Posts tagged Hunter Burke
Get On Up “Loud and Proud”
Aug 14th
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
GET ON UP is the story of James Brown, known at various times in his life and career as The Hardest Working Man in Show Business, The Godfather of Soul, or as he preferred to be called by strangers and even friends, “Mr. Brown.”
Brown is played remarkably by Chadwick Boseman, expect him to be nominated for an Academy Award in 2015, and don’t be surprised if he wins one for Best Actor.
TIME magazine said that “From 1958 to 1986, [Brown] landed 116 singles on BILLBOARD’s Hot 100 singles chart, and their irresistible grooves have since been sampled on about 4,000 songs.”
Mick Jagger is one of the producers of the film, and he has said that he copied a lot of Brown’s moves for his performances from what Brown did so remarkably on stage.
Incidentally, one of the most interesting scenes in the movie is when Brown and the Rolling Stones appeared together during a performance and Brown’s manager, played by Dan Aykroyd, tells Brown that the Stones will be has-beens within a year.
When Brown walks off stage after his performance, he passes Jagger, who has been watching Brown from the wings, and Brown says, “Welcome to America.”
The movie jumps around in time to show Brown’s life as a little boy being abused by his father and abandoned by his mother to how he developed an interest in music to how he formed his first singing group, The Famous Flames, with his lifelong friend Bobby Byrd to his many brushes with the law and many relationships with women, but mostly to his many performances of his most famous songs in various performances in various locations around the world.
The editing is almost surreal when it cuts between performances of the same song at different times and locations.
We see how Brown overcame the rules that had already been written in the music business and how they mistreated Black performers, we see how Brown broke away from the Famous Flames and became his own star performer, and we see how Brown mistreated his own band and those around him who loved him.
But most of all, we see outstanding performances that earned him the right to be called “The Hardest Working Man in Show Business.”
GET ON UP can bring tears to your eyes.
Get On Up – Movie Trailer
Aug 1st
In his follow-up to the four-time Academy Award (R)-nominated blockbuster The Help, Tate Taylor directs 42’s Chadwick Boseman as James Brown in Get on Up. Based on the incredible life story of the Godfather of Soul, the film will give a fearless look inside the music, moves and moods of Brown, taking audiences on the journey from his impoverished childhood to his evolution into one of the most influential figures of the 20th century. Boseman is joined in the drama by Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, Nelsan Ellis, Lennie James, Tika Sumpter, Jill Scott and Dan Aykroyd.
Million Dollar Arm “Thousand Dollar Movie”
May 22nd
(“Thousand Dollar Movie”)
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
MILLION DOLLAR ARM is a comedy about sports, and it is about an underdog who eventually achieves success.
It is also a Disney movie, and so you might think it could practically write itself, but it didn’t, because it is based on a true story.
Jon Hamm plays JB Bernstein, a sports agent who along with his partner, Aash, have been on their own for three years, and they can’t manage to sign a new client.
In fact, all their good clients are retired.
At the beginning of the movie, JB is trying to sign a professional football player named Popo, but Popo says that he wants a $1 million bonus in cash up front.
JB tells Popo, “What? I can’t do that. No one can do that.”
The agency’s situation is so bad that Aash says he doesn’t think he can keep doing it.
So, one night JB is bored and flipping through the television channels when he comes across a cricket match and “Britain’s got Talent,” in which Susan Boyle amazed Great Britain with her singing.
JB gets the idea of combining the two concepts and that leads him to going to India and conducting a talent competition in the hopes of finding a cricket player who can be trained to pitch a baseball and eventually become a professional baseball player in the United States.
And the first half of the movie is about JB in India trying to find two pitchers to bring back to the U.S. to be trained and be good enough to get a tryout with a professional baseball team through the competition he created called “Million Dollar Arm,” promising $1 million to whoever wins and succeeds.
So, the second half of the movie is about the two leading contenders, Rinku and Dinesh, being trained in Los Angeles in a sport they know nothing about.
You see, JB believes that if he is successful, he will have created a market with a billion new fans of American baseball in India rooting for their homeboy.
Alan Arkin is also in the movie playing the same cranky oldtimer that he seems to always play these days, and Lake Bell is also in it as a potential love interest for JB.
MILLION DOLLAR ARM is not much more than just a thousand dollar movie.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
