Mission: Impossible

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

Action Movie Audience goes to see Action Movie to see Action Movie Shit. Action Movie Director decides to pass up perfectly good opportunity to show Audience some Action Movie Shit in order to show... less Action Movie Shit. Its not a matter of seeing everything that takes place during the time period. Its about seeing every Action Moment that Action Movie Star gets involved in.

Its not a cop-out because someone was afraid (what does making an action movie have to do with courage?) to put it in there, its a cop-out because someone was too lazy/unimaginative/unskilled to put it in there.

How are the moments of satisfaction mutually exclusive? Instead of seeing the heist, we get the Asian woman and Raskolnikov praying and Ving Rhams being Ving Rhames, plus the aforementioned juke.

And the moments of satisfaction are mutually exclusive because the present moment of satisfaction is derived from the absence of the other scene. You could still have everthing that is shown in the movie, there should just be a scene before that scene showing the Heist.

in Europe! with lasers! and Cherry Jones! and meta-joeks!

http://www.cinemovies.fr/images/data/films/Pfilm36321250802778.jpg

I'm really defending my tossed off comment and minor thought about a movie too much. My argument is also sort of like, "Man that Movie would have been better if all those girls were topless."

uhm.. I really liked that scene where Tom Cruise ran. I was impressed.

-Helicopter chase through windmills was asinine. They are in HELICOPTERS, fly ABOVE the blades. Also, how did they get from Germany to the windmill farm in Tehachapi so damn fast? Note to filmmakers - don't use an easily recognizable landmark and say it's somewhere other than where it is.

-Hooray for Simon Pegg! When's the next Shawn Of The Dead movie?

-The most unbelieveable part of the movie wasn't Cruise, the action scenes, or the over-reliance on masks. It was Keri Russell as superagent Felicity "I couldn't find a guy at NYU so I'll join the CIA."

-Abrams didn't appear to take advantage of film all that well. Much of it was framed like a TV show.

-There's a mole in the organization? This is only the plot of every episode of Alias ever.

-Vatican scene was exceptionally well done. Felt like a different movie all of a sudden. The bridge scene was also great, but like the windmill scene Cruise could have just run around to the half of the bridge that wasn't missing instead of wasting our time by jumping across.

-I like the no-show of the heist too. Reminded me of that Neal Stephenson chapter that ends "everything else was just a chase scene." Negative points for the ridiculous line about "it's the prayer I used for my cat to come home" though.

When I heard Abrams, those were two things I was expecting, and he delivered.

Helicopter chase through windmills was asinine. They are in HELICOPTERS, fly ABOVE the blades.

The helicopter being chased was "trynna lose 'em" among the windmill blades, and I loved the way they established that the windmill blades were massive and threatening before they had a helicopter run into one of 'em. Pretty great scene, actually.

I agree that the wind farm scene wasn't all that hot, but who cares if the wind farm was actually in CA. This is an American movie. If we can export our pop culture, we can export our disdain for geography. For M:I:X, I hope a computer-generated Tom Cruise jumps from the top of the Eiffel Tower onto the Kremlin. California? Is that the one shaped like a boot, or the one that invented clocks?

What, they don't fall over when they are struck by missiles that just missed the good guys, and their blades don't blow up bad guy hellicopters? 'Cause that was the important part. I'm pretty sure they work that way when TOM CRUISE IS KICKING ASS.

Besides, these are German windmills. Didn't the Germans invent them to run their dikes in La Mancha? I suppose you think think THEY DON"T KNOW HOW TO BUILD COPTER KILLING MACHINES IN LA MANCHA.

PWN3D!

Who would play Cantiflas?

http://www.film.ru/img/shots/arnold_schwarzenegger--around_the_world_in_80_days.jpg

The wife pissed me off.

― uptoeleven (uptoeleven), Monday, May 8, 2006 6:17 AM (2 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

nu-uh.

sort of think 1 is better than 3, but only marginally. they should have used PSH more.