Posts tagged student
“Solitary Man” Scoundrel of a Man
Jul 1st
Scoundrel of a Man
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
SOLITARY MAN shows audiences that Michael Douglas just keeps getting better with age.
Douglas plays Ben Kalmen, successful owner of numerous car dealerships all over Long Island and New Jersey, and the movie begins with a title that says “About 6-1/2 Years Ago.” Ben is in his doctor’s office, where he has just taken his yearly physical, and the doctor comes in and says, “I don’t love your EKG.”
Then we cut suddenly to today, and Ben’s fortunes have changed. He doesn’t want his daughter to call him “Dad” in public, and he doesn’t want his grandson to call him “Grandpa.”
Ben is divorced, he is almost 60, and he is dating a woman for what we are told is to establish a connection with her father.
You see, Ben did something illegal that caused embarrassment to the auto industry, he paid a fine in order to keep from going to prison, and he lost all his dealerships.
Meanwhile, his girlfriend’s daughter, Allyson, is trying to get accepted at Ben’s alma mater in Boston, and when her mother comes down with the flu, she asks Ben to accompany Allyson on her college interview.
Ben not only knows the dean personally, but he has also been a large donor to the college, and his name is on the library.
However, while they are on campus, Ben gets into a fight with a student over a frisbee, and he has a run-in with the campus police.
Allyson is assigned a student, Daniel Cheston, to show her around, and Ben takes it upon himself to give Daniel advice on dating, which he also does with Allyson, but his advice to Allyson takes a surprising turn.
Ben also looks up an old college friend named Jimmy, whom he hasn’t seen in 30 years and who is played by Danny DeVito. Ben had said that he would never come back to the town, and Jimmy had said that he would never leave.
Ben had met his ex-wife, played by Susan Sarandan, on a park bench that is still there, which he remembers fondly.
However, Ben’s actions just keep getting him into more and more trouble, and eventually we learn what caused him to change and bring it all upon himself.
SOLITARY MAN is a terrific study of a scoundrel of a man.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
“A Single Man” An Unhappy Man
Jan 20th
An Unhappy Man
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
A SINGLE MAN looks terrific and strives to be momentous, but to steal a line from the legendary animator Chuck Jones, deep down it is pretty shallow.
The time is 1962, and Colin Firth plays George Falconer, a college professor of literature in Los Angeles who is gay.
Firth has already won a Best Actor award for this role and has received other Best Actor nominations, as well.
The story begins one morning when George wakes up, and we hear him say in a voice-over, “For the past six months, waking up has actually hurt.”
You see, six months earlier George’s lover, Jim, was killed in an automobile accident, and George’s heart was broken. George can’t see his future, but today, he has decided, will be different.
George gets dressed, and he puts a novel by Aldous Huxley and an empty revolver in his briefcase, which appear to be ominous, but all will be explained later.
Throughout the film, we see unsettling images that don’t appear to have anything to do with the story, and we also get flashbacks that represent George’s memories of his life with Jim and the 16 years that they were together.
When George arrives at his office, a secretary tells him that she had given his home address that morning to a student who had asked for it. That student turns out to be Kenny, a young man in George’s literature class, and Kenny will keep turning up in the story.
Julianne Moore plays Charlotte, who also plays an important role in the story, and who is a close friend of George’s and the first one he turned to for comfort the night he was informed of Jim’s death.
There are also interactions with a neighbor family that don’t seem to have anything to do with the story except to establish that George isn’t very sociable on this day, which he admits is kind of a serious day for him.
George claims that he is exactly what he appears to be, if you look closely enough, but he does have some surprises for the audience in his behavior on this day in his life.
A SINGLE MAN is simply a day in the life of an unhappy man, but the story is past its prime in terms of shock value in every aspect.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”