Posts tagged Kelly Reilly
Calvary “Depressing Through and Through”
Aug 18th
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
CALVARY has been called a “dark comedy,” and I certainly agree that it is dark, but I found nothing in it that I would call a comedy.
It stars Breendan Gleeson, an Irish actor who has made some terrific comedies, and in this film he plays Father James, a Catholic priest in a small town in Ireland who hears something startling at the beginning of the film while he is holding Confession.
The person that Father James is listening to tells him about being sexually abused by a priest starting at seven years old and then says in a calm, steady voice, “I’m going to kill you, Father.”
Now, Father James was not the abuser, he is told that he is innocent, but he is also told that is the reason Father James is going to be killed, along with when and where his death will take place.
Later, Father James is advised that the choice is his whether or not to go to the police, and he does go to the police, but for a reason other than to report the threat on his life.
Father James says that he knows who the person is, but later in the film he says that he doesn’t.
So, for the rest of the film we watch Father James conduct his priestly duties and go about the business of living his life while we in the audience try to figure out who the possible killer is and what Father James is going to do when the time comes.
Is it Jack the butcher, whose wife has been knocked about, but not by Jack, or so he claims, but by someone she has been seeing, and not so secretly?
Is it the person Jack believes is mistreating his wife or one of her many boyfriends that person says she has?
Is it Michael Fitzgerald, who is rich and has a nice home, but is now alone after everyone around him has left him?
Is it the owner of the pub where everyone goes to forget their troubles and who seems to have a grudge against Father James?
Could it even be someone we don’t see until the time and place of the death threat?
CALVARY is depressing to begin with, in the middle, and even more depressing after it is over.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
Calvary – Movie Trailer
Aug 14th
CALVARY’s Father James (Brendan Gleeson) is a good priest who is faced with sinister and troubling circumstances brought about by a mysterious member of his parish. Although he continues to comfort his own fragile daughter (Kelly Reilly) and reach out to help members of his church with their various scurrilous moral – and often comic – problems, he feels sinister and troubling forces closing in, and begins to wonder if he will have the courage to face his own personal Calvary.
“Sherlock Holmes” Deconstructing Holmes
Dec 30th
Deconstructing Holmes
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
SHERLOCK HOLMES takes one of the most famous of all fictional characters, the brilliant but eccentric London detective created in the late 1800s by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and turns him into a modern-day action hero.
The setting is still London in the late 1800s, but Robert Downey Jr.
plays Holmes as just as much a martial-arts fighter as a brilliant thinker.
And Jude Law plays Dr. Watson, Sherlock’s partner, colleague, and writer of Sherlock’s famous cases, as just as much an equal in the martial arts as Holmes is.
To steal a line from somebody else, “This is not your great-grandfather’s Sherlock Holmes.”
In fact, Watson himself may be onto something, because a major subplot in this mess of a movie is that Dr. Watson is engaged and preparing to move out of their digs at 221B Baker Street.
The fault, Dear Audience, lies with the writers and the director, Guy Ritchie, known for his rock-’em, sock-’em modern-day British crime-caper comedies, but most famous for being the recently divorced husband of Madonna.
When the movie opens, Holmes is in a foul mood, and Watson says to Mrs.
Hudson, the woman who keeps their rooms as tidy as she is allowed to, “He just needs another case, that’s all.”
The last case that Holmes had and presumably solved was three months ago, but before he acquires a new case, Holmes is invited to dinner in a restaurant with Watson and his fiancee, Mary, who insists that Holmes examine her at the table and tell her what his observations reveal about her.
To say that it doesn’t go well would be the understatement of the 19th century.
Holmes eventually gets a case that involves black magic, a midget, a plot to rule England and to reacquire the United States, and Holmes’s female nemesis, Irene Adler, played by the beautiful Rachel McAdams.
Yes, this movie is more like a James Bond adventure than a story about the Sherlock Holmes we have come to know, love, respect, and admire.
The movie is preposterous, the story is preposterous, the action scenes are preposterous, even the acting is preposterous.
And, unfortunately, the ending has all the earmarks of a sequel in the works.
SHERLOCK HOLMES is a silly deconstruction of the four novels and 56 short stories that we have read and loved.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
