The Soloist – Movie Trailer
Apr 24th
Academy Award-nominated Atonement director Joe Wright teams with screenwriter Susannah Grant to tell the true-life story of Nathaniel Ayers, a former cello prodigy whose bouts with schizophrenia landed him on the streets after two years of schooling at Juilliard. Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.) is a disenchanted journalist stuck in a dead-end job. His marriage to a fellow journalist having recently come to an end, Steve is wandering through Los Angeles’ Skid Row when he notices a bedraggled figure playing a two-stringed violin. The figure in question is Ayers (Jamie Foxx), a man whose promising career in music was cut short due to a debilitating bout with mental illness. The more Lopez learns about Ayers, the greater his respect grows for the troubled soul. How could a man with such remarkable talent wind up living on the streets, and not be performing on-stage with a symphony orchestra? Later, as Lopez embarks on a quixotic quest to help Ayers pull his life together and launch a career in music, he gradually comes to realize that it is not Ayers whose life is being transformed, but his own.
“State of Play” Damn Fine Filmmaking
Apr 22nd
Damn Fine Filmmaking
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
STATE OF PLAY is a very entertaining political thriller starring Russell Crowe, Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams, Helen Mirren, and Robin Wright Penn.
It was adapted from a BBC miniseries of the same name, but has been changed to take place in Washington, D.C., and to be about a reporter for an American newspaper who investigates a murder that becomes very personal for him.
The story begins with a man being shot and killed at night on the streets and an unlucky witness also being shot and sent to the hospital.
Cal McAffrey, a reporter for the WASHINGTON GLOBE, shows up at the crime scene the next day, and we see right away that he has a lot of sources and contacts in the police department.
Then a woman named Sonia Baker is killed in an accident in a subway station, and it turns out that she was the lead researcher and a member of the staff of Congressman Stephen Collins, who is the head of the committee that is investigating the outsourcing policies of the Pentagon.
McAffrey happens to know both Congressman Collins and his wife, Anne, because McAffrey and Collins were roommates in college.
Congressman Collins shows up at McCaffrey’s apartment one night, telling him that McCaffrey is the only real friend he has, and when Collins admits that he was having an affair with the dead woman, McCaffrey has to become both a friend to the congressman and a reporter for his newspaper.
Collins complains about reporters being camped out at his house now, and McCaffrey says, “Nature of the beast: public office.”
Meanwhile, McCaffrey’s newspaper has new owners who are concerned about the paper’s profitability, his editor wants McCaffrey to go with the story before McCaffrey believes it has been completed, and he has been teamed up against his will with the new blogger for the newspaper, Della Frye.
Then there is another murder, and McCaffrey suspects that a private military company that works for the Pentagon is involved.
You can think of the film and the story as “ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN with guns,” and when McCaffrey does something that Della believes is illegal, he tells her that it’s not breaking the law, but is “damn fine reporting.”
STATE OF PLAY is damn fine filmmaking, even though it does leave some unanswered questions.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
Earth – Movie Trailer
Apr 22nd
As co-directed by Mark Linfield and Alastair Fothergill, the nature documentary Earth represents an edited-down version of the 12-hour small-screen miniseries Planet Earth, reslated for cinematic release. The program provides a sweeping 99-minute tour of our home planet’s biosphere — spanning every level of gaze, from the epic (crystal-clear shots of the Earth hovering in space) to the hyper-specific (a mother polar bear and her cubs waking from a lengthy period of hibernation). The film almost exclusively emphasizes the behavior of the animal populations that inhabit the Earth, yet carefully omits shots that depict the more gory predatory behavior of species, rendering it family-friendly. It also employs a chronological approach — beginning in January in the Arctic wilderness, and moving progressively through the four seasons and 12 months comprising a single year, until it hits late December — contrasting various geographic regions of the Earth as shot in various seasons. Above all else, a cautionary message underscores this footage; as in An Inconvenient Truth, the filmmakers continually remind their audience that despite the grandiloquence present onscreen, all may be lost if humankind is not careful.
