Posts tagged planet
NCAR – Air, Planet, People
Nov 22nd
At the National Center for Atmospheric Research, they don’t forecast the weather. They get inside the weather, climate, and surrounding environment to understand it better. Collaborating with researchers all over the country and all over the world to study the thin layer of air that surrounds our planet and connects all of us to each other. They study the Sun, air chemistry, how the atmosphere interacts with the land and oceans, and how we change and are changed by weather and climate.
“Moneyball” No ‘Big Game’
Sep 30th
No ‘Big Game’
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
Moneyball takes what some people believe to be the two most boring subjects possible–statistics and baseball–and combines them to make a movie that is disappointing in a way that most movies about a particular sport or team is not.
Starring Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics who at the start of this century revolutionized the way the teams acquired new players, the movie follows him and his team for the 2002 season and shows the success of his revolutionary method, which has come to be known as “sabermetrics.”
As a matter of fact, that revolutionary method of using statistics to rate players for their effectiveness in the game is probably now being used by all the teams in Major League Baseball, as well as many other teams in the world of sports all over the planet.
According to the movie, Beane met a young employee of the Cleveland Indians named Pete Brand during a visit there to talk about trading players.
Pete is played by Jonah Hill, and Beane notices how during the negotiations the coaches in the room were conferring with Pete, who studied economics at Yale and his first job anywhere was with the Cleveland Indians.
So, recognizing and understanding a good thing when he sees it, Beane later calls Pete and tells him, “Pack your bags, Pete, I just bought you from the Cleveland Indians.”
Back in Oakland, Beane makes Pete the assistant general manager, and now he has to convince the owner and the coaches that this new method of evaluating players will be successful, which is compared with card counting in a gambling casino.
We also see some of Beane’s personal life, the fact that he is divorced and has a 12-year-old daughter, as well as some background on his own career as a baseball player, but these scenes are merely interesting and appear to be put in just to add more time to the movie.
During the course of the season, the A’s do something remarkable in winning 20 straight games, but if you aren’t familiar with recent baseball history and are expecting an emotional “Rocky” finish, you will be disappointed in the overall movie.
Moneyball ends with a “Big Season,” but no “Big Game,” and that leaves the audience with one “Big Disappointment.”
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
“The Tree of Life” The Film of Pretentiousness
Jun 22nd
“The Film of Pretentiousness”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
The Tree of Life won the Palme D’or at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, which says something more about the French than it does about this film.
Written and directed by Terrence Malick, well-known, reclusive, but slow-working filmmaker, this is only his fifth feature-length film, his first being the 1973 Badlands, which has a cult following, as do most of Malick’s films.
I believe it is safe to say that Malick’s films are an acquired taste, and I found his latest one to be distasteful.
No, “distasteful” is such an ugly word. Let’s just call it boring and pretentious.
The film contains very little dialogue within scenes that are part of what little story there is, and most of the dialogue is voice-over narration, such as when Mrs. O’Brien says at the beginning of the film, “The nuns taught us there were two ways through life–the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you’ll follow.”
Then we see the first of the scenes that will develop this theme, which involve the O’Brien family, Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien, played by Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain, and their three boys, the oldest of whom, Jack, is played by Sean Penn as a grown-up.
Although most of the scenes about the family take place in the 1950s in Texas, sometime in the Sixties Mrs. O’Brien receives a telegram that one of the boys is dead, when he was 19.
So, then we see scenes of grief, hear lots of voice-over spiritual narration, and then we experience a long sequence of images that actually depict the beginning of the cosmos, the planet, the beginnings of life, and, yes, even dinosaurs.
Two women in the theater walked out at this point, before the film got back to the story of the O’Brien family in the Fifties, beginning with the birth of Jack.
Mr. O’Brien is a strict disciplinarian who demands that everyone obey him, but also profess their love for him. He represents nature.
Mrs. O’Brien plays wildly with abandon with the boys when Mr. O’Brien is away on a business trip. She represents grace.
However, the story is weak to begin with, and the film is made even weaker with all the spiritual visual images.
The Tree of Life is the film of pretentiousness.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”