Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation Movie Review

The whole plot of the latest Mission: Impossible film, subtitled Rogue Nation, and directed by Christopher McQuarrie, who also wrote the screenplay and is involved in one way or another in just about everything Tom Cruise stars in these days, hinges on the usual MacGuffin device. In this case it’s a cache of data that will give financial support to an international crime organization known as The Syndicate. They are essentially the anti-Impossible Mission force, comprised of agents from all over the world who disappeared, presumed dead, over the last several years. The thing is, the data can be accessed using fingerprint and voice ID of only one person – the Prime Minister of Britain! I mean, there’s security and then there’s just plain stupid and ineffective. What happens if the PM suddenly dies? What if he resigns? What if he’s revealed to be greater than Nixon levels of corrupt? Anyway, this is just a minor logical inconvenience o the way to a cleverly-crafted sequence that results in the kidnapping of the Prime Minister. And clever set pieces are the stock in trade of the Mission: Impossible series.

Special 500th Movie Review: Magnolia - a Modern Classic From My Collection

In choosing a movie to watch to mark my 500^th full length review, I went with Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia because, along with Pulp Fiction and The Godfather, it’s one of my top three movies of all time. By that I mean I consider it not only a great film, but that I find it endlessly watchable. Incidentally, I chose it several weeks prior to, and started watching the night before, Philip Seymour Hoffman's death. It was merely a thematically fitting coincidence. I have tried to watch it about once a year since it came out in 1999 and have mostly kept up on that vow. I think I may have watched it twice during my five years in Spain and possibly only this time since returning two and a half years ago, but I am intimately familiar with the movie. I also chose it because so much time has passed since last we met.

25 Years Ago This Month: December 1988

Typical of December, the final month of 1988 was full of releases vying desperately for awards consideration, especially Oscars. Eight films released in this month received Academy Award nominations, including all five of the Best Picture nominees.

As always, we start with what I've seen...

Barry Levinson's Rain Man was the box office behemoth of the year and winner of the Best Picture Oscar the following year. It embodies everything a typical "best picture" is, but mostly it's a rather simplistic portrait of autism produced at a time when virtually no one knew anything about the disorder. A quarter century later, many people can probably tell you something about it, most mistakenly that it's caused by childhood vaccinations. Dustin Hoffman's autistic savant is the very rare exception among people on the spectrum, but in 1988 it led most people to believe that being autistic meant being able to count cards and take the house in a Las Vegas casino.

Short Cut Movie Review: Oblivion

A Short Cut Movie Review is normally less than 400 words, but in some cases may go slightly over. This is my attempt to keep writing about as many films as I see without getting bogged down with trying to find more to say. They are meant to be brief snapshots of my reaction to a movie without too much depth.

Oblivion is a movie that looks almost perfect in terms of production design and visual effect. It deftly recalls and references several science fiction classics, but then fails to live up to the standards set by those that came before.

Tom Cruise is Jack Harper, a technician working to repair battle drones on earth that are in place to defend some big energy-producing machines from attack by Scavs, an alien race that lost a war with humans several decades ago. He explains everything in a narration that precedes the title. If you miss anything, don’t fret because it is all repeated almost verbatim later in the film as dialogue between Jack and Beech (Morgan Freeman), the leader of a band of humans found to still be living on earth.

25 Years Ago This Month: July 1988

The two biggest movies of the month were total counter-programming to one another.

First there was John McTiernan's Die Hard, a fine action thriller that spawned a string of increasingly ludicrous sequels. It solidified Bruce Willis as an action hero, helping him break out of his "Moonlighting" and romantic comedy typecasting, and it introduced Alan Rickman to American audiences as the suave and cunning villain Hans Gruber.

For the ladies there was Tom Cruise in Cocktail later in the month. Believe it or not, I've never actually seen it. I had no interest in it during its cable run in 1989/1990.

Short Cut Movie Review From My Collection - Mission: Impossible II

I was so crazy for John Woo at the time Mission: Impossible II came out that almost nothing could have deterred my enthusiasm for the film. I still love it today and see plenty to admire in it and it remains my favorite of the four films in the series, but there are some obvious flaws in it that I never quite saw 13 years ago.

People have been criticizing this film, as well as many other Woo films, for the use of slow motion, for the unbelievable drama, for the doves and pigeons. Okay, his use of birds floating around during climactic action scenes does get tiresome. But I think the heightened drama really plays well in most of his films, and especially well in the case of Mission: Impossible II. Woo loves to combine elements of Douglas Sirk level melodrama with totally unbridled action. Isn’t an action sequence more thrilling, doesn’t the lump in your throat or the hold on your breath grow more powerful if the dramatic tension is raised even beyond the level of realism? Why should we criticize a movie that employs ridiculous and unbelievable action stunts for coupling it with unbelievable drama?

Until Misson:Impossible – Ghost Protocol, this was easily some of Tom Cruise’s greatest stunt work as an actor. His love interest, played by Thandie Newton, is exquisitely beautiful. I never had any problem believing the two of them could fall so hard for each other so quickly. Dougray Scott isn’t exactly the greatest villain in action history and he does force it occasionally, but watching it now I’m more focused on his number two man, played by Richard Roxburgh. Compare Roxburgh’s performance here with his role in Moulin Rouge and you see what a fantastic actor he is.

The movie’s weakest link, I see now, is Robert Towne’s screenplay, which relies too heavily on cliché-ridden often lazy dialogue. It’s remarkable to think this is the same guy who wrote Chinatown. Also, some of the stunts don’t make physical sense when a man is flying through the air in one direction and he’s suddenly propelled in the opposite direction by a bullet. It’s poor in a disorienting way. But overall, the stunts are spectacular and the vast majority of the action expertly directed by master Woo.

Short Cut Movie Review - Mission: Impossible III

A Short Cut Movie Review is normally less than 400 words, but in some cases may go slightly over. This is my attempt to keep writing about as many films as I see without getting bogged down with trying to find more to say. They are meant to be brief snapshots of my reaction to a movie without too much depth.

The writing partners Alex Kurtzman and Robert Orci, along with director and co-writer J.J. Abrams, tried to give IMF agent Ethan Hunt a little more personal stake in the spy game by giving him a fiancée (Michelle Monaghan). To allay any suspense regarding the action movie cliché of the hero’s lover being in danger, Abrams opens the film with a sadistic scene of the villain, Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman) attempting to extract information from a bound Ethan (Tom Cruise) before killing his fiancée. This allows the anticipation to build differently, knowing what their fate will be and also knowing that once he capture Davian early in the film, we will see him get away. Having flesh in the game isn’t quite enough, apparently, because they also gave Ethan a female spy protégé (Keri Russell) for whom he feels a need to exact revenge.

Ving Rhames returns as Luther, the team’s computer expert, remarking about their mission to break into The Vatican that it’s a cakewalk compared to Langley, referencing the centerpiece break in of the first film. Maggie Q and Jonathan Rhys Myers round out the IMF team, with Billy Crudup serving as Ethan’s boss and Laurence Fishburne adding severity and gravitas as the IMF director. The action dutifully pumps along. Abrams has continually proved himself a whiz of an action director and this is where he had just begun to cut his teeth. It’s generally a fine effort as far as these things go.

Jack Reacher Movie Review

It has been so long since I’ve been both truly surprised and genuinely thrilled at the movies that I’d almost forgotten the feeling, but Jack Reacher reminded me of exactly the reason why I love sitting in a darkened cinema several dozen times a year. It is not the best movie I’ve ever seen. It’s not even the best movie I’ve seen this year. But it did exactly what I expect an action thriller to do and it did it competently, excitingly, originally, and without pandering to the lowest common denominator audience members. I loved this movie. I loved it almost unequivocally. I loved it for all the reasons it could have been a standard genre film, but wasn’t. Loved it for all the ways it managed to enthrall me from one minute to the next. Christopher McQuarrie, who wrote the hugely popular (though not well-liked by me) The Usual Suspects, adapted the story from the eponymous character created by author Lee Child and more specifically from one of the sixteen books featuring Jack Reacher as the main character.

From My Collection: The Outsiders Movie Review

Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders, based on the novel by S.E. Hinton, is one of those iconic movies from my childhood. It was slightly before my time, but I watched it any time I caught it on TV. The boys in the film were old enough that to me they were grown up. Still, something in the story connected with me in a strong way so that I lived and breathed with their actions and, in some cases, their tragic ends. Of course it didn’t hurt that it’s a story about boys being boys without any real authority to direct their rambunctious energy and it all ends with an epic rumble in the rain and mud.

25 Years Ago This Month: May 1987

Everything that makes tons of money at the box office is ripe for sequel production. Beverly Hills Cop II didn't live up to the promise of the first one, which is a smartly written and well-made action film. The sequel finished at number three for the year with $153 million in domestic box office receipts.

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol Movie Review

With the exception the second (because John Woo is an exceptional action director), I’ve generally been less than impressed by the Mission: Impossible series of films. They tend to be keyed up James Bond knock-offs employing high-tech non-existent gadgets, but going a few steps beyond 007 by staging spectacular stunt and action sequences. What has generally impressed me most is Tom Cruise’s tremendous physicality and propensity for doing nearly all his own stunts. That he is willing to dive in head first (sometimes literally) lends the series a bit of authenticity. It allows the action sequences to be shot at distances that simultaneously reveal the actor’s face and the sheer danger involved. Seldom do I notice use of green screen in these films, a fact I attribute to Cruise’s hands-on control as a producer of the series.

25 Years Ago This Month: October 1986

25 Years Ago I was probably just beginning to learn my multiplication table in Mrs. Hansen's third grade class. I don't remember much else about what I learned that year. I remember studying European geography, learning the countries and possibly their capitals. Yugoslavia was still a unified country and I remember, even at age 8, that my classmates were immature in laughing at the name because it was like, "You go slav." The things that stick in our memories.

I certainly wasn't going to the movies so much, but I've seen a half dozen or so of the films that opened in October of 1986. There's little that's particularly notable. The list of releases contains the usual mix of prestige projects aiming for the awards season and popular fluff (action and comedy, mainly) to keep the investors happy.

25 Years Ago This Month: May 1986

Anyone remember a movie called Sweet Liberty? It's about a guy who writes a book on the American Revolution, sells the film rights and then the film crew comes to town to make the movie and throws his life into upheaval. It was directed by and stars Alan Alda. Also with Michael Caine and Michelle Pfeiffer. It was also Lillian Gish's second to last movie. I have vague recollections of catching bits of it on cable TV when I was a kid and skipping right past it. Well, it opened 25 years ago this month.

There were several more memorable films opening that month, so it's no surprise that in the lead-up to the summer box office bonanza, Sweet Liberty only pulled $14 million.

After all, Top Gun went on to be the top grossing film of the year, raking in a whopping $177 million (Hey! That was a lot of money back then). This film really needs no introduction, right? Tom Cruise, Anthony Edwards, Val Kilmer and Rick Rossovich playing beach volleyball shirtless? Ring a bell? Cruise and Kelly McGillis enjoying passion with soft blue backlighting to the tune of Berlin's "Take My Breath Away."

25 Years Ago This Month: April 1986

It turns out April 1986 was a rather uneventful month at the cinema in the United States. The two biggest box office money earners were basically flops. First was Ridley Scott's Legend starring a pre-Top Gun Tom Cruise.

The second was the low-budget creature feature Critters starring Dee Wallace and a teenage Scott Grimes.




If we ignore a forgotten film from 1974 and a nearly forgotten horror flick called The Hand, Oliver Stone's first important directorial feature was released this month. Salvador stars James Woods as a journalist who travels to El Salvador to document the 1980 civil war and becomes entangled with both the guerrillas and the right-wing military.

The Last Samurai Movie Review

This review was first written and published in December 2003 on a website that no longer exists. The unusual structure is a remnant of that site's requirements.

Synopsis: Captain Nathan Algren (Tom Cruise) is a war hero who served under General Custer. He is offered the opportunity to travel to Japan to train the Imperial Army so they may successfully put down a rebellion of samurai warriors. The US Government stands to get a lucrative weapons contract out of the deal. When the ill-prepared Japanese soldiers are hastily sent into battle, the samurai handily defeat them, taking Algren as their prisoner after demonstrating his fearsome fighting capabilities while fending off five or six samurai. He spends the winter months in a small village in the mountains learning the ways of Japanese culture and training as a samurai. In the spring he returns to Tokyo and his own commanding officer to find that his loyalties lie with the villagers with whom he has developed a strong bond. Algren chooses to side with his principles and to fight with the samurai against the invasion of the US-backed Japanese military.

Scoop: A film like The Last Samurai risks criticism for making a white man the emotional center of a story about Japanese warriors. If this were a story about a white man who leads the helpless samurai, through the use of his Western knowledge, to a tremendous victory against the invaders, then such criticism might be valid. But director Edward Zwick and screenwriter John Logan have made a film about an American soldier who has lost himself at home and is saved by a culture he finds to be right, pure and honorable.

Knight and Day Movie Review

Knight and Day is absolutely the kind of cheap (and I’m not referring to the budget) mindless entertainment I should hate, but there was something about this Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz star vehicle that was really quite enjoyable.

The film is directed by James Mangold from a script by Patrick O’Neil. Mangold is establishing himself as a good action director whose indie roots with films like Heavy and Cop Land taught him not to lose sight of character development. His 2007 remake of 3:10 to Yuma is probably his best film, but I still think he has a substantial, if not great, film in him yet. He’s got a great feel for action pacing. Clocking in at 105 minutes, Knight and Day is a breath of fresh air from the bloated excess of the 2 hour plus action films that normally come from the big studios.