Posts tagged Brad Calcaterra

“Hotshots” looks at a movie!

ST. VINCENT is the latest film starring Bill Murray, and that is all you need to know to make you want to see it, and you will be pleased you did. Murray plays Vincent, who is the furthest thing you can imagine being a saint at the beginning of the movie.

Vincent lives in a run-down house in Brooklyn, he drinks, he gambles, and he has a so-called “friend,” who is a pregnant Russian stripper and hooker named Daka, who is played by Naomi Watts.

Well, one day some new neighbors move in next door, and things get off to a bad start when the moving truck breaks a branch off a tree in Vincent’s front yard, which falls onto Vincent’s car parked in his driveway and damages it.

The car, not the driveway.

The truck also runs over Vincent’s fence, and he wants the new neighbor to pay for that, too, although we have already seen Vincent run over the fence himself while driving his car into the driveway drunk and backwards.

The new neighbors are Maggie, a woman going through a divorce played by Melissa McCarthy in a surprisingly and thankfully toned-down performance, and her young son Oliver, who says when he is told about Vincent, “It’s gonna be a long life.”

Maggie has a new job at a hospital, and Oliver starts a new school, which happens to be Catholic, although he is not, nor are many of the kids in his class, as the teacher finds out when he introduces Oliver to the class.

The teacher, Brother Geraghty, is played by Chris O’Dowd.

On his first day at school, Oliver gets picked on by some bullies, and his clothes are stolen, and so when he gets home he is locked out of the house and goes next door to use Vincent’s phone in order to call Maggie.

When Oliver tries to explain why he wants to use Vinent’s telephone, Vincent says, “I don’t need to hear the whole story,” which Vincent will say more than once in this movie.

When Maggie gets home, she anticipates future needs to use Vincent, and so they agree that Vincent will babysit Oliver for a small wage whenever necessary.

Well, you can see where this arrangement is headed, can’t you?

ST. VINCENT pays off with big rewards.

I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”