3 Hours Film

[Asdrubal Dagreat]

TheHours is a 2002 psychological drama film directed by Stephen Daldry and starring Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman. Supporting roles are played by Ed Harris, John C. Reilly, Stephen Dillane, Jeff Daniels, Miranda Richardson, Allison Janney, Toni Collette, Claire Danes, and Eileen Atkins. The screenplay by David Hare is based on Michael Cunningham's 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name.

The film was theatrically released in Los Angeles and New York City on Christmas Day 2002, and was given a limited release in the United States two days later on December 27 before expanding in January 2003. Critical reaction to the film was positive, with nine Academy Award nominations for The Hours including Best Picture, and a win for Nicole Kidman for Best Actress. The film and novel were adapted into an opera with the same name in 2022.

With the exception of the opening and final scenes, which depict the 1941 suicide by drowning of Virginia Woolf in the River Ouse, the film takes place within the span of a single day in three different decades, alternating between them to follow three women: Virginia Woolf in 1923, Laura Brown in 1951, and Clarissa Vaughan in 2001. The following plot summary has been simplified and is in chronological order, and not in the order presented in the film.

Virginia Woolf has begun writing the book Mrs Dalloway in her home in the town of Richmond, London. Virginia has experienced several nervous breakdowns and suffers from depression. She is constantly under the eye of her servants and her husband, Leonard, who has begun a publishing business at home, Hogarth Press, to stay close to her. Virginia's sister, Vanessa, and her children, Julian, Quentin, and Angelica, come over for an afternoon visit. She and Vanessa talk about Vanessa's life in London and Virginia's mental condition. She longs for a life similar to Vanessa's, living in London. Vanessa's children find a dead bird. Virginia and Angelica make a funeral for the bird. Virginia lies down beside the bird and looks into its eyes. She sees herself in the dead bird, suffering and dying in her circumstances. Everyone goes back inside and Virginia continues writing her book. She says that she was going to kill her heroine but instead chooses to kill another character in the book. Before Vanessa leaves, Virginia passionately kisses her sister. It is clear Virginia wants them to stay and wants her sister's life. After their departure, Virginia flees to the train station, where she is awaiting a train to London. Leonard arrives to stop her, and they argue. He tells her that Richmond was intended to soothe her mental illness and that he lives in constant fear that she will take her own life. She replies that she also lives with that fear but argues that she has the right to choose her own destiny and that she would prefer London, even if it means her death, to remaining stifled in Richmond. Leonard mournfully concedes, and they return home, where Virginia begins writing again. Leonard questions her as to why someone has to die. Virginia says "In order that the rest of us should value life more." Leonard asks who will die and Virginia says "The poet will die, the visionary."

Pregnant with her second child, Laura Brown spends her days in her tract home in Los Angeles with her young son, Richie, and escapes from her conventional life by reading Mrs Dalloway. She married her husband, Dan, soon after the Second World War. On the surface they are living the American Dream, but she is nonetheless deeply unhappy. She and Richie make a cake for Dan's birthday, but it is a disaster. Her neighbor Kitty drops in to ask Laura to feed her dog while she's in the hospital for a procedure. Kitty reveals that the procedure is related to the fact that she has been unable to conceive, that it may portend permanent infertility, and that she really feels that a woman is not complete until she is a mother. Kitty tries to stay upbeat, but Laura senses her sadness and fear and embraces her. Laura escalates this comforting gesture into a passionate kiss; Kitty then leaves, politely refusing to acknowledge the kiss. Laura and Richie successfully make another cake and clean up, and then she takes Richie to stay with a babysitter, Mrs. Latch. Richie runs after his mother in anguish as she drives away, fearing that she will never come back. Laura checks in to a hotel, where she intends to commit suicide. Laura removes several bottles of pills and Mrs Dalloway from her purse and begins to read it. She drifts off to sleep and dreams that the hotel room is flooded and she almost drowns. She awakens with a change of heart, strokes her belly and weeps. She picks up Richie and kisses him, and they return home to celebrate Dan's birthday. Dan gratefully says the dream of this domestic happiness is what kept him going during the war, seemingly oblivious to Laura's dissatisfaction.

The film ends with Virginia's suicide by drowning with a voice-over in which Virginia thanks Leonard for loving her: "Always the years between us. Always the years. Always the love. Always the hours."

Stephen Holden of The New York Times called the film "deeply moving" and "an amazingly faithful screen adaptation" and added, "Although suicide eventually tempts three of the film's characters, The Hours is not an unduly morbid film. Clear eyed and austerely balanced would be a more accurate description, along with magnificently written and acted. Mr. Glass's surging minimalist score, with its air of cosmic abstraction, serves as ideal connective tissue for a film that breaks down temporal barriers."[8] Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle observed, "Director Stephen Daldry employs the wonderful things cinema can do in order to realize aspects of The Hours that Cunningham could only hint at or approximate on the page. The result is something rare, especially considering how fine the novel is, a film that's fuller and deeper than the book ... It's marvelous to watch the ways in which [David Hare] consistently dramatizes the original material without compromising its integrity or distorting its intent ... Cunningham's [novel] touched on notes of longing, middle-aged angst and the sense of being a small consciousness in the midst of a grand mystery. But Daldry and Hare's [film] sounds those notes and sends audiences out reverberating with them, exalted."[9]

Peter Travers of Rolling Stone awarded the film, which he thought "sometimes stumbles on literary pretensions," three out of four stars. He praised the performances, commenting, "Kidman's acting is superlative, full of passion and feeling ... Moore is wrenching in her scenes with Laura's son (Jack Rovello, an exceptional child actor). And Streep is a miracle worker, building a character in the space between words and worlds. These three unimprovable actresses make The Hours a thing of beauty."[10]

Philip French of The Observer called it "a moving, somewhat depressing film that demands and rewards attention." He thought "the performances are remarkable" but found the Philip Glass score to be "relentless" and "over-amplified."[11] Steve Persall of the St. Petersburg Times said it "is the most finely crafted film of the past year that I never want to sit through again. The performances are flawless, the screenplay is intelligently crafted, and the overall mood is relentlessly bleak. It is a film to be admired, not embraced, and certainly not to be enjoyed for any reason other than its expertise."[12] Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian rated the film three out of five stars and commented, "It is a daring act of extrapolation, and a real departure from most movie-making, which can handle only one universe at a time ... The performances that Daldry elicits ... are all strong: tightly managed, smoothly and dashingly juxtaposed under a plangent score ... Part of the bracing experimental impact of the film was the absence of narrative connection between the three women. Supplying one in the final reel undermines its formal daring, but certainly packs an emotional punch. It makes for an elegant and poignant chamber music of the soul."[13]

The film's score by Philip Glass won the BAFTA Award for Best Film Music and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Score and the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score. The soundtrack album was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media.

Hours is a 2013 American thriller film directed and written by Eric Heisserer. The film stars Paul Walker, Genesis Rodriguez, TJ Hassan, Shane Jacobsen, and Judd Lormand, and follows a father who struggles to keep his newborn infant daughter alive after the electricity cuts off in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The film premiered on March 10, 2013 at the South by Southwest Film Festival in the Topfer Theatre in Austin, Texas. It went on general release on December 13, 2013, two weeks after Paul Walker's death on November 30, 2013.

In 2005, before Hurricane Katrina strikes New Orleans, Nolan Hayes rushes his wife Abigail to the emergency room as she is in labor five weeks early. The doctor explains that his wife gave birth to a baby girl, but died of liver failure. Nolan refuses to accept her death and is in grief. He then learns that his newborn baby needs to be kept in a ventilator for the next two days before she can breathe on her own. The only problem is that the hurricane is beginning to flood the hospital and the ventilator cannot be moved.

When the hurricane becomes too strong, everyone evacuates the building, leaving only Nolan and his baby (whom he names Abigail, after her mother) in the empty hospital. A nurse promises to bring back help. The power then goes out and he is forced to find a way to keep his baby alive. He finds a hand-cranked generator in a storeroom and is able to manually charge the ventilator battery, but it only holds a charge for three minutes. He also finds some more IVs for the baby to keep her nourished, and some food and drinks for himself. With each charge, the battery life gets shorter. he juggles trying to get help and keeping the battery charged. Sometimes, he sits down with his baby and tells the story about how he met her mother, (the two met after stopping a bank robbery together).

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