Posts tagged dinner
“Date Night” Date Night from Hell
Apr 14th
Date Night from Hell
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
DATE NIGHT is the perfect movie for married couples who have such rituals, but it should come with the following warning: “We’re professionals. Don’t try this when you leave home on your date night.”
Steve Carell and Tina Fey play Phil and Claire Foster, who live in New Jersey and who have the obligatory two young children. Phil is a tax accountant, Claire is a real-estate agent, and at the beginning of the movie we see what they do on a typical date night and their typical bedtime routine for discussing whether or not to have sex, both of which should be familiar and funny to couples in the audience.
Then when they learn that two friends of theirs who are married to each other are going to break up, Phil and Claire decide to change their usual date night of dinner at a local restaurant and instead go to a fancy restaurant in New York City, even though they don’t have reservations, which normally have to be made a month in advance.
So, while they are waiting in the bar for a table to open up, Phil hears the hostess calling “Tripplehorn, party of two” more than once, decides that the Tripplehorns are a no-show, says to Claire, “I want this night to be different,” and announces to the hostess, “We are the Tripplehorns.”
Once they are seated, they toast “Here’s to a great night” with empty wine glasses, and then all hell breaks loose.
Two men show up at their table and want to talk to Phil and Claire outside in private. The Fosters assume that they have been “busted” for taking the Tripplehorns’ reservation, but, no, the two men believe that they ARE the Tripplehorns and demand that they turn over a flash drive to them, a small, portable drive for a computer.
And thus begins a “great night” of laughs for the audience and certainly a “different” night for Phil and Claire.
There is at least a double case of mistaken identity, blackmail involving a mob boss, a crooked politician, crooked policemen, a building break-in, a slow chase across the lake in Central Park, and one of the funniest car chases you will ever see.
DATE NIGHT is a date night from hell for the Fosters, but a great night for the audience.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
“Chloe” Raises Questions about Sexual Fidelity
Mar 31st
“Raises Questions about Sexual Fidelity”
CHLOE is a domestic thriller and a sexual suspense film that raises questions about sexual fidelity, but the answers are much too nicely tied up at the end to prevent any embarrassment to the characters.
Or confusion for the audience, either, for that matter.
Julianne Moore plays Catherine, a successful gynecologist in Toronto, and the story begins with her arranging a surprise birthday party for her husband, David, who is played by Liam Neeson.
David is a college professor, and he is in New York City giving a lecture on opera. When a pretty girl asks him out to dinner after the lecture, David changes his plans to fly directly back to Toronto and thus misses the surprise birthday party that Catherine was giving for him.
The next morning back in Toronto, David lies to Catherine and tells her that he missed his flight back and that was why he was late getting home.
However, Catherine sees a text message on David’s phone that says, “Thanks for last night. Miranda.”
Catherine doesn’t confront David about his lie, but instead does something more drastic. David has always been too flirtatious with women he just meets to suit Catherine, and she suspects that he is cheating on her.
So, when Catherine meets Chloe, a high-priced call girl played by Amanda Seyfried, Catherine hires Chloe to “accidentally meet” David, just to see what David will do and then report back to Catherine.
Well, you can see where this is going, can’t you?
Or maybe not.
Chloe and David meet a second time, but when she reports back to Catherine, Catherine says that she shouldn’t have involved Chloe in this, she made a mistake, and she tells Chloe to stop.
However, something happens which causes Chloe not to stop, and the relationship between her and Catherine changes. Not only that, but when Chloe is at Catherine’s office, Chloe meets Catherine’s teenage son, Michael, and a fourth major character enters the messy situation.
For what it is worth, this film by Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan is based on a 2004 French-Spanish film called NATHALIE, which has been called a “pretentious character study,” but which I have not seen.
CHLOE kept me guessing right up until, oh, about the halfway point when I figured out what was going on, and then I lost interest.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
“Sherlock Holmes” Deconstructing Holmes
Dec 30th
Deconstructing Holmes
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
SHERLOCK HOLMES takes one of the most famous of all fictional characters, the brilliant but eccentric London detective created in the late 1800s by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and turns him into a modern-day action hero.
The setting is still London in the late 1800s, but Robert Downey Jr.
plays Holmes as just as much a martial-arts fighter as a brilliant thinker.
And Jude Law plays Dr. Watson, Sherlock’s partner, colleague, and writer of Sherlock’s famous cases, as just as much an equal in the martial arts as Holmes is.
To steal a line from somebody else, “This is not your great-grandfather’s Sherlock Holmes.”
In fact, Watson himself may be onto something, because a major subplot in this mess of a movie is that Dr. Watson is engaged and preparing to move out of their digs at 221B Baker Street.
The fault, Dear Audience, lies with the writers and the director, Guy Ritchie, known for his rock-’em, sock-’em modern-day British crime-caper comedies, but most famous for being the recently divorced husband of Madonna.
When the movie opens, Holmes is in a foul mood, and Watson says to Mrs.
Hudson, the woman who keeps their rooms as tidy as she is allowed to, “He just needs another case, that’s all.”
The last case that Holmes had and presumably solved was three months ago, but before he acquires a new case, Holmes is invited to dinner in a restaurant with Watson and his fiancee, Mary, who insists that Holmes examine her at the table and tell her what his observations reveal about her.
To say that it doesn’t go well would be the understatement of the 19th century.
Holmes eventually gets a case that involves black magic, a midget, a plot to rule England and to reacquire the United States, and Holmes’s female nemesis, Irene Adler, played by the beautiful Rachel McAdams.
Yes, this movie is more like a James Bond adventure than a story about the Sherlock Holmes we have come to know, love, respect, and admire.
The movie is preposterous, the story is preposterous, the action scenes are preposterous, even the acting is preposterous.
And, unfortunately, the ending has all the earmarks of a sequel in the works.
SHERLOCK HOLMES is a silly deconstruction of the four novels and 56 short stories that we have read and loved.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”