Posts tagged Tom Hanks
“Angels & Demons” Leaves Questions Unanswered
May 20th
Leaves Questions Unanswered
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
ANGELS & DEMONS is the much-anticipated follow-up to the highly successful and highly controversial 2006 THE DA VINCI CODE, and although it is entertaining, it is less satisfying.
The reason I say “follow-up” instead of “sequel” is that even though the story is identified as taking place after the events in the first film, the novel by Dan Brown on which this film is based was published three years before the novel of THE DA VINCI CODE was published.
The story begins with the death of the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church and the Cardinals of the Church must choose the next Pope from among them to lead the world’s one billion Catholics.
Then we switch to the CERN Laboratory in Switzerland where the world’s largest particle collider is being used in an experiment to create antimatter.
The experiment succeeds, but one of the scientists is murdered and the antimatter is stolen.
Professor Robert Langdon, again played by Tom Hanks as the professor of symbology at Harvard University but without the ugly haircut this time, is summoned to the Vatican in Rome, because the four Cardinals who were favored for one of them to be chosen as the next Pope have been kidnaped by a group identifying themselves as the Illuminati, saying that they will kill one of the Cardinals every hour leading up to midnight, when they will destroy the Vatican with the stolen antimatter.
Langdon explains that the Illuminati is a secret organization dedicated to science and the search for truth, and when the head of the Vatican police asks Langdon, “Are you anti-Catholic, Professor Langdon?” Langdon answers, “No, I’m anti-vandalism.”
Now, the threat note from the kidnapers contains clues to where each of the Cardinals will be murdered, and so Langdon has to decipher the clues so that they can prevent their death.
And accompanying Langdon and the Vatican police is a beautiful scientist from the CERN Laboratory who can defuse the antimatter “bomb” if they can find if before its battery runs down and it explodes.
Confusing? Yes. Complicated? You bet. At one point I wrote in my notes, “What’s going on?”
The biggest question to ask ourselves, however, is “Why can’t science and religion just get along?”
ANGELS & DEMONS is entertaining, but it leaves too many questions unanswered.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
Angels and Demons – Movie Trailer
May 15th
Angels and Demons re-teams director Ron Howard and star Tom Hanks for the sequel to their international blockbuster adaptation of Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code. Although the book Angels and Demons was written before the novel The Da Vinci Code, the movie transpires after the events of the earlier movie. Hanks stars as professor Robert Langdon, the most respected symbologist in the United States, who uses his knowledge in order to decode a symbol on the skin of a murder victim. The clues put him on the trail of an international conspiracy involving the Catholic Church. Ewan McGregor and Ayelet Zurer also star in the Sony Pictures production.
“The House Bunny” Ugly Ducklings Meet ‘Mean Girls’
Sep 10th
Ugly Ducklings Meet ‘Mean Girls’
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
THE HOUSE BUNNY has a “high concept” coupled with “low humor” and some girls who are very “easy on the eyes.”
Oh! And it is touching at the end, too, and I am not being punny.
Well, so much for the “low humor.”
The high concept is “A Playboy Bunny becomes the house mother for a sorority house full of losers and misfits and saves the girls from disaster.
Again, I am not being punny.
Anna Faris stars as Shelley Darlingson, and you might recognize her from the SCARY MOVIE movies, because she has been in all four of them. Tom Hanks’s son appears in it, as well.
Shelley grew up in an orphanage, but now she has been living in the Playboy Mansion for nine years, where she fulfills her duties as a Playboy Bunny.
Shelley wants to live “happily ever after” in the Mansion, but she wishes that she would be chosen to be a Centerfold, which she says would mean, “I’m naked in the center of a magazine.”
However, the morning after Shelley is given a party for her 27th birthday, she is told that she has two hours to move out of the Mansion, with the explanation that “27” is “59” in Bunny years.
So, Shelley packs all her belongings into her beat-up old automobile with a bumper sticker that reads “Mean People Are Mean” and drives off looking for a place to stay and new employment.
Through a series of fortuitous circumstances, Shelley gets hired by the Zeta Alpha Zeta sorority at a small college to be the girls’ house mother.
The sorority is in trouble. It hasn’t met its campus requirements for three years, they get no pledges, and everyone thinks they are losers. It has only seven members now, and they have to get 30 new pledges in order to keep their standing with the college administration.
So, Shelley gets to work, using all her experience to make the seven girls the hottest girls on campus, which is no easy task. She gives them all makeovers in order to make them noticeable, telling them “The eyes are the nipples of the face.”
There is a surprise twist in the middle, the gags are good, and it is better than what it appears to be.
THE HOUSE BUNNY is “The Ugly Ducklings Meet ‘Mean Girls.'”
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”