Mission: Impossible

nah no psuedo religious undertones just a party there but with catholic security to make things more "serious"

The idea of casting Angelica Huston and Sigourney Weaver as villainesses has got me too excited for words.

It grossed about $10 M less than the last MI on opening weekend, which has resulted in columns like this one proclaiming THE KING IS DEAD!

http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/archives/2006/05/upside_of_taps.php

how long is it going to take them to pull this from the Uptown?

TEH INTERNEST IS KILLING HOLLYWOOD!1!!!!

Gabbneb, you're probably going to have to wait 'til X-men.

no Poseidon, then? I'd rather see MI3. :(

"he may sell dirty bombs to Middle Eastern regimes and torture an American female agent, but at least he doesn’t drag William Shawn along to watch."

how do i get literary referece?

i don't quite get why people like anthony lane

because he's not david denby?

i don't understand why this movie is getting bad reviews (tom cruise?). its actually quite good. its not perfect, but its entertaining, and most of the action scenes are handled fairly well, script is pretty good, acting is good all around. Its like 100 times better than MI:2(worst movie ever?), and if there are any better action movies this summer, we will all be a lucky movie-going public. Although I expect the Pirates of the Caribbean sequal to be better.

If you want to see a really good Spy Film, watch Munich. Its gotta be the best one ever. Action packed, edge of your seat kinda stuff.

this movie is great!

lots of very entertaining set pieces, well-written, suprisingly well-directed, well-acted

and it has my crush from kiss kiss bang bang in it!

best line: "the rabbit's foot isn't in paris, five"

just for the delivery

haha yeah

you know as unfashionable as it might sound i really liked tom cruise in this movie

i think no matter what the film was like it was gonna get bad reviews since the public turned on cruise (see also gwbush)

tom cruise can be fine, but only in the context of a movie. once he steps into the real world he's creepy.

hahaha unlike most actors i'm sure

"but at least he doesn’t drag William Shawn along to watch."

haha - at first I read this as Wallace Shawn, which is even funnier. kinda.

wallace shawn is william shawn's kid!

i love how they played the (unseen) theft of the rabbit's foot

haha yeah, true. and that slide down the windows of the building was pretty great.

well, I think the unseen theft of the rabbit's foot was actually pretty damn lame. but because I shouldn't complain about what isn't there, I will say it was an interesting choice, and despite not seeing that theft, the tension remained high throughout the whole sequence. its still a cop out though. People went to see an action movie, stuff gets stolen, stuff gets blown up. We should see it all if its integral to the plot.

I do think this is the first movie where I was genuinely amused by the "action-movie-one-liners" in a way that didn't seem as if I was appreciating them for ironic or camp value. they were just funny and cheesy and great. not so great that I can remember any of them right now though.

like when ving rhames asked tom, "ever fuck your sister?"

the rabbit foot=pure 100% unapologetic MacGuffin

the first time i ever heard the term "macguffin" was in an episode of g.i. joe in which they were pursuing a device called...the macguffin device

what exactly were they "copping out" of by not showing the rabbit's foot theft? i thought it was a great way to avoid a very ordinary part of a heist sequence and it made for a great surprise. the swinging/parachuting stuff was what that scene was all about!

i liked it because during the whole planning sequence everyone was asking TC, "how are you going to do it?" and he never really answered, he didn't know, etc, and we never see it. i thought it was a good joke.

yeah i like when movies play with my expectations in regards to that sort of thing.

I've tried to avoid the press on Cruise, but I can't help absorbing it enough to see this movie as the ultimate expression of his personality, with a wife looking like Katie Holmes (that totally threw me out of the movie). Philip Seymour Hoffman is good. Love the way he takes that drink at the Vatican.

x- post

Its a cop out because they didn't show the theft. if its the ordinary part of a heist sequence.. well make it EXTRAordinary. the screenwriter's couldn't think of an interesting way to do it, so they decided that the interesting way to do it would be to not show it. I say thats a cop out.

Not a totally unsastifying cop out because the movie moves from good scene (rooftop swinging and shootout), slight lull in action while team waits in van, to good scene (parachuting stuff) that seems more exciting because of previous lull. But it was a missed opportunity that I as a audience member might have liked to see. Of course, I seem to be in the minority on that point.

random thoughts:

i liked the shorthand of not showing the heist. it was great at keeping the tension up as the audience is waiting around w/ the IMF crew, not knowing exactly what's going on inside. I thought that it was one of the moments of economy in flick, since we didn't need to seen more heisty stuff(the Vatican took care of that), and as i mentioned, the tension was kept just by helplessly waiting outside.

some of the things that pissed me off was usual Action Movie Stupidity(i.e. a defib that took 30 secs to charge, the team apparently not having the ability to close a huey door, using a defib on your head i accept, using 3-phase 220V power lines, less so, etc)

The chopper chase thru a field of windmills was a great setpiece.

you can tell when tom is Acting becuase he tries very, VERY hard to turn on the "intense."

i was happy that the asian chick didn't have to be Stock Asian Chick.

billy crudup looks weird w/ short hair.

they did the Collateral thing of occasionally switching to green-tinged DV whenever something Dramatic or Actiony was about to happen. Lots of off-center, semi-shakey extreme close-ups, too.

Anybody get a "Escape from NY" vibe of the hero w/ ticking bomb in his head that can only be deactivated with two paddles injecting a charge?

Movie-wifey looks like Liv Tyler, not Katie Holmes.

I liked it a lot, but it felt endless at times because everything was telegraphed so far ahead, and some of the action pieces could have been shorter. I wish action directors would chop a few minutes off of each setpiece, you really wouldn't notice it, but the movies would be paced so much better.

The team was awesome, Seymour Hoffman was awesome, Cruise was about as good as he always is.

After seeing the James Bond trailer beforehand, I'm not sold on Daniel Craig as 007. He just doesn't seem suave enough, even in a thuggy Dark Bond way.

MI:3 gadgets >>>> anything Bond has worked with recently.

I would also like an entire movie about the adventures of Felicity, ass-kicking secret agent.

i've had enough of suave bond. time for a blonde shitkicker.

brontosaur you're insane. it's not a cop-out. jj abrams wasn't afraid to show tom cruise actually stealing the rabbit's foot. it would not have been a controversial or difficult scene. not showing it was a CHOICE that helped build tension and made the scene funny and memorable.

you can tell when tom is Acting becuase he tries very, VERY hard to turn on the "intense."

he's good at it though! it's funny, the crazier and more publically-reviled the guy has gotten the more i've been enjoying his performances.

This thread of late reminds me of Ocean's Twelve, which I need to buy soon.

for god's sake why

of course its a cop out and, duh, its a CHOICE. Its a CHOICE to skip over one scene that could have had any number of moments of "wow thats cool" or whatever the hell people enjoy in an action movie in favor of one moment of post-modern, "oh look they defied action movie convention, thats funny". Of course it also functioned like an "elevator scene with muzak" moment that pop up in action movies lately that are usually played for comedic effect, which usually create a nice stop gap and make the ensuing action seem that much more intense.

yes, that's called "pacing."

I haven't seen this mi3 thing but apparently it doesn't pull the off-camera crap as blatantly as Ocean's 12. I think I was the only one giggling because I realized Soderberg was pissing on the audience by turning it into a cheap postmodern prank, then kind of annoyed that he was able to half-ass it that much, then mostly entertained that he did it in a way that audience members were able to "get it" without overexplanation.

there's a difference between mi3 where five seconds of a heist weren't shown--to RAD effect--and the whole movie is full of great set pieces, and O12, which is a heist movie w/o any heist scenes, and the whole movie is full of julia roberts frowning.

oceans 12 is a little too close to hudson hawk for me

was there singing?

Well s1ocki, I'm glad we both agree the sequence was reasonably "paced".

Its still a cop-out though. You haven't exactly refuted that point, you're just calling it by a different name. As an in-the-moment audience member I went right along with the whole thing. No doubt about it, it was well done. It was only afterwards, when discussing it that it really bugged me.

x-post in MI3 i think its more like 2-5 minutes of a heist that wasn't shown.

and i think O12 is mostly a movie about watching good looking people be charming and stylish. and it works on that level. as a heist movie.. not so much.

dude, "cop-out" only applies if the director was for some reason too cowardly to present the scene on-screen. as there is no possible way that was the case, the term does not apply.