Posts tagged Movie
“Shutter Island” Disappointment City
Feb 25th
Disappointment City
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
SHUTTER ISLAND is the fourth collaboration between director Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio and to say that it is a disappointment would be an understatement.
The film contains too many elements from previous films that appear to be obvious rip-offs, it wants to be surprising and shocking but instead is just confusing, and the ending is so bad that it makes you want to get up and leave, except that the audience is already doing that.
In addition, there are too many scenes that are nothing more than just exposition designed to fill in the holes for the audience.
DiCaprio plays U.S. Marshall Teddy Daniels, the time is 1954, and the place is Ashecliffe Hospital on Shutter Island, an institution for the criminally insane on one of the islands in Boston Harbor.
Daniels is there with his brand-new partner, Chuck Aule, played by Mark Ruffalo, and they are investigating the disappearance of a female patient, Rachel Solando, who is there because she killed her three children, but believes that they are still alive.
As he starts his investigation, Daniels remarks that the inmates appear as if they are all on edge, and he is told, “Right now, Marshall, we all are.”
He is also corrected that the people there are patients, not inmates, by Dr. Cawley, played by Ben Kingsley.
The island is 11 miles from the nearest land, the dock is the only way off or on the island, Rachel has no shoes, and it is as if she evaporated from a locked cell with bars on the window.
And then there is a storm coming up that will turn into a hurricane.
If all this weren’t enough for Daniels to deal with, he starts to have flashbacks to his experience in World War II when he helped liberate a concentration camp, and he also begins to have dreams and visions of his dead wife, Dolores.
Daniels has an ulterior motive for requesting this case, because he suspects that the man who killed his wife is also a patient in the asylum.
Watching this movie can lead you to these conclusions: Scorsese does surrealism, Scorsese does melodramatics, Scorsese doesn’t do shock or suspense, Scorsese doesn’t do surprise endings, Scorsese does do overindulgence–no, make that self-overindulgence–and finally Scorsese doesn’t do Hitchcock.
SHUTTER ISLAND is Disappointment City.
Shutter Island – Movie Trailer
Feb 24th
Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio team up for a fourth time for this adaptation of Shutter Island, a novel by Dennis Lehane (Mystic River). The film opens in 1954 as World War II veteran and current federal marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his new partner, Chuck (Mark Ruffalo), ferry to Shutter Island, a water-bound mental hospital housing the criminally insane. They have been asked to investigate the disappearance of Rachel Solando (Emily Mortimer), a patient admitted to the asylum after she murdered her three children. As Teddy quizzes Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley), the head of the institution, he begins to suspect that the authorities in charge might not be giving him the whole truth, and that a terrible fate may befall all the patients in the spooky Ward C — a unit devoted to the most heinous of the hospital’s inmates. Complicating matters further, Teddy has a secret of his own — the arsonist who murdered his wife is incarcerated on Shutter Island. Driven to confront his wife’s killer, and stranded on the island because of a hurricane, Teddy must unravel the secrets of the eerie place before succumbing to his own madness. Max von Sydow, Emily Mortimer, Michelle Williams, Patricia Clarkson, and Jackie Earle Haley round out the supporting cast.
“Valentine’s Day” Predictable and Sappy
Feb 18th
Predictable and Sappy
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
VALENTINE’S DAY is stuffed with stars, filled with stories, overflowing with romance, and you don’t have to be in love to enjoy it.
But it couldn’t hurt, because chances are you can probably spot one of your own love stories.
Here are the stars: Jessica Alba, Kathy Bates, Jessica Biel, Bradley Cooper, Eric Dane, Patrick Dempsey, Hector Elizondo, Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, Topher Grace, Anne Hathaway, Ashton Kutcher, Queen Latifah, Taylor Lautner, George Lopez, Shirley MacLaine, Emma Roberts, Julia Roberts, and Taylor Swift.
And here are just some of the stories, which all pretty much intersect because of the characters and which all come full circle at the end of the day, which of course is Valentine’s Day.
Kutcher plays Reed Bennett, who owns a flower business, and as he tells Alphonso, one of his employees, when they are out making a delivery, “Everyone is romantic on Valentine’s Day.”
And Reed should know, not just because of his business and all the deliveries that he and Alphonso will make during the course of the day, but also because that morning Reed proposed to his girlfriend, and she said yes.
However, the results do not turn out the way that he expected, as we shall see.
Then there is Kelvin, a TV sportscaster, who is ordered by his producer to take a camera crew out onto the streets and interview people about Valentine’s Day, because the station wants more “fluff.”
The new boyfriend of a charming elementary school teacher is a doctor and can’t be with her on this day because he has to fly to San Francisco and perform an operation, but he has a secret that he is keeping from his girlfriend.
A wealthy businessman sits next to a woman captain in the Army for a 14-hour flight from overseas. She is going to be able to spend just one day with her special “Valentine” before she has to fly back to duty.
A couple of high-school sweethearts are planning to make this a very special day in their relationship.
A professional football player who might be retiring holds a press conference to reveal his own secret.
And the characters and stories just go on and on.
VALENTINE’S DAY is predictable and sappy, and the ending is completely heart-wrenching, but not in the way you would think.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
