Posts tagged Suspense
“Broken Embraces” More Interesting and Terrific As It Goes Along
Feb 4th
More Interesting and Terrific As It Goes Along
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
BROKEN EMBRACES stars Penelope Cruz in her fourth film with writer-director Pedro Almodovar, and it is a very good romantic mystery that will keep you interested and trying to guess its secrets up until the very end.
The time shifts between 2008 and the early 1990s in Madrid, and the story involves the relationships of a beautiful sexy woman, an old wealthy businessman, and a young handsome filmmaker and how their lives became intertwined.
We first meet Harry Caine, who is blind and who writes movie scripts.
A young woman he has just met is reading the newspaper to him in his apartment, and she reads the notice of the recent death of Ernesto Martel, a famous businessman who had spent some time in prison.
After she has finished reading to him, Harry asks her to describe herself for him, uses his hands to confirm her description, and the next thing we know, they are making love on the couch.
When the young woman is in the bathroom, an older woman named Judit Garcia lets herself into the apartment, and after the young woman has left, Judit confronts Harry about his indiscretion.
Harry says, “All that’s left is for me to enjoy life.”
Judit has a son named Diego, who also helps Harry, even to the point of their trying to write a movie script together. Then when Judit goes away from Madrid for two weeks and Diego has an accident that sends him to the hospital, Harry starts telling Diego the story of the love of his life, Lena, which we see as the details unfold.
It was back in 1994 when Harry met Lena and Ernesto. Harry’s name was Mateo Blanco back then, and he was a movie director.
But most important, he wasn’t blind.
Lena was Ernesto’s mistress, she wanted to act in the movies, and she showed up to audition for Mateo’s next movie, GIRLS AND SUITCASES.
However, Ernesto was extremely jealous of Lena, and so he sent his awkward son to follow Lena wherever she went and film her under the pretext of making a documentary.
You can guess what happened next. Lena got the part, she and Mateo fell in love during the making of the movie, but then what happened?
BROKEN EMBRACES gets more interesting and terrific as it goes along.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
Broken Embraces – Movie Trailer
Feb 1st
A follow-up to Spanish enfant terrible Pedro Almodóvar’s 2006 arthouse sensation Volver, Los Abrazos Rotos finds the filmmaker re-teaming with actress Penelope Cruz and working on a canvas much broader than those of his previous outings, in terms of genres covered, narrative scope, and duration. Lluís Homar stars as the former Mateo Blanco, a screenwriter and ex-director who changed his name to Harry Caine after losing his sight in an automobile accident. A past scandal suddenly resurfaces when the news arrives that the producer of one of Harry’s old movies (“Girls and Suitcases”), a corrupt stockbroker named Ernesto Martel (Jose Luis Gómez), has died. For mysterious reasons, this makes Harry’s ex-production manager Judit (Blanca Portillo) nervous; then Ernesto’s son, Ray X (Ruben Ochandiano), turns up and asks Harry to help him write a vindictive script to get back at his vile father. The film subsequently flashes back to the early ’90s, when Martel became involved with his secretary, Lena (Cruz), but Mateo also began to develop feelings for her, and auditioned her for “Girls and Suitcases.” In response to Mateo’s interest in Lena (and her burgeoning interest in him), the jealous Martel commissioned Ray to make a documentary about the making of “Girls and Suitcases” as an excuse to spy on the director and star. This enabled him to watch Mateo spiriting off with Lena right under his nose, and set the stage for the wily producer’s elaborate revenge against Mateo. As this synopsis suggests, Almodóvar uses a tricky structure laden with flashbacks to both comment on and explain the events of the present; he also interweaves a noirish sensibility throughout the picture that marks something of a first for this director.
“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.”
