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 Reader – Movie Trailer
Dec 10th
Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes star in The Hours director Stephen Daldry’s haunting period drama concerning the relationship between a 15-year-old German boy and a mysterious woman twice his age, and the way that it grows doubly complex when the man reencounters the woman years later and discovers a shocking truth about her past. Based on author Bernhard Schlink’s best-selling novel of the same name, the film opens on the character of Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes) in middle age — cold, remote, and emotionally withdrawn. It then moves back in time to 1950s Berlin, where ailing teenager Michael (now played by David Kross) has fallen ill with fever, and is discovered in the street by Hanna, a woman in her thirties. After Michael recovers, the two immediately lapse into a torrid affair and Michael falls prey to the confusion of his own burgeoning sexuality. Their liaisons are often marked by Hanna’s request that Michael read to her (hence the title). Later, when Michael returns to Hanna’s flat and finds it deserted, her absence becomes an emotional blow for which he is completely unprepared, and indeed, scarred for life. The film then moves forward in time by eight years. Michael — now a law student — walks into a courtroom and comes across Hanna, one of a series of Nazi prison guards being tried for murderous war crimes during World War II. As he watches her on the witness stand, memories of their past experiences together bring him to the point of realization concerning a startling, long-buried truth about Hanna — and Michael knows that if he divulges this information, it could modify the prison sentence handed out and dramatically alter her fate.
Frost/Nixon – Movie Trailer
Dec 5th
Hollywood heavyweight Ron Howard adapts playwright Peter Morgan’s West End hit for the silver screen with this feature focusing on the 1977 television interviews between journalist David Frost (Michael Sheen) and former president Richard Nixon (Frank Langella). At the time Nixon sat down with Frost to discuss the sordid details that ultimately derailed his presidency, it had been three years since the former commander in chief had been forced out of office. The Watergate scandal was still fresh in everyone’s minds, and Nixon had remained notoriously tight-lipped until he agreed to sit down with Frost. Nixon was certain that he could hold his own opposite the up-and-coming British broadcaster, and even Frost’s own people weren’t quite sure their boss was ready for such a high-profile interview. When the interview ultimately got under way and each man eschewed the typical posturing in favor of the simple truth, fans and critics on both sides were stunned by what they witnessed. Instead of Nixon stonewalling the interviewer as expected, or Frost lobbing softballs as the truth-seekers feared, what emerged was an unguardedly honest exchange between a man who had lost everything and another with everything to gain. In this film, viewers are treated to not only a recreation of that landmark interview, but a behind-the-scenes look at the power struggles that led up to it as well. Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, and Brian Grazer team to produce a film adapted for the screen by original play author Morgan (The Queen and The Last King of Scotland).
“Australia” Simple Stories Writ Large
Dec 4th
Simple Stories Writ Large
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
AUSTRALIA is the big epic film starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman that was directed by Baz Luhrmann and which will likely remind you of many other movies and possibly annoy you with its many endings.
The difference between all those other movies and this one? All those other movies are stitched together into one movie and relocated Down Under in Australia just before World War II.
The reason there are many endings? All the stories are stitched together, one right after the other, each with its own ending, so that just as you think the movie is over at one satisfying ending, another familiar story begins with the same characters and leading to another ending. More than once.
I have said it before, and I will say it again: Hollywood has run out of ideas. This time, big time.
The first story begins in September 1939 at a cattle station called Faraway Downs in the Outback of Australia. We hear the narration of Nullah, a little boy who says he belongs to no one, because he is a “creamy,” a child of mixed race whose father was white and whose mother is an Aborigine.
Nullah sees cattle being stolen, comes face to face with the body of a murdered man, and then proceeds to tell the story of whom he calls “The strangest woman I’ve ever seen.”
She is Lady Sarah Ashley, and we see her in England complaining that her husband spends too much time in Australia. So, she travels to Australia in order to sell Faraway Downs and return to England.
Then we meet The Drover, whose occupation is to drive cattle from one place to another. He was sent to meet Lady Ashley in Darwin and take her to Faraway Downs.
They “meet cute,” with a lot of cheap laughs. They travel to Faraway Downs, which is no easy task. She learns that her husband has been murdered in a connection to steal her cattle and buy out Faraway Downs by a competing rancher.
Then comes the “Cattle Drive” story in which seven people–Lady Ashley included–drive 1500 head of cattle to Darwin to sell to the Army. If you have seen one cattle-drive story, you have seen this one.
But, wait! There is more. Many more.
AUSTRALIA is nothing but simple stories writ large.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
