Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol - Dir. Brad Bird (2011)

Tom Cruise is one of the biggest movie stars in the history of cinema. Yet, his reputation and box office clout have been tarnished by his bizarre behavior. The Tom Cruise publicity machine has been working overtime to restore his standing in the eyes of the public. Will a return to the mega-successful Mission: Impossible franchise rehabilitate Cruise's status? In my opinion, the man can jump on all the couches he wants as long as he keeps making films like Ghost Protocol.

The fourth Mission: Impossible opens with an exciting prison escape as Ethan Hunt (Cruise) breaks out of a Moscow gulag with help from IMF (Impossible Mission Force) agents Jane Carter (Paula Patton) and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg). During his incarceration, another IMF member (Josh Holloway from "Lost") has been murdered while attempting to retrieve launch codes for the Russians' nuclear missiles. As it turns out, the codes have fallen into the hands of sultry French assassin, Sabine Moreau (Léa Seydoux), who is in the employ of Kurt Hendricks (Michael Nyqvist), a Swedish-born scientist code-named Cobalt. Hendricks genuinely believes all-out nuclear war will benefit mankind in the long run, allowing only the strong to survive.

The IMF team infiltrates the Kremlin in order to retrieve information on Cobalt. Unfortunately, the enemy is several steps ahead as Hendricks alerts the security to IMF's presence, steals a launch device, blows up the Kremlin, and implicates Hunt's team as the culprits. Branded as terrorists, the entire IMF department has been disavowed by the U.S. government. On the run from Russian authorities, Ethan and his team must clear their names and prevent a nuclear holocaust. Joining them as their newest member is Brandt (Jeremy Renner), an intelligence analyst whose combat skills belie those of a mere paper pusher.

Mission: Impossible III took the franchise down a darker path in line with Casino Royale and the Bourne franchise. Ghost Protocol gleefully embraces the over-the-top elements of the spy genre. JJ Abrams, who directed the previous installment, has stayed on as producer and brought on board writers Josh Applebaum and André Nemec from his Alias days to pen the script. Their screenplay seems to have emerged from the 80's since it is packed to the gills with Cold War trappings. There are Russian antagonists, shady villains with generic foreign accents, and the looming threat of all-out nuclear war between the superpowers. The gadgets are all here too. The IMF utilizes high-tech gear such as a contact lens that can transmit visual data, a magnetic levitation suit, not to mention iPads and iPhones. The iconic masks are present as well. What would a Mission: Impossible movie be without a cool mask reveal? A running gag throughout the film is how the team's equipment always seems to malfunction at the most inopportune of times. Even the famous self-destructing message (hidden inside a payphone) needs a good bang to the side to get it started.

Each installment of the Mission: Impossible series has had a different director behind the camera employing his own trademark style. For Ghost Protocol, Tom Cruise went with an unlikely choice in Brad Bird, whose experience has solely been in animation. Bird has helmed The Iron Giant, Ratatouille, and The Incredibles. His skills have translated to live-action with rousing success. Bird has managed to create an edge-of-your-seat thrill ride in a way that not even action maestro John Woo, who directed Mission: Impossible II, could have. Ghost Protocol consists of one unique action sequence after another as Bird takes the audience on a globetrotting adventure from Budapest to Mumbai. You have a foot chase through a blinding sandstorm and a climactic fist fight in the middle of an automated parking garage. Without a doubt, the centerpiece of Ghost Protocol is a spectacular set piece involving Tom Cruise precariously scaling the outside of the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. It's an amazing stunt that Cruise insisted on doing himself. The sequence was also one of several that were shot in IMAX. Ghost Protocol features approximately thirty minutes of footage shot in the larger format and Bird makes the most of every frame, including the ones featuring the beautiful Paula Patton in a slinky evening gown.

Despite being 49, Cruise is as youthful as ever and slips right back into the role of Ethan Hunt with his usual exuberance. But, Cruise is smart enough to know when to step aside and allow his co-stars to share the spotlight. Indeed, Ghost Protocol is more about teamwork than its predecessors. Simon Pegg is easily one of the film's highlights with his trademark brand of comic relief. Jeremy Renner, who might be groomed to take over the franchise, is a welcome addition. While his castmates play it big, Renner underplays the role of Brandt and gives him a dry sense of humor. Also look for cameos from Tom Wilkinson as the head of IMF and Ving Rhames returning as Luther Stickell.

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol is the epitome of a well-made, big budget blockbuster. The law of diminishing returns is not in effect here as the fourth picture is far and away the best in the series. The extra surcharge is worth it for the IMAX version as Ghost Protocol is gorgeously shot and one of the most fun movie experiences of the year.

Rating: **** (*****)

Midnight in Paris

Midnight in Paris - Dir. Woody Allen (2011)

Woody Allen remains one of the most prolific American filmmakers working today. At the age of 75, Allen still manages to write and direct a new film every year, even if they aren’t as critically acclaimed as those of the past. Every so often, he’ll craft a picture (Match Point, Vicky Cristina Barcelona) that will have movie buffs clamoring about how it’s a welcome return to form for the man behind works like Hannah and Her Sisters and Crimes and Misdemeanors. Midnight in Paris is just such a film, capturing the wit that was once Allen's trademark. More importantly, Midnight in Paris is simply a flat out fun experience, which is not a description that is generally used in discussing a Woody Allen movie.

The plot has largely been kept a secret. Judging by the trailers and advertisements, Midnight in Paris would seem to be no different than anything else Woody Allen has made. However, there is an incredibly clever plot twist that I hesitate to reveal because the surprise is part of the fun. Yet, I don't think I would have rushed out to see the movie if I hadn't learned about it. Plus, it's difficult to review the film without mentioning it so…

SPOILER WARNING!!!

Midnight in Paris begins in a similar fashion to Manhattan with a jazzy montage of the gorgeous sights to be found in Paris. We meet Owen Wilson as Allen's stand-in, Gil Pender, a self-described hack screenwriter of innocuous Hollywood fare. He is visiting the City of Lights with his fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her parents (Kurt Fuller & Mimi Kennedy). Gil is excited about the possibilities that await him as he works on his novel about a man who works in a nostalgia shop. He waxes poetic about rain soaked streets and Paris as a cultural haven for the greatest artists of the 20th century. But, Inez and her folks haven't a romantic bone in their body. They are stuffy conservatives constantly clashing with Gil's more Bohemian interests. The final straw for Gil is the arrival of Inez's friend, Paul (Michael Sheen), a pedantic and pompous professor more than happy to show off how much smarter he is than everybody else.

To escape Paul's hot air, Gil decides to take a nightly stroll through the cobbled streets of Paris. He winds up lost on some innocent-looking street corner when the clock strikes midnight and a vintage car pulls up and whisks Gil away to what he thinks is an elaborate costume party. Wait, did somebody say this shindig is for Jean Cocteau? And the guy playing the piano sure resembles Cole Porter. Yes, Gil has been magically transported to the 1920's where he's greeted by Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald (Alison Pill & Tom Hiddleston). Next thing you know, he's sitting in a bar with Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll), who promises to show Gil's manuscript to Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates).

Each night Gil escapes the drudgery of his shrewish paramour and her insufferable clan to converse with T.S. Elliot ("Prufrock is my mantra!") and dance the Charleston with Djuna Barnes. Gil's predicament is so surreal that he can only discuss it with the surrealists Luis Bunuel, Man Ray, and Salvador Dali (Adrien Brody). In one of many gags that will have viewers rushing to check Wikipedia, Gil pitches Bunuel the concept for The Exterminating Angel, which only befuddles the soon-to-be famed filmmaker ("Why don't they just get up and leave?"). Not all the jokes are so esoteric. When Gil hears Stein has purchased a Matisse for a mere 500 francs, he asks if he can also pick up six or seven.

Gil finds himself falling in love with Adriana (Marion Cotillard), a beautiful muse/mistress to artistic giants like Modigliani and the pioneers of Cubism, Picasso and Braque. Adriana, in turn, wishes she could have been alive during La Belle Epoque. Sure enough, a horse-drawn carriage whisks them away to 1890's where they watch can-can dancers with Gauguin, Degas, and Toulouse-Lautrec. A perfect Woody Allen moment occurs when Gil complains they are in an era before the invention of antibiotics.

Owen Wilson's Gil may act as a surrogate for Allen in the sense of being a creative soul caught in a stifling environment, but he is far less neurotic than the typical Allen protagonist. Wilson melds the character with his own laid-back persona and trademark drawl. Michael Sheen is also fantastic as the appallingly arrogant scholar who annoyingly prefaces his sentences with phrases like, "If I'm not mistaken," or "I believe…," as if he were attempting to hedge his bets. He is the vainglorious pseudo-intellectual Allen has enthusiastically skewered numerous times, most famously in Annie Hall. You half expect Marshall McLuhan to be pulled into the scene to refute every ridiculous thing Paul says. Rachel McAdams isn't given much to do as a one-note character. It's a cheat on Allen's part to put Inez and Gil together because it doesn't make any sense why these two would ever be together. Then again, it doesn't make any sense that a man could travel back in time via a Peugeot. A DeLorean, maybe…

The real stars of Midnight in Paris are the who's who of actors brought on to play the who's who of artistic giants. Allen makes no attempt to accurately depict these people. They are broadly drawn caricatures filtered through decades of pop culture. Alison Pill is the flighty flapper we imagine Zelda Fitzgerald to be. Tom Hiddleston (in a complete 180 from Loki) doesn't have much screen time as the author of The Great Gatsby though hints of the Fitzgeralds tempestuous marriage seep through. Adrien Brody is delightfully over-the-top as an exceedingly eccentric Dali. His offer to sketch Gil involves a rhinoceros, a teardrop, and the face of Christ. Brody definitely makes a better Dali than the pretty boy from Twilight. Corey Stoll, by a wide margin, gives the best performance in the film as Hemingway. He speaks the way he writes, in terse, blustery sentences about masculine subjects like hunting, war, and death.

Midnight in Paris is a wankfest for English Lit and Art History majors and I mean that in the most complimentary way. Allen has created a clever and vibrant romp akin to The Purple Rose of Cairo with its blurring of reality and fantasy. It is a modern-day fairy tale that embraces nostalgia, but only in moderation. This refuting is ironic considering Allen's own proclivities have been less than contemporary. The past may be a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there.

Rating: *** ½ (*****)

Robin Hood

Robin Hood - Dir. Ridley Scott (2010)


”Rise and rise again until lambs become lions.”

Was there a dire need for yet another Robin Hood film? There have been dozens and dozens of iterations about the famed archer on film and television. One of the most well-regarded versions is The Adventures of Robin Hood starring Errol Flynn in a light-hearted, Technicolor adventure film. The garish color palette of the 1938 picture is in stark contrast to Robin and Marian with Sean Connery as an aging, world weary Robin Hood returning to England and his love Marian (Audrey Hepburn in her first film after a 9 year absence) who has since become a nun. A grimier and grounded approach was taken with Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves starring Kevin Costner as the blandest version of the title character. Despite Costner’s vanilla performance and sad attempt at a British accent, Prince of Thieves was buoyed by the mere presence of Morgan Freeman and a deliciously over-the-top Alan Rickman as the Sheriff of Notthingham. You can also toss Disney’s animated Robin Hood and Mel Brooks’ parody Robin Hood: Men in Tights into the mix.

So where does Ridley Scott’s vision of Robin Hood stack up against the competition? Even with a $200 million budget, this Robin Hood sinks to the bottom of the barrel.

Russell Crowe teams with Ridley Scott for the fifth time. They originally paired up in the historical epic Gladiator and surprisingly followed that up with the romantic comedy, A Good Year. Their collaboration continued with the gritty crime film, American Gangster, and the spy thriller, Body of Lies. Robin Hood is closest in spirit to Gladiator and acts as a pseudo-companion piece to Scott’s Crusades picture, Kingdom of Heaven. This is a down and dirty rendition with nary a buckle swashed.

The film kicks off during the tail end of the 12th century with Richard the Lionheart (Danny Huston) attempting to make his way back to England following the folly of the Third Crusade. King Richard is killed by an arrow through the neck while ransacking a French castle. Among the king’s army is a skilled bowman by the name of Robin Longstride (Crowe) who quickly deserts the battlefield with his friends Little John (Kevin Durand), Will Scarlet (Scott Grimes), and Alan A’Dayle (Alan Doyle). Meanwhile, Richard’s right hand man, Sir Robert of Loxley (Douglas Hodge) leads a small band of knights to return the king’s crown to England. They are ambushed by the evil Sir Godfrey (Mark Strong) who conspires with King Philip of France (Jonathan Zaccai) to weaken England with civil war.

Robin and his Merry Men (though they are never called as such) come across the aftermath. Donning the knight’s chain mail, Robin poses as Loxley upon his return to England. He arrives at Loxley’s estate where Robert’s father, Sir Walter (Max von Sydow), requests that he continue the masquerade much to the chagrin of Robert’s widow, the Lady Marian (Cate Blanchett). While Robin undertakes the charade, Godfrey brutally and relentlessly gathers taxes from the people under the orders of Richard’s brother, the petulant King John (Oscar Isaac), a near-copycat of Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus.

The main cast also includes: William Hurt as the royal regent William Marshal, Mark Addy as Friar Tuck, and Matthew Macfadyen as an utterly inept Sheriff of Nottingham.

If that sounds like a lot to digest, it’s only the appetizer. There is a helluva lot more to come during the film’s daunting two and a half hour runtime. Robin Hood’s biggest strength lies in the spectacular production values. Scott and cinematographer John Mathieson (who also first collaborated on Gladiator) have created a gorgeous looking film that captures the majesty of the English landscape belonging to royalty and the squalidness of the world of the lower classes. CGI is effectively used to lend an added layer of authenticity. The acting isn’t particularly noteworthy, but the actors are fine in their roles. Honestly, the majority of them are capable of performing these parts in their sleep.

The weak link of the movie lies solely in the story. The screenplay was originally written by Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris who also wrote Kung Fu Panda and…ugh…Bulletproof Monk. Working under the title of Nottingham, the project was intended to portray Robin Hood as the villain while his arch-enemy, the Sheriff, would be shown in a more sympathetic light. Brian Helgeland (L.A. Confidential) was brought on board to rewrite the script. Tom Stoppard (Shakespeare in Love) was hired later on to perform script polishing while on-set. The filmmakers settled on telling the origin story of a character who has no definitive origin story. Thus, Scott has stripped Robin Hood of nearly everything that makes him Robin Hood.

The names and places may be the same, but the romance between Robin and Marian is only just blossoming. Robin doesn’t live in Sherwood Forest yet and he only robs from the rich and gives to the poor once. The film does postulate an interesting premise in making Robin, who has always been portrayed as a nobleman, a humble peasant and conning his way into the higher classes. However, that subplot is dropped soon after. See, Robin never knew his real father, but Sir Walter conveniently knew Daddy Longstride and reveals all to him. Oh, and Robin’s father apparently came up with the Magna Carta.

Therein lays another weak point in the script, the uneven hodgepodge of historical fact and fiction. Real-life figures and events feel shoehorned into the legends and myths of Robin Hood. The movie maintains a self-serious tone which is completely undone during the climactic battle when the transport ships from Saving Private Ryan arrive. It only gets more ludicrous when Marian arrives in battle armor with an army of wild boys who look like they wandered off the set of Lord of the Flies.

Imagine going to see Batman Begins only to discover Bruce Wayne doesn’t don the Bat-costume until the final minute of the film. Robin Hood makes us sit through a 140 minute prologue that ends at the exact moment when it should have begun.

Rating: * ½

Inglourious Basterds

Inglourious Basterds - Dir. Quentin Tarantino (2009)

”…And when the Germans close their eyes at night and their subconscious tortures them for the evil they’ve done, it will be with thoughts of us that it tortures them with…Sound good?”

Quentin Tarantino has dabbled in a variety of genres and given each his own unique stamp. He’s tackled the heist film (Reservoir Dogs), the gangster pic (Pulp Fiction), blaxploitation (Jackie Brown), the drive-in B-movie (Death Proof) and though he only wrote the screenplay, Tarantino has stated that True Romance was his take on the love story. Kill Bill was his stab at the martial arts epic and Spaghetti Western. Now, Tarantino adds his signature to the war movie with the long in development, Inglourious Basterds. More specifically, I’m speaking of the ‘bunch of guys go on a mission during World War 2’ subgenre, taking inspiration from similar films like The Dirty Dozen and Enzo G. Castellari’s original Inglorious Bastards.

With scars around his neck and a country fried hillbilly accent, Brad Pitt becomes Lt. Aldo Raine, the commander of a Jewish unit dropped into enemy territory. Their mission is to kill every Nazi they find. Known as the Bastards, Lt. Raine’s company has put the fear of God into the enemy due to their brutal methods including scalping their victims and carving Swastikas into the lucky few who escape. Also in Lt. Raine’s unit are Sgt. Donny Donowitz (Hostel director Eli Roth), a baseball bat wielding Bostonian, and Hugo Stiglitz (Til Schweiger), a former German soldier imprisoned for murdering Gestapo officers in their sleep. Two unlikely members of the Bastards are B.J. Novak (best known as Ryan on The Office) and the 5’4 Samm Levine from Freaks & Geeks.

Though the Bastards are the title characters of Tarantino’s picture and the centerpiece of the film’s advertising, they really aren’t the main characters. In fact, many of the Bastards disappear without much word about their fates. The lion’s share of the attention belongs to Shoshanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent), a Jewish fugitive who survived the massacre of her family, and Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), nicknamed the Jew Hunter. Having a nickname like that, it’s easy to guess who the villain of the piece is. Shoshanna is the heart of the film and there’s real heartbreak and tragedy throughout her arc. Inglourious Basterds opens with the chilling account of Col. Landa discovering her family’s hiding place underneath the floorboards of a French dairy farm.

Has there ever been a movie villain like Hans Landa? Someone so deliciously evil? The late-Heath Ledger blew audiences away with his Joker and the little known Christoph Waltz appears to be doing the same with his Landa. This is a multi-faceted character that goes beyond simple mustache twirling. His Landa greets you with a smile and friendly chit-chat and somehow it’s both humorous and unnerving. He possesses a disarming charm that actually makes you like him one minute, but then he does something monstrous and you remember he’s a fucking Nazi. Landa is also smart, quite possibly the smartest guy in the movie. His intellect and deductive abilities remind one of Sherlock Holmes and Tarantino plays those allusions up when Landa pulls out a comically large pipe.

As the Bastards cut through the Nazi ranks, Shoshanna has made her way to Paris where she now owns and operates a movie theater. The venue was left to her by an “aunt” who was to be played by Maggie Cheung before her scenes were excised from the final cut. Laurent actually learned how to operate a projector for her role and even screened a print of Reservoir Dogs along with trailers and cartoons. Much to Shoshanna’s chagrin, she is pursued romantically by an overzealous German soldier named Frederick Zoller (Daniel Bruhl) who has become the subject of his own picture after killing hundreds of American soldiers single-handedly. The Nazi high command (including Hitler) will screen the film at Shoshanna’s theater. It is here that both she and the Bastards make their plans to assassinate Hitler and all his cronies.

While Inglourious Basterds is nominally a war movie, Tarantino once again throws in a heavy dash of the Spaghetti Western into the mix. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that he fills Basterds’ score with compositions by Ennio Morricone and other pieces culled from Westerns such as The Alamo and The Big Gundown. The film’s opening chapter feels just like a prologue out of a Sergio Leone movie and is packed with Western iconography from its title (“Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France”) to a John Ford-style shot through the doorway. During a jailbreak sequence, the Bastards emerge from their hiding spots in a scene reminiscent of the way Henry Fonda and his men were revealed in Once Upon a Time in the West. He finds inspiration of a different sort in a projecting booth shoot-out that ends in a fashion that draws obvious allusions to John Woo’s The Killer.

No matter who Tarantino casts, sometimes the real star of his films is the dialogue. Often, Tarantino’s penchant for pop culture references and long conversations derail the actual plot and come off as self-indulgent. Take a look at the never ending breakfast conversation in Death Proof for a perfect example of that. You’re just waiting for them to shut up so we can get to the car chase. Here, Tarantino leaves you wanting more. He writes his characters like real, three-dimensional characters rather than characters that sound like they’re written by Tarantino, if that makes any sense. Yes, a few times the dialogue could have been easily trimmed, but the majority of the time, he’s able to weave the words in a way that builds the kind of tension I haven’t felt at the movies in a long time. He finds incredibly clever ways to juggle the various languages (French, German, English) that once again works to enhance the overall story. The titular Bastards are the only ones who feel one-dimensional, but that’s not a knock at all. They are cartoon characters (especially Brad Pitt), but damned if they aren’t entertaining.

Writing and directing a period piece certainly helped in reining in Tarantino though he still manages to make plenty of other references that fit the time period and the story. Shoshanna’s theater, for example, screens films from directors like G.W. Pabst and Henri-Georges Clouzot. He also manages to drop in the obligatory references to Leni Riefenstahl.

Despite all the scalping and machine gunning, the film’s highlight for me was a sequence involving Michael Fassbender (fresh off his amazing performance in Hunger) as Sgt. Archie Hicox, a stiff-upper lip British paratrooper and former film critic; Mike Myers under heavy make-up as his commanding officer, and veteran Rod Taylor in a quick cameo as Winston Churchill. There was just something so joyous to this film geek about hearing these men explain UFA in hoity toity aristocratic accents.

Tarantino does get a little too cute with a pair of anachronistic moments. He uses a 70’s style title to introduce Stiglitz that was actually rather amusing. Tarantino also chooses David Bowie’s “Cat People (Putting Out the Fire)” for a sequence with Shoshanna getting all dolled up (applying her own brand of war paint) for the film premiere. The song is the theme from Paul Schrader’s remake of Cat People, a film only Tarantino could like.

Even at a length of two and a half hours, Inglourious Basterds feels like an appetizer for a much bigger film. I don't think QT has ever been able to manipulate the wide range of emotions that he does with Basterds. He brings the action and the funny while never letting us forget the tragic ugliness of war. He's made a fantastic hybrid of the war & Western genres that alternately acts as a love letter to movies, one where two of its heroes are a film critic and a film projectionist. Imagine Cinema Paradiso with machine guns and explosions. Tarantino has already mentioned the possibility of a prequel to flesh out the backgrounds of the Bastards. Whether or not this project will ever see the light of day or fall to the wayside (i.e. The Vega Brothers, Kill Bill anime prequel) remains to be seen. This is easily one of Tarantino’s best films and one of the best releases of 2009.

Also in the picture are the gorgeous Diane Kruger as actress/spy Bridget Von Hammersmark and in voice-over cameos by Samuel L. Jackson (as the narrator) and Harvey Keitel (as Lt. Raine’s commanding officer).

Rating: ****