Posts tagged 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.”
“The Ghost Writer” Full of Ominous Surprises
Mar 25th
“Full of Ominous Surprises”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
THE GHOST WRITER is a political thriller of the first order with a contemporary subject and characters designed to make the audience identify them with real people in international politics.
Roman Polanski received the award for best director at the 2010 Berlin Film Festival for this film, which is as good as-if not better than-his 1968 Rosemary’s Baby and the 1974 Chinatown.
The story begins with a ferryboat crossing from an island off Massachusetts to the mainland, but when it arrives, one automobile is left on the boat and no one claims it.
Then when a man’s body is found washed up on the shore of the island, the authorities determine it was either a suicide or an accident.
The man was the ghost writer of the memoirs of Adam Lang, a former prime minister of Great Britain who lives in a mansion on the island.
However, the publisher of the book has invested $10 million on the manuscript, and so another ghost writer is hired for $250,000 to finish the book and deliver it in a month.
The new ghost writer is played by Ewan McGregor, and when he expresses some concern about the death of the first writer, his agent says, “Accident, suicide, who cares? It was the book that killed him.”
McGregor arrives at the prime minister’s estate, which is under tight security, and is shown the manuscript, which cannot be removed or copied. After examining it, he proclaims that all the words are there, but just in the wrong order.
Then Lang himself shows up at the estate. He is played by Pierce Brosnan, and McGregor interviews him to learn some interesting details about his life, such as why he got into politics in the first place, especially since he had seemed to be more interested in acting while at college.
A media circus suddenly erupts when Lang is accused of handing over prisoners to the CIA for torture when he was prime minister, and now the publisher wants the finished manuscript in two weeks.
Not only that, but the ghost writer’s hotel room was searched while he was away, he suddenly encounters suspicious people, and he has to move onto the estate, where he is put in the first ghost writer’s room.
THE GHOST WRITER is full of ominous surprises.
“Green Zone” Simple Story with Complex Overtones
Mar 18th
Simple Story with Complex Overtones
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
GREEN ZONE is the third collaboration of director Paul Greengrass and actor Matt Damon, the first two being the 2004 THE BOURNE SUPREMACY and the 2007 THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM, and as TIME magazine put it, this movie essentially parachutes “their franchise’s hero, Jason Bourne, into the toxic reality of Iraq.”
This time, however, Damon plays U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, and his assignment right after the war in Iraq began is to lead his team of soldiers to find the weapons of mass destruction that were the cause of the war in the first place.
So, we see Chief Miller and his team roll up to a site in Baghdad that is a disaster, full of Iraqi looters and even an Iraqi sniper in the area.
Miller finds the U.S. officer in charge and tells him, “Intel says we’ve got live chemical agents in this site!”
After they take out the sniper, they go into the building and find . . . nothing. No chemical agents, no weapons of mass destruction, nothing, nada, zip, zilch!
This is not the first time, either. Chief Miller and his team hit another site the week before that was supposedly based on good intelligence, but the site turned out to be nothing more than a toilet factory.
Then we meet Clark Poundstone, played by Greg Kinnear. Poundstone is from Pentagon Special Intelligence, and he swears by the intelligence they have been receiving from an Iraqi source with the code name “Magellan.”
In the meantime, Miller encounters an Iraqi civilian who tells him about a private meeting taking place with high-value Iraqis. They call the man “Freddy,” and he leads them to the house where, sure enough, one of Saddam Hussein’s high-level generals, named Al-Rawi, is at the meeting, but he escapes after a firefight.
At this point other American troops come onto the scene, and a fight breaks out between them and Miller’s team over a black book that was obtained at the house.
There is the suspicion that General Al-Rawi is actually Magellan and was intentionally feeding the Americans false information, which Poundstone might even have known was false.
At this point, the movie turns into one long complicated chase that is awfully confusing about who is who and what is going on.
GREEN ZONE is a simple story with complex overtones.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
