Tag Archives: kevin costner

Movies, Their 10 Best

Kevin Costner’s 10 Best Movies

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Kevin Costner

Kevin Costner didn’t turn out to be the second coming of Gary Cooper that some people thought he would be in the late 1980s to early 1990s.  A champion of sports films and westerns (genres he’s continued to revisit over and over during his four decade career),  Costner’s meteoric rise, which peaked with the success of Dances With Wolves ended with legendarily horrific production nightmares on subsequent directorial efforts like Waterworld and The Postman. Costner’s star fell and fell hard.  However, the actor has-in the past decade-reinvented himself as a supporting character actor and done better work there than he ever did as a leading man.  Hidden Figures, Man of Steel, Molly’s Game, The Company Men, and more all feature Costner in strong supporting roles in ensemble films, and he’s become so good at it that his appearance in a film’s credits makes a film more appealing than it does when he was one of the biggest stars in the world.   Continue reading Kevin Costner’s 10 Best Movies →

movie review, Movies

Movie Review: Molly’s Game (2017) *Go All In on Sorkin’s Latest!*

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Jessica Chastain in Molly's Game

Aaron Sorkin has written Emmy-winning TV shows (Sports Night, The West Wing, The Newsroom) and Oscar-winning films (Moneyball, The Social Network), but Molly’s Game is the first one of his scripts that he also chose to direct.  What does an Aaron Sorkin-directed film look like?  Well, it’s a lot like his scripts as it turns out.  It’s fast, it’s smart, it’s funny, and it’s brilliant.  Throw in the performance of Jessica Chastain’s career, an astounding true story, and Molly’s Game is one of the best films of 2017.

Continue reading Movie Review: Molly’s Game (2017) *Go All In on Sorkin’s Latest!* →

Movies, My Favorite Scene

My Favorite Scene: Hidden Figures (2016) “The Bathroom Speech”

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I’m a born and bred space nerd, so any movie that tells me a story I don’t already know about NASA’s golden age already has me at hello.  Hidden Figures wasn’t as good a film as it was hyped to be, but that doesn’t mean it still wasn’t a great story told exceptionally well with a fantastic ensemble.  It’s a both sad and practical problem that there have been so many films about discrimination that it’s sometimes hard to hammer home the vicious indignity of it without borrowing from previous efforts.


What Hidden Figures did so well was to take an everyday reality for every person on the planet-using the restroom-and make it the film’s most poignant moment of the maddening unfairness of segregation.  Kevin Costner and Taraji Henson both give fantastic performances in this film, and Henson’s quiet character finally losing her mind over the ridiculousness of having to run 30 minutes to find a “colored restroom” is a wonderfully written and performed monologue.  Costner’s response has a lot fewer words in it, but then he got to do his talking with a crowbar.

Kevin Costner in Hidden Figures

movie trailers, Movies

Molly’s Game Trailer #2 (2017) “Go All In”

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Aaron Sorkin is my favorite writer working….in any format.  The scribe behind The West Wing, The Newsroom, A Few Good Men, The American President, Moneyball, Charlie Wilson’s War, has written some of the greatest screenplays of this generation.  Now, he’s directing his own script in Molly’s Game.  The second trailer reveals more about the insane dilemma Molly Bloom finds herself in when she’s put on trial for running elite poker games, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg of nuts this story is and I’ll let your read the full description below for a better summary.  Molly’s Game bows November 22, 2017.

The true story of Molly Bloom, a beautiful, young, Olympic-class skier who ran the world’s most exclusive high-stakes poker game for a decade before being arrested in the middle of the night by 17 FBI agents wielding automatic weapons. Her players included Hollywood royalty, sports stars, business titans and finally, unbeknown to her, the Russian mob. Her only ally was her criminal defense lawyer Charlie Jaffey, who learned there was much more to Molly than the tabloids led people to believe.
Molly's Game Poster

 

movie trailers, Movies

Molly’s Game Trailer #1 (2017) *Aaron Sorkin Goes Behind the Lens*

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Aaron Sorkin is my favorite writer working….in any format.  The scribe behind The West Wing, The Newsroom, A Few Good Men, The American President, Moneyball, Charlie Wilson’s War, and the list goes on, can literally make the English language sit up and dance while making both a pop culture reference and an intellectual point.  Not content to merely pen Molly’s Game, Sorkin is also taking his first turn at directing his script of a true story so crazy I’m just going to paste the official synopsis below and tell you I’ll be there when it opens November 22, 2017.

The true story of Molly Bloom, a beautiful, young, Olympic-class skier who ran the world’s most exclusive high-stakes poker game for a decade before being arrested in the middle of the night by 17 FBI agents wielding automatic weapons. Her players included Hollywood royalty, sports stars, business titans and finally, unbeknown to her, the Russian mob. Her only ally was her criminal defense lawyer Charlie Jaffey, who learned there was much more to Molly than the tabloids led people to believe.

Jessica Chastain in Molly's Game
Jessica Chastain in MOLLY’S GAME