Posts tagged policeman
“The Place Beyond the Pines” a Terrific, Wonderful Drama
Apr 13th
“Terrific, Wonderful Drama”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
The Place Beyond the Pines is a wonderful drama in three parts about the influence of one generation on the next, or as William Wordsworth put it in “My Heart Leaps Up,” “The child is father of the man.”
The action takes place in Schenectady, New York, and when the movie opens we meet Luke, played by Ryan Gosling, who performs in a traveling circus as a motorcycle stunt daredevil.
One night a young woman named Romina, played by Eva Mendes, approaches him, and Luke recognizes her as the woman he had a fling with the year before when he was in town.
They talk, and Luke gives Romina a ride home, where he tells her that he leaves town the next day and won’t be back for another year.
Well, the next day Luke goes back to Romina’s house to see her, but she is away at work.
The woman who answers the door is holding a baby in her arms, and she tells Luke, “He’s yours. You want to hold him?”
Luke is immediately smitten by this surprise addition to his life, and he makes some dramatic changes because of it.
He quits his job with the circus, stays in town, and determines that he is going to take care of Romina and the baby, who is named Jason.
Unfortunately, Romina, Jason, and her mother are living in the house of Romina’s boyfriend, Kofi, and Kofi doesn’t take kindly to Luke’s sudden appearance and desires.
Meanwhile, Luke meets a man named Robin, who has a small mechanic shop out in the woods, and he gets a job working for Robin, which also gives Luke a place to stay.
Robin also gives Luke the idea for how Luke can make some fast money to give to Romina and Jason, but it leads to disastrous results.
Then we meet Avery, played by Bradley Cooper, who is a rookie policeman in Schenectady, and his first encounter with Luke makes Avery a hero in the eyes of his fellow policemen, which leads to ill-fated consequences.
Avery has a wife, Jennifer, played by Rose Byrne, and a young baby named AJ.
Then the movie shifts 15 years later to the two teenage boys, Jason and AJ.
The Place Beyond the Pines is a terrific film, and I cannot praise it enough.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
“Safe Haven” Might Have Started with Gimmicky Ending First
Feb 24th
“Gimmicky Ending First”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
Safe Haven is from a Nicholas Sparks novel, and for those of you out there who are familiar with his novels and the movies made from his novels, I need to say nothing more.
However, for those of you out there who aren’t familiar with them, here goes.
The movie begins with a young woman played by Julianne Hough running through the rain in Boston and getting onto a bus.
The bus makes a rest stop at a small fishing village in North Carolina, but the woman doesn’t get back onto the bus.
She gets a job as a waitress at Ivan’s Fish Shack, and she finds a place to stay, a small cabin isolated in the woods that needs quite a bit of fixing up.
One day a young woman named Jo stops by and says that she also lives in the woods, because she is rustically inclined.
Then we see a policeman back in Boston going through the police work as he tries to track the first young woman down, who is named Katie.
Meanwhile, Katie buys some yellow paint to paint her kitchen floor in the general store, where she meets Alex, a young widower with two children, who is played by Josh Duhamel.
Katie and Alex begin to develop a romantic relationship, and Katie tells him, “I was just looking for a change, and I’ve always wanted to live in a small town.”
In the meantime, you might think that the movie contains a lot of unnecessary scenes, but we also get some flashbacks that begin to explain the situation that caused Katie to run away in the rain in Boston, which point to her as having been responsible for having done something awful.
Of course, there are also scenes that are not too subtle of Katie and Alex falling in love, but she keeps whatever it was she did back in Boston a secret from him.
And then as the audience learns the secret through flashbacks and scenes of the policeman tracking Katie down, you might even begin to think that the backstory is completely gratuitous to the love story going on between Katie and Alex.
Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t.
Safe Haven ends, however, as if the writer thought up a gimmicky ending first and then wrote the story second.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
“Silver Linings Playbook” Contrived and Over the Top
Feb 6th
“Contrived and Over the Top”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
Silver Linings Playbook has already won some awards and will likely win more, but some of you might be disappointed in this so-called “dramedy” about two troubled souls.
Bradley Cooper stars as Pat, he is in a psychiatric facility in Baltimore, where he has been ordered to stay by a judge after Pat went home, found his wife Nikki in the shower with another man, and went berserk, which is now referred to as “the incident.”
While there, Pat has been diagnosed as being bipolar with mood swings, but we see him on the phone talking to someone, and he says, “I’m better now, and I hope you are, too.”
After being in the facility eight months, Pat’s mother takes him out and drives him back home to Philadelphia, where Pat will now live with her and his father, played by Robert De Niro.
You see, Nikki has left Pat, sold their home, and now has a restraining order against him, but Pat plans to get in shape, get his old job back as a substitute history teacher, and get Nikki back, too.
Pat’s mother tells him that she didn’t tell his father that she was bringing Pat home and to take things easy, because his father lost his job and is now a small-time bookie, who is also a fanatic obsessed with the Philadelphia Eagles professional football team.
In fact, Pat’s father is such a fanatic that he had his own “incident” in the past and is now banned from ever attending another Eagles home game.
Meanwhile, Pat is invited to Sunday dinner by his friend Ron, who is married to Nikki’s friend, Veronica, they just had a baby, and Ron is feeling crushed.
Veronica’s sister, Tiffany, played by Jennifer Lawrence, is also at the dinner, and she has problems of her own, having recently lost both her husband and her job. Her husband was a policeman who was killed on duty, and she lost her job for reasons I won’t go into here.
Well, you can guess that Pat and Tiffany will have a troubled relationship, that they will have many obstacles to overcome, but not that the climax is a big dance contest, which substitutes for the Big Game at the end of many movies.
Silver Linings Playbook is too contrived and over the top.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
