response 126 of 326:

May 28 13:05 UTC 2000

Mission Impossible: 2

I went in to this movie not expecting much.  Perhaps something James
Bond-ish, but with some similarity to the Mission Impossible team
concept waved at in MI:I.  No such luck.

What I got was an ode to Ethan Hunt, super-fixer.  Yeah, there was a
small team concept, but one guy was a doorman and a helicopter pilot,
Luther came back as some laptop whiz, and a love interest that showed
some apparent skills early in the movie, but played the innocent waif
victim through the rest.  Frankly, the guys were just props, and the 
girl was eye candy that gave Ethan Hunt some emotional dilemma.

I found the movie to be totally cartoonish.  A venue for Tom Cruise to
play a mortal super-hero.  There's no real plot twist.  They love the
face masks that turn one person into someone else and play it to
death, completely unrealistically at times.  

Gunplay and explosions and chase scenes, mostly too long and too
super-human.  A thin, see-it-coming-a-mile-away plot line where they
repeat lines like "Her record will be expunged.  Her crimes will be
wiped clean." as if the audience has no brain.  Fight/chase scenes
where you constantly say, "No, he can't do that!", and then they do
something else equally inanely super-human in the very next sequence
all detract from any thought that this movie has any basis in real
human world physics or ability.  Purely a foil for Tom Cruise to look
the action-hero, make the impossible possible, and drive a movie on
pure guts, action, and emotion.

No way.  It was poorly paced with long drawn out sequences both fast
and slow.  Lots of weak emotional build-up.  Poor stylistic play.
Completely improbable long event chains, not just single events.  No
real plot twists of any value to the movie.  All this conspired to 
suck the escapist enjoyment out of the movie.

I read Rex Reed's review before the movie, figuring that he was
hunting for Hollywood style in a summer stock film.  Actually, he was
looking for a movie.  What we saw was two hours and 10 minutes of
implausibility, and after a while looking for the end of it all.

Take a favorite food, pizza for instance.  Presume that whatever is
delivered, you have to eat it all.  Early on, the pizza tastes great,
but they just keep delivering more with toppings that are starting to
taste funny.  Soon, you wish the pizza would stop.  You're full and
the pizza is tasting worse and worse.  But, yet another pizza comes
to your door.  When will it end?

Indeed.  That's MI:2

response 128 of 326:

May 28 23:53 UTC 2000

(She was only particularly beautiful when she SMILED)

If anyone saw this week's "Entertainment Weekly" .. look for the picture of
her in it.  She looks like a total dog.

response 130 of 326:

May 30 23:06 UTC 2000

Didn't Luthor say the laptop had to be fixed, but the it suddenly started
working again?

response 132 of 326:

May 31 01:26 UTC 2000

  I heard something about it on "All Things Considered's" summer movie
  round-up the other day.  They mentioned that it was "from the folks
  who brought you 'Wallace and Gromit'" -- does that mean Nick Parks
  specifically or just that it's produced by the Aardman studios?

  I can't remember the title but it has something to do with chickens..
  I really hope that they manage to successfully make the jump from
  Parks' brilliant animated shorts to a full-length feature..

response 134 of 326:

May 31 02:54 UTC 2000

I'll be passing on "Chicken Run" :)

I do want to see "Hollow Man".

response 136 of 326:

May 31 16:32 UTC 2000

        Was that "Shaun" or "Shorn"?  I'm not that good with British accents.

        Does the Second Coming also feature a phallic "mothership"? :)

response 138 of 326:

May 31 18:15 UTC 2000

It's Shaun the Sheep.  I should know - I have tons of Shaun stuff hanging
around.

response 140 of 326:

May 31 20:16 UTC 2000

Who wants to acknowledge the original Battlestar Galactica?
I saw the theatrical release: it made my head hurt.

response 142 of 326:

May 31 22:09 UTC 2000

Battlestar Galactica was a fun show. I still love to watch it at times.

response 144 of 326:

Jun 1 01:46 UTC 2000

Er, space:1999 was made after most of the apollo missions and definitely
after the excitement had died down.

response 146 of 326:

Jun 1 02:03 UTC 2000

Yeah, it's a shame the moon flew out of orbit last year. ^_^

response 148 of 326:

Jun 1 05:03 UTC 2000

  Snuck out of work a little early tonight to make it to the late-matinee
  showing of Mission:Implausible.

  I suppose it was entertaining in a way, but if there's any justice in the
  world it should lead to legislation requiring Hollywood, before releasing
  and distributing any action movie, to screen it for a test audience of
  ordinarily intelligent 8-year-olds.  If the movie doesn't display at least
  enough internal consistency for an enthusiastic 8-year-old to describe the
  plot in a way that makes sense to someone who hasn't seen the movie, then
  it doesn't get released.

  Obviously a totally *huge* amount of work, including a phenomenal amount
  of meticulous attention to detail, goes into the making of a mega-dollar
  action movie.  So why is it that when it comes time to make a big-budget
  movie, the studios seem to devote far more time to choosing the music 
  that goes on the soundtrack than they do examining the script for any sort
  of logical consistency?

  I'm not claiming to want a realistic or true-to-life action film.  I'm
  totally OK with the idea that the whole genre exists to fulfill a need 
  for escapist fantasy.  I just want to walk out of the theater without
  feeling confused and vaguely insulted.  Is that *so* much to ask?

  Within the peculiar but established logic of the action movie universe,
  Mission:Impossible 2 gets off to a fairly decent plot.  The bad guys have
  stolen something important and the good guys have to resort to highly
  unusual methods to get it back.  So far so good..  About half-way through,
  though, the logical consistency of Mission:Impossible starts completely
  disintegrating, even by action-movie standards. 

  Before the end of the movie, long before you can sort out how things got
  so out of hand, the main characters are running around some sort of
  bizarre island biotech-storage facilities where white doves flutter
  artistically through the underground corridors.  By the time people start
  pulling off the rubber face masks and voice-modulators that imbue such
  magical powers of disguise, you're too bemused to congratulate the hero
  for the astonishing foresight which led him to pack all of the masks he
  couldn't have anticipated needing for his commando raid on the island
  fortress (who'd've known he'd need a mask OF HIMSELF?  or does he simply
  make them on the spot?)

  In the end, the most annoying thing about Mission:Impossible is the
  blantantly obvious attention paid to every tiny detail *except* the script.
  When the filmmaker is sufficiently in control of his medium to give us a
  shot of flames reflected in the iris and pupil of the villains eye, yet no
  attempt is made to give the characters an iota of believable motivation,
  the viewer has to feel like the target of a fair amount of contempt.
  What really bugs me is that it seems that with just a little bit of effort,
  an excellent movie could've been made, using the same action sequences,
  but obeying at least the laws of action movie logic.  Even an attempt would
  have been nice..