Posts tagged behavior
“A Single Man” An Unhappy Man
Jan 20th
An Unhappy Man
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
A SINGLE MAN looks terrific and strives to be momentous, but to steal a line from the legendary animator Chuck Jones, deep down it is pretty shallow.
The time is 1962, and Colin Firth plays George Falconer, a college professor of literature in Los Angeles who is gay.
Firth has already won a Best Actor award for this role and has received other Best Actor nominations, as well.
The story begins one morning when George wakes up, and we hear him say in a voice-over, “For the past six months, waking up has actually hurt.”
You see, six months earlier George’s lover, Jim, was killed in an automobile accident, and George’s heart was broken. George can’t see his future, but today, he has decided, will be different.
George gets dressed, and he puts a novel by Aldous Huxley and an empty revolver in his briefcase, which appear to be ominous, but all will be explained later.
Throughout the film, we see unsettling images that don’t appear to have anything to do with the story, and we also get flashbacks that represent George’s memories of his life with Jim and the 16 years that they were together.
When George arrives at his office, a secretary tells him that she had given his home address that morning to a student who had asked for it. That student turns out to be Kenny, a young man in George’s literature class, and Kenny will keep turning up in the story.
Julianne Moore plays Charlotte, who also plays an important role in the story, and who is a close friend of George’s and the first one he turned to for comfort the night he was informed of Jim’s death.
There are also interactions with a neighbor family that don’t seem to have anything to do with the story except to establish that George isn’t very sociable on this day, which he admits is kind of a serious day for him.
George claims that he is exactly what he appears to be, if you look closely enough, but he does have some surprises for the audience in his behavior on this day in his life.
A SINGLE MAN is simply a day in the life of an unhappy man, but the story is past its prime in terms of shock value in every aspect.
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.
“Confessions of a Shopaholic” Pretty Lame
Mar 11th
Pretty Lame
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
CONFESSIONS OF A SHOPAHOLIC starts off bad, goes downhill from there, and then manages to redeem itself just enough that all in all it is not good, not bad, but just okay.
This says something about a movie that, after all, is making fun of what is a serious problem for some people.
No, I am not talking about compulsive behavior that causes some people to spend money beyond their means. I am talking about the compulsion that some people have to search for romantic love.
Isla Fisher plays Rebecca Greenwood, a young and attractive magazine writer in New York City who discovered the power of shopping when she was a little girl and the fact that you didn’t have to pay money for anything if you had a “magic card,” which is what she called a credit card.
Now she has 12 of them and the bills to prove it.
To explain her compulsive behavior, Rebecca says, “When I shop, the world gets better, and then it’s not anymore and I need to do it again.”
When the magazine that Rebecca works for fails, she buys an expensive green scarf that she cannot afford for an interview with a fashion magazine for a job that she believes will make her happy forever if she gets it.
Then through a series of ridiculous setups and even more ridiculous payoffs, Rebecca is hired to be a columnist for a financial magazine and to write about how to save money.
Hugh Dancy plays Luke Brandon, the editor of the magazine whom Rebecca lied to about her credentials, and so now she is in serious trouble, right?
Wrong. Rebecca’s even more serious problem is that she has a bill collector after her who she tells Luke is an ex-boyfriend who is stalking her.
So, Rebecca is advising people about debt and she is up to her eyeballs in it, she lied about herself to her editor to get the job, she has a bill collector after her, and what else could go wrong?
Well, for one thing she attends a meeting of Shopaholics Anonymous and when she talks about shopping, she causes all the other members to relapse.
CONFESSIONS OF A SHOPAHOLIC is pretty lame from beginning to end, but if you’re a sucker for romance–and who isn’t–it redeems itself.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”