MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - ROGUE NATION Soars As High As Cruise's Amazing Airplane Stunt

Now playing at a multiplex near all of us:

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - ROGUE NATION

(Dir. Christopher McQuarrie, 2015)

I thought it would've been impossible for Tom Cruise to top his death defying stunt in the last entry in this series (MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - GHOST PROTOCOL), which was scaling Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, aka the tallest building in the world, without a stuntman for Chrissakes!



But obviously the man takes these missions very seriously so this time out, in the first five minutes no less, we see his Ethan Hunt hanging on to the side of an airplane as it takes off. Again, there was no stuntman. Is anybody going to be surprised if he actually gets killed doing another one of these crazy stunts on a future sequel?

Anyway, it’s a pretty thrilling opening to the fifth MISSION IMPOSSIBLE which re-unites Cruise with his IMF (Impossible Missions Force) team members Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames, while Jeremy Renner watches via satellite back in Washington D.C.

Via his amazing airplane stunt, Cruise’s Hunt is able to stop terrorists’ shipment of missiles laced with nerve gas from reaching its destination and we’re off and running with Lalo Schifrin’s famous theme music blaring over the flashy credits sequence.

Then we’ve got Alec Baldwin as stuffy CIA director Alan Hunley who wants to dismantle the IMF because of their reckless disregard for rules and regulations, and recall all the operatives, especially Hunt, but nobody is giving up his location.

Months later, Hunt is captured by The Syndicate, the evil organization that he’s been unable to prove the existence of to his former superiors. With the help of a British agent (a badass Rebeccca Ferguson) Hunt is able to escape - after a torture room fight scene, that is. Hunt has a lead to pursue – the blonde, well-groomed but rat faced assassin who captured him played by Sean Harris, who’s a much better villain than Michael Nyqvist in the previous installment, 2011's GHOST PROTOCOL.

From there we get killer set piece after killer set piece. In one, Cruise and crew thwart an assassination attempt at the Vienna opera house involving more than one sniper. Another mighty sequence features a major motorcycle chase down Morocco’s winding R203 highway, and yet another has Cruise holding his breath for 6 and a ½ minutes in order to access a computer server that’s stored underwater. Yep, ROGUE NATION’s high ratio of kick ass set pieces puts every other action movie this year to shame. James Bond’s highly anticipated next adventure, SPECTRE, has its work cut out for it to top this.

The twists and turns in the plot involving a flash drive that contains all of the Syndicate’s secrets – the film’s MacGuffin - and how the British Prime Minister (Tom Hollander) and the head of MI6 (Simon McBurney) figure in the cover-up are fine, but it’s the beautifully bombastic barrage of stunts, fights, chases, and self aware humor (a lot of which comes from Simon Pegg who welcomely has a larger role than before) that audiences will most respond to.

Who knew that the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE series would become one of the most solid and dependable movie franchises out there? It’s stunning and impressive how increasingly stunning and impressive each new entry has been. Christopher McQuarrie, who’s worked with Cruise in JACK REACHER, and co-wrote the Cruise vehicles VALKRIE and EDGE OF TOMORROW, joins Brian de Palma, John Woo, J.J. Abrams, and Brad Bird in the exclusive club of hot shot film makers who’ve performed great genre exercises in the form of these M:I movies.

The bottom line on Cruise has been for a while that whatever you think of his off screen drama with the Scientology and all, the guy makes good movies. You look at his filmography and there’s a lot of quality there. Cruise’s performance as Ethan Hunt works so well because the guy projects an air of cocky arrogance but there’s a detectable level beneath that where you can sense real fear that he has to talk himself out of. In other words, there’s a believable, relatable human being behind the action star front.

I’m definitely down with Bilge Ebiri who posited on Vulture.com that “It’s Time to Start Liking Tom Cruise Again,” and seeing the excellent, intelligent, and genuinely exciting MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - ROGUE NATION is the best place to now put that into practice.

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STILL ALICE: The Film Babble Blog Review

Now playing at art houses, and a few multiplexes near me:

STILL ALICE (Dirs. Richard Glatzer & Wash Westmoreland, 2014)

Julianne Moore is a front runner to win the Best Actress Oscar for her role as Alice Howland, a Columbia University linguistics professor diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease, in this touching, emotionally stirring drama opening today at an indie art house near you. 



As this is Moore's fifth Academy Award nomination, it does indeed feel like it’s her time, but she really deserves it as this the best work I’ve ever witnessed yet from the actress who hails from my home state.

We first meet Moore’s Alice, her research scientist hubby John (Alec Baldwin), and some of their family - their doctor son Tom (Hunter Parrish), lawyer daughter Anna (Kate Bosworth), and her nice-guy husband Charlie (Shane McRae) - as they are celebrating her 50th birthday at a posh New York restaurant. Except for a brief instance of confusion, Moore appears vibrant and happy among her loving spouse and grown-up, well to do children.

Then we see her giving a speech as a guest lecturer at UCLA, in which she blanks on a certain word. After she returns home, she panics because gets lost during her routine run around an area that’s normally well known to her, the Columbia campus.

These lapses of memory disturb Alice so fearing she has a brain tumor, she visits her Neurologist in serene scene that captures Alice in an unbroken close-up answering her unseen doctor’s questions. He asks her to have a loved one, her husband or a close relative accompany her the next time she comes in, but she doesn’t feel this is necessary when she returns.

The neurologist, now seen as Stephen Kunken (THE WOLF OF WALL STREET, The Affair), tells her that after tests, including a PET Scan, the symptoms sadly corroborate that she has early-onset Alzheimers, and the news hits Alice and her husband hard.

The shaken couple gather together their son and daughters, which also includes Kristen Stewart as the youngest, an aspiring Los Angeles-based actress, to tell them about their mother’s diagnosis, and to let them know that there’s a 50 percent chance that each of them could inherit the gene.

From there we experience Alice’s devastating progression into what she calls “hell” – “It feels like my brain is fucking dying!” A painful subplot has her recording an iBook video for her future self to find in which she gives instructions to swallow a bottle of pills in order to commit suicide.

A large portion of the film concerns the relationship between Moore’s Alice and Stewart’s Lydia. Now, I understand there’s lots of hate out there for Stewart, but having no bias myself (largely, I bet, from not having seen any of the TWILIGHT movies), I thought she did a really good, genuinely affective job here.

Early in the film it is established that Alice disapproves of her daughter’s decision to pursue acting. Later, when the mother’s mind is failing, she attends a play Lydia is performing in and when the family meets up after, Alice has forgotten that this woman she watched on stage is her daughter. Moore’s reaction, along with Stewart’s processing of what’s happening, when Bosworth informs her mother who she’s talking to is one of the most moving moments I’ve seen this last year on screen.

In another affecting scene, Alice tries to explain her ordeal to Lydia: “I’ve always been so defined by my intellect, my language, my articulation, and now sometimes I can see the words hanging in front of me and I can’t reach them and I don’t know who I am and I don’t know what I’m going to lose next.”

Based on the bestselling debut novel by Lisa Genova, STILL ALICE is not to be confused with any sort of Lifetime disease of the week TV movie melodrama. Directors/writers Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland’s sharply written screenplay features a tightly crafted narrative with an intensely real feeling tone; there’s no schmaltzy sentiment, nor any pandering creepiness. Even Ilan Eshkeri’s spare score, mostly made of quiet piano tinkling, is tastefully unobtrusive.

Moore and Baldwin have displayed great chemistry as a couple before on Tina Fey's NBC sitcom 30 Rock, but they are real, fully fleshed out people here not those comic concoctions, and they are as convincing as can be. Baldwin braces himself for the worst with his wife’s predicament, with none of his trademark smugness present. It’s a soft spoken, and affectionate performance, that ranks with his best, albeit in a small sideline role to the tour de force that Moore delivers.

Although this year has other worthy candidates, including Marion Cotillard for TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT and Reese Witherspoon for WILD, for what Moore pulls off in STILL ALICE, put me down for pulling for her to win.

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