networks in Hotshots Movie Reviews
Magnificent Failure
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK was written and directed by the extremely “different” Charlie Kaufman, and so you know you are in for something, well, “different” if you see this three-hour film.
Kaufman, of course, previously wrote the 1999 BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, the 2002 ADAPTATION, and the 2004 ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND, to give you an idea of what you are in for: quirky, more quirky, and quirkiness to the max.
First of all, the title is a play on Schenectady, New York, where the story opens, but then it gets serious, because “synecdoche” is a figure of speech by which a part is put for the whole, the whole is put for a part, and so on in the dictionary definition until you come to “or the name of the material for the thing made (as ‘boards’ for ‘stage’).”
I can imagine that Kaufman read this definition once and came up with the idea for the film, because it is about one man’s attempt to put his whole life into a stage play. Wink wink. Nudge nudge. Know what I mean? Get it?
Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Caden Cotard, whose first name means “warrior” and whose last name signifies the psychological disorder whose sufferers imagine themselves to be dead. Get it?
In case you don’t, at one point he says, “It’s a play about death. Birth. Life. Family. It’s about everything.”
Caden is a small-town theater director with quirky ideas of his own.
When
the film opens, he is directing a production of DEATH OF A SALESMAN, a play about one man’s failure at the end of his life, and Caden casts young people to play Willy Loman and everyone else.
Then Caden wins the MacArthur Award “genius” grant, which gives him enough money he can do anything he wants with, and he starts working on his play “about everything.”
Meanwhile, his wife leaves him and takes their daughter to Berlin with her.
Caden is always having accidents, seeing doctors, and going to the hospital, and there are many funerals he attends.
He gets involved with other women, one of whom owns a house that is always burning–literally.
Years pass, he hires actors to play the actors playing himself and other people in his life. The End.
SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK shows that a magnificent failure is still a failure.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”