Posts tagged prisoner
“Savages” Bloody and Ironic
Jul 15th
“Bloody and Ironic”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
Savages is the latest film directed by Oliver Stone, and it was also written by him along with Don Winslow, whose 2010 novel was the basis for the film.
The best-known members of the cast, but not necessarily the stars, are Blake Lively, Benicio Del Toro, John Travolta, and Salma Hayek, and the story is about a Mexican drug cartel trying to move in on the successful marijuana business run by two best buddies in Southern California.
Lively plays Ophelia, a spoiled young rich girl who goes just by “O” and who is the girlfriend of both Chon and Ben, the successful marijuana growers and distributors who have been best friends since high school and whose pot is considered the best in all of California, if not the world.
O also narrates the story, and more than once she says, “Just because I’m telling you this story doesn’t mean I’m alive at the end.”
If she is alive at the end, that would be ironic, wouldn’t it?
On the other hand, if she is not alive at the end, that would also be ironic.
One day Chon and Ben receive an e-mail video from the Baja Cartel in Mexico that shows a bunch of bodies with decapitated heads and blood all over everything.
Then they receive an e-mail from the cartel wanting to meet the next day. Ben is afraid of the Mexicans, but Chon says he is not afraid of them. Of course, Chon is a former Navy SEAL who smuggled the marijuana seeds back to the U.S. from Afghanistan that got them started in the business.
Chon and Ben check in with Dennis, a DEA agent who is less than pristine in his duties, and Dennis advises them to take whatever deal they are offered rather than decapitation.
However, when Chon and Ben meet with the representatives of the Baja Cartel, they don’t like the deal they are offered and tell the representatives that they will think about it and meet again in 24 hours.
Ben wants to get out of the business altogether, but before they can do anything, the cartel kidnaps O and holds her prisoner, which forces their hand, because they will do anything to get O back safely.
And the rest of the movie is just about anything.
Savages is bloody and ironic.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
“The Debt” Truth Is a Luxury
Sep 9th
“Truth Is a Luxury”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
The Debt is a suspense thriller that shifts between different years, different locations, and even different actors playing the same characters, and the suspense and shocking conclusions to various scenes keep the audience’s attention from start to finish.
The story is about a secret mission conducted in the 1960s by three Israeli secret agents and the consequences of that mission which follow them for the rest of their lives.
The three secret agents are Stephan, David, and Rachel, and their mission is to slip into East Berlin, find and identify a suspected Nazi war criminal, capture him, sneak him out of East Berlin, and then take him back to Israel where he will stand trial for the atrocities he committed in a German concentration camp located in Poland.
Rachel is played by Jessica Chastain back in the Sixties during the mission, and when David mentions to her that she is brave, she says, “I’m not brave. I’m terrified.”
Helen Mirren plays Rachel in the present-day scenes, she still has the facial scar that she received during a bloody fight with their prisoner, and once again she is terrific in this role.
Present-day Rachel has a grown-up daughter who is married and has a son. The daughter has also written a book about the mission that has become a success, and Rachel sometimes reads from the book when her daughter is asked to give talks about the book.
However, there is a secret about the mission, which didn’t exactly go as planned, and as Rachel tells Stephan, Rachel cannot tell her daughter the truth, because it would destroy her daughter.
Eventually we see the details of the mission back in the Sixties, and we also learn the truth. The Nazi war criminal that they are after is working under a different name as a doctor, and Rachel and David pretend to be married and having difficulty conceiving a child.
So, Rachel goes to the doctor for help and has to experience the humiliation, embarrassment, and horror of being examined by him while the agents put their plan into action and finally abduct him.
What happens next is the consequences they have to face in the present.
The Debt shows that the truth is a luxury, it plays with the audience, and the shocks keep coming until the very end.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”