Mission: Impossible (1996)

A heist-favouring spy team working for an organization called the IMF (which stands for “Impossible Mission Force”, so not to be confused with the IWF, I assume) under the leadership of Jim Phelps (Jon Voight), is wiped out during an operation in Prague meant to retrieve some kind of ridiculous master list the IMF has of all of their undercover spies. The situation turns out to be at least a double cross. This doesn’t just kill off some of the best actors in the cast, but leaves only one agent alive: a tiny, shouty, perpetually grinning man named Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise). Or so it seems at first.

This does of course leave Hunt under heavy suspicion from his superiors, and instead of rotting away in a secret prison, our protagonist decides to go on the run and find out who killed his friends while also retrieving the list. He gets help from a surprise survivor of his wiped out team, Claire (Emmanuelle Béart), Phelps’s improbable wife, and a couple of burned, I mean “disavowed”, former IMF agents, Krieger (Jean Reno) and Luther (Ving Rhames). There will be heisting and an astonishing number of double crosses.

Mission: Impossible (which I pretend to take place in universe next to the original series, for reasons obvious to anyone who liked the show and has seen the movie) falls into a weird space in the career of Tom Cruise. While wielding quite a bit of star power, he didn’t have quite as much clout as to be able to bully his directors into an infinite number of close-ups of him looking heroic/constipated, even in a film he produced; though he already was able to play down the importance of every other character in his movies, resulting in a film with Reno, Béart, Rhames, Voight, and Kristin Scott Thomas that finds no space to give any of them an actual substantial scene. Only Vanessa Redgrave seems impervious to this, joyfully chewing the scenery whenever she’s on screen and flirting at Cruise in the exact same predatory manner his heroes would increasingly take on in the coming decades.

Cruise is attempting to make up for the too sharp focus on himself by trying very hard indeed, more often than not falling into a trap that comes up regularly with him during the early decades of his career when he was trying to be a proper actor as well as a movie star – he looks like a guy trying much more than one doing, grimacing and shouting when he doesn’t seem to know how to express human feelings in a more natural manner.

Ironically, the blockbuster bigness of projects like this first Mission: Impossible can’t have helped him either, for this is not a film that lends itself to attempts at being subtle and human; being appropriately big is a skill Cruise really got better in during the years following this. And really, think what you want about the guy, one can’t fault him for being a slacker.

So that leaves Mission: Impossible to be carried by its twisty passages of a curiously predictable script full of set pieces and the great Brian De Palma’s direction alone. Fortunately, De Palma in his thriller director for hire phase is brilliant in his overblown pomposity, clearly loving the technical tricks his budget affords him, finding ways to keep Cruise off-screen at least sometimes by using POV camera, and otherwise applying everything he learned from studying Hitchcock, while also adding his own ability to melodramatically heighten every action by stylish flourishes that would make them ridiculous instead of suspenseful in lesser hands.

Now, many of the set-ups for the film’s central set pieces and the heist scene everybody still seems to remember decades later are patently ridiculous when you think them through, but De Palma’s impeccable staging and timing of thrills cheap and costly makes them utterly convincing while you’re in the moment, which is all that matters in the kind of film that only ever is about its moments of excitement and the thrills that come with that. This is not at all meant as a criticism of big, loud blockbuster movies – I love rather a lot of them, older and very new – but rather an acknowledgement of what they are typically meant to be and do. Mission: Impossible does it rather well indeed, even for someone like me who only ever likes movies starring Tom Cruise despite of him and not because of him.

Past Misdeeds: The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh (2012)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

After the death of his mother Rosalind (Vanessa Redgrave), Leon Leigh (Aaron Poole) comes to her house looking for something like closure, or at least to confront parts of the past he shared with his mother. They had been estranged for years, without visits or phone calls, because Rosalind suffered from a kind of mania that drove her to pressing her religion on Leon, playing "games" bordering on child abuse.

Rosalind's house - not the one where Leon grew up in - is a strange place, full of antiques, and statues and statuettes of angels, many of which Leon acquired for Rosalind in his profession in the antiques trade without knowing whom he bought them for. The longer Leon stays the more he is hit by a feeling of something strange, something malevolent even, going on, as if there were some truth to Rosalind's Christian cultish beliefs, and now something were about to punish Leon for his conscious decision against belief. Things seem to move where there shouldn't be movement, Leon is inexorably pressed into confrontation with elements of his mother's beliefs that seem to have taken on life and reality, and something is prowling around the house. Only time will tell if ghosts, wrathful angels, or just Leon's still bruised mind are the cause of the strange happenings.

Rodrigo Gudiño's The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh is the kind of film that easily divides opinions, not just because Gudiño is the publisher of Rue Morgue mag (never trust a journo - or blogger - making movies, right?) but because it is a film that combines a lot of elements people usually either love or hate in movies, depending one their temperaments.

It's a slow moving film with comparatively little outward action, utterly dependent on the creation of mood through set design, sound design, camera work, and acting. The Last Will tells its story in a way that not quite answers the question of the reality of what Leon encounters in the house, and consciously keeps parts of the plot's background ambiguous. Seeing that this is also a film circling questions of belief and disbelief via the weird and influences of classic supernatural tales, it's no surprise certain people will find the film boring or pretentious. As with all things mood-based, it's a matter of being compatible with the feeling the film is going for, and if you don't feel it, you just don't feel it, though I'd really wish people would more often differentiate between things that aren't for them, and things that aren't good.

To me, The Last Will is a little wonder of a movie, with a lead actor in Aaron Poole who can carry a film all on his own, never sharing the screen with anyone else. Other actors make their appearances as voices on the phone, in a small bit of video footage, and in form of a long-ish monologue by Vanessa Redgrave that really pulls the film together thematically. But really, the film is centred on Poole, with not a few scenes only showing him exploring the house.

One could argue that the house - on the outside built in a mock-medieval castle style, on the inside a living space reimagined as an angel-obsessed antiques store - really is the film's other main actor beside Poole, as it is the main source of the film's increasingly oppressive mood. The way Gudiño films it, the house is a place probably once meant to fill Rosalind's loneliness through an accumulation of stuff, but now has become something different, a kind of graveyard of emotions and an attempt at keeping a past alive so that it can never truly turn into a new present. In short, it's a place that seems custom-built to create its own ghosts; and Rosalind had turned herself into a ghost even long before she died, it seems. This mood as well as Rosalind's turn of mind might very well have something to do with intellectual influence the Christian sect Rosalind belonged to had on her, but then neither Leon nor the audience ever really learn if they had an active role in the proceedings that caused the house's haunting, or if they just provided more of the emotional trouble Rosalind was looking for.

In fact, the film only ever completely accedes the existence of Rosalind's ghost to be real; we never learn how much of what happens to Leon is caused by her, how much of it is a product of his mental damage, or how much of it has another supernatural source. The film leaves room for various interpretations, if you're interested in them, so you can takes its hints about a cult awakening something supernatural that leeches onto Rosalind's and Leon's private pains at face value, or you can ignore them completely without losing out on much of the film's meaning either way. In the end, the film seems to say, there's really not much of a difference between being haunted by a ghost or being haunted by the past in its non-supernatural form - both things can kill you one way or the other.

The Last Will is also one of the few films questioning the nature of belief and unbelief that doesn't feel the need to come down on either side while damning the other. Rosalind's ghost exists as a creation of her own beliefs, while Leon saves himself by reasserting his disbelief. It's unexpectedly satisfying, and definitely quite a bit less annoying than being petulantly preached at by another movie, quite independent of the direction the preaching comes from.


So, obviously, and not quite unexpectedly given my tastes, I come down on the side of those viewers who find The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh rather spectacular in its quiet, intelligent way. If it were a book, it would probably be published by Ash Tree Press or Tartarus Press, and if that sounds like a recommendation to you, it most definitely is.

Bear Island (1979)

A UN sponsored group of scientists of different nationalities – of course all played by English native speakers doing horrible fake accents – under the leadership of one Otto Gerran (Richard “Nein, hören Sie!!!!” Widmark) comes to arctic, Norwegian Bear Island for some vague studies concerning climate change. Apart from the small former Nazi base the scientists are making themselves at home in, there’s only an old Nazi submarine harbour and a NATO base that is so completely out of bounds for the scientists they are not even supposed to make radio contact with it. Even before most of the expedition arrived, there has been the first mysterious disappearance (well, it’s a mysterious disappearance for the characters, the audience knows full well the victim was murdered), and that’s just the beginning of a series of violent events.

American scientist Frank Lansing (Donald Sutherland, not attempting a Californian accent as far as I can make out), who is actually on the island because his father was a German submarine captain who probably died right there and he feels in need of some closure, quickly discovers that there’s a huge cache of gold hidden on the island. It’s a lot of the stuff, and there are a lot of people in the expedition willing to kill for it.

Finding out who these people are will become rather difficult, though, because nobody on the island actually seems to have come to do any science at all, everybody has a secret, and nobody is truly who he or she seems to be.

By 1979, Don Sharp – despite a career that would in stops and starts continue for a further ten years – was still the always at least dependable, sometimes brilliant director he had been for decades, but he didn’t exactly move with the times anymore. From this perspective, he’s a very good fit for Bear Island, a thriller inevitably based on an Alistair Maclean novel that seems to come from a different world in a movie landscape after Star Wars and Jaws as well as after much of 70s action and adventure cinema.

There’s something old-fashioned and stiff about the film, a certain lack of sharpness and focus that results in a rather draggy middle act, with a script that can’t seem to decide if it wants to be a more visceral thriller, a variation of an Agatha Christie style manor mystery, or both, or nothing of the sort. From time to time, the film finds its step for ten minutes or so, thanks to Sharp creating a set-piece that’s actually exciting (if you like snow mobile duels, that is), or moody and actually telling us something about the characters (like Lansing’s first secret visit to the submarine base). Of course, a few minutes later, everything becomes a bit lifeless again, because obvious red herrings (seriously, no self-respecting old-fashioned mystery would be this obvious) have to be laid, and anything interesting has to wait for a while.

At least Bear Island has quite the cast. Apart from Sutherland (giving a performance fluctuating between bored and amused), and Widmark, there are also Lloyd “Bad Ass” Bridges, Christopher “I’m Polish, really” Lee, and Vanessa “Oops, forgot my accent for a scene again” Redgrave (wasted on playing The Girl, of course), and while the script does its damndest to not give them much to do or puts many a clunky line in everyone’s mouth, you can’t quite put this assembly of talent down, so from time to time, tiny sparks are indeed flying between them.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,canadian movies,reviews,thriller,don sharp,donald sutherland,vanessa redgrave,richard widmark,christopher lee,lloyd bridges

On Exploder Button: The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh (2012)

There aren't all that many horror films standing in the same tradition as less on-the-nose and ambiguous contemporary literary horror. I'm not surprised, for doing this sort of thing well must be exceedingly difficult in a medium that is by nature not as easily turned towards interiority and ambiguousness as fiction is. Even worse, even if your film achieves its goal well, a lot of people will still hate it just for its insistence on things other than plot or blood.

Rodrigo Gudiño's The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh is one of these films, and it achieves its goals admirably. My column over at ExB explains how.

Technorati-Markierungen: canadian movies,reviews,rodrigo gudiño,horror,aaron poole,vanessa redgrave,other places

The Seven-Per-Cent-Solution (1976)

His cocaine habit has finally caught up with Sherlock Holmes (Nicol Williamson), and he begins to have rather intense paranoid delusions concerning his former maths tutor, a certain Professor Moriarty (Laurence Olivier). A desperate Watson (Robert Duvall) realizes the only one way to save his friend from madness and a junkie's death is the help of Viennese alienist Sigmund Freud (Alan Arkin). But how to get him there? Holmes's brother Mycroft (Charles Gray) has a plan. Clearly, he and Watson only need to convince Holmes that Moriarty is planning some evil in Vienna, and off he'll go after him.

That plan, as it turns out, is a sound one, and once Holmes meets Freud, it doesn't even take that much effort to convince the detective he needs treatment.

Once Holmes is at least half rid of his more acute problems, Freud follows a call to a former patient, the singer Lola Deveraux (Vanessa Redgrave) whom he also helped through a cocaine addiction. To the unschooled eye, it looks as if Deveraux has had a relapse, followed by a suicide attempt. Holmes, though, quickly notices that the singer must have been held and drugged against her will and has only escaped her captors with great risk and effort.

Clearly, it's a case the reconvalescent consulting detective, his friend and Freud just have to investigate.

Herbert Ross's The Seven-Per-Cent Solution is one of the stranger examples of professional Sherlock Holmes fanfic in the movies. It's scripted by Nicholas Meyer based on his own - and much beloved - novel, but is hated by just about as many Holmes fans as love it. I think part of the loathing a certain part of Holmes fandom has for this particular film is based on the same lack of humour usually found in the more fanatical religious people  - a state of mind that is the absolute antithesis of a film that clearly loves Holmes as a character and a concept yet also is willing to make fun of him and treat him as a human being instead of a mere icon.

On the other hand, The Seven-Per-Cent-Solution really is just so very problematic as a film. For each clever nod to the Holmes canon, for each moment that wonderfully (and quite ironically) explains the mores of the time the film takes place in, for each intelligent and humane deconstruction of Holmesian basics, there's another element bound to annoy even the more mild-mannered viewer. Tonally, the film's just all over the place, jumping from comedy to adventure movie to deconstruction of a modern myth with little regard for thematic coherence; every scene's an only child, and Herbert Ross the last director in the world to be able to change that.

And I don't even need to start on the predictable and unimaginative "save the woman from the evil Austrian and the evil Muslim" mystery plot when there's also the film's curious decision to deconstruct parts of Holmes's heroism, but let the much more dubious Freud look flawless, or the script's tendency to pack every tired classic Holmes bon mot into its running time, or the horrible assortment of normally excellent actors speaking in bad accents. Robert Duvall is clearly the worst offender of them all in that respect. The combination of his ridiculously overdone stiffness and his comic opera accent not only make him a horrible caricature of a caricature of a Victorian gentlemen, but just don't work at all with Arkin's rather laid-back (but don't worry, badly accented) Freud and Nicol Williamson's intense Holmes.

On the third hand (yes, I use three hands in an argument - what of it?), this collection of flaws somehow can't keep the film from being enjoyable and entertaining, because the the film's many bad moments cannot outshine its good ones as completely as one would suspect. There's something just so right about Sherlock Holmes being treated by Sigmund Freud that it's impossible for me to actively dislike the movie.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,british movies,reviews,herbert ross,nicol williamson,robert duvall,alan arkin,vanessa redgrave,comedy,mystery,adventure