Dan Culberson
Dan Culberson is an author, TV performer, editor and publisher who has been writing about culture, politics and religion since 1994. He was graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. in English literature in the Honors Program from the University of Colorado and was president of the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity. He was born in Carmel, CA, but grew up all over the U.S. and Europe, living in Monterey, CA: Medford, OR; Lawton, OK (twice); Pampa, TX; Minot, ND; El Paso, TX; Tacoma, WA; Kennewick, WA; Erlangen, Germany; Lebanon, MO; Colorado Springs, CO (where he attended high school); Boulder, CO (where he attended college and now lives); and Heidelberg while serving in the U.S. Army and Sindelfingen, Germany while on assignment for IBM. He served three years in the U.S. Army, retired from IBM after 25 years with a career in publications and is a writer, editor and publisher who came of age in the Sixties, which he remembers quite well. He was named a Boulder Pacesetter in 1985 by the BOULDER DAILY CAMERA in the first year of that program and was a film reviewer from 1972 to 2014 for newspapers, magazines, radio stations and TV programs.
Homepage: http://c1n.tv
Posts by Dan Culberson
“Kill Your Darlings” Is Full of Oddities
Dec 22nd
“Full of Oddities”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
Kill Your Darlings is an odd little movie starring Daniel Radcliffe as Allen Ginsberg that tells a story about him and other writers of the Beat Generation in 1943 in New York City.
For those of you in the audience who are too young to know and those of you who are old enough but might have forgotten, Ginsberg was an American poet best known for writing “Howl,” a 1956 long poem attacking American values who later in life was associated with Naropa University in Boulder.
The title refers to advice sometimes given to writers to eliminate the parts of their work they are most in love with, because those parts are probably the most self-indulgent, but in the movie it can also refer to an actual murder.
The movie begins when Ginsberg is 19 years old, and he is accepted to Columbia University, where he will meet other writers with whom he will get in and out of trouble, such as William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and others who didn’t become as famous.
We also see some of Ginsberg’s home life with his father, who was also a poet, and his mother, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, who was a very troubled woman.
Ginsberg becomes friends with Lucien Carr, and through him he meets David at a weird party at David’s apartment, where David says about Ginsberg, “Under the right circumstances, even he might change the world.”
Remember, this was 70 years ago at a time when writers were serious, and they believed that their writing could change the world, which they hoped would be for the better.
If it also made them successful and famous, then that was better, too.
Ginsberg and his fellow writers also have a saying, “First thought, best thought,” which they believe to be performed and useful in their writing, but if you know anything about serious writing, such an idea would probably fall into that category of darlings which should be killed.
The movie is full of disjointed scenes, and the audience might have trouble keeping the story line straight and also keeping track of who all the characters are.
Of course, homosexuality plays a big role in the story, and this was at a time when homosexuality was illegal in numerous places.
Kill Your Darlings is full of many oddities.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
“Delivery Man” a Sweet and Touching Comedy
Nov 30th
“Sweet and Touching Comedy”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
Delivery Man stars Vince Vaughn in a remake of a French-Canadian movie about a man with enough problems to begin with who finds himself in a situation that allows him to create even more problems.
Vaughn plays David Wozniak who works for his father’s business in New York City driving a truck and delivering meat.
However, that is not all that makes him a delivery man.
You see, 20 years ago David earned a lot of money by donating sperm as a regular visitor at a fertility clinic.
And yet David is a terrible investor, and he now owes $80,000 which he borrowed from the Mob.
When David’s girlfriend, Emma, tells him that she is pregnant, David takes the news well and tells her, “This could be the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me.”
However, Emma has doubts about whether David will make a good father, and she says that she will declare him “the father on probation.”
Meanwhile, David learns that the fertility clinic where he would “wrestle the dragon alone,” as he puts it, made a mistake and gave all the women in its clientele David’s sperm.
David had used the name “Starbuck” for all his donations, which amounted to 692 times, 533 children resulted, and 142 of those children have filed a lawsuit in order to learn Starbuck’s true identity.
David’s best friend, Brett, who has four children of his own, also happens to be a lawyer, and when David goes to Brett for help, Brett says that the dream of every lawyer is to argue a case of this significance.
Brett obtains the profiles of all the children involved in the lawsuit, turns them over to David in an envelope, but tells David not to open the envelope.
Well, you can guess what happens, can’t you? David opens up one profile, just one, and then he tracks down this son of his and is so impressed with who he is and what he turned out to be that David decides to convince Emma that he deserves to be her child’s father.
And opening up one profile to learn about one of his biological children is just like eating one potato chip. It can’t be done and doesn’t end there.
Delivery Man is a comedy that is sweet and touching and funny.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”