Posts tagged Michelle Williams
“My Week with Marilyn” Delightful and Believable
Dec 10th
“Delightful and Believable”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
My Week with Marilyn tells the true story of what must have been every young man’s dream back in the 1950s: spend time on a movie set with Marilyn Monroe and get paid to take care of all her needs and wants.
The time is 1956, the 23-year-old man is Colin Clark, and the movie is The Prince and the Showgirl, which was being made in England.
Marilyn is played wonderfully by Michelle Williams, Kenneth Branagh plays Laurence Olivier, and, yes, that is Emma Watson playing Lucy, a wardrobe assistant working on the movie.
Judi Dench plays an actress in the movie being made, which was based on a play called The Sleeping Prince, and one could ask, “Is Judi Dench in every movie these days?”
Colin says that he will do anything to be in the film business, and he remarks, “Everyone remembers their first job. This is the story of mine.”
Through family connections, Colin is able to get a job as a gofer on the production and is even given the title of Third Assistant Director, a position that nowadays is called Second Second Assistant Director, so that people will stop referring to the person by a rude word that rhymes with “third.”
Marilyn is having personal problems in her life, she is terribly insecure, and she arrives with her new husband, Arthur Miller, along with a large number of handlers who like to keep Marilyn medicated because it is easier to keep their cash cow under control that way.
After Marilyn keeps everyone waiting on the set and slowing down the production, Olivier tells Colin to “Be a good boy and keep an eye on her.”
Then after Arthur Miller leaves and goes back to the United States, Marilyn starts noticing Colin and calls him at all hours when she just wants a friend or to have someone near whom she believes she can trust and is on her side in the conflict that is going on.
Marilyn claims that she just wants to be loved like a regular girl, but Olivier believes that she knows exactly what she is doing, and now Colin is in a very fortunate and privileged position that gets him in trouble with her handlers and other members of the crew.
My Week with Marilyn is delightful and believable.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
My Week with Marilyn – Movie Trailer
Dec 8th
In the early summer of 1956, 23 year-old Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), just down from Oxford and determined to make his way in the film business, worked as a lowly assistant on the set of ‘The Prince and the Showgirl’. The film that famously united Sir Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) and Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams), who was also on honeymoon with her new husband, the playwright Aurthur Miller (Dougray Scott). Nearly 40 years on, his diary account The Prince, the Showgirl and Me was published, but one week was missing and this was published some years later as My Week with Marilyn – this is the story of that week. When Arthur Miller leaves England, the coast is clear for Colin to introduce Marilyn to some of the pleasures of British life; an idyllic week in which he escorted a Monroe desperate to get away from her retinue of Hollywood hangers-on and the pressures of work.
“Blue Valentine” Biggest Disappointment
Jan 19th
“Biggest Disappointment”
BLUE VALENTINE is a searing look at the rise and fall of a short-lived marriage, and although it has received a lot of praise for its excellence, it just might be a big disappointment to you.
Ryan Gosling plays Dean, and Michelle Williams plays Cindy, and we watch them in scenes of their present-day marriage, as well as scenes of when they first met and fell in love about six years earlier, but in distracting jump cuts back and forth instead of in chronological order.
In fact, this film looks as if the filmmakers finished making the film chronologically and then decided that it was so bad that in order to make it more interesting, they reedited it and rearranged all the scenes to be out of chronological order.
Unfortunately, that only made it worse.
The film begins in the present, Dean and Cindy have a little five-year-old daughter named Frankie, and a family crisis occurs when their dog runs away.
Dean tells Frankie that maybe the dog moved out to Hollywood to become a movie dog, and then they take Frankie to stay with Cindy’s parents for a reason that we don’t know until later.
Then we get a time switch to six years earlier and see Dean working for a moving company and moving an old man named Walter out of his apartment and into an assisted-living home.
Back in the present, Dean tells Cindy, “We’ve got to get out of this house.”
This is the reason they took Frankie to Cindy’s parents, and they book a night in the Future Room of a theme motel, where they have a night of drinking and sexual carousing.
And then it is back and forth to their meeting, falling in love, a nasty encounter with Cindy’s old boyfriend, having dinner at the home of Cindy’s parents, as well as what happens to them after their night in the Future Room.
In the present, Dean is a free-lance painter, a job he admits that he likes because he can start drinking at 8 o’clock. In other words, Dean doesn’t have any big ambitions.
Cindy, on the other hand, works as a nurse and wants to become a doctor.
BLUE VALENTINE is a film I was looking forward to, but so far it is the biggest disappointment of the year.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”