Posts tagged children
“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.”
“Nights in Rodanthe” What’s the Point?
Oct 2nd
What’s the Point?
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
NIGHTS IN RODANTHE is the latest film to be made from a novel by romance novelist Nicholas Sparks, and if the films are true to his novels, then I would have to say that Sparks has a problem with endings.
The film doesn’t have a problem with casting, as once again Richard Gere is teamed with Diane Lane in a love story.
However, you have heard of a “meet cute”? Their characters “meet long.”
Rodanthe is a little village on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and the film begins with Adrienne Willis getting ready to leave her home and go to Rodanthe for a weekend in order to take care of her best friend’s home, which is a bed-and-breakfast smack-dab on the beach.
But when her estranged husband arrives to pick up their two teenage children, he surprises and shocks Adrienne by saying, “I want to come home.”
Meanwhile, we see Dr. Paul Flanner finish selling his house in Raleigh and traveling to Rodanthe for the weekend, and we see how just getting there is an adventure.
Paul checks in, saying he might stay as long as four nights, and because he is the only guest, he takes his food from the dining room into the kitchen to eat with Adrienne, saying that he doesn’t want to eat alone.
Well, we can all see where this is heading, can’t we? And when a storm hits and they secure the house against it together, they are drawn toward each other even more.
Now, there is a back story for Paul, and he is in Rodanthe for more than just a weekend vacation, but this serves only to slow down the inevitable ending, right?
Wrong! The back story creates the ending, which is completely unexpected and not true to everything that comes before it. It is not so much a cheap ending as it is a “cheat” ending.
The film is manipulative, because it wants to create a specified feeling in the audience, but it goes on much too long and has that cheat ending.
In fact, you could even say that it is too schmaltzy and has an unsatisfactory ending, but all in all, we have to ask ourselves, what is the point of movies and stories like this?
NIGHTS IN RODANTHE left me asking “What’s the point?”
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
Hippieman’s Plan for America – Part 8
Apr 18th
A whole new line of crap from the hippie perspective. What about our children? Lost jobs in america and how to build a working force like China has. Can we afford our future? Hippieman has got the plan.