Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol **

Director: Brad Bird
Cast: Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Paula Patton, Simon Pegg
Michael Nyqvist, Vladimir Mashkov, Samuli Edelmann, Léa Seydoux
Anil Kapoor, Josh Holloway, Tom Wilkinson

To say plot is unimportant in Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol would be like saying that Tom Cruise isn't trying too hard to prove he still matters. The film pretty much is an altar to why the 49-year old is as relevant as 20somethings who spend entire movies running to-and-from explosions showing their toned pecs and virile grins.
Cruise is back to play Ethan Hunt, in the fourth movie in the Mission: Impossible series -which have always suffered from a lack of homogeneity in terms of artistic vision - this time around he faces a crazy Russian scientist Hendricks (Nyqvist) who has decided to single-handedly start a nuclear holocaust.
Hunt and his team, conformed by tech genius Benji Dunn (Pegg who's here just for comedic relief), kick-ass agent Jane Carter (Patton) and the mysterious William Brandt (Renner), trek all over the world trying to stop Hendricks.
From skyscraper climbing in Dubai, to seducing loony lotharios in India, the film's major concern seems to be just how crazier and over the top can the situations get. At first, watching Cruise jump from Russian hospitals and survive explosions is a bit fun, but in a movie where even the title credits are too much, you have to wonder if they will ever stop and smell the flowers.
The action gets to be so much that the film can't help but end feeling like a live action version of Spy vs. Spy (wait, that already exists, right?) or a parody of an action movie.
When the team figure out they have to hack a server room in Dubai, Brandt reminds them that it's located in "the tallest building in the world", and you can't help but think "of course", before rolling your eyes and sipping on your diet soda.
For all its insanity which is unarguably well choreographed by the brilliant Brad Bird, the film can't help but feel utterly joyless at times. It's easy, and perhaps right, to blame Cruise for this feeling, given that this is his show and he must've been in control of everything that went on in it.
The supporting cast is quite good but more often than not you feel that they are just in it because they want to fit in with the popular kid. Patton for example, shows she has superb action heroine skills, but the story reduces her to being a "woman", meaning an agent with a brilliant future who can't help but fail because she gets her period. Renner similarly gets stuck with a shady character just so he won't be able to steal the movie from Cruise. Even if he's poorly written, the wonderful actor still plays Brandt with a wink.
It's slightly pleasant to see Cruise in top form, trying to atone for his lunacy period by doing what he always did best: entertain. Too bad he is so eager that he decided to employ every single trick in his hat. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol could've been an action landmark, instead it satisfies itself with being distracting.

Sheet-y Saturday.

Where we take a look at posters for upcoming features.

While not a big fan of the Alien series myself (feel free to burn me at the stake...) I find myself all sorts of excited about the upcoming Prometheus. The first teaser, of course, says absolutely nothing more than "I am a dark moody sci-fi flick that might haunt your nightmares for years to come", but they got themselves one killer tagline!

Are all teasers for 2012 going to be shadows against blueish spotlights? (See above!) Unlike Prometheus though, Rock of Ages is all about flaunting that cast. Is it me or are all of you excited to see CZJ in another musical? A Tony and an Oscar prove these might be the only thing she should be working in...

Knight and Day *

Director: James Mangold
Cast: Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz
Peter Sarsgaard, Jordi Mollà, Viola Davis, Paul Dano
Marc Blucas, Celia Weston, Dale Dye

When thinking of Knight and Day, the word "throwback" might come to mind but it's definitely not the word that best helps describe it.
It reminds us of a throwback because we understand the film wanted to be something in the tradition of The African Queen or Charade; a show for grownups featuring two big movie stars who romance each other while running away from peril.
In execution though the movie feels more like a bad TV pilot, done just to pair Diaz and Cruise (who had been wickedly good together in Vanilla Sky, her more than him, but still there was something there).
This time around the tables are turned and it's Cruise who's in control as he plays Roy Miller, a seductive rogue spy who teams up with unsuspecting ditzy civilian June Havens (Diaz) as he tries to clean his good name from the people who framed him...or so we think.
After meeting "by accident" in an airport, Roy takes a liking to June (some might call it plain old stalking) and spends most of the movie trying to convince her he's a good guy trying to do his best to protect an important weapon designer (Dano in full geeky glory).
She's approached by an FBI agent (Sarsgaard) and his boss (Davis) who tell her, Roy is in fact an agent who lost his mind...
But who to believe?
The film in a way acts like an analogy for Tom Cruise's latter days career. On one side we have Cruise trying to remind us how he's the irresistibly charming movie star we always thought he was, this part is essentially conveyed by Miller, who needs to do not more than flash his million dollar smile and scoff (in that very Tom Cruise way) to get away with anything.
On the other side we have what seems to be the voice of reason in the shape of the FBI who informs us that despite our best knowledge this man is in fact insane. This could very well represent, well, our opinion of what Cruise has been doing for the past seven years; meaning action after action to convince us something's not quite working up there.
So on a very basic level the film is an endurance test of how much Cruise you can take. If you think he's an obnoxious midget you'd be better off watching something else because besides the whole lotta Tom we get, the plot also asks us to push the boundaries of coherence in order to accept what's going onscreen as something remotely real.
There is a recurring gag throughout the film where Roy drugs June, mostly to move locations without her having a panic attack, which are represented visually by a series of mostly blurry snippets that give us an idea of what the hell is going on.
We see Roy hanging upside down, Roy on a plane, Roy on a boat etc...the difference between this and say something like North by Northwest (another example of polar opposites in a cross continent adventure) is that we don't care where June will wake up next, or if she'll even wake up at all.
Deep inside we know everything will turn out well for these two and the movie fails to raise even a second of real excitement, thrills or even fun.
The one thing that remains a mystery throughout the film is what got Sarsgaard and Davis to star in this?

Valkyrie **

Director: Bryan Singer

Cast: Tom Cruise

Kenneth Branagh, Tom Wilkinson, Carice van Houten

Thomas Kretschmann, Bill Nighy, Terence Stamp, Eddie Izzard

It takes but a slight knowledge of history to know how "Valkyrie" will end. The film chronicles the attempt to kill Adolf Hitler led by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (Cruise) on July 20th 1944.

Teaming with high rank members of the German Army Stauffenberg planned a coup that would use the Fuhrer's very own "Operation Valkyrie" to take over Germany and make a truce with the Allies putting an end to World War II.

When the key members of the army are played by character actors like Branagh, Stamp and Nighy the idea of the kind of prestige drama this could amount to would get any film lover salivating.

But when this remarkable team is led by Tom Cruise, it works in a completely different way. Not even attempting to have a German accent, Cruise doesn't make a clown out of von Staffenberg, because we never even get to see past the actor playing him.

Whenever Cruise tries to be serious and muster some sort of gravitas, all we really see is Tom Cruise wearing an eyepatch and trying to kill Hitler.

Rarely has the public perception of an actor affected so much the outcome of an entire movie, but it seems that deep down Cruise has come to terms with the fact that he's a movie star and if you stop taking the film as a serious historical piece and choose to view it as an action thriller the results can be obscenely entertaining.

Singer, who directs like a stock filmmaker under the studio system, just goes with the flow and lets his star shine.

The director's meticulousness is outstanding in the small flashes he let's us see, like the care he has taken in showing us bureaucratic and logistic methods of the era.

Since there is absolutely no regard for character growth and background, scenes with extras and unknown actors in small roles showing the chilling efficiency of the Nazi regime make for a treat.

Singer choreographs the action sequences with just as much care, giving the plot an actual tension even if you know how everything will end.

"Valkyrie" often plays out like an appointed B movie made for propagandistic reasons, after all movie stars were used to draft people during WWII and watching Tom Cruise battling the Nazis, although preposterous and somewhat disrespectful, still is able to engage the audience on a primal level.

When it comes to entertainment "Valkyrie" is an effective, if inconsequential, accomplished mission, as cinema it stays merely as a drill.

Tropic Thunder **

Director: Ben Stiller
Cast: Ben Stiller,
Jack Black, Robert Downey Jr.
Nick Nolte, Steve Coogan
Jay Baruchel, Tom Cruise
Brandon T. Jackson
Matthew McCounaghey

There's only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous, or so goes the adage which perfectly helps describe this film.
What begins as a satire of the most cynical, rarely seen, kind, slowly descends into a film you no longer laugh with, but at (or sometimes just cringe), as it proves that Hollywood has mastered the art of blockbusters, creating stars and draining a clever idea until its just left stale.
The plot centers around the shooting of a Vietnam war film called "Tropic Thunder" that has brought together three of the brightest male stars available.
Action superstar Tugg Speedman (Stiller), scatological comedian Jeff Portnoy (Black) and five time Academy Award winning, method actor, the Australian Kirk Lazarus (Downey Jr.) who is playing an African American by going blackface.
Their very different screen personas are established in the absolutely brilliant prologue (to which the rest of the movie sadly never lives up) in which things as seemingly inocuous as trailers deliver some hilarious, cleverly conceived critiques on the roles of actors, audience perception and studios in the ultimate concept of cinema.
Later we see director Damien Cockburn (Coogan) as he struggles to capture the action while the actors' egos are the only ones in full battle.
When he is threatened by a studio executive (Cruise in "look at me being funny and showy in a fatsuit" mode) he decides to follow the advice of the mysterious John Tayback (Nolte), who wrote the book the film is based upon, who suggests that the only way his cast will get the work done is if they go to real war.
They take the cast to the middle of a jungle infested with members of a drug gang who assume the actors are DEA agents, while the actors think of them as really good stuntmen.
When things start getting out of control Speedman decides this will be the role of his career and goes forward with the guerrilla shoot, while Lazarus tries to convince the others that they are no longer in a movie.
Stiller (who wrote the script with Etan Cohen and the amazing Justin Theroux) makes an intriguing first impression with his "war as a game" take on how the media has made us perceive violence.
When one of the actors spills his fake guts after being shot, the scene makes for an uncomfortable moment where some audience members will laugh out loud at the silliness of it all, while others will wonder when did it become normal to laugh at guts being spilled.
Perhaps Stiller was trying to point out how people react to different genre stimuli and go "this is a Ben Stiller film, so this is supposed to be funny", leading us to examine carefully the way in which we process information regarding the channel and medium.
But the problem is that most of the film suffers because of this, you wonder if it's trying to be bitter, morbid, smart or just going with the flow.
It offers some funny observations on various industry types (and the film is probably enjoyed more by those who know about the trade) but it never lets us forget the fact that these very people greenlit this and allowed it to be made.
The Academy Awards are a major source of gags in the film and while the writers honestly think they are one step ahead of the organization by revealing how it chooses to award people, truth is you can almost touch the fact that in this blasé take, they are also demanding the Academy takes notice of them and it is so with almost every other thing in it.
Except Downey Jr. who aptly owns the film with a performance that is always a step ahead of the others. Playing "a dude playing another dude who's playing a dude" he brings a certain dignity to something that could've resulted highly offensive and obscene.
Lazarus' love for the craft (he never leaves character even as the others endure personal hell) highlights what is both great and wrong about film, giving Downey the distinction of being the rare kind of figure who can be box office draw while preserving artistry.
That we never think of his "blackface" as his character or as Downey Jr. as Lazarus is a testimony to an actor at his very best.
"Tropic Thunder" is sometimes too clever for its own good, like the popular kid at school who hides his geekiness to preserve his coolness, it knows it can do better, but chooses to settle. It encompasses itself perfectly with Kevin Sandusky (a scene stealing Baruchel), a young actor who ends up becoming the leader in the background because he knows how to balance different parts of his personality. During a key scene he confesses to Lazarus that he became an actor because of him, while acknowledging to Speedman that he also watched his action movies repeated times. Sandusky, like the film, is both its attack and its salvation, its most fervent admirer and fiercest enemy and as war itself the results are rarely a laughing matter.