Posts tagged Trailer
“Burn After Reading” Laugh-Out-Loud Comedy
Sep 25th
Laugh-Out-Loud Comedy
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
BURN AFTER READING is the Coen brothers’ first movie since their award- winning success with the 2007 NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, and they could easily win an Academy Award two years in a row, first with a drama and then with a comedy.
And don’t be surprised if Brad Pitt wins the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Chad Feldheimer, a trainer in a gym whose attempt to take advantage of an opportunity doesn’t go as well as he had hoped, to say the least.
If most of the characters in this film talk smart and act stupid, then you would have to say that Pitt’s character, Chad, talks the smartest.
The story begins when Osborne Cox, a CIA analyst played by John Malkovich, quits the agency. However, as someone says later about Washington, DC, “Most of the people in this town who quit are fired.”
Ozzie is told he has a drinking problem, which of course he denies, but he will investigate a suspicious noise in his house with a drink in his hand.
Ozzie tells his wife, Katie, played by Tilda Swinton, that he has been thinking about writing a book, “or a sort of memoir,” and he does. But then a computer disc of his tell-all “memoir” accidentally gets lost at a local Hardbodies gym, and the rest, as they say, is laugh-out-loud comedy.
Chad and his partner in attempted crime, Linda, played by Frances McDormand, believe that the disc contains incriminating secrets that someone should be willing to pay $50,000 for. Linda is also a trainer at the gym, she wants the money for plastic surgery on four areas of her body, and she is actually the “brains” of the outfit.
Linda tells Chad, “This is our opportunity. You don’t get many of these.”
Meanwhile, George Clooney plays Harry, a federal marshal who gets involved with everybody, but not how you would expect. Although happily married, he is having an affair with Ozzie’s wife, Katie, meets Linda through an Internet dating service, and panics when he believes he has killed a government agent.
In other words, everybody is connected to everybody else, everybody seems to have someone watching them and following them, and everybody is funny in some way.
BURN AFTER READING made me laugh from the opening to the closing logo.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
“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.”