Posts tagged Action
Alice in Wonderland – Movie Trailer
Mar 5th
Director Tim Burton and screenwriter Linda Woolverton (Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King) team up to deliver this visually dazzling take on the classic Lewis Carroll tale. Nineteen-year-old Alice (Mia Wasikowska) is attending party at a lavish country estate when she sees a white rabbit with a pocket watch dart into the bushes. Curious, she follows the rabbit to an enormous tree, and tumbles down a hole that takes her to Underland, a strange world inhabited by anthropomorphic creatures in search of someone to save them from the dreaded Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter), who has assumed control of the kingdom by decapitating anyone who dares disagree with her. According to a scroll detailing a historical timeline of Underland — including events that have not yet taken place — it is Alice who will set the kingdom free by defeating the Jabberwocky, a powerful dragon-like creature under the control of the Red Queen. But is this Alice the same Alice who appears in the scroll? While some of the creatures of Underland have their doubts, the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) and his friends are certain she’s the same girl who previously visited them years ago. When the Red Queen kidnaps the Mad Hatter, Alice attempts to free her friend and locate the one weapon with the power to slay the Jabberwocky, thereby restoring the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) to the throne, and bringing peace back to Underland.
“Shutter Island” Disappointment City
Feb 25th
Disappointment City
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
SHUTTER ISLAND is the fourth collaboration between director Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio and to say that it is a disappointment would be an understatement.
The film contains too many elements from previous films that appear to be obvious rip-offs, it wants to be surprising and shocking but instead is just confusing, and the ending is so bad that it makes you want to get up and leave, except that the audience is already doing that.
In addition, there are too many scenes that are nothing more than just exposition designed to fill in the holes for the audience.
DiCaprio plays U.S. Marshall Teddy Daniels, the time is 1954, and the place is Ashecliffe Hospital on Shutter Island, an institution for the criminally insane on one of the islands in Boston Harbor.
Daniels is there with his brand-new partner, Chuck Aule, played by Mark Ruffalo, and they are investigating the disappearance of a female patient, Rachel Solando, who is there because she killed her three children, but believes that they are still alive.
As he starts his investigation, Daniels remarks that the inmates appear as if they are all on edge, and he is told, “Right now, Marshall, we all are.”
He is also corrected that the people there are patients, not inmates, by Dr. Cawley, played by Ben Kingsley.
The island is 11 miles from the nearest land, the dock is the only way off or on the island, Rachel has no shoes, and it is as if she evaporated from a locked cell with bars on the window.
And then there is a storm coming up that will turn into a hurricane.
If all this weren’t enough for Daniels to deal with, he starts to have flashbacks to his experience in World War II when he helped liberate a concentration camp, and he also begins to have dreams and visions of his dead wife, Dolores.
Daniels has an ulterior motive for requesting this case, because he suspects that the man who killed his wife is also a patient in the asylum.
Watching this movie can lead you to these conclusions: Scorsese does surrealism, Scorsese does melodramatics, Scorsese doesn’t do shock or suspense, Scorsese doesn’t do surprise endings, Scorsese does do overindulgence–no, make that self-overindulgence–and finally Scorsese doesn’t do Hitchcock.
SHUTTER ISLAND is Disappointment City.
Shutter Island – Movie Trailer
Feb 24th
Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio team up for a fourth time for this adaptation of Shutter Island, a novel by Dennis Lehane (Mystic River). The film opens in 1954 as World War II veteran and current federal marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his new partner, Chuck (Mark Ruffalo), ferry to Shutter Island, a water-bound mental hospital housing the criminally insane. They have been asked to investigate the disappearance of Rachel Solando (Emily Mortimer), a patient admitted to the asylum after she murdered her three children. As Teddy quizzes Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley), the head of the institution, he begins to suspect that the authorities in charge might not be giving him the whole truth, and that a terrible fate may befall all the patients in the spooky Ward C — a unit devoted to the most heinous of the hospital’s inmates. Complicating matters further, Teddy has a secret of his own — the arsonist who murdered his wife is incarcerated on Shutter Island. Driven to confront his wife’s killer, and stranded on the island because of a hurricane, Teddy must unravel the secrets of the eerie place before succumbing to his own madness. Max von Sydow, Emily Mortimer, Michelle Williams, Patricia Clarkson, and Jackie Earle Haley round out the supporting cast.
