Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol follows the action/spy thriller formula to the letter. There’s not even a hint of straying outside the genre’s tropes. But they do it oh so well. Fight moves I’ve never seen before. Stunning photography. Chase scenes I’ve never seen before. Cool new gadgets you’ve never seen before that walk the line between plausibility and science fiction. Cool cars. Hot women. Lots of bling from all over the world. I had a damn good time at this movie and can heartily recommend it if you are looking for a good action movie.

The movie is well cast. Never been a big Tom Cruise fan, but this is a good role for him and the supporting cast holds their own in every scene, especially Paula Patton who plays on of Cruise’s team mates. She’s just as bad ass as he is and is not the typical withering female that you find in Bond movies. Simon Pegg is quickly sealing his title of geek of choice in the A List Actors league. And Jeremey Renner could easily carry his own action movie franchise.

Of course all those explosions of famous land marks, car chase scenes, building climbing, computer  network hacks don’t leave much time for character development. The few seconds of poignant character background development are laughable, “yeah, whatever” moments in the film. That’s fine. No great loss. For what it is, Mission Impossible: ghost Protocol is a bang up good movie.

Had the opportunity to see Moneyball at a sneak preview yesterday. I’m always a little leery of sports movies, afraid that they will turn horrendously cliche’ or overly smarmy. But Brad Pitt was the main producer on this film. He put his own money into so he could play the lead character,  Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane. This is the man who led the Oakland A’s to an unprecedented 20 straight wins and arguable the man who changed how modern baseball is managed. I’m glad to be able to report that Brad Pitt has an eye for a good story and that the movie is neither cliche’ nor smarmy.

The premise of the movie is that Billy Beane is the general manager of a relatively unsuccessful team in a small market. Because he’s in a small market and the owner can’t afford to buy the players that other teams like the Yankees can. Anytime he gets a good player, some other team outbids Beane and he loses the player. Beane knows he can’t compete with other teams on money, so he has to find a way to be successful without the money. Bean is observant and willing to try anything and as a result he stumbles across Peter Brand, an economics graduate from Yale. Not exactly the type of guy to fit into the good old boys club in team management. But Brand is from an emerging school of baseball junkies that believe you can use high powered statistics to find good players that other teams have passed over. He compares them to “an island of misfit toys.” The one thing you can say about Billy Beane is that he had courage to try something different. He hires Peter Brand as his assistant and then together they start putting a team together from the league’s rejects.

But this is not at all a Bad News Bears kind of movie. In fact, Beane’s relationship with the players is deliberately distant. Does Beane’s team succeed? In a way. After everyone, including his own staff has totally has written off Bean and his misfit players, they begin to show signs of promise and before the season is over, they have broken the all time winning streak in Major League Baseball.

It turns out that the team’s success, or lack of it, is irrelevant to the point of the movie. The real question is, Did Beane change the way people think about baseball?  Did he prove that statistics are a better tool for recruiting than veteran scouts? The answer to that one is, hmmm, well now we’re moving into spoiler territory. And what really emerges from the plot is why Beane was so driven to change the game of baseball and whether or not he managed to put his own demons behind him. I liked how the screen play doesn’t make a showcase of Beane’s personal problems you barely even notice them through the movie because he’s so focused on his job of managing the team. But at the end of the movie, you realize it’s less about “Moneyball,” less about changing the game of baseball, and more about what drove Billy Beane to have the courage to try something so radically different. And that makes the story really interesting.

When I went to see Rise of The Planet of the Apes the other day, one of the minor characters was an Orangutan and it reminded me of Every Which Way But Loose. So I had to rent it. Holy Frijoles! This movie is so low-brow you culd sweep the floor. When I say Clyde the Orangutan is the best actor in the move, I’m not lying.

It’s kind of funny to see this version of 1978. Tough guys fighting in meat packing plants. Bar fights. Truck driving. Honky tonks. Bikers as keystone cops. Fun with Trash Compactors. Cars on blocks in the front yard. Everyone smokes like chimneys.

There are also 1970′s era head nods to racial integration that look oh so painfully contrived now. There were references to women that would get guys tared and feathered today and they just roll right through the movie like there’s no tomorrow. 

Another surprising thing about the movie is just how many guns show up. I love the sight of a little old lady repelling bikers from her front yard with a shot gun. Yes!

Think of this movie as Animal House for the blue collar crowd. I can’t exactly recommend this movie. But You gotta remember this movie was so popular they actually made a sequel. So it’s worth it to see what was popular that year and you can laugh at it while you are laughing at it. 

I never read the comic book that Cowboys & Aliens is based on, but I think the premise is fantastic. Aliens among us in 1870. The movie starts out very much like a spaghetti western. Daniel Craig does a passable job as the movie’s version of Outlaw Josey Wales. Harrison Ford is the cranky cattle king. Sam Rockwell the nerdy barkeep. Olivia Wilde the mysterious woman with dark eyes and a distant gaze. Every cliche in the Spaghetti Western Handbook is thrown at us in about the first 15 minutes. But it works. It works because there’s never once a wink at the camera or a campy moment. They play the movie absolutely deadpan as if it is a serious Western movie.

The humor, such as it is, is very subtle. The aliens are rounding up people like intergalactic cattle herders. Lassoing them from their space ships above and taking people away like so much cattle. The aliens without spoiling too much are mucking about in the mountains of New Mexico for the same reason everyone else in the godforsaken town is mucking around in the mountains. There are horse/alien races. There are battle scenes that resemble a cattle stampede as much as anything else.  I really like the fact that the movie did not beat us over the head with the cowboys-as-cattle metaphor. It was just there for you to discover and recognize as you went along.

The aliens, of course, were ridiculously impossible. But so what? They were aliens. They were the bad guys that had to be Dealt With or they would continue to steal the women folk and scare the cattle. Or is it the other way around? Doesn’t matter. They were the bad guys.

The one really interesting thing about the script to me was how the aliens make their appearance in the middle of everyday live. The bad guys are being bad guys. The good guys are being good guys. The jerks are being jerks. And then the Alien Stuff happens and there is a brief alliance of humans against the aliens. And then at the end everyone kinda picks up where they left off. Yeah, everyone kinda learned their lesson and dealt with their stuff as part of fighting the aliens. But there was no smarmy Scene of Redemption at the end. Just more like a tip of the hat to what they’d all been through together.

And yes, there is riding off into the sunset. Deal with it.

Even though the movie is only rated PG-13, I’d say this is a great summer action movie for adults. I highly recommend it.

photo credit

Plain and simple, Super 8 is all about JJ Abrams trying to make a Steven Spielberg movie. It’s like he went through every single Spielberg movie, starting with ET, and made a list of every element that they have in common. Then he wrote a movie that’s a cross between ET, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the X-Files. The result is a visually fun popcorn movie that goes poof into a cloud of fallacious logic the minute the move’s last frame flickers dark. (Why _were_ all those dogs running away? )

But the movie has a saving grace. A big one. The child actors are fantastic, every single one of them. They work well as an ensemble. Their roles feel very authentic and true for kids that age and the dialog seems spot on. Very early on in the movie, I found myself more interested in whether the boy was gonna get the girl in the end than what the Big Mystery is.

A second saving grace for the move is that it is set in 1979 and they did a fantastic job of recreating 1979. The cars! The clothes! The music! The pot! That made the movie fun too.

This movie will never be called ET for this generation, but it’s a decent popcorn movie.