Posts tagged rock
City Island – Movie Trailer
May 5th
A dysfunctional family living on a picturesque island in the Bronx spares no expense in avoiding the truth about their messed-up lives in writer/director Raymond de Felitta’s dark family comedy. The family patriarch, Vince (Andy Garcia) is a prison guard who is secretly plotting a new career as an actor. Meanwhile, as Vince takes acting lessons on the down low, his daughter moonlights as a stripper and his younger namesake harbors a secret fetish that involves the family’s 300-pound neighbor. Under normal circumstances Vincent’s wife, Joyce (Julianna Margulies), would be the family rock, but lately she’s been preoccupied with uncovering the identity of the hired help, a secret that only her husband knows.
“Sherlock Holmes” Deconstructing Holmes
Dec 30th
Deconstructing Holmes
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
SHERLOCK HOLMES takes one of the most famous of all fictional characters, the brilliant but eccentric London detective created in the late 1800s by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and turns him into a modern-day action hero.
The setting is still London in the late 1800s, but Robert Downey Jr.
plays Holmes as just as much a martial-arts fighter as a brilliant thinker.
And Jude Law plays Dr. Watson, Sherlock’s partner, colleague, and writer of Sherlock’s famous cases, as just as much an equal in the martial arts as Holmes is.
To steal a line from somebody else, “This is not your great-grandfather’s Sherlock Holmes.”
In fact, Watson himself may be onto something, because a major subplot in this mess of a movie is that Dr. Watson is engaged and preparing to move out of their digs at 221B Baker Street.
The fault, Dear Audience, lies with the writers and the director, Guy Ritchie, known for his rock-’em, sock-’em modern-day British crime-caper comedies, but most famous for being the recently divorced husband of Madonna.
When the movie opens, Holmes is in a foul mood, and Watson says to Mrs.
Hudson, the woman who keeps their rooms as tidy as she is allowed to, “He just needs another case, that’s all.”
The last case that Holmes had and presumably solved was three months ago, but before he acquires a new case, Holmes is invited to dinner in a restaurant with Watson and his fiancee, Mary, who insists that Holmes examine her at the table and tell her what his observations reveal about her.
To say that it doesn’t go well would be the understatement of the 19th century.
Holmes eventually gets a case that involves black magic, a midget, a plot to rule England and to reacquire the United States, and Holmes’s female nemesis, Irene Adler, played by the beautiful Rachel McAdams.
Yes, this movie is more like a James Bond adventure than a story about the Sherlock Holmes we have come to know, love, respect, and admire.
The movie is preposterous, the story is preposterous, the action scenes are preposterous, even the acting is preposterous.
And, unfortunately, the ending has all the earmarks of a sequel in the works.
SHERLOCK HOLMES is a silly deconstruction of the four novels and 56 short stories that we have read and loved.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
“Pirate Radio” Will Never Sink
Nov 18th
Will Never Sink
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
PIRATE RADIO is based on the fact that back in the Sixties the British government–meaning “the Establishment”–didn’t approve of rock ‘n’ roll music, and so it wasn’t allowed to be played on traditional radio stations.
As a result of that ban, “pirate” radio stations developed, some even broadcast from ships anchored off the coast of Great Britain and thus outside the law and safe from the long arm of the Establishment. This is one story, which takes place in 1966.
Philip Seymour Hoffman plays The Count, an American disc jockey on one such ship in the North Sea playing rock ‘n’ roll music 24 hours a day to an enthusiastic audience, one of whom isn’t Sir Alistair Dormandy, played by Kenneth Branagh, a government official who spends his time in the film trying to shut down the radio station by the end of the year.
This causes the following response: “They can’t shut us down. We’re pirates!”
There is one woman on board, Felicity, but that is okay, because she is a lesbian, or as one character says, she is “of the lesbionic tendency.”
Serving as the catalyst to the story is Carl, a young 18-year-old lad who has been kicked out of school and sent into the care of his godfather, Quentin, who owns the pirate-radio ship and is also in charge of running it.
Carl’s father had sex with his mum and then left without leaving his name or address, and the search for the identity of Carl’s father is a subplot of the film.
Now, you might think that life aboard a ship would be cramped in terms of a story, but we have many colorful characters, and occasionally Quentin arranges for adoring female fans to be brought aboard in order to meet their favorite deejays–if you know what I mean.
Also, the music might not be historically accurate, but it is great nonetheless.
One disc jockey even gets married, which allows his wife to come live aboard with him, but that causes more problems than he bargained for.
The film doesn’t exactly have a TITANIC ending, but it might be the only time that the expression “rock ‘n’ roll” brings tears to your eyes and a smile to your lips.
PIRATE RADIO also shows that rock ‘n’ roll will never sink.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”