10.16.18 rec

Mission: Impossible as Screwball Comedy

Mission: Impossible as Screwball Comedy

The name, “popcorn flick,” and even to a degree, “Mission: Impossible” itself encourages a passive viewing experience, a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get contract: the viewer agrees to only look for certain elements and ignore everything else, and the movie agrees to check those boxes. It is a blockbuster compromise—the film accepts a level of derision from the audience, and the audience accepts to like the movie a certain amount for indulging them. This phenomenon is best encapsulated in the phrase, “It was stupid, but it was fun.” We’re going to talk about everything else — specifically, how Mission Impossible is at its heart, a comedy.

That New Terminator and the End of Originality

That New Terminator and the End of Originality

So, in case you haven’t heard, James Cameron, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Linda Hamilton are working together again on a new Terminator film. They’re saying all the right things: they’re returning to the roots of the original two films; they’re resetting the franchise, essentially; they’re pretending the films Terminator 3 onward do not exist.  And I was on board. Until they said, “…and we want to make it three movies.”

…and then I was very much off board.

Fast and Furious, No Longer the Right Kind of Mess

Fast and Furious, No Longer the Right Kind of Mess

Charlize Theron and Helen Mirren star in Fast and Furious 8—two actresses, who, between them, hold 4 Oscar nominations and 2 wins. It is a degree of prestige the Fast films have not seen before, so why does it feel like the beginnings of a last wheeze? In this latest entry in the protracted franchise, Theron plays Cipher, a villainous hacker figure who forces Dominic Toretto (the chronically stoic Vin Diesel) into her service against his own merry band of street-racers-turned-criminals-turned-international-mercenaries. Mirren plays the mother of Deckard Shaw—or, as he will more likely be remembered, Jason Statham—the man who killed Han, one of Diesel’s accomplices, in Furious 7, Furious 6, and, retroactively, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. The series sounds like a mess because it is one; until now, though, it has felt rare and lively, something that cannot be said the eighth time around...

John Wick 2: Humanity, Off-Camera on a Smoking Break

John Wick 2: Humanity, Off-Camera on a Smoking Break

The climactic gunfight of John Wick: Chapter Two takes place in a labyrinth of mirrors, an art exhibition in New York. Having been dragged (away from playing fetch with his dog and seeing perfunctory flashbacks of his dead wife) back into a comical underworld of assassins—again—Wick, in a turn of events that will surprise no one, now hunts down the man who brought him back. We see Keanu Reeves as Wick enter, our view of him steady and focused as mirrored doors close behind him, bathed in cold blue light. Opposing mirrors make Wick appear to stretch into infinite (and infinitely diminishing) copies in the background, receding into itself and into insularity. Reeves’ reflections are an infinite number of points in a nerve-rackingly enclosed space. Is this a comment by Chad Stahelski and Derek Kolstad, the director and writer of John Wick: Chapter Two, respectively, on the necessarily diminishing returns of a sequel to such a complete first film? ...