In A man called OttoTom Hanks plays a crusty old man named Otto who is kind of crooked. He’s a bit busy. He lives on a quiet street in the suburbs of Pittsburgh where everyone seems to know each other and where you need a parking permit in your window to park your car or someone (Otto) will notice. The elderly residents, Otto among them, have a bit of a history. This does not stop Otto from believing that everyone around him is an idiot. He is right; all others are wrong. Kidnappers on their phones and social media. The young shop assistants, whose insistence on helping this old man find what he needs, makes Otto feel that his intelligence is being insulted. People putting trash in the recycling bin, which Otto, a stickler for rules whose daily routine consists of going around and correcting his neighbors’ mistakes, aims to dutifully pick up and dispose of in the proper place. It seems that nothing makes him happy. The retirement party only reminds him that he felt bad about the job to begin with. And he has no one. her personality makes it amazing, but still. Watching it, you immediately jump to the idea of where his family is, thinking that the lack of family might explain why he is the way he is.
A man called Otto kind of funny like the tom hanks attempt. That explains something about his personality. This is the man who played Mr. Rogers, who once worked to save Matt Damon from World War II, maintaining his dignity in the face of shocking violence. He is Mr. Reliable. Apollo 13, Captain Phillips and: Sully all the palm on his strong moral spine, a rectitude that doesn’t get in the way of a short temper or an occasional stern look. Hanks is one of those actors who uses his toughness so insightfully that you think you’ve earned it. When he gets weird, it’s like a joke. strangeness does not come naturally to him. So he sometimes plays with the unnatural. Grotesque like the kind we saw earlier this year Elvis, in which Hanks played the king’s skinny, bloated, carnival manager, is a feature that only works (or tries to) in Hanks’ hands because we know the actor to be the radical opposite. We know it’s fake, but he’s a movie star, one of the best and one of the last. When a movie star of this caliber makes a fake post, we’re almost criminally willing to pretend it was intentional. The convincing thing about Hank’s slippery, oily turn ElvisWhat Hanks obviously likes is that it will be hard to prove us wrong.
As Otto, Hanks plays an even bigger idiot About Schmidt variety – classic code. Or to keep it in the Hanksiverse, Jimmy Duggan’s confidante, Mr. “No Crying in Baseball.” because you have him fixed from the start as a sentimental convert. Otto is particularly cuddly, in his own way, kind of like a wrinkly cat whose face you can’t help but hiss at you because you somehow convince yourself the cat doesn’t mean it, even as your scratches bleed. This is how Otto is treated by his new, younger neighbors, Marisol (Mariana Treviño) and Tommy (Manuel García-Rulfo) and their young children. They know they get on his nerves. They know they’re asking too many favors to be a part of someone’s life who shows they want to not worry. What they don’t know is that Otto has given up on his life, actually committed to killing himself when they move across the street. What? we You know a little extra love is just what the movie formula of the gods ordered.
A man called Otto based on the 2012 novel A man called Ove by Fredrik Backman, which has already been adapted into a Swedish film of the same name. The movie is just good. Marc Forster basically knows what he’s got: a big star, a good script, a tellable story. Done. The flashbacks tell us more about who she is (there was a woman, after all) and why she is the way she is. The minor incidents involving Otto and his neighbors, and the plotting that allows this grumbling to shrink into the big fluff that he really is, culminate in an amazing act of solidarity, a move we shouldn’t have suspected Otto was capable of, because After all, he is not an idiot because he enjoys it; it all stems from a deep sense of right and wrong. He is deceitful, but not unfair.
What’s interesting is thinking about what the film is and what it isn’t. Otto had such a crassness that in the hands of another actor, say Clint Eastwood, he could easily have become a crazy boomer. Gran Torino the anti-hero, from idiot to reluctant hero, on the same path as the Otto we were given, but with an awkward bite. A man called Otto often feels like it’s just on the brink of giving us a man who’s genuinely abusive, less of a down-to-earth, and more of a troubled grandfather that you’ll struggle to approve of. But he deviates like a virtuoso.
Maybe that’s what makes an ultimately average movie feel so funny; A likable cast of oddballs and friendly faces surround the expert Hanks as he performs a familiar but complicated two-step, an eerie dance, almost wrong, but. after all, morally correct directions. All that is under his control. His anti-hero is basically a hero. If anything, the film almost overcompensates. Hanks’ personalities are clearly diverse, checking different boxes (Latino, black, trans, disabled, a whole range of ages) without a sense of mercy. too cynically crafted. Because Otto, as written, doesn’t reject that world because he doesn’t name-call a young trans man at his door, or hurl racist slurs at the new minorities moving into his neighborhood, we’re meant to understand that as bad as he is : it seems as he is, if he doesn’t complain about these things, he can’t be that bad. But Hanks is already talking about it. He is not in danger of becoming a bad person. His appeal is to convince us that he is sufficiently flawed and forgivable simply as a man.
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