Hotshots Movie Reviews
Hotshots Movie Reviews by Dan Culberson
“Horrible Bosses” Great Fun
Jul 13th
“Great Fun”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
Horrible Bosses has built right into the title that the bosses in question are much worse than just “bad bosses,” doesn’t it, but the best thing about it is that the movie might just be better and much funnier than you expected it to be.
So, if you have ever had a bad boss or, worse yet, a horrible boss, you owe it to yourself to see this movie and be prepared to laugh your head off.
On the other hand, if you have ever been accused of being a bad boss, or if you think you might have been a bad boss, then you owe it to your employees to see this movie and perhaps learn how to repair the error of your ways.
No, I’ll make it easier for you: Are you now or have you ever been a boss? Then see this movie, even if you have just known a boss, but don’t expect to get any tips from it, either on how to be a bad boss or how to handle a bad boss.
Jason Bateman, Charlie Day, and Jason Sudeikis star in the movie, but they are not the bosses of the title. They are the ones who have the bad bosses, who are played by Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Aniston, and Colin Farrell, respectively, although you might not recognize Colin Farrell at first.
Early in the movie, Spacey tells Bateman’s character, Nick, “If you want a promotion, you’ve got to earn it.”
And then Spacey does everything in his boss powers to prevent Nick from getting a promotion.
Well, Nick, Dale, and Kurt are friends going back to high school, and they meet regularly for drinks. One night while they are engaged in a mutual commiseration society, they come up with the idea to kill their bosses.
I didn’t say it was a good idea.
They know that they can’t do it themselves without getting caught, and after one hilarious attempt to hire a hit man on the Internet, they end up paying Jamie Foxx in a great performance as their “murder consultant.”
Now, because this is a comedy, you know that everything isn’t going to go as planned, even though the plan seems so simple and even draws from the great mystery writers and also Alfred Hitchcock.
Horrible Bosses is great fun.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
“Beginners” Gimmickers
Jul 7th
“Gimmickers”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
BEGINNERS is one of those movies whose trailer is intriguing and makes you want to see it, but then after you have seen it, you wish you hadn’t and conclude that it was a waste of time and money.
The reason isn’t just that the trailer gives away the whole story, even though it does, but the story still looks interesting, and it is based on the life of the writer and director, Mike Mills.
No, the reason is that the story is made gimmicky by the way it is told, the chronology is chopped up arbitrarily, and I lost interest in it about halfway through with all the back and forth and further back and further forth.
The story is about a man named Oliver Fields, who is played by Ewan McGregor. We see him cleaning out his father’s house after his father has died, and he says to a dog there, “Arthur, you’re coming with me now.”
The dog is a Jack Russell terrier, and we see subtitles that represent the cute thoughts of Arthur if he could talk and if he could understand what Oliver is saying to him.
We also see what are supposed to be clever graphic images from old advertisements as Oliver comments in voice-over narration about such topics as love, happiness, and homosexuality in society.
You see, Oliver’s father, who is named Hal and played by Christopher Plummer, announced six months after his wife and Oliver’s mother died that he was gay. And then four years after that, Hal died at 75 from cancer.
As if that weren’t enough turmoil in Oliver’s life, he meets a woman named Anna at a costume party, who is played by Melanie Laurent.
So, now we see scenes of the developing relationship between Oliver and Anna, flashbacks to scenes between Oliver and Hal, and even further-back flashbacks to scenes of Oliver as a young boy with his mother.
Some parallelisms are shown between scenes in the present and scenes in the past, but you might find yourself asking as I did, “What’s the story?”
Then, more like “What’s the point?”
In other words, what we have is a very simple story made intentionally and unnecessarily complicated with gimmicky visual comments.
BEGINNERS should have been called GIMMICKERS and it would have been more true to form.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
“The Tree of Life” The Film of Pretentiousness
Jun 22nd
“The Film of Pretentiousness”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
The Tree of Life won the Palme D’or at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, which says something more about the French than it does about this film.
Written and directed by Terrence Malick, well-known, reclusive, but slow-working filmmaker, this is only his fifth feature-length film, his first being the 1973 Badlands, which has a cult following, as do most of Malick’s films.
I believe it is safe to say that Malick’s films are an acquired taste, and I found his latest one to be distasteful.
No, “distasteful” is such an ugly word. Let’s just call it boring and pretentious.
The film contains very little dialogue within scenes that are part of what little story there is, and most of the dialogue is voice-over narration, such as when Mrs. O’Brien says at the beginning of the film, “The nuns taught us there were two ways through life–the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you’ll follow.”
Then we see the first of the scenes that will develop this theme, which involve the O’Brien family, Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien, played by Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain, and their three boys, the oldest of whom, Jack, is played by Sean Penn as a grown-up.
Although most of the scenes about the family take place in the 1950s in Texas, sometime in the Sixties Mrs. O’Brien receives a telegram that one of the boys is dead, when he was 19.
So, then we see scenes of grief, hear lots of voice-over spiritual narration, and then we experience a long sequence of images that actually depict the beginning of the cosmos, the planet, the beginnings of life, and, yes, even dinosaurs.
Two women in the theater walked out at this point, before the film got back to the story of the O’Brien family in the Fifties, beginning with the birth of Jack.
Mr. O’Brien is a strict disciplinarian who demands that everyone obey him, but also profess their love for him. He represents nature.
Mrs. O’Brien plays wildly with abandon with the boys when Mr. O’Brien is away on a business trip. She represents grace.
However, the story is weak to begin with, and the film is made even weaker with all the spiritual visual images.
The Tree of Life is the film of pretentiousness.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
