Movies
These are video movie reviews, movie trailers, and websites of the latest movies. The C1N Movie section includes Dan Culberson’s Hotshots Movie Reviews with a new review every week. We also show our C1N trailer pick of the week by Aaron Smith which is about 40 years younger than Dans taste. Show times and ticket avails are up. Look for film festivals, movie news, events, and news about the pictures here too.
“The Ghost Writer” Full of Ominous Surprises
Mar 25th
“Full of Ominous Surprises”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
THE GHOST WRITER is a political thriller of the first order with a contemporary subject and characters designed to make the audience identify them with real people in international politics.
Roman Polanski received the award for best director at the 2010 Berlin Film Festival for this film, which is as good as-if not better than-his 1968 Rosemary’s Baby and the 1974 Chinatown.
The story begins with a ferryboat crossing from an island off Massachusetts to the mainland, but when it arrives, one automobile is left on the boat and no one claims it.
Then when a man’s body is found washed up on the shore of the island, the authorities determine it was either a suicide or an accident.
The man was the ghost writer of the memoirs of Adam Lang, a former prime minister of Great Britain who lives in a mansion on the island.
However, the publisher of the book has invested $10 million on the manuscript, and so another ghost writer is hired for $250,000 to finish the book and deliver it in a month.
The new ghost writer is played by Ewan McGregor, and when he expresses some concern about the death of the first writer, his agent says, “Accident, suicide, who cares? It was the book that killed him.”
McGregor arrives at the prime minister’s estate, which is under tight security, and is shown the manuscript, which cannot be removed or copied. After examining it, he proclaims that all the words are there, but just in the wrong order.
Then Lang himself shows up at the estate. He is played by Pierce Brosnan, and McGregor interviews him to learn some interesting details about his life, such as why he got into politics in the first place, especially since he had seemed to be more interested in acting while at college.
A media circus suddenly erupts when Lang is accused of handing over prisoners to the CIA for torture when he was prime minister, and now the publisher wants the finished manuscript in two weeks.
Not only that, but the ghost writer’s hotel room was searched while he was away, he suddenly encounters suspicious people, and he has to move onto the estate, where he is put in the first ghost writer’s room.
THE GHOST WRITER is full of ominous surprises.
“Green Zone” Simple Story with Complex Overtones
Mar 18th
Simple Story with Complex Overtones
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
GREEN ZONE is the third collaboration of director Paul Greengrass and actor Matt Damon, the first two being the 2004 THE BOURNE SUPREMACY and the 2007 THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM, and as TIME magazine put it, this movie essentially parachutes “their franchise’s hero, Jason Bourne, into the toxic reality of Iraq.”
This time, however, Damon plays U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, and his assignment right after the war in Iraq began is to lead his team of soldiers to find the weapons of mass destruction that were the cause of the war in the first place.
So, we see Chief Miller and his team roll up to a site in Baghdad that is a disaster, full of Iraqi looters and even an Iraqi sniper in the area.
Miller finds the U.S. officer in charge and tells him, “Intel says we’ve got live chemical agents in this site!”
After they take out the sniper, they go into the building and find . . . nothing. No chemical agents, no weapons of mass destruction, nothing, nada, zip, zilch!
This is not the first time, either. Chief Miller and his team hit another site the week before that was supposedly based on good intelligence, but the site turned out to be nothing more than a toilet factory.
Then we meet Clark Poundstone, played by Greg Kinnear. Poundstone is from Pentagon Special Intelligence, and he swears by the intelligence they have been receiving from an Iraqi source with the code name “Magellan.”
In the meantime, Miller encounters an Iraqi civilian who tells him about a private meeting taking place with high-value Iraqis. They call the man “Freddy,” and he leads them to the house where, sure enough, one of Saddam Hussein’s high-level generals, named Al-Rawi, is at the meeting, but he escapes after a firefight.
At this point other American troops come onto the scene, and a fight breaks out between them and Miller’s team over a black book that was obtained at the house.
There is the suspicion that General Al-Rawi is actually Magellan and was intentionally feeding the Americans false information, which Poundstone might even have known was false.
At this point, the movie turns into one long complicated chase that is awfully confusing about who is who and what is going on.
GREEN ZONE is a simple story with complex overtones.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
Green Zone – Movie Trailer
Mar 17th
United 93 director Paul Greengrass explores the aftermath of the Iraq invasion in this feature adaptation of author Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s literary expose Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone. A onetime Baghdad bureau chief of the Washington Post, Chandrasekaran was present as American forces attempted to set up a provisional government on the grounds surrounding former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s opulent palace. The resulting governing body, according to critics, existed in a bubble so far-removed from the grim realities of the Iraq War that it failed to properly assess the needs of the people. In this fictional thriller set during the U.S.-led occupation of Baghdad, director Greengrass and screenwriter Brian Helgeland use Chandrasekaran’s journalistic account as the foundation for the story of an officer who joins forces with a senior CIA officer to unearth evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon) is certain that Hussein has been stockpiling WMDs in the Iraqi desert, but in their race from one empty site to the next, they soon stumble across evidence of an elaborate cover up. As a result, Miller realizes that operatives on both sides of the conflict are attempting to spin the story in their favor. Now, as Miller searches for answers made ever more elusive by covert and faulty intelligence, the truth becomes the most valuable weapon of all. Will those answers prove pivotal in clearing a rogue regime, or escalate the war in a region that grows increasingly unstable with each passing day? Amy Ryan co-stars as the New York Times foreign correspondent who travels to Iraq investigating the U.S. government’s allegations about weapons of mass destruction, with Greg Kinnear appearing in the role of an additional CIA officer, and Antoni Corone essaying the role of a colonel. Brendan Gleeson rounds out the main cast for this Universal Pictures production.
