Sure Tom Cruise is reportedly naming his child "Hubbard" if you believe the tabloids, but the man makes pretty decent films. Check out the Japanese trailer for Mission Impossible III:
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I think you mean Ethan Hunt. Ethan Hawke is a real person.
Oops, damnit!
I strongly dislike both Mission Impossible films.
They both have exactly the same problem, and unfortunately it's very difficult to succictly express what that problem is (even though it's very vivid in my mind). I've been trying for years to come up with an effectively eloquent dis because I keep running into people who say, "Oh, I LIKED them!" in that particular "cavalier" tone with which similar peope defend something by saying, "Oh...it's FUN," meaning, "Why are you making the dreadful mistake of taking this stuff so seriously?"
Both MI flicks were written by Robert Towne, a very bitter former genius who, back in the day, wrote movies like "Chinatown" and ghost-wrote two of the crucial scenes from "The Godfather." Now he's just another bitter, white-beared/sunglass wearing L.A. hack, and he's brought in when some Tom Cruise type needs a "popcorn movie" script and doesn't want to get his hands dirty with any young, smart writers when he rather buy the "Rolex"/"Porsche" of scripts. (Towne wrote "Days of Thunder," which Cruise produced. Enough said.)
So you get "Mission Impossible," which is a decent TV show and could have been a great movie in the hands of people who actually cared about the show or about TV or about action movies or fun or anything like that, rather than the people who made it, who obviously think it's "beneath" them; not deserving of much blood, sweat or tears...because, after all, it's "just...fun." You can picture them in some restaurant in the hamptons sketching out the movie. "We'll put some of that mask nonsense in...for the kids...blow some stuff up...that's what this sort of movie apparently does..."
The whole thing is condescending, snide, and elitist. Let them eat cake (or, explosions). No good movie was ever made by people employing such contempt for their audience. Non-artists don't realize that when Paul McCartney sits down to write a song, he never says, "time to knock out another pop song...let's see, which chords do the kids like? I don't care, etc." He says, "Wow! I'm pissed off and in love. Let's get that into a killer tune." Likewise Fincher and Tarantino and even Michael Bay (not to mention Cameron, Spielberg, Hitchcock) are magical because they believe in what they're doing, not because they've cynically mastered some formula. (That's what their IMITATORS try to do, and what all those non-artists clogging up Hollywood are trying to do with their damn screenplays on their laptops in Starbucks).
Sorry for the length of the rant but I think the MI franchise is a perfect example of this phenomenon. Cruise did his usual good job both times, but the two stories are just so...so STUPID. Because the filmmakers are not inspired; they're like Anthony Michael Hall in The Breakfast Club, astonished that they're failing to make a lamp in shop class, since they're obviously so smart and "the people who take shop" are so clearly beneath them. And, as John Bender said so eloquently and so memorably, sure, without triginometry there'd be no engineering, but without lamps there'd be no light.
"Ethan Hawke is a real person"
Sort of!
What really bothers me about both films (especially part II) is the use of the “masks”. This is such a cinematic cheat because (a) this technology doesn’t exist and because (b) it’s way overused. I had this problem in the last James Bond flick when his car could turn invisible. I mean, yeah these things WOULD be cool if they COULD exist, but it’s unlikely that they ever will and it’s a convenient way to get our protagonists out of certain scrapes. It would be like me making a film about my junior high years with the added ability to turn invisible whenever the bullies showed up (or whenever I was near the girls locker room).
Exactly!
And I can just hear a bunch of people on a Hamptons beach deck hearing your complaint and retorting, "Oh, it's FUN" in the dismissive way I was talking about above.
I'm picturing Thurston Howell III saying, "Oh it's fun! Now pour me another martini."
LOL
Ah, see, I really liked the first Mission Impossible movie and hated the second. In the first one, the contempt Jordan speaks of mostly manifests in the turning of Jim Phelps, which is a lame-ass sucker punch for those who loved the show. I've seen the show maybe twice in my life, so I didn't care. The movie I saw was a good combo of action/thriller. It's also the movie in which I noticed that Kirsten Scott Thomas is a babe and a half.
The second one is the best example of how John Woo lost his marbles when he came to the West. What a clusterfuck. They use the "peeling off the mask" gag no less than FIVE times. And the ending fight between Cruise and Dougray Scott is over the top like the fight in They Live, except this one edges into homoeroticism somehow.
The GOOD thing about MI2 is that it kept Dougray Scott from playing Wolverine in the first X-flick.
Hey, nobody told me Kerri Russell is in this movie, that's cool. I want to see Felicity all bloody and sooty and tough.
"I want to see Felicity all bloody and sooty and tough." and with long hair.
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