May | 2025 | Talking Movies

May 31, 2025

Miscellaneous Movie Musings: Part LVIII

Filed under: Talking Books,Talking Movies — Fergal Casey @ 1:11 pm
Tags: CGI, Christopher Nolan, Disney, Homer, JJ Abrams, Marvel, Mission: Impossible, Star Wars, Talking Movies, The Fantastic 4: First Steps, The Odyssey, Tom Cruise

As the title suggests, so forth.

Homework reading

I’ve had in my possession a copy of Chapman’s Homer for nearly a decade now, but have yet to look into it. But now my Keatsian epiphany is almost upon me, because I have to read it before Christopher Nolan’s new film comes out next year. The same thing happened in 2012 when I found myself crashing thru Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities before The Dark Knight Rises after Jonathan Nolan mentioned in interviews that he had drawn inspiration from it for the Fall of Gotham. I also read Gone Girl rapidly before David Fincher’s adaptation came out, after having read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo when it was the book du jour before he was even attached to bring it to cinematic life. I feel like I should do something of the same for Paul Thomas Anderson’s somehow blockbuster One Battle After Another and blast thru Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland very fast in late summer. In some respects this way of reading makes me think of the old days of HMV, when they had, beside mugs and t-shirts, what one might dub rock and roll books – Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Trainspotting, A Clockwork Orange. It is a pretty daft way to decide what to read next. But frankly how I decide what to read next is usually barely a conscious decision and frequently quite daft, so why not? At least this way I can see what great directors do to their source material. And it usually is quite interesting to appreciate what they’ve cut and what they’ve elaborated – like reading Empire of the Sun and noting that Tom Stoppard heightens the trauma of JG Ballard’s first half by making everything that more personal.

The CGI Feint

It is very revealing that Disney’s publicity machine is hyping up the practical effects and sets used for The Fantastic 4: First Steps, as if setting it in the 1960s had led them to a revelation, and everything was now going to be executive supervised by Doug Trumbull beaming in from production on 2001: A Space Odyssey courtesy of Zoom and a handy wormhole. But we have been down this road before, and we know exactly where it leads. Remember JJ Abrams talking up the practical magick that was going to characterise his rip-off reimagining of Star Wars to get back to the true Spirit of ‘77. One cute BB-8 puppet does not outweigh multiple entirely CG’d characters and obvious great washes of CGI -just- everywhere. And l have no doubt The Fantastic 4: First Steps will be wall to CGI, with the occasional showy physical prop or effect for show. And this CGI will not be good: witness the worse than 2007 digital render of the Silver Surfress in the trailers. But why lie? Disney and Marvel want us to believe that this is them not shooting everything on greenscreen in Atlanta, with actors who are so addled from the Brechtian alienation of the process that they don’t remember what film they’re in, all adding up to people running around in drab grey CGI backgrounds in confused action scenes against vague welters of swirly destruction. If the audience is fed up with that, perhaps stop doing that. CGI has become a crutch for not knowing what you’re doing. If you build a model you have a clear idea for a sequence in which it will be used. Having a clear idea would also avoid effectively shooting your film three times, Captain America 2.0. Everyone wins.

Dead on the Money

To prepare for The Final Reckoning the other week I revisited Dead Reckoning, and must sheepishly admit to having a patented The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers reaction to it. Back in 2002 I was somewhat miffed by the changes that Peter Jackson had made to the book when I first saw The Two Towers. I then went to see it twice more in the cinema. The second time I saw it I was curious to see if I was wrong about it, now that I knew the changes; I was. The third time I saw it was to enjoy it unabashedly for what it was, which was masterful. Dead Reckoning is not masterful, but it is far better than I remembered, because I was so annoyed at Ilsa Faust being written out of the story. (Is that Ilsa at the end of the Inception-like coda in The Final Reckoning? Isn’t it pretty to think so) I hadn’t really appreciated that Hayley Atwell delivers a performance of calculated flirtatiousness. In nearly every scene of the first two acts she is smiling, half-smiling, or simply has her mouth open. Around her Pom Klementieff’s Paris is a very good henchwoman, especially her absolute Fassbendering in the Rome chase sequence. The gripes about The Entity versus Samaritan in Person of Interest remain, but each Mission: Impossible film is different from its predecessor, and I have a terrible habit of underrating their rewatchability. The Final Reckoning suffers from less colour in its palette and sophistication in its globetrotting compared to Dead Reckoning, which also has the effect of dialling down the comedy. And yet who knows if I won’t appreciate that very tone for its own sake in the future? The three 2010s Mission: Impossible movies are constantly on TV for a reason – they are supremely rewatchable. And each is very different. Rogue Nation ends, compared to Ghost Protocol, on a muted note – a foot chase thru London rather than the visceral fist-fight in a mobile multi-level car park to prevent a nuclear strike. But that more muted note is the perfect note, chiming with Solomon Lane’s introduction. And while there is less sophistication and comedy in Fallout, the action sequences are stellar, and the ending is a nail-biting exercise in gruelling suspense. The mission is to rewatch.

May 24, 2025

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning

Tom Cruise is back for more death-defying stunts as the IMF’s Ethan Hunt, a super-spy who; as other agency’s spies lament; always, always goes rogue.

Ethan is up against his ultimate foe, The Entity, a truth-eating artificial intelligence which has managed to create a doomsday cult of acolytes after the failure of its agent Gabriel (Esai Morales) to retrieve the cruciform key on the Orient Express in Dead Reckoning. Reunited with Luther (Ving Rhames), Benji (Simon Pegg), and Grace (Hayley Atwell), Ethan now has the means to exploit this key, courtesy of a poison pill of coding by Luther that will destroy The Entity. Everything hinges on discovering where to use the key, which means recruiting the ruthless Paris (Pom Klementieff) in order to track down her boss Gabriel. The machinations of Shea Whigham’s pursuing agent and Henry Czerny’s spymaster Kittridge complicate Ethan’s efforts to prevent nuclear armageddon. So he needs the President, old CIA antagonist Sloane (Angela Bassett) to trust him, one last time.

Even longer than its predecessor The Final Reckoning once again features a very extended cold open before the title sequence. And oddly, even though there are multiple flashbacks to the entire run of previous movies; which creates a distinctly elegiac feeling from early on; and an explicit callback to JJ Abrams’ Rabbit’s Foot maguffin, this movie feels like there is a dominant element of The Hunt for Red October and WarGames in its coding. We are in a Cold War world of submarines hunting each other. There is a curious lack of real action spectacle until the climactic bi-plane battle. And that comes off, bizarrely, as a remake of the duelling helicopters of Fallout as Ethan tries to retrieve something from an airborne villain. But it is superb – featuring perhaps the most obviously dangerous aerial stunt work since Capricorn One.

As a Person of Interest fan it’s hard not to mark writer/director Christopher McQuarrie down for failing to do ASI as well as Jonathan Nolan did, and this installment is even more bewildering because its finale location screams Nolan’s other ASI show – Westworld. McQuarrie and cinematographer Fraser Taggart used ostentatious camera moves in Dead Reckoning, but here it feels like they had a personal bet to outdo Bertolucci’s constantly moving camera in The Conformist. But again, often this is to titivate lengthy dialogue scenes, in which McQuarrie rewrites MAD game theory for an ASI scenario. But can one really channel Alistair MacLean, Tom Clancy, doff the cap to franchise history with the return of Rolf Saxon’s William Donloe, and introduce a slew of new characters (Holt McCallany, Hannah Waddingham, Nick Offerman, Janet McTeer)? Not without losing some vim, no.

The Final Reckoning is quite good, but its submarine longueurs leave you wishing McQuarrie would’ve tightened the screws on his editing, and gone out on spectacle not spygames.

3/5

May 5, 2025

Any Other Business: Part CIII

As the title suggests, so forth.

Yes, and/No, because

GK Chesterton in The Crimes of England spoke of the spirit that affirms and the spirit that denies, and averred that Prussia was very much the spirit that denies – made flesh. I’ve come to think that when it comes to people these truly are the animating spirits. And not, unlike improv, the spirit that affirms says “Yes, And” to any and all propositions presented. The natural predisposition is to action, to adventure, and to figuring out solutions to problems. On the other hand is “No, Because” which magicks up multiple problems without any interest in ever finding solutions, because the problems are never real. They are after the fact rationalisation of the natural predisposition to veto, to shut down any hint of fun or progress. Why? Because. And in our time it has morphed from “Because, Health & Safety” to “Because, GDPR”. There is never further explanation offered, which is convenient because there wouldn’t be any behind the bullsh-t facade of respectability. The dynamic is familiar from watching bullies at play, if one can call it that: Whenever you see a larger child take something away from a smaller child, not because they want to play with it themselves but expressly to deprive the smaller child of it. The pleasure is gained entirely in causing someone else pain by capriciously depriving them of something they want; Shakespeare might put it as robbing someone “of that which enriches you not but makes him poor indeed”. When these people grow up, if they enter positions of power they are very recognisable by their words and deeds as people whose only positive pleasure in life is inflicting suffering on others and denying pleasure to others. I think the agreeable/disagreeable split is a precursor towards this affirming/denying dynamic, possibly interventions in childhood can prevent disagreeable people entering adulthood as brazenly cruel jobsworths. Instead they become disagreeable wretches, who could find quarrel in a straw.

Living by a Mann Code

“And what cheese-eating yahoo of a Governor signed that idiot bill into law? … … … It was me, wasn’t it?” – The West Wing

“Hoist on his own petard”.That’s what happened to Jed Bartlett there. And it’s not a phrase that is much heard these days, despite its applicability. It is something that, say, the French rugby coach at the Six Nations refused to do: if it happens to his player it should result in after the fact official complaints and hell and damnation for the entire Ireland team, if his players do it -well, rugby is a contact sport after all, and if you can’t take the rough and tumble of it… Hypocrisy! And yet, it is easy. The rules shouldn’t apply to us because we meant well, or, more accurately the rules shouldn’t apply to us – because we’re us. It makes me think of something The Engineer came across some years ago. Across many different cultures a survey found that men most deeply admired men who lived by a code. This is the point of the Mann Code. Across many films Michael Mann has portrayed characters who are men of their word, men of honour, who believe, par Chesterton, that people avoid making vows not because they are silly but because they lack the faith in themselves to be true to them. De Niro’s master thief tells Pacino’s cop in Heat that the discipline of the job is not forming any attachments that you will not be willing to walk out in thirty seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner. Kilmer and De Niro’s characters then do exactly that later in the film. It is not easy, but that’s the point of living by a code – it requires self-abnegation. Pete Hegseth, alleged macho man who is going to bring back masculine values to the Pentagon, does not live by a Mann code.Though he would care for you to think he does. He lives by the weasel code, which is far more common. He lambasted Hillary Clinton’s emails, but he’s allowed send classified information to every group chat. After the Six Nations I thought of Trevor Sargent. He swore that he would not lead the Greens into Government with Fianna Fail, and then resigned his leadership when it became clear that the party willed it. That seems … anomalous. Imagine a politician keeping their word, at such considerable cost. And yet it is admirable. Certainly compared to the ABBA parties in Downing Street during COVID-19 lockdown. So why did people just sort of snigger and raise eyebrows at the time rather than celebrating it? Perhaps the answer is from another moment in The West Wing: “No one expects.” “No one expects! Toby, more and more it seems to be that we’ve come to expect less and less from each other” Living by a code is damn hard. That’s why Mann has built such a distinctive filmography from interrogating it. Just look at 2020, as a recent Jon Stewart podcast had me thinking, and the clash between COVID-19 and BLM. Gatherings were bad. You couldn’t pray together. You couldn’t eat together. You couldn’t even walk on a beach or a moor alone. But if you wanted to protest together, well, that’s different. At which point the idea “of listening to the science” became defunct. Because the virus sure as hell could not tell the difference between good gatherings and bad gatherings. If it was bad for evangelicals to gather and shout and sing because that would spread the virus, then it was also bad for activists to gather and shout and sing because that would spread the virus. But, to their eternal shame, 1288 medicos signed an open letter saying the opposite, because it was easier. It’s always hard to tell your friends they are in the wrong: Imagine being the NIH person instructed to tell his political cohort that they aren’t allowed to do what they want, and being shunned socially for it. You can see the same dynamic at work with Bishop Barron of Minnesota who rightly castigated the Paris Olympics for their sacrilege last summer, which they didn’t have the decency of admitting was a deliberate impiety. But he is lamentably silent now as President Trump posts an AI image of himself as Pope, which is also sacrilege; and galling during the official mourning for Pope Francis. Trump also doesn’t have the decency of admitting it was a deliberate impiety. But it’s hard to tell your friends they are in the wrong. Perhaps this is another reason that Mann’s characters are so often lone men – living with someone who lives by a code is challenging, it’s as exasperating as trying to be friends with an actual saint.

Holy Generational Age Gap, Druid!

I still, from time to time, think of moments from DruidShakespeare’s Richard III back in 2018. Indeed it semi-poisoned my very belated viewing of Laurence Olivier’s 1955 film of Richard III because I had been trained to expect the black comedy of the White Boar’s race for the throne to be brought out, and it was not. So, I should be very excited that Druid are now tackling Macbeth for the Dublin Theatre Festival in September. And with Marty Rea as the bloodsoaked Thane, no less! And Marie Mullen as Lady Macbeth. … Wait, what? And there’s the rub. Marie Mullen is 72 years old. I don’t know what exactly Garry Hynes is thinking here, but it means that this dynamic will not be that of an imperious Ciara Gough in a 2007 Astra Hall production of Macbeth; sexually toying with her returning husband till he agrees to her ambitious desires. For context the historical Eleanor of Aquitaine was 12 years older than Henry II, and it was much discussed at the time, and ever since, as an unusual age gap in a marriage intended, as many medieval monarchical matches were, to unite dynasties thru the getting of children. What exactly is this casting aiming for? The (cough) Freudian interpretation of Hamlet has been more or less erased from the repertoire because it never did very much except show how 20th Century the director was. But Freudians never really went for Macbeth. Why start now?!