Posts tagged change
“Moon” Excellence
Jul 22nd
Excellence
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
MOON is an excellent film that doesn’t answer all of the questions it raises, but it leaves them for you to think about and enjoy for weeks to come, if not for years to come.
In other words, it stays with you and isn’t easily forgotten about, as so many other movies are today.
It was directed by Duncan Jones, which is all the more remarkable, because this is the first feature film that he has directed. What is at least interesting, if not also remarkable, is that Jones is the son of David Bowie.
The film stars Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell, the only human on a mining base on the far side of the Moon, which means that he doesn’t even have the comfort of being able to look up into the sky and see planet Earth.
Sam has only two weeks left on his three-year contract with Lunar Industries, and he says, “I’m talking to myself on a regular basis. Time to go home.”
However, Sam isn’t alone inside the lunar station. There is also a robot named Gerty to look after him and the operation.
Gerty, which is voiced by Kevin Spacey, isn’t just a stationary box inside a wall, either. It has components that can move around inside the station, and it has an animated smiley face that displays its three “emotions”: happy, sad, and noncommittal.
Sam can also communicate with his wife and daughter back home on Earth by using recorded video messages, but that isn’t very much comfort to him.
One day Sam injures himself when he is distracted by a hallucination of a beautiful woman sitting in a chair, and his injury will have consequences later on.
Worse than that, however, Sam has an accident in one of the lunar rovers while out at a mining operation, and this accident will change his life for the rest of the time he has on his contract, if not forever.
When Sam lies to Gerty, and then we catch Gerty lying to Sam, we know that something dramatic is about to happen. And when Sam’s replacement shows up, it does.
At first Sam and his replacement don’t get along, but then they start cooperating for reasons that we couldn’t have imagined.
MOON leaves us with questions, but its lasting impression is excellence.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
“The Soloist” Could Have Been Better
May 14th
Could Have Been Better
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
THE SOLOIST is based on a true story, and yet it comes across as if the filmmakers weren’t exactly sure where they wanted the focus to be.
It stars Jamie Foxx as Nathaniel Ayers and Robert Downey Jr. as Steve Lopez, two men whose lives change dramatically when they meet each other and become friends.
Lopez is a columnist for THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, and one day he encounters Ayers in a park playing beautiful music on a violin that has only two strings.
Lopez thinks that Ayers could be the subject of an interesting column, writing “violin guy” in his notebook for ideas, and he begins finding out all he can about this homeless man with amazing musical talent.
He learns that Ayers had been a student at the Juilliard School of Music, but had dropped out before graduating. And when he tracks down the sister of Ayers in Cleveland, she asks him why he is interested in her brother, and Lopez says, “Everyone has a story, and it’s interesting.”
The sister tells Lopez that Nathaniel had become fascinated with music when he was a young boy and after that there was no more football, no more baseball, just music. She says, “That was all he did, just music.”
We see flashbacks to when Ayers was a kid that show his fascination and also to when he arrived in New York City to attend Juilliard, which also give us an indication as to why he dropped out before graduating.
Lopez begins writing some columns about Ayers, which cause one reader to send him a cello that she can’t play anymore to give to Ayers, because the cello was his first instrument of choice.
Lopez involves himself even more into the homeless man’s life, managing to obtain an apartment for Ayers, cello lessons for the first time in three decades, and even to arrange for Ayers to attend a rehearsal for a Beethoven concert.
However, things don’t always go the way Lopez plans them, and the relationship between Ayers and Lopez takes a turn for the worse.
Because we see so many details of Lopez’s life at home and at the office, we begin to wonder if the filmmakers wanted to tell the story about Lopez or about Ayers.
THE SOLOIST is good, but could have been better.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
“Knowing” Wants It Both Ways
Mar 25th
Wants It Both Ways
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
KNOWING is a film that looks promising at the beginning but then falls apart as it gets more and more preposterous.
Nicolas Cage stars as John Koestler, a professor of astrophysics at MIT, and one day his son, Caleb, comes home from school with an envelope that was handed out to him at a school ceremony which will change their lives and the world around them.
Before that, a prologue from 1959 has shown us what is in the envelope and who was responsible for it.
Back then, the new elementary school had a dedication ceremony for which the children were asked to draw a picture of what they thought the world would look like 50 years later in 2009, and the pictures were put into a time capsule that was buried at the school.
However, one strange little girl, instead of drawing a picture, had covered her paper with nothing but numbers. That is the paper that Caleb had been given.
John and Caleb have a special bond between them ever since John’s wife and Caleb’s mother was killed in an accident some years earlier. They repeat a ritual saying that goes “You and me together . . . forever.”
Well, late one night John is studying the list of numbers to try to make sense out of them, and he discovers “91101” in the list with “2996” immediately after it. On a hunch he researches the tragedy of September 11, 2001, and learns that 2,996 people were killed in the World Trade Towers that day.
Using that as his starting point, John then realizes that the date of every major disaster is in the numbers, along with the number of casualties following the date.
However, if that weren’t frightening enough, according to John’s system in the numbers, three major disasters haven’t occurred yet, but are going to happen soon within the next year.
Granted, there are more numbers than just dates and casualties, but when John discovers what they mean, the piece of paper becomes even more frightening.
Now, the special effects are fantastic, but here is where the story starts to become preposterous. Then it gets really preposterous.
And then even more preposterous than that.
KNOWING wants to have it both ways and then every way possible after that, but you have to see it to understand what I mean, and I don’t recommend it.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”