Posts tagged married
“What’s Your Number?” One-Sidetrack Movie
Oct 6th
Official Website
“One-Sidetrack Movie”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
What’s Your Number? follows the recent Hollywood trend of movies about women who are assertive, raunchy, bawdy, and, yes, even foul mouthed.
In other words, the target audience is young men, who Hollywood believes don’t want to see movies about women unless the women are assertive, raunchy, bawdy, and, yes, even foul mouthed.
Get the women to strip and show off their bodies, and, heck, Hollywood has expanded the audience to include teenage boys, too.
Anna Faris, she of the Scary Movie spoofs of the, well, scary movies and the surprisingly good 2008 The House Bunny, stars as Ally Darling, a young woman in Boston who creates a dilemma for herself.
Ally’s sister is getting married, and Ally starts feeling sorry for herself. Then she learns that the average number of lovers a woman has in her lifetime is 10.5.
Ally counts up all her past lovers and determines that she has had 19, but then when she also learns that if a woman hasn’t gotten married after having had 20 lovers, the odds are she will never get married, Ally decides that she will never sleep with a man again unless he is the one she is going to marry.
Well, when that plan doesn’t work, Ally decides to track down all her past lovers to make sure that she hadn’t overlooked one and that he just might have been the one for her.
Of course, that is going to be difficult, and so Ally enlists the help of Colin, the guy who lives across the hallway from her in her apartment building.
Colin is played by Chris Evans, and he agrees to help Ally in exchange for being allowed to hide out in Ally’s apartment every morning so that he can avoid the latest woman whom he brought home the night before.
So, you can see where this is going, can’t you, and if you have seen the trailer for the movie, you have already seen most of the movie.
Now, there is one sidetrack that you won’t anticipate, and for a while you might believe that you were fooled.
We also see Ally’s parents, played by Blythe Danner and Ed Begley Jr., who are divorced because they have two entirely different personalities.
What’s Your Number? is a one-sidetrack movie that you can surely avoid.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
“Straw Dogs” an Exercise in Violence
Sep 24th
“Another Unnecessary Remake”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
Straw Dogs is a remake of the classic 1971 film starring Dustin Hoffman and Susan George that was directed by acclaimed director Sam Peckinpah, who was known for the violence in his movies.
This 2011 version stars James Marsden and Kate Bosworth and was directed by Rod Lurie, and the location has been changed from a small town in western England to a small town in Southern Mississippi.
The title comes from the straw dogs that were used as ceremonial objects in ancient China. They were used as sacrifices, dressed up, put on the altar, and then when the ceremony was over, they were thrown into the street.
David and Amy are married, and when they drive into Blackwater, Mississippi, where Amy grew up, she mentions that the young good ol’ boys in town don’t have much to do anymore after their glory days of high-school football are over, and David compares them to the “straw dogs” of ancient China.
David is a Hollywood screenwriter, Amy recently starred in a television series, and they are in Blackwater because Amy’s father died and they are there to fix up his house and then sell it.
So, when they meet Charlie in town and find out that he has a small construction business, they hire Charlie to repair the roof on the barn.
Charlie says, “We take care of our own here,” and then he says to Amy, “Remember when I took care of you?”
And that is when David learns that Amy and Charlie had been high-school sweethearts.
Well, you can see where this is going, can’t you? Charlie and his construction team are rude and obnoxious, they ogle Amy because of the provocative way she dresses, and they belittle David almost every chance they get, because he doesn’t understand their small-town Southern culture, doesn’t fit in, and unknowingly insults them.
And then when Charlie and the boys invite David to go hunting with them, David feels obligated to go with them as a gesture of good will, but, of course, things don’t end well.
Things don’t end well at all, which can also be said about the whole movie.
There are some small subplots that attempt to flesh out the main plot, but basically the movie is an exercise in violence.
Straw Dogs is just another unnecessary remake.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
“The Debt” Truth Is a Luxury
Sep 9th
“Truth Is a Luxury”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
The Debt is a suspense thriller that shifts between different years, different locations, and even different actors playing the same characters, and the suspense and shocking conclusions to various scenes keep the audience’s attention from start to finish.
The story is about a secret mission conducted in the 1960s by three Israeli secret agents and the consequences of that mission which follow them for the rest of their lives.
The three secret agents are Stephan, David, and Rachel, and their mission is to slip into East Berlin, find and identify a suspected Nazi war criminal, capture him, sneak him out of East Berlin, and then take him back to Israel where he will stand trial for the atrocities he committed in a German concentration camp located in Poland.
Rachel is played by Jessica Chastain back in the Sixties during the mission, and when David mentions to her that she is brave, she says, “I’m not brave. I’m terrified.”
Helen Mirren plays Rachel in the present-day scenes, she still has the facial scar that she received during a bloody fight with their prisoner, and once again she is terrific in this role.
Present-day Rachel has a grown-up daughter who is married and has a son. The daughter has also written a book about the mission that has become a success, and Rachel sometimes reads from the book when her daughter is asked to give talks about the book.
However, there is a secret about the mission, which didn’t exactly go as planned, and as Rachel tells Stephan, Rachel cannot tell her daughter the truth, because it would destroy her daughter.
Eventually we see the details of the mission back in the Sixties, and we also learn the truth. The Nazi war criminal that they are after is working under a different name as a doctor, and Rachel and David pretend to be married and having difficulty conceiving a child.
So, Rachel goes to the doctor for help and has to experience the humiliation, embarrassment, and horror of being examined by him while the agents put their plan into action and finally abduct him.
What happens next is the consequences they have to face in the present.
The Debt shows that the truth is a luxury, it plays with the audience, and the shocks keep coming until the very end.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”