Hotshots Movie Reviews
Hotshots Movie Reviews by Dan Culberson
“Extract” Dumb, but Extremely Funny
Sep 9th
Dumb, but Extremely Funny
Hotshots” looks at a movie!
EXTRACT is the latest comedy written and directed by Mike Judge, who previously made the 1999 OFFICE SPACE and created the TV series “Beavis and Butt-Head” and “King of the Hill,” and so you know that you are in for a treatment of one poor schlub swimming against a sea of dumb guys and gals.
Rudyard Kipling wrote about keeping your head when all about you are losing theirs. Well, Jason Bateman does an excellent job as Joel, who is trying desperately to keep his head while everyone around him is losing theirs and some are even being stolen.
Joel owns a company that makes flavoring extracts, but his two biggest problems are trying to avoid talking to his annoying neighbor, expecially when Joel is trying to get home to his wife every evening after work before Suzie puts on her sweat pants and ties the knot.
That means that there will be no sex that night, and Joel laments to his buddy, Dean, that there hasn’t been any sex in months.
Dean is played by Ben Affleck, and he is a bartender where Joel used to work. Dean calls himself “an entrepreneur, spiritualist, healer,” but mostly he dispenses advice and pharmaceutical drugs.
When Joel tells Dean about his problem with Suzie and that a new hot-looking temp he hired seemed to be coming on to him, Dean advises, “You hire a gigolo to cheat on your wife.”
That way, you see, if Suzie takes the bait and cheats on Joel with the gigolo, then Joel can cheat on Suzie with the new temp and not have a guilty conscience.
To his credit, Joel resists the advice, but when Dean gives Joel a pill to calm him down, he gets his pills mixed up and gives Joel a horse tranquilizer instead. So, without thinking clearly, Joel takes Dean’s bad advice, hires a dumb kid that Dean knows to pretend to clean Joel’s swimming pool, and even agrees to pay Dean 10 percent.
Meanwhile, a freak and very funny accident at work causes an employee to lose a testicle, the hot-looking temp is much more than she appears to be, and Joel ends up with more problems at work than he has at home.
EXTRACT is full of the dumbest characters you will ever meet, but also extremely funny.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
“Inglourious Basterds” Ostentatious Self-Indulgence
Aug 27th
Ostentatious Self-Indulgence
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is intentionally misspelled, because writer-director Quentin Tarantino wanted that title for his latest movie, but also wanted to differentiate it from the 1978 Italian movie of the same name, which just shows how easily he could have given it a unique title.
I’ll tell you what that unique title could have been later on.
The film is divided into five chapters, which are identified at the beginning of each section, and Chapter 1 takes place in 1941 in Nazi-occupied France.
Col. Hans Landa, a German SS officer played brilliantly by Austrian actor Christoph Waltz, shows up with his men at a small dairy farm to question the owner in private.
Waltz has already won the Best Actor award at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, and he is sure to be nominated for and to win many more similar awards for this role.
Col. Landa is charged with finding and killing Jews in France, and he suspects that the farm owner he is questioning can provide him with information about the last Jewish family unaccounted for in the neighborhood.
Chapter 2 then shows the title characters, who are a squad of Jewish- American soldiers who have been dropped behind enemy lines in France and are led by Lt. Aldo Raine, played by Brad Pitt in a surprisingly comic role.
Lt. Raine tells his men, “We’re here to do one thing and one thing only: Killing Nazis.”
Well, that’s not entirely true, because they also scalp the German soldiers that they kill in order to send a message to whoever finds the soldiers’ bodies.
Chapter 3 then jumps to 1944 in Paris, and we meet Shosanna Dreyfus, a young Jewish woman who owns a movie theater, and here is where Tarantino really starts to show off his cinematic knowledge, so much so that the audience can get the impression that this is a lecture on the history of cinema instead of a movie itself.
Col. Landa shows up again, and then later Lt. Raine and the Inglourious Basterds show up, too, but by now this is no longer a war movie, but an elaborate hoax on the audience because of Tarantino’s rewriting of well-known history.
And remember how I said that Tarantino could have given it a unique title?
INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS could easily have been called OSTENTATIOUS SELF-INDULGENCE.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”