Posts tagged out of
“Earth” Tears to Your Eyes
Apr 30th
Tears to Your Eyes
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
EARTH is a beautiful film that covers the globe from the Arctic to Antarctica and focuses on a family of polar bears, elephants, and humpback whales in the process.
To do so, dozens of film crews used 200 locations in 64 countries, and the result is magnificent.
The film begins in January in the high Arctic where there has been no sun for months.
The narrator, James Earl Jones, says, “Every living thing is waiting.”
Then we see a mother polar bear and her two cubs come our of their den. The mother hasn’t eaten in five months and has lost half her body weight, we are told.
In the meantime, we also see the father polar bear in his solitary search for food, which becomes increasingly difficult because of the melting polar ice.
We see herds of caribou in migration across the tundra and the wolves who shadow them.
At this point, you might ask, “How did they manage to film this?” Stick around for the closing credits, and you will see how those shots were made and some of the dangers that the film crews encountered.
We see baby ducklings and their first flying experience out of the tree, or more accurately, as the narrator says, “falling with style.”
Then we are in the Tropics, where the sun shines 12 hours a day every day, and we see the Birds of Paradise in New Guinea. You can try to ignore the cheap jokes and comments from the narrator, but it is also hard to forget that he was also the voice of Darth Vader, remember?
We travel to the dry season in the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa and pick up a mother elephant and her calf struggling to keep up with the herd on their search for water.
We watch the drama unfold between the hunter and the hunted in extreme slow motion.
The pictures of scenery are majestic and make you appreciate what a wonderful planet we live on, as well as how fragile and dangerous life on it is for us all.
The final family we track is a mother humpback whale and her calf, who have to travel 4,000 miles from their breeding ground to Antarctica in search of food.
EARTH is so moving that it brings tears to your eyes.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
“Observe and Report” A Double Shock Ending
Apr 16th
A Double Shock Ending
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
OBSERVE AND REPORT is a very profane but also very funny movie about a shopping-mall security guard with aspirations to be more than he is and to have more than he currently has.
Excuse me. It is about a man who is “head of mall security,” and, no, I am not talking about the similar movie starring Kevin James that was released recently before this one.
This very funny, but very profane, movie stars Seth Rogen as Ronnie Barnhardt, and he has also broken into the ranks of leading-man status, most recently by appearing on the cover of PLAYBOY magazine.
Granted, there is a pretty girl on the cover with him, but as his “Playboy Interview” points out, only six times before has a man appeared on the cover of that magazine.
The story begins with a flasher in the parking lot, a man wearing apparently only a raincoat who targets women getting out of their cars, dashes up to them, and pulls open his coat.
Ronnie lives with his mother, and he says to her, “Part of me thinks that this disgusting pervert is the best thing that ever happened to me.”
You see, Ronnie wants to be a real policeman, and he believes that if he can solve the flasher case, he can apply to the local police department and get into the police academy.
Also, he might get the pretty girl at the cosmetics counter in the mall, played by Anna Faris, to go out with him.
However, when the flasher strikes again, the local police are called, and Detective Harrison, played by Ray Liotta, shows up, who not only puts a dent in Ronnie’s plans, but also disregards Ronnie and makes fun of him.
Also, whenever things start looking up for Ronnie and his aspirations, something happens to bring him back to reality, but then sometimes Ronnie surprises us and shows that he is more than we have come to expect.
The secondary characters are all also very good and funny, especially Ronnie’s mother, but when Ronnie goes undercover at the mall in an attempt to catch the flasher, you might think that the worst that could happen would be for Ronnie to blow his cover, right?
Wrong!
OBSERVE AND REPORT has a double shock ending you have to see to believe.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
“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.”