Posts tagged survival
127 Hours – Movie Trailer
Feb 4th
James Franco stars in director Danny Boyle’s inspiring survival drama based on the incredible true story of Aron Ralston, who became trapped alone in a Utah canyon for days after slipping on a loose rock, and resorted to extraordinary measures in order to make it out of his dire predicament alive. An experienced hiker and climber, Ralston (Franco) is very much in his element when he parks his truck by a mountain near Moab, UT, hops on his bike, and peddles to the middle of nowhere. Later, when Ralston encounters a pair of young female hikers who have gotten lost while searching for a local landmark, he jovially shows them a sight that most casual hikers miss before bidding them farewell and continuing on his way. Drifting through the canyons alone, deep in thought, however, the explorer who presumed he was ready for anything quickly discovers just how fast things can spin out of control when a rock gives way as he shimmies down a crevice, and pins his hand to the unforgiving wall of stone. Over the course of the next 127 hours, Ralston tries everything he can think of to free himself, flashing back to small but memorable events in his life — as well as forward to the future that he might enjoy should he manage to wiggle free — as his body begins the slow process of shutting down. Eventually realizing that the only way out is to leave part of himself behind, the exhausted, delirious adventurer draws his cheap made-in-China multi-tool, and does what it takes to survive.
“The Road” More Style than Substance
Dec 2nd
More Style than Substance
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
THE ROAD is based on the 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Cormac McCarthy, it stars Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron, and it is a depressing story about two people traveling on foot to the ocean in the United States after some cataclysmic event has destroyed the world and left hardly any hope for the future.
And if that isn’t depressing enough, along the way they see scenes of extreme destruction and desolation, they see terrible things both natural and as the result of other human beings who are still alive, and they do some terrible things themselves.
The two people are a man and his son, who is about 12 years old, the man believes that it is his job to kill anyone who touches his boy, and everything depends on their reaching the coast, where the man believes that living by the ocean will be better and easier than living inland is.
To set the mood for the audience, in a voice-over narration, the man says, “I think it’s October, but I can’t be sure. I haven’t kept a calendar in years.”
The man has a revolver with him, but it is not so much for protection as it is for some perverse sense of “survival.” He shows his son the two remaining bullets he has left and says, “Two left. One for you and one for me.”
Along the way, we see flashbacks to when the man was living with his wife and she was pregnant with their son, but even these scenes don’t represent happier times for the man, just times of less hardship and despair.
Whenever the man and the boy encounter other people, they usually have to hide from them, because the people are generally gangs of marauders who will take whatever they find that is useful to them and kill anything that isn’t useful. Not only that, but the gangs will also resort to cannibalism in order to have something to eat.
The man tells the boy that the two of them are the “good guys” and that they always will be no matter what happens to them. He says that they both carry the fire inside them, the desire to be good which makes them the good guys.
THE ROAD is more style than substance, and even the style is depressing.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”