The Hip Opinion

Hollywood is woefully indifferent to the scripts it puts together for its action flicks (those scoundrels!), and so the one created for Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011) doesn’t exactly tell a high-quality story.  But it’s such a wonderfully rich B-feature I was delighted to have laid eyes on it. 

Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his International Monetary Fund team–scratch that!  that’s not what IMF stands for here–go after a mad scientist with a remake-the-world scheme.  There are plenty of tight, technically savvy action scenes (Ethan’s vertical car ride to the bottom of a confined area, his effort to climb a stunning skyscraper, Jane Carter’s heated battle with a female assassin).  Also, the film sort of channels pictures of the past:  2001: A Space Odyssey gadgets and “zero gravity” floating emerge.*  And in Mumbai, where the story finally ends up, Tom Cruise becomes an everyman James Bond and Paula Patton, who plays Agent Jane Carter, becomes an exemplary Bond movie beauty-cum-heroine.

Irresistible stuff.

Directed by Brad Bird.

*It’s not really zero gravity, which I why I used the term in quotation marks.

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The Undefeated, Stephen K. Bannon’s  2011 documentary about Sarah Palin, begins with footage of familiar people speaking about Palin in words ranging from insulting to disgusting.

Sarah Palin is not Hitler; she is not a monster.  The loutish haters treat her as though she were.  Bannon’s film is wholly in favor of her, using for voiceover parts of the Going Rogue audiobook and featuring people who used to work with Palin as they talk about her accomplishments.  It’s also a film about Alaska and the oil industry, which became the esteemed governor’s opponent.  (It’s not so much about the John McCain presidential campaign.)

The Undefeated is propaganda, though.  It should have been more intelligently searching.  Bannon still could have shown he was on Palin’s side had he focused on any sensible questions that have been raised about her decisions, her governance, etc.  For example, was her governance in Alaska always conservative—probably not–and if not, why?  Such a thing hardly would have hurt her standing as a right-winger.  Palin’s respect for conservative values has long been evident.

Bannon’s film is technically well-made, but a more incisive pro-Sarah doc would have been a stronger doc.

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I never saw the original Footloose movie from 1984, but the story told in Footloose the Remake (2011) is pure rubbish.  It rattles along indecorously and, in spite of everything, it’s dated.  Yet filmmaker Craig Brewer concentrates on it as carefully as he does the dancing.  Big mistake.

Even so, at least the dancing doesn’t get shortchanged.  The music does.  Both “Let’s Hear It for the Boy” and a forceful White Stripes song get lost in the narrative balderdash.  Footloose should have been more of a musical and less of a drama.

The movie stars Kenny Wormald (Ren) and Julianne Hough (Ariel).  Ren is a teenaged know-it-all, Ariel knows nothing except how to have fun.  I wish to have no truck with either of them.

In The House of Mirth (2001), a Terrence Davies film, Gillian Anderson offers no real surprises as Lily Bart.  But she does offer skill, having an almost childlike quality and the capacity to move us.  Eric Stoltz, as Laurence Seldon, does nothing either particularly right or particularly wrong, but Laura Linney, as Bertha Dorset, is true and wonderfully self-confident.  She and Anderson are the best actors here.  Add to this the spot-on costumes and production design and you have . . . well, not quite the Edith Wharton novel from which this commendable movie was adapted.  It makes me ambivalent in a way the great novel never could.

This is the one about the woman who, without being shallow, wants to marry a man with money, but does not do so.  Instead she suffers and ultimately dies, doing so as a tragic heroine more than as a victim–something Terrence Davies fails to understand.  Thus he has Lily Bart not so much living as simply going downhill.  Moreover, the Lily of the novel rightly appreciates the finer things in life, certainly including material things, but the film never points this up.  It knows Miss Bart isn’t shallow but that’s about it.  She might as well be a thoroughgoing stock heroine.

Yes, Anderson tries to rescue Lily but she can’t–can’t rescue her from what Davies has done.  Though the film has its virtues, it does not understand the novel’s virtues.

Cover of The House of Mirth