Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation

Okay so the plot doesn’t really matter here and I don’t know if I could actually explain it, it’s overly complicated with double-crossing and face-pulling-off happening left, right and centre, but that’s okay, these films were always about action set pieces, and there were two good ones here, one at the opera as Ethan Hunt has to thwart an assassination attempt and another where he has to swim underwater without an oxygen tank and do a thing with a computer so Simon Pegg can break in to somewhere without an alarm going off. The problem is that these both happen too quickly and there’s an hour of boredom thereafter.

To be honest I don’t know why I had such high expectations for this movie, I guess because I heard Simon Pegg’s in it a little more, and I do like Tom Cruise. But there is so much fun you could have with these movies. It’s kinda like Antman where you have comedic actors - here Simon Pegg and Alex Baldwin - but they don't really have many jokes. It’s not enough to just have them in the movie. A whoopee cushion isn’t inherently funny; you have to sit on it. Give them something funny to say!  Compare this to Guardians of The Galaxy which is packed with comedic actors; Chris Pratt, Peter Serafinowicz, John C Reiley, Bradley Cooper, only GoTG remembered to be funny and not throw shit loads of plot at us, plus it’s obvious who the good guys and bad guys are. MI Rogue Nation couldn’t decide whether it was a serious spy movie with double agents and international terrorism or a lighthearted buddy action movie with Simon Pegg and clarinet rifles. I’m giving it a hard time, but only because I think they could make a great Mission Impossible with the ingredients they have. This isn’t it. It's not terrible, just very average, and a little long.




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Love and Mercy

Before seeing this pretty much all I knew about Brian Wilson came from the Barenaked Ladies song Brian Wilson; that he lay in bed for a few years and gained a lot of weight. I think I heard that he was a paranoid schizophrenic somewhere too. I like The Beach Boys, but I’m not a superfan or anything, which is probably the perfect position going into this movie; I knew enough to be excited and know all the songs but not enough to notice any factual inconsistencies, or actually properly know what Brian Wilson looks like.

So here you have two different actors in two different time periods playing the unhinged pop genius, Paul Dano in the ‘60s making Pet Sounds while his mental illness is getting worse his and John Cusack in the ‘80s, over the worst of his paranoid schizophrenia but trapped under Dr Eugene Landy who is over supervising his entire life, at one point denying him a burger at a barbecue because he only ‘thinks’ he’s hungry, and generally being really creepy and shouty, as Paul Giamatti does so well (so well in fact that I really don’t like him, I guess only because he’s so good at these ‘jerk’ roles that I now believe him to be a jerk; he’s too good).

This is the most I’ve seen John Cusack have to do in a movie and it’s probably his most impressive performance; he’s so vulnerable while being simultaneously enigmatic you can see why Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks) falls for him. Paul Dano was fantastic too, and more how I imagine Wilson, an extremely gifted, funny and eccentric, boyish man. Dano had the more enjoyable scenes in the film, where you see all the madness in the studio as he frantically and obsessively runs around, part cheerleader part conductor, much to everyone’s amusement. These bits were was so well filmed, shot on super 16 so they look grainy and like real home movie style footage (I think they even used actual footage from back then), albeit very well crafted home footage with stunning camera work. 
This movie really captured the spirit of Brian Wilson and I left the cinema smiling like an idiot, I loved it

Inside Out

Inside Out could only have been made by Pixar; any other studio wouldn’t have the balls to make a movie where the major plotline concerns what happens when anthropomorphic representations of joy and sadness (Amy Poehler and Phyllis Smith) have to get back to the ‘control center’ of an 11 year old girl’s mind so she can again experience these emotions. This allows for some wonderfully weird scenarios as Joy and Sadness travel through strange parts of the mind like ‘imagination land’ and ‘abstract thought land’, with the help of imaginary friend Bing Bong (Richard Kind – google him, you know who he is) who is kind of like koosalagoopagoop, Didi’s imaginary friend from Dexter’s Laboratory, a camp, pink elephant/cat/candy floss hybrid. My only criticisms would be that Riley, who would normally be the main character kind of takes a back seat to Joy and I felt like I didn’t get to know her as much as I should have, and most of the film takes place in Riley’s brain and not the outside world, though Joy is part of Riley, so I’m not really sure if it is a criticism and this confusion as to how it should be interpreted is what I love most. What’s at stake is whether or not Riley’s joy and sadness will return, which is really powerful because it is so literally represented. Throughout most of the film, when Joy and Sadness aren’t in the control centre, it was very tense as she was literally unable to experience joy. It’s a great trick, Riley’s never really in danger, it’s all internal, but it’s represented in a way that’s so easy to understand, you really worry about this girl. To say it’s not the best Pixar movie is far from an insult, and it’s a bit of a change of pace for the studio, more intellectual and less sentimental, though it will still probably make you cry. And as it’s Pixar it’s funny and gorgeous and the cast are fantastic, it has the quality and charm you’d expect while being really interesting and unique. I loved it. 

The Third Man

Frequently named the greatest British movie of all time, The Third Man is a great movie that constantly keeps you guessing. It’s a film noir, though it absolutely doesn’t feel like one; it has this brilliantly light, cheeky zither soundtrack that makes the whole thing seem like a giant prank played on Joseph Cotten’s Holly Martins, who is in post-war Vienna to meet his friend Harry Lime, who promised him a job. When he gets there he finds Lime is dead, though SPOLIER ALERT: he’s not dead and he’s Orson Welles. He suspects Lime was murdered and is trying to track down ‘the third man’, a supposed witness to Lime’s death that no one can identify. The thing is with such a massive name in the movie and all this tension building up over who this third man is, I can’t imagine audiences being at all surprised when Orson Welles’ giant, smug face is finally illuminated. I mean his name is in the trailer but he himself doesn’t appear. Still, for me, like most film noir, the mystery is secondary to watching the protagonist react to its unfolding, and Cotten’s performance in this is really funny. Well not like, Will Ferrell funny, more like 1949 reserved banter rib ticklery. He’s a writer of cheap novelettes, not a detective, and instead of detecting, he quips his way to the heart of the mystery in a largely passive role as the story unfolds around him. ‘Happy as a lark and without a cent’. It’s worth noting that I saw this in the cinema in 4K. It looked fantastic when I was trying to notice it, but my experience was pretty much the same as when I saw last year in the cinema for University, and I think that was on DVD. I’d definitely recommend going to see it though.

AI, Chronicle

First of all I should say that Chronicle is a bizarrely unmemorable title. Nobody I know can remember what it's called. They should have called it KRONIK-L; you’d probably remember that. A typical discussion of the film would go like this: 'Have you seen that movie about those boys that get superpowers from a hole? Ah what's it called?' 'I don't know but it looks shit.' 'Actually, I've heard it's good'. Well, it's alright. It’s about three teenage kids who get superpowers and use them to do teenage kid stuff opposed to becoming superheroes, and it’s a found footage movie which means what you’re seeing on screen is filmed by the main characters. There was a lot to like and dislike in Chronicle, most of it coming from the found footage style; which makes the film way more interesting and entertaining than it should be, though occasionally you go ‘oh come on!’ when yet another character decides to film everything, pretty much because it says so in the script. There was a great bit, when they’re flying and they drop the camera, and you fear not for the characters but for the camera, through which you’ve seen the whole movie so far. There is a cool gimmick where the main character uses telekinesis to float the camera through the air, which makes some interesting shots that would normally seem out of place, and frees the filmmakers from the constraints of found footage.There are many problems though; under-developed characters, loose ends left hanging everywhere and general lazy writing. Perhaps more problematic though is the lack of a soundtrack; because of the found footage thing, all the music is diegetic (the only music comes from on-screen sources). This is no Rear Window though, it only serves to make the action sequences seem unfinished and the whole thing oddly emotionless, only to feeling like a movie in one ‘suiting up’ scene where Ziggy Stardust plays, presumably through the protagonists headphones. You have to admire the ambition for messing around with the superhero genre as much as it does, but it falls flat in so many areas, though it’s worth a watch.

AI was another mixed bag. Like Pinocchio, it’s about a robot who wants to become a real boy so his mother will love him. It was famously a Stanley Kubrick film before he had problems finishing it what with being dead and everything, so Stephen Spielberg took over. Jude Law was fantastic as was Haley Joel Osment, especially when he was being creepy at the beginning, before his mother ‘imprinted’ on him. There was a lot to like, the middle section was cool, and the Blade Runner style future was fantastic to look at. The scenes with David and his mother at the beginning and end of the film, however were just too cringey for me, and I like Spielberg sentimentality. The dialogue is often like an early Disney film, but without the barrier of being animated I find it so embarrassing, especially the word ‘mommy’ in an American accent. There’s also a warmhearted voiceover that explains everything that’s going on, which felt heavy-handed.