The ‘Mission: Impossible’ Franchise’s Reckoning
Starting with 2011’s Ghost Protocol, the Mission: Impossible films found a schtick in doubling and tripling and quadrupling down on the tension of elongated, elaborate, and escalating action set-pieces. The five films since and including that one form a bell curve that almost perfectly illustrates the franchise’s journey to balance tone (left of curve) and plot (right) around said schtick.
‘Phantom Thread’ & Misunderstanding Autism for Personality
Paul Thomas Anderson may be 21st-century cinema’s best writer of complex male characters and the intrinsic and destructive nature of egotism, and his penchant for such characters, whether you agree with the superlative, infects 2017’s Phantom Thread, about a middle-aged dressmaker named Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) — a brilliant, perfectionistic, demanding, ornery, stubborn man who appears to fit tidily into the aforementioned bucket. And he does, to a degree, but nowhere near as tidily as canon egocentrics Dean Trumbell, Daniel Plainview, Lancaster Dodd, or Jack Horner; unlike them, Reynolds is low-spectrum (“high-functioning”) autistic, and many of his behaviors which could be attributable to egotism are actually — and independently — autistic ones.
Three Films by Sean Baker: An Assessment
The Italian neorealism movement rose from the ruins of WWII, and its characteristic pseudo-aimlessness was a powerful metaphor for life in the time of recovery. Without war recovery, the effect is mostly lost; the movement’s been dead for 70 years and a longshot for revival, especially in American cinema.
Two by Ozu: ‘The Only Son’ & ‘There Was a Father’
To pretend to truly comprehend life in post-WWI Japan as a 21st Century white guy would be shameful, but even with a little bit of preparatory research for nominal context, The Only Son (1936) is a miraculously compassionate and quietly devastating snapshot of an era and culture for the societal majority, themes which no other Japanese filmmaker — perhaps no other global filmmaker — cased better or more touchingly than Yasujirō Ozu. His work is always entrancing for its craftsmanship and precision and for its emotional gravity and tenderness, and The Only Son is a prime example.
Robert Bresson’s ‘The Devil, Probably’
Like A Gentle Woman (1969), The Devil, Probably (1977) opens on (two contradictory reports of) the main character’s suicide, then jumps backward in time. At the 4-minute mark, at a gathering of students (which through context we can infer are an analog to “68ers”), a guy says into the mic, “I proclaim destruction. Everyone can destroy. It’s easy.” Sure enough, the next shots are of polluting smokestacks and dead trees.