Posts tagged traveling
“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.”
“Nights in Rodanthe” What’s the Point?
Oct 2nd
What’s the Point?
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
NIGHTS IN RODANTHE is the latest film to be made from a novel by romance novelist Nicholas Sparks, and if the films are true to his novels, then I would have to say that Sparks has a problem with endings.
The film doesn’t have a problem with casting, as once again Richard Gere is teamed with Diane Lane in a love story.
However, you have heard of a “meet cute”? Their characters “meet long.”
Rodanthe is a little village on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and the film begins with Adrienne Willis getting ready to leave her home and go to Rodanthe for a weekend in order to take care of her best friend’s home, which is a bed-and-breakfast smack-dab on the beach.
But when her estranged husband arrives to pick up their two teenage children, he surprises and shocks Adrienne by saying, “I want to come home.”
Meanwhile, we see Dr. Paul Flanner finish selling his house in Raleigh and traveling to Rodanthe for the weekend, and we see how just getting there is an adventure.
Paul checks in, saying he might stay as long as four nights, and because he is the only guest, he takes his food from the dining room into the kitchen to eat with Adrienne, saying that he doesn’t want to eat alone.
Well, we can all see where this is heading, can’t we? And when a storm hits and they secure the house against it together, they are drawn toward each other even more.
Now, there is a back story for Paul, and he is in Rodanthe for more than just a weekend vacation, but this serves only to slow down the inevitable ending, right?
Wrong! The back story creates the ending, which is completely unexpected and not true to everything that comes before it. It is not so much a cheap ending as it is a “cheat” ending.
The film is manipulative, because it wants to create a specified feeling in the audience, but it goes on much too long and has that cheat ending.
In fact, you could even say that it is too schmaltzy and has an unsatisfactory ending, but all in all, we have to ask ourselves, what is the point of movies and stories like this?
NIGHTS IN RODANTHE left me asking “What’s the point?”
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
TTS Auto Tips “Gas Saving Tips”
Jul 5th
In this informative episode, Doug tells us all the best tips he can think of to help your cars get the most gas mileage possible.