Posts tagged Julia Prud’homme
Gone Girl “Excellent Thriller”
Oct 8th
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
GONE GIRL is an excellent mystery thriller based on the 2012 best-selling novel by Gillian Flynn, who also wrote the screenplay, and if you haven’t read the novel, you are in for a surprise.
No, you are in for more than one surprise, maybe even shockers.
Ben Affleck stars as Nick, Rosamund Pike stars as Amy, his wife, and one morning Amy goes missing from their home in Missouri under mysterious circumstances.
Evidence left in the living room of the house suggests to the police that Amy might have been murdered, and of course in cases like this, the husband is always the prime suspect.
Kim Dickens plays Detective Rhonda Boney, who is investigating the case, and she and her partner provide what little comic relief occurs in the movie, along with Tyler Perry, who plays Nick’s high-priced, high-profile, and high-powered defense attorney.
One of the many problems for the police is that Nick is not acting as they believe a husband would if his wife was missing and believed to have been murdered, as well as the fact that Amy went missing on their fifth wedding anniversary, and Amy’s present to Nick was a game in which she left clues for him labeled “Clue One,” “Clue Two,” and so on.
Also, when they question Nick, his answers don’t strike them as being filled with the sort of information that they believe a husband should know about his wife.
Nick has a twin sister, Margo, and she tells Nick, “Everyone knows ‘complicated’ is code for ‘bitch.'”
Amy left a diary behind, and we hear Amy’s voice as she reads excerpts from the diary and see flashbacks to when they met in New York City, where they were both writers, and then when they both got laid off and moved to Nick’s hometown in Missouri to take care of Nick’s ailing mother.
From the entries in Amy’s diary, we get the impression that their marriage was not as happy as Nick has been telling the police it was.
Finally, Neil Patrick Harris plays an important role as a former suitor of Amy’s, whose departure from her life was not under the most pleasant circumstances.
GONE GIRL ties all these complicated loose ends up at the end in which some people might believe is a bit ambiguous and messy.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
Gone Girl – Movie Trailer
Oct 6th
Directed by David Fincher and based upon the global bestseller by Gillian Flynn – unearths the secrets at the heart of a modern marriage. On the occasion of his fifth wedding anniversary, Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) reports that his beautiful wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike), has gone missing. Under pressure from the police and a growing media frenzy, Nick’s portrait of a blissful union begins to crumble. Soon his lies, deceits and strange behavior have everyone asking the same dark question: Did Nick Dunne kill his wife?
“Julie & Julia” Mastering the Art of Fine Filmmaking
Jun 24th
Mastering the Art of Fine Filmmaking
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
JULIE & JULIA tells the story of two women who were both secretaries for U.S. government agencies, who were both married to great guys, and whose lives were both saved by food.
Julia, of course, is the legendary Julia Child, played exquisitely by Meryl Streep, the woman who popularized French cooking for Americans and who was fearless in the kitchen both at home and on the set of her long-running cooking show on television.
Julie Powell, played by Amy Adams, is the young woman in New York City who decided in 2002 to change her life by giving herself the challenge of cooking all 524 recipes in Julia Child’s cookbook in 365 days and writing about her cooking project on the Internet.
Julie says, “Cooking is what I do to get away from what I do all day.”
Julie’s day job is working for a city agency processing claims from victims of 9/11, and her blog became a book which in turn became the basis for half this movie.
The other half is based on Child’s book, My Life in France, and the film switches back and forth between the two stories in a comic telling of two delightful and fascinating lives.
Julia and her husband Paul, played by Stanley Tucci, arrive in Paris in 1949, and in trying to decide what to do with her time, Julia settles on going to cooking school. The scenes of Julia competing with her all-male fellow students are laugh-out-loud funny.
Equally funny are Julie’s attempts to get through all 524 recipes in one year, but not so funny are the strains that it puts on her marriage to her husband Eric, who naturally has to eat everything Julie cooks, but with help from their friends, too, at times.
Yes, there is lots of eating and lots of cooking in this film; so be prepared to be hungry at the end of it, as well as entertained.
Be prepared for pleasant surprises, too, such as Dan Aykroyd’s portrayal of Julia Child on “Saturday Night Live,” which is still hilarious in spite of its disastrous ending.
We see Julie get her book published, and Julia eventually publishes her famous cookbook with two friends, MASTERING THE ART OF FRENCH COOKING.
JULIE & JULIA is an excellent example of mastering the art of fine filmmaking.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
