Beast of Burden

AARGH! I am so sick of the current inability of Hollywood to actually engage in competition and earn its box office dollars. With many films sporting excessively large budgets, studios are so scared of rival films biting into their bottom line that they will do anything within their power to prevent such a threat from occurring, often shifting their own films to less occupied release dates. Occasionally you will see a pair of new releases on the same day, but more often than not they appeal to widely diverse demographics (such as this weekend's pairing of the R-rated sci-fi thriller Prometheus and animated family film Madagascar 3). In the past month, there has been barely more than one single major release per weekend, and that can make things difficult for someone who posts his movie musings here three time a week. I was looking at the few remaining titles out there I haven't seen, but religious war film For Greater Glory and stoner comedy High School barely get more than minor shrugs from me; I'm no more interested in reviewing them than most of you are in seeing them, so why should either of us waste our time?

So I decided to take a Netflix Streaming day. Yes, I know many of you have cancelled your subscriptions because there really isn't all that much left on there that's any good. It's also disappointing when the service actually has cool, big-deal movies available, only to remove them a short time later. Still, you can find some nice gems if you go digging, and that's where I found The Iron Giant yesterday. Despite the growth of 3D animation that began with 1995's Toy Story, classic 2D animation was still the norm in 1999, when Warner Bros released The Iron Giant with weak marketing on its way to an even weaker box office run. Despite its early failings, it was quite the critically-acclaimed film, and has become a monumental success from DVD sales. It's also one of those films that people you know will highly recommend if you haven't seen it, and when I did finally see it on Netflix, I figured that I had nothing to lose, and pressed the "play" button.

Set in 1957 at the height of America's fears of the Red Menace, Hogarth Hughes (Eli Marienthal) is a smart, impressionable child whose only desire is a pet, and therefore friend, all his own. After several failed attempts (to the annoyance of his single mother, played by Jennifer Aniston), Hogarth finally gets his wish, though in no way that he expected. Something from space has crash-landed near his sleepy Maine town, and when it turns out to be a giant, metal-eating and amnesiac robot, Hogarth becomes his first and best friend. But the world isn't ready for the Iron Giant, and when the military learns about the beast from paranoid government agent Kent Mansley (Christopher McDonald), they come in full force to put down this monster from places unknown.

I don't know any other way to say this: I loved The Iron Giant. I loved the needling at just how paranoid of Communism and Soviet Russia we as a society had become in the post-WWII era. I loved the sci-fi and horror influences included that were a huge part of pop culture at the time. I loved the acting, from great talents such as Aniston, McDonald, Harry Connick Jr and John Mahoney. I even liked the relatively annoying Hogarth after a while. And I ABSOLUTELY loved the character of the Iron Giant, who was sparsely voiced by a then-up-and-coming Vin Diesel. The character of the Giant displayed a brilliantly childlike naivete, and that in essence set the stage for his remarkable personality, from his adoration of comic book hero Superman to his distress of the death of a deer at the hands of hunters. His growth is the growth of the film, and director Brad Bird's ability to create something so alien and still infuse it with the necessary humanity to make him sympathetic to the audience is a sight to behold.

Bird also did a wonderful job recreating what it meant to live in small-town American during the fifties. In the tiny port of Rockwell, Maine, everything is small business and local industry. The rest of the world feels so far away, through the vast forests and over the mighty ocean. Yet schools show "educational" videos telling children to hide under their desks during nuclear attack, and bunkers for the people to hide in are in town. Fandom of science fiction is at an apex, and children dream what it would be like to see an alien creature or to possess powers like their favorite superhero. Last year's Super 8 had a very similar feel, but while it captured the small town life well enough, it didn't quite do enough on the Sci-fi side of things to make as much of an impact for me. Bird proves here - in one of his early films no less - that he has ample talent for a future in film directing, which he would prove was no fluke in future animated works The Incredibles and Ratatouille, and last year's live-action debut Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.

The Iron Giant is a truly heartfelt, inspiring tale of what it means to define oneself and to have a soul, steered fantastically by Bird, his animators and his talented cast. Sure, some of the characters are a little cliched, and perhaps the film does a little too much parody for its own good, but that is entirely forgiven when Diesel's giant metal man defies his destructive nature and saves the day, proving himself the hero he could always be. And that's the real meaning of this excellent film; no matter what our nature, we can always be the good guy, can always do the best we can. Only we define who we are. And that's what makes The Iron Giant so great, and so worth watching.

A Tom Cruise Horror Story

The search for last minute additions to 2011's "Worst Of" list continues. Today's contender is the latest in Tom Cruise's popular Mission Impossible films, code-named Ghost Protocol. It's relative easy to write off Tom Cruise these days. Ever since he decided he was going to act all bat-shit crazy, his box office performance went from "sure thing" to "meh" in a heartbeat and although he's still a profitable actor, he's nowhere near the superstar he was a decade ago. Thankfully for his agent, there's still one franchise that is completely under his control, and that's the Mission Impossible series. With both his sexuality and religion constantly under fire, it must be nice to be able to make an escapist film with zero elements of realism and earn a ton of cash doing so. In this latest installment, Cruise upped the ante by bringing in such talented performers as Jeremy Renner, Paula Patton and Michael Nyqvist, not to mention director Brad Bird in his live action film debut. So will this latest entry have the same draw as the series' earlier titles? I'd be content knowing whether or not it was any good.

Tom Cruise: rugged and loving it

After his IMF unit breaks him out of a Russian prison, super-spy Ethan Hunt (Cruise) is tasked with the mission of breaking into the Kremlin to extract sensitive nuclear launch information before it can be appropriated by a fanatic intent on starting a worldwide nuclear holocaust. When they fail and the Kremlin is bombed in a related attack, Hunt and his team are blamed, forcing the US President to declare "Ghost Protocol" in effect, disavowing the IMF completely. Now this small group must stop terrorist Kurt Hendricks (Nyqvist) from successfully launching a nuclear warhead, and they must do it without backup, support or any allies to fall back on. Win or lose, they must do it on the fly and with whatever materials they can scrounge up, from Moscow to India and home again.

Yes, Simon Pegg is here... I'm not sure why, exactly, but there you are

As in all the previous Mission Impossible titles, you have to keep a very high measure of disbelief in your system throughout most of your viewing. There is so much that happens, and the heroes (especially Cruise) are banged up so much over the course of the film that it's a shock they can still stand through most of it. Adrenaline and sheer willpower can only take you so far, after all. Still, Ghost Protocol does have some truly exciting sequences, and spread throughout the film to boot. There's no one moment that stands out as best from the others, though sufferers of Acrophobia will probably find it impossible to watch Ethan Hunt scale a portion of Dubai's Burj Kalifa without a safety harness. It's a difficult scene to watch even without the ever-present sense of vertigo setting in. Other standouts include Hunt chasing a target through a sandstorm and Agent Brandt (Renner) diving into a tunnel to get "caught" before he can impact with a giant turbine. The special effects are consistent throughout, with only a few moments looking obviously tweaked beyond the realistic. Bird's live-action directorial debut obviously could have benefited with a step further from the animation that he's used to working with, but to be honest the difference would have been negligible at best.

I'm guessing they can't hear him now. Good.

The acting, like the SFX, is if nothing else consistent. This is the type of film where most actors can get by on their charm, and for most of the people here, that is true. It's certainly the case for Cruise, who (ahem) cruises through everything that happens with a cool face of detachment, except for the few moments in the script that call for mild frustration. Despite his relative career downturn, Cruise hasn't needed to act in almost a decade, and when all he apparently does these days is action films, that's understandable. Less understandable is when a talented performer such as Paula Patton falls in that trap, an actress who has nowhere near the career cachet to justify oozing with charm without bringing more to the table. There's plenty of opportunity for her character to grow, but sadly that never really seems to happen. Simon Pegg is the comedic sidekick and he knows it, but apparently the script didn't, and Pegg does more than you might expect, though it was nice to see him bring a levity among the critically serious characters around him. Veteran actors Tom Wilkinson and Anil Kapoor also do little, with Wilkinson playing his small role as dry as the Sahara, and Kapoor doing just the opposite, playing up on the charm he exuded in 2008's Oscar winner Slumdog Millionaire.

The best deterrent against catcalls

But there are still a few actors who defy the shallowness of their roles. It's a shame to see that this year Michael Nyqvist has followed up arguably his most successful heroic role (that of Mikael Blomkvist in the Swedish adaptation of the Millennium series) with two cliched villain parts, first in the stinker Abduction and now this. He's a far more talented actor than he's being given a chance to be in Hollywood, and I wonder how long the good will is to last for him on the big screen in the good ol' USA. Still, he does do menacing well, and his final battle with Ethan Hunt at the film's finale is nothing if not believable. Lea Seydoux also stands out as a French assassin for hire, though she only appears in a few scenes of note. Finally, Jeremy Renner plays the only member of the four-person IMF team given real character development, and he is the only one who actually acts his way through the entirety of the movie. Renner is quickly becoming a true superstar, and I'm happy to see him rise to such heights from the relative success of 2009's The Hurt Locker.

Don't look down don't look down don't look down...

Between the action, special effects, and a liberal dose of humor that doesn't overpower the seriousness of the situations presented in the film, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol does a better than average job of entertaining its audience. It's not a very good movie overall, but nobody expects that of franchise action films these days, and this entry is no different from any similar release. That's it's biggest drawback, of course; you could have literally stayed home and rented any other action film (or an earlier Mission Impossible) and gotten exactly the same amount of fun from that than you would from Ghost Protocol. Still, it's nowhere near as poor as you can imagine, and should ensure more entries to the Mission Impossible series before too long. After all, Tom Cruise has to make money SOMEHOW.