“Chloe” Raises Questions about Sexual Fidelity
Mar 31st
“Raises Questions about Sexual Fidelity”
CHLOE is a domestic thriller and a sexual suspense film that raises questions about sexual fidelity, but the answers are much too nicely tied up at the end to prevent any embarrassment to the characters.
Or confusion for the audience, either, for that matter.
Julianne Moore plays Catherine, a successful gynecologist in Toronto, and the story begins with her arranging a surprise birthday party for her husband, David, who is played by Liam Neeson.
David is a college professor, and he is in New York City giving a lecture on opera. When a pretty girl asks him out to dinner after the lecture, David changes his plans to fly directly back to Toronto and thus misses the surprise birthday party that Catherine was giving for him.
The next morning back in Toronto, David lies to Catherine and tells her that he missed his flight back and that was why he was late getting home.
However, Catherine sees a text message on David’s phone that says, “Thanks for last night. Miranda.”
Catherine doesn’t confront David about his lie, but instead does something more drastic. David has always been too flirtatious with women he just meets to suit Catherine, and she suspects that he is cheating on her.
So, when Catherine meets Chloe, a high-priced call girl played by Amanda Seyfried, Catherine hires Chloe to “accidentally meet” David, just to see what David will do and then report back to Catherine.
Well, you can see where this is going, can’t you?
Or maybe not.
Chloe and David meet a second time, but when she reports back to Catherine, Catherine says that she shouldn’t have involved Chloe in this, she made a mistake, and she tells Chloe to stop.
However, something happens which causes Chloe not to stop, and the relationship between her and Catherine changes. Not only that, but when Chloe is at Catherine’s office, Chloe meets Catherine’s teenage son, Michael, and a fourth major character enters the messy situation.
For what it is worth, this film by Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan is based on a 2004 French-Spanish film called NATHALIE, which has been called a “pretentious character study,” but which I have not seen.
CHLOE kept me guessing right up until, oh, about the halfway point when I figured out what was going on, and then I lost interest.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
Chloe – Movie Trailer
Mar 31st
An untrusting wife attempts to prove that her husband is cheating by hiring an escort to seduce him, inadvertently endangering her entire family in the process. Catherine (Julianne Moore) is a respected doctor, and her husband, David (Liam Neeson), is a dedicated music professor. They’ve been married for years and have a teenage son together, but lately the passion has faded from their romance. The morning after David misses his flight home — and the elaborate surprise birthday party Catherine had planned to celebrate his return — Catherine finds a text message on his phone that leads her to believe her husband is sleeping with a female student. Her suspicions grow over the following weeks, and when Catherine has a run-in with an escort named Chloe (Amanda Seyfried), she hires the ravishing blonde to test her husband’s fidelity. After each encounter with David, Chloe reports back to Catherine with all the sordid details. But the further the experiment goes, the less clear Chloe’s motivations for taking part in it become, and the more the untrusting wife begins to fear that the situation has spiraled out of control. Directed by Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter, Ararat), this erotic thriller is a remake of Anne Fontaine’s French film Nathalie…, and was adapted by Erin Cressida Wilson.
“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.
