Posts tagged Patrick St. Esprit
Draft Day – Movie Trailer
Apr 21st
On the day of the NFL Draft, general manager Sonny Weaver (Costner) has the opportunity to save football in Cleveland when he trades for the number one pick. He must quickly decide what he’s willing to sacrifice in pursuit of perfection as the lines between his personal and professional life become blurred on a life-changing day for a few hundred young men with dreams of playing in the NFL.
Draft Day “Special Insight”
Apr 16th
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
DRAFT DAY stars Kevin Costner as Sonny Weaver Jr., the general manager of the Cleveland Browns professional football team, whose job is even more important every May when the NFL teams select the college football players they want to play for their teams.
There are 32 teams and seven rounds of drafting, the order of which is determined by where the teams finished overall the previous season and by what picks they have from deals with teams during trades and previous draft days.
Cleveland didn’t do well the previous season, and Sonny gets a lot of phone calls from people trying to influence him with his picks.
The hot player this year is quarterback Bo Callahan, the Heisman Trophy winner who is expected to be chosen by whoever ends up getting the first pick in the first round.
As Sonny says to one football player during his conversations, “You only get drafted once,” which shows just how important draft day is to the players who are turning professional.
Even the owner of the team, played by Frank Langella, puts pressure on Sonny, and right away we see the wheeling and dealing that goes on between teams as they negotiate among themselves for higher picks.
When Sonny talks to other team managers, we see aerial shots of that team’s stadium, and Sonny makes a deal with the Seattle Seahawks on his way to work that is going to upset some members of his staff.
Also, the movie uses fancy editing techniques during split-screen shots when two people are talking on the phone.
Well, news must travel fast in football, and by the time Sonny gets to work, people know about the deal and assume that because of it, Cleveland gets to pick Bo Callahan.
One person who isn’t happy is Brian Drew, the Browns quarterback who was injured last season, but who has worked hard to rehabilitate himself, doesn’t want a new quarterback drafted, and trashes Sonny’s office when he hears about the deal.
Now, those of you who follow football know that not all players who are picked high in the draft succeed professionally.
Others know that not all good college quarterbacks succeed, either.
DRAFT DAY shows special insight into what goes on during draft day, and it is surprisingly emotional and suspenseful right up until the end.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
“Green Zone” Simple Story with Complex Overtones
Mar 18th
Simple Story with Complex Overtones
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
GREEN ZONE is the third collaboration of director Paul Greengrass and actor Matt Damon, the first two being the 2004 THE BOURNE SUPREMACY and the 2007 THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM, and as TIME magazine put it, this movie essentially parachutes “their franchise’s hero, Jason Bourne, into the toxic reality of Iraq.”
This time, however, Damon plays U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, and his assignment right after the war in Iraq began is to lead his team of soldiers to find the weapons of mass destruction that were the cause of the war in the first place.
So, we see Chief Miller and his team roll up to a site in Baghdad that is a disaster, full of Iraqi looters and even an Iraqi sniper in the area.
Miller finds the U.S. officer in charge and tells him, “Intel says we’ve got live chemical agents in this site!”
After they take out the sniper, they go into the building and find . . . nothing. No chemical agents, no weapons of mass destruction, nothing, nada, zip, zilch!
This is not the first time, either. Chief Miller and his team hit another site the week before that was supposedly based on good intelligence, but the site turned out to be nothing more than a toilet factory.
Then we meet Clark Poundstone, played by Greg Kinnear. Poundstone is from Pentagon Special Intelligence, and he swears by the intelligence they have been receiving from an Iraqi source with the code name “Magellan.”
In the meantime, Miller encounters an Iraqi civilian who tells him about a private meeting taking place with high-value Iraqis. They call the man “Freddy,” and he leads them to the house where, sure enough, one of Saddam Hussein’s high-level generals, named Al-Rawi, is at the meeting, but he escapes after a firefight.
At this point other American troops come onto the scene, and a fight breaks out between them and Miller’s team over a black book that was obtained at the house.
There is the suspicion that General Al-Rawi is actually Magellan and was intentionally feeding the Americans false information, which Poundstone might even have known was false.
At this point, the movie turns into one long complicated chase that is awfully confusing about who is who and what is going on.
GREEN ZONE is a simple story with complex overtones.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
