One thing which this blog delights in doing is jumping straight from the sublime to the ridiculous. So, with Godot safety in the bag, get a load of this!I had this idea for an occasional series of posts. My thinking went something along these lines:
It’s all too easy to write about things we hate – and I hate doing that (… thinks, is there a future post in that?).
It’s also quite easy to blog about things which practically everybody likes, “This 'breathing' lark is quite good isn’t it?” or "Underwear Rawks Dude"...
So I thought it would be fun to come up with some stuff that I like but which most other people probably won’t.
So here goes with a little movie for starters…
As a little Irish geezer, I used to love ‘Mission Impossible’ on the telly. All that ‘Dun-dun-dun-dun’ theme music, improbably-easy rubber masks and… hell, just the quiet efficiency with which the team always got through their objectives.
Yup, ‘Quiet efficiency’ was one of my big things, back when I was five years old.
So when I heard the movie was coming out, I was quite excited… and then I was disappointed.
Brian De Palma didn’t quite carry it off, for me and then came John Woo with the second installment and that just didn’t do it either. All that graceful slow-mo gun-fighting and iconic doves sailing around everywhere.
Doves!! 'Bleedin’ rats-with-wings, if you ask me.
So I didn’t hold out any hope for ‘M:I III’. None at all. Then, to make matters worse, Tom Cruise started acting the maggot all over Oprah’s couch and the critics got to dissing it badly and the audiences went ‘meh’. So I did what I usually do anyway – I waited for the DVD...
...
Oh My God!! What a great action movie this is!
If you haven’t seen it, go get it, it’s simply a blast from start to finish. Easily the best of the three, director JJ Abrams (yes, he of ‘Lost’) directs a fast-moving, involving and even occasionally touching bit of cinematic fluff.
Philip Seymour Hoffman is just the very best ‘Bad Guy’ I’ve seen in ages. He simply oozes menace and he is written to be bad-to-the-bone, which is what we need to see in these things.
There’s a great mission set-piece in and around the Vatican (no, no nazis in sight, Caledonian Jim), there’s some very impressive non-CGI stunt work and, there’s even a bit-of-a-story to follow.
And there is, I believe, a truly great piece of screenwriting right slap bang in the middle of the show. I won’t give it away but, as Ethan enters a high tech skyscraper to complete the next part of his mission, the screenwriter give us a little master class in how to get out of a scene early.
Quite brilliant, watch for it.
So there it is, something I like that you might well not.
I mean, it ain’t ‘Citizen Kane’ or ‘Bicycle Thieves’ but, if you fancy a lively entertaining DVD-night-in, you could do a lot worse.
Now, what’s next?
