If Tom Cruise’s tenure as a Big Movie Star is ending, he’s not going out without a fight.

“Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol” isn’t just a rip-roaring yarn worth seeing in all its IMAX glory. It’s the most eye-popping installment in a franchise overseen by some of the biggest directors in Hollywood.

Each “Mission” recruits a new director – should they choose to accept the assignment – to interpret the modern spy film as they see fit. This time, Pixar veteran Brad Bird (“The Incredibles”) got the nod. Seems he’s just as comfortable directing human beings as he is orchestrating ones and zeroes on a keyboard.

Yes, the “Protocol” story is sketchy, and you won’t be quoting any of dialogue as you file patiently out of your seats. But when an action caper delivers this much excitement, demanding more almost seems churlish.

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The latest “Mission: Impossible” film, an enormous piece of product said to have consumed some $140-million on its way to an IMAX pleasure dome near you, has one idea, and you already know it. The idea is: Run for your life!

In “Ghost Protocol,” the fourth installment of this 15-year-old franchise, Tom Cruise—short of hits in the five years since the last film in the series—returns as Ethan Hunt, star agent of the Impossible Mission Force, that U.S. government espionage squad dedicated to squashing colorful malefactors in picturesque locations around the world.

This time out, Hunt has a new team: brainy-hot Agent Jane Carter (Paula Patton, smart choice); displaced intel analyst William Brandt (Jeremy Renner, over-qualified for this sort of exercise); and, also back again, tech wiz and comic-relief specialist Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg). Their target: nuclear terrorist Kurt Hendricks (Michael Nyqvist, of the Swedish “Dragon Tattoo” movies), whose rather Bondian ambition is to destroy the world and then rebuild it into a new, improved, presumably more Hendricks-centric society.

The story begins inauspiciously. Hunt is confined in a Moscow prison, for reasons we don’t learn till much later. Carter and Dunn bust him out, and they all set off in search of the nuclear launch codes that are a key component of Hendricks’ scheme.

Read the full review at Reason.com

This hasn’t been the best of times for A-list movie stars.

First, Adam Sandler’s latest comedy, “Jack and Jill,” failed to measure up to his previous blockbusters. Over the weekend, the star-laden “New Year’s Eve” debuted at number one, but with a final tally of $13 million that few folks found impressive.

And Will Smith, arguably the most bankable star of his generation, has been MIA of late until the lackluster MIB3 trailer hit the Web today.

That brings us to Tom Cruise, the mega-star with the mega-smile. His latest film, “Mission:Impossible – Ghost Protocol,” opens in limited theaters Friday before going wide Dec. 21.

To say there’s plenty riding on the film for Cruise is a Hollywood-sized understatement. Should “Ghost Protocol” falter at the box office, it’ll be all the evidence needed that Cruise is no longer a box office draw.

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It’s been 14 years since ‘Cop Land’ first hit movie theaters, but director James Mangold distinctly remembers his first reaction to casting Sylvester Stallone as the film’s heroic sheriff.

“I was dead set against it. I was horrified by the idea,” says Mangold, who would later go on to direct Oscar-winning films like ‘Walk the Line’ and ‘Girl, Interrupted.’ “He played a superhero so often. I didn’t want to make a movie about Judge Dredd.”

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Mangold graciously went to dinner with Stallone all the same and laid out his vision for the role.

“You have to let your body go. I mean let it go … gain at least 40 pounds” the director told the erstwhile Rocky Balboa.

‘He agreed immediately,” Mangold recalls. “He took the leap, and he delivered.”

Stallone’s sensitive performance in the tale of a New Jersey town teeming with dirty cops reminded us he’s more than just a slab of muscle for hire. The film, out this week in a Director’s Cut Blu-ray edition, also proved Mangold could handle a veteran cast led by Harvey Keitel, Robert De Niro and Ray Liotta.

“I have a memory of being a young man with this ridiculously heady cast all around me… it’s like pretty big boots to be strapping on in your second movie,” he says. “It demystified working with really important actors.”

The film also taught him that his complete vision won’t always make it to the big screen.

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Brilliant idea and concept.

Has Hollywood finally snapped out of their wicked anti-American streak thanks to profits, Obama being in office, or a little bit of both? It isn’t a moral awakening, that you can be sure of.

DHD:

Christopher McQuarrie will write, produce and direct Rubicon, a new property that is intended to be turned into a movie, graphic novel and videogame. McQuarrie is directing Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher in One Shot, but the project was announced at NY Comic-Con by coproducers Mark Long and Dan Capel. They describe the project as The Seven Samurai, set in Afghanistan with Navy SEALs as the heroes, and the Taliban the villains. Since Navy SEAL Team Six killed Osama Bin Laden, the SEALs have become the centerpiece of numerous feature films.

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It’s always a bad sign when my Hot Wife switches to Spanish, which she did after watching about 20 minutes of the premiere of Terra Nova.  She dubbed it Terra Mierda.  I won’t translate it for you gringos; just understand that it does not mean “World of Quality Entertainment.”

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Now, understand that it gives me no pleasure to report that Terra Nova is off to a crappy start.  None.  Anyone living in California knows lots of people who work in the Industry, from crew to talent, who rely on production to feed their families.  We want shows to be great, to be hits, to run for years.  And none of them got up and said “I want to take an interesting idea and turn it into a hackneyed, tedious death march.” Well, maybe the writers and producers did – the vicissitudes of chance do not account for how they managed to hit every tiresome cliché and make every bad choice available every time.

The conceit of Terra Nova is that a bunch of people from 2189 are sent back in time from a polluted, fascist Earth 85 million years to restart human civilization.  They face all sorts of ferocious dinosaurs, which is cool, and that have all sorts of bitchin’ guns, which is also cool.  Steven Spielberg is involved with it, and once upon a time he made movies I actually liked.  Fox is spending a fortune on it.  It should be kinda interesting and kinda fun.

But no.

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Three was the best of the series and Jeremy Renner is certainly a welcome addition to any film, but CGI stunts that defy gravity and reality are starting to get pretty old. I count at least four times someone should die in this two-minute trailer. Heaven only knows what the final film will look like. After a while that kind of artificial invincibility begins to numb the senses until you get the feeling you’re watching someone else play a video game.

It would be nice if the franchise were to go back to the roots of the long-running television show where brains, cunning teamwork, and some terrific role-playing combined to create a sense of real suspense and excitement — as opposed to phony excitement enhanced by obvious CGI.

One reason, however, to scratch everything written above is that the director of this installment is the great Brad Bird, the unqualified genius behind “The Incredibles” and “Ratatouille,” two of the best films of the last decade. Bird is a brilliant storyteller and director. I expect great things and will ultimately not judge “Ghost Protocol” by its trailer. The story look interesting, as well. High concept with massive stakes involving both the fate of the individual characters and, naturally, the fate of the world.

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We went to Vietnam to stop communism!… We shell women and children!

Why it’s a left-wing film

This is another in a long line of Hollywood films that qualify as a Cambodian Holocaust denier, something I elaborate more on here.

Using the true story of Ron Kovic, an all-American kid born on the 4th of July who grew up in Long Island during the idyllic 1950s and eagerly joined the Marines in order to fight for his country and against the scourge of communism in Vietnam, co-writer/director Oliver Stone is able to hide behind the credentials of an autobiographical true story in order to create yet another one of his deceptive soda straw looks at America’s role in defending the South Vietnamese from the communist North.

Through Kovic’s story we witness American Marines accidentally massacre an innocent Vietnamese family after panicking under the confusion of battle, the military cover up a horrible friendly-fire incident after Kovic mistakes one of his own men for the enemy, and Vets home from the war unable to psychologically make peace with themselves. Are these the truths surrounding the formative events that eventually helped to shape Ron Kovic into a high-profile anti-war activist? Sure. But in a larger historical context, it’s not the truth about the war or in any way representative of what really happened over there or how our military behaved. And yet, with rare exception, this is the only way this war and the brave men who fought it are ever portrayed on film.

The other benefit of choosing this particular story is how it allows Stone to tell his critics how wrong they are by cinematically molding those of us who disagree with him into someone who eventually comes to see the leftist light. Young, America-loving, communist-hating Ron Kovic represents everything Oliver Stone and the Left despise. What a pleasure it must have been for him to tear that persona down and rebuild him (us) into his own self-righteous image.

Using a true story or not, this is something Hollywood loves to do; haul out the template I call the He Who Believes In The Goodness Of America Template.

And it goes a little something like this… (more…)

Pop quiz: what do the following movies have in common?

Gone with the Wind (1939), Star Wars (1977), The Sound of Music (1965), E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), The Ten Commandments (1956), Titanic (1997), Jaws (1975), Doctor Zhivago (1965), The Exorcist (1973), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1939), 101 Dalmatians (1961), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Ben-Hur (1959), Avatar (2009), Return of the Jedi (1983), The Sting (1973), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Jurassic Park (1993), The Graduate (1967), Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace (1999), Fantasia (1941), The Godfather (1972), Forrest Gump (1994), Mary Poppins (1964), The Lion King (1994)

If you said they all made scads of money, bravo — they are the top twenty-five domestic box-office champions of all time (adjusted for inflation, of course).

But consider another similarity: surprisingly few of them relied on established A-list movie stars — the most famous, the highest paid — for their moneymaking prospects. Gone with the Wind had Gable, yes. The Sting had Newman and Redford. The Godfather, Brando.

As for most of the rest, they either featured no A-listers at all, or used them before they became bonafide movie stars. In fact, many of those pictures can take credit for sending now-famous actors into the celestial Hollywood firmament in the first place. Gone with the Wind made Vivian Leigh known to the world. The Ten Commandments did it for Charlton Heston. The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman. The Godfather, Al Pacino. Star Wars, Harrison Ford. Mary Poppins, Julie Andrews. (more…)

The story for Tom Cruise’s new action film “Knight and Day” opens at an airport where the two lead characters, Roy and June (played by Cruise and Cameron Diaz), bump into each other several times before getting on the same airplane. On the plane, the lives of these two strangers are tied together through a series of events, and the rest of the movie revolves around their unlikely partnership as they try to stay alive while being attacked by numerous foes. Unfortunately, their partnership and the talents of a lot of the individuals involved in the making of the film, are wasted on an uneven actioner that begins with potential and ends with embarrassment.

As noted above, things start out at an airport where our two protagonists meet for the first time. They’re supposed to be on the same flight but plans change when an airline employee does not allow June onto the aircraft. Consoling her, Roy says, “Sometimes things happen for a reason,” right before he boards. However, a few moments later, June is invited back onto the plane to Roy’s surprise.

The plane takes off and after flirting with each other, June heads to the restroom and Roy — who is actually a government agent — is confronted by a number of  passengers who try to kill him. June returns from the bathroom and quickly realizes…actually, she doesn’t realize anything until Roy tells her, that the pilots are dead (supposedly, she’s too self-absorbed to notice the other passengers have been killed). (more…)

After waxing poetic about John Woo’s talent for the last month, it may surprise you to learn that I consider his later career an embarrassing falloff from his Hong Kong prime. That such sad declines are all-too-common among directors (and actors, and authors, and painters, and musicians) doesn’t make it any easier a pill to swallow. I miss young John Woo almost as much as I miss young Steven Spielberg, and I don’t make that comparison lightly.

Part of Woo’s problem was the advent of American special effects capable of mimicking, with a few mouse clicks, the previously unique style he pioneered via endlessly inventive cinematography and editing. Soon anyone could make what at least superficially looked like a John Woo movie, and they saturated the market with mediocre simulacra of his imagery until it felt old and tired. This is what I suspect Werner Herzog once meant when he condemned the “worn-out images” which imperil our civilization’s collective imagination “because of the inability of too many people to seek out fresh ones.”

Then there was Woo’s catastrophic loss of creative control, resulting from his move to Hollywood soon after he finished Hard Boiled. He once wearily explained his momentous decision to abandon his homeland in this way: (more…)

[Editor's Note: Script reviews of upcoming projects have been around for as long as there's been an Internet. Therefore it's no secret that a film can evolve into something quite different from its screenplay. Please keep in mind that this article represents a look at a particular script and not the final product.]

The truth is, it was State Department official Richard Armitage – a Bush critic, not an evil neocon – who leaked Plame’s name. Yet Armitage’s name never appears in the script. And how could it? That would defuse the filmmakers’ intent to demonize Rove and Bush and to condemn the war as shameful, unjust American aggression.

Coming soon to a theater near you: a movie starring Sean Penn as a great American patriot taking a courageous stand against a tyrannical power. No, it’s not a biopic about Penn’s South American idol, Hugo Chavez, facing down the imperialistic Goliath of the United States. It’s a dramatization of “Plamegate,” the affair of the CIA operative whose identity was outed in the run-up to the Iraq War, ostensibly by a vindictive Bush administration. Fair Game, based on Valerie Plame Wilson’s autobiographical book of the same name, stars Naomi Watts as the aggrieved Plame and Penn as her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, in a role apparently already gaining Oscar buzz.

(By the way, what Oscar voters in recent years refer to as “buzz” is actually the sound of audiences all across this country snoring – such is the disconnect between Oscar winners and what Americans usually like to see). (more…)

Many of you know the story of Jerry Maguire, the agent with a conscience. Ya, I know. It’s only a movie. But sometimes movies can be great moral guideposts. Ironic that I should use one of Hollywood’s finest morality plays to illustrate how Tinseltown should operate at its most basic level.

In Jerry Maguire, the key conflict was Jerry’s realization that he was putting a pretty facade on the moral deterioration within his profession, and was in fact complicit in it. It took an injured hockey player’s young son telling him to fuck off and a bad dream for Maguire to realize the true ugliness of who and what he had become, especially when measured against the high standards of his idol and mentor, agent Dicky Fox. Those troubling events created in Maguire a perfect storm of revulsion, introspection and a commitment to reaffirm the basic principles of his profession, which he laid out in his memo “The Things We Think and Do Not Say.” In truth, he had me at hello. Tom’s a hottie! (more…)

My first two posts at this site addressed the topic of so-called “Christian” films in Hollywood. In my first post, I opined that the increased interest in Christian films by Hollywood execs hasn’t necessarily been a good thing because films with a faith theme are being sent to the small, low-budget faith divisions of the studios and marketed nearly exclusively to Christians. In my second post, I gave what I consider the reasons that most Christian films are so bad. Even though I’m an evangelical Christian, I had to admit that the films made by my brethren, intended for audiences like me, were typically very poorly done.

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So…I was faced with a few realities. Hollywood wanted more Christian films. As a Christian, I wanted more Christian films that were actually watchable. I’d publicly and condescendingly bemoaned the fact that Christian films usually weren’t good. I’m a Christian. I’m a filmmaker. (more…)

Celebrated actress Meryl Streep’s latest project “Julie & Julia” is out in theaters. I have not seen the film and am not sure if I will. I did see the trailers, and admit to being tickled by Streep’s uncanny portrayal of Child’s mannerisms and unusual voice. (For Big Hollywood reviews of this film, click here and here.)

Streep is one of those rare thespians who truly morphs into the character she is playing. You forget for a while that you are watching Meryl Streep (as opposed to never forgetting it’s Tom Cruise in “[insert film title here]“), and for that she deserves heaps of praise.  But her off-screen silliness is ripe for mocking.

Take, for example, her declaration during a promotional interview for “Julie & Julia” that she was “disappointed” in Child because 20 years ago, Child refused to take part in Streep’s efforts to get organic produce into supermarkets: (more…)

Being a celebrity means that you can do anything you want to do because you know more than the average person. Not just when it comes to hawking hair care products and credit cards, but important things like how to save the Earth and telling governors how to run their states.

And if you’re Tom Cruise, that means you are not only qualified to advise women on how to deal with postpartum depression, but you are also qualified to act as marriage counselor.

That’s right – Tom “Couch Commando” Cruise is, out of the goodness of his heart, David and Victoria Beckham’s new “relationship guru” – because you know with all of their money, they can’t afford a certified therapist:

After an evening with David, Tom decided to have a friendly chat with Victoria about the family’s future, saying it was because he cared so much about all of them,” revealed a source.

“They love each other dearly but Tom is a big believer in talking about issues . He could see they were both worried about the future and what it might hold.”

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Kicking back listening to Bonnie Tyler belt out “Holding Out For A Hero” made me think of a recent visit to Hollywood where I had the opportunity to speak with a few producers and screenwriters, truly good people all. 

Their big message: military films aren’t working. The country is weary and doesn’t want war films as entertainment. Rather, they say, the good citizens of our nation want to escape with the fictional heroes in movies such as “Transformers,” “X-Men,” and “Spider-Man.” 

Military movies may not be working because Hollywood presently refuses to capitalize on the real life heroes in combat everyday. Everyone loves a good hero and for Hollywood to embrace the notion that there might be a valorous man or woman worthy of a feature film may lend creditability to the cause for which they are fighting. And we can’t have that. 

Instead, their latest war films are partisan propaganda as opposed to realistic and balanced. Somewhere between the screenplay and the final edit group therapy takes place and movie houses release message films as opposed to realistic action movies.  (more…)

In what is becoming an annual rite of self-destruction, Broadway has once again chosen to snub many of the big-name stars who have put their film careers on hold to trudge onto the boards eight times a week, take a significant pay cut, and run the risk of being ridiculed for being unable to cut the mustard as a theatre actor  (As Alan Swan famously said before having to appear on live television in “My Favorite Year”:  ‘I’m not an actor, damn you, I’m a movie star!’).  This week’s announcement of nominees for Broadway’s top prize, the Tony Award, was more newsworthy for the names left off the list than for the relatively unfamiliar names singled out for the honor. 

Nathan Lane and John Goodman are selling tickets hand over fist for their revival of “Waiting for Godot” but neither received the honor of a nomination.  Same with David Hyde Pierce, Frank Langella, Mary Louise Parker and Matthew Broderick. 

It was no surprise that Jeremy Piven was included out of the Best Actor category after his famous sushi defense for missing performances in David Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow,” but not honoring John Lithgow’s brilliant turn in “All My Sons” in the same category is a crime against humanity!  It ranks up there with the snub of Dustin Hoffman as Willy Loman in the 1984 revival of “Death of a Salesman.” Brian Dennehy was honored with the Best Actor award when he did Willy Loman in 2000, but that goodwill did not anoint him worthy of a nomination this year for his turn in “Desire Under the Elms.”  (more…)

On November 4th, 2008, when I realized that Joe Biden was going to be the next Vice President of the United States, I swear that I could hear “Taps” playing faintly in the distance. There’s no used crying over spilled milk however, which is why I say; Let’s laugh at this chump while we can. Oh Joe! What will he do next?

When life gives you lemons… Poke fun at the absurdly oblivious Vice President and his pipe-cleaneresque hair-plugs.

Mormon church leaders are criticizing HBO for including a private, sacred ceremony in its show Big Love, the drama about a polygamous Mormon family in Utah. Apparently only church members “in good standing” are allowed to enter temples and either witness or take part in the rite called the “endowment ceremony.”

HBO, of course, apologized for offending Mormons but defended its use of the ceremony because its depiction is “critical” to the show’s story line. Ah, the quintessential non-apology apology, used frequently by politicians: We’re sorry if we offended anyone, but we’re not going to do anything that will actually rectify the situation. Be sure to tune in, though, and boost our ratings! (more…)