Posts tagged silly
“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.”
“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.”
“Bride Wars” First Thing Women Want
Jan 14th
First Thing Women Want
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
BRIDE WARS is a silly chick flick that is NOT a romantic comedy, just a comedy.
However, the only people laughing in the audience when I attended were women, and some of them were laughing hysterically. (No pun intended.)
Starring Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway, the story is about two best friends from childhood for the past 20 years who have been inseparable ever since they saw a wedding together at the Plaza Hotel in New York City.
So, all their lives they have dreamed and planned to have their own weddings at the Plaza and that each of them would be the maid of honor for the other one.
And then the complications ensue.
They both get engaged at about the same time, and so they meet together with Marion St. Claire, the most sought-after wedding planner in Manhattan, played by Candice Bergen.
Earlier, they had criticized a wedding, one of them saying, “It ain’t June,” and the other one adding, “And it ain’t the Plaza.”
So, they settle on two of the only three available dates in June, which is 3-1/2 months away, and here is where the complications ensue.
Marion’s assistant mistakenly books them both on the same date, and let the forced comedy for women begin.
I know what you’re thinking: “Are there any men in this movie?”
Yes, there are. Two fiances, a brother, and an assistant, but except for the assistant, the men are so nondescript that you can’t even tall them apart, and they have almost no role in the story.
And any men in the audience will start losing interest when the two women start fighting with each other. You see, guys would just split the check down the middle, have two separate weddings, order pizzas, and turn on the ball game.
Now, men would ask what is so funny about two brides fighting. Or sympathetic about their making up?
But then the movie isn’t over when you think it’s over. We get an added scene that is a ho-hum setup for a sequel.
BRIDE WARS is a chick flick times 2 that is apparently all about the first thing women want, which in the end might not be anything more than leading to a sequel that would be a chick flick times 4 about the second thing women want and named BABY WARS.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”