Inside Out - Danny's Review

The magic of Pixar tempted me to pay to watch an animation, for the first time in decades. The cinema was packed, and some of the kids looked about four years old. I know people claim that these sorts of films are for adults too, but they're wrong. The target audience of almost every film is the same as the protagonist, in this case an 11 year old girl called Riley, who like all animated characters has eyes the size of lemons.

The action takes place inside the girl's head, where the control tower is manned by the five emotions of Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust. This references the theory that all human cultures have six basic facial expressions (Surprise gets left out). It's a bit odd that these emotions are in charge, I would have thought they were subconscious automated responses, and the actual control centre of the brain should be somewhere else. Perhaps with those little aliens in the Eddie Murphy film Meet Dave.

Sometimes you see into other people's heads. They have their own version of the five emotions, with a different one at the controls. For the little girl Joy is mostly in charge, but we see the value of the other emotions too, in particularly sadness. It's a bittersweet story.

We get a strange and colourful tour of the brain. At the end of each day the memories are shifted from short to long-term, and the Dream Production team puts on a performance complete with reality filter to make it seem real. There's clowns lurking in the subconscious, a graveyard of old childhood memories, and caretakers who destroy old memories that aren't needed any more ("Phone numbers? She's got them all on her cell now."). Most of it seems loosely based on neuroscience, though I'm not convinced by the personality islands and core memories.

Hearing someone's innermost thoughts is always entertaining, and this film had plenty of that. It was an enjoyable film, with some well thought out moments.

Ant-Man - Danny's Review

I went to the cinema yesterday for a double bill. One family-friendly superhero film (Ant-Man) and one animation for children (Inside-out). It was a tough sell as I don't like superhero films and I don't like animations. I like films with prisons, submarines, and Denzel Washington.

Arnold Schwarzenegger had it right in his autobiography Total Recall when he was anxious that his character in Terminator 2 wasn't allowed to kill anybody, and had to be reassured by James Cameron that the rest of the film was still violent. There's something hugely disappointing about action sequences where you know no one can get hurt. Weirdly Ant-Man's 12 certificate does allow swearing, specifically the word shit which appears a few times.

The premise is that Michael Douglas has discovered a way to "shrink the distance between atoms" but decided to bury the research as it was too dangerous. But his evil bald protege and former friend has now cracked the formula, so Douglas recruits ex-con Paul Rudd to use the tiny technology to destroy the research. There's also Michael Pena providing quite a good comedy sidekick, a woman with a massive fringe and icy demeanour (like the woman in Jurassic World; 80s power dressing is back) and look out for a surprise appearance by Avon Barksdale from The Wire.

Two plot flaws. The first time Ant-Man is shrunk nobody can hear him shouting, but later they all can. It's explained that when he's tiny he's much denser (his mass hasn't changed) which is why he's so strong. But Michael Douglas has a tiny tank on a keyring which he reveals is actually a full size tank. So why doesn't it weigh the same as a full size tank?

The CGI fest of Ant-Man shrinking and running around is all done in a helter-skelter way, which makes you think you're watching an animation (specifically B Movie). There's no time to think about what it would actually be like to be tiny.

This film is written by Edgar Wright (Sean of the Dead etc.) and Joe Cornish (Adam & Joe) but clearly has a studio influence too. It's a strange mish-mash of standard action and attempted comedy. Paul Rudd as Ant-Man occasionally has sarcastic lines that mock the action, such as "I really ruined the moment there didn't I?" When he suggests that they call The Avengers I thought he was joking, but he was serious and this film does surprisingly live in the world of The Avengers, and there's the worst sequence of the film where they meet The Falcon.

It's a good cast, and slickly made. The best bit is the surreal moment that you've already seen in the trailer when they zoom out on the crash-bang-wallop action and it's just toy-trains. I found this entertaining but think it could have been really good if it was made 30 years ago, with a bit less polish.

Mission: Impossible - Rogue; Nation = Jamie's (review)

The grammar primer's fifth instalment is the fourth best, ranking behind the beautiful De Palma confection in first place, Brad Bird's rollicking cartoon in second and JJ Abram's vicious, elevated-by-Philip Seymour Hoffman third entry in third. Woo's whiffy second entry, which now seems a lot more fun then it did at the time, remains in last position.

But they don't exist in a steep curve from excellent to crap. All five are of a high standard for this sort of whizz-bang-pop PG summer action confection. The franchise is helped by the fact that a different director takes on each entry, resulting in a new flavour every time, from De Palma's taut, balletic staging to Woo's hollow melodrama and slo-mo absurdity, from Abram's chaotic, verite paranoia to Brad Bird's live action Incredible's comedy and cartoonish stunts.

McQuarrie might have been expected to bring a bit of that seedier, more grounded street-level action seen in the under appreciated Jack Reacher, but instead the film is a bit of a grab-bag of styles (because who the hell wants a grounded Mission: Impossible film?). The results are mixed.

The stand-out sequence is a taut assassination attempt with multiple shooters poised around an opera house as Cruise tries to silently take them all out. Did McQuarrie watch the similarly-excellent opera scene in Quantum of Solace (also the highlight in that film)? There's something about theatre-set suspense that works well on-screen. Watching a theatre audience triggers a Pavlovian response in the cinema audience. We experience a disproportionate concern that the performance will be disrupted. See also the rollicking, grand guinol Grand Piano.

Cruise is also great. I've always been a fan. Say what you will about his cult membership, he is a movie star and he is not lazy. Ironically, he never cruises. Tom Effort would have been a more appropriate stage name. It's a quality that's more and more recognised now. I wondered if the film's opening was a knowing nod to the memes that have built up of Cruise sprinting, which he seems to do in every film, always with maximum effort writ across his beautiful brow, because as soon as the movie opens he's off, dashing like a dog let slip - inexplicably in a suit, like he's run straight from his running scene in The Firm.

Cruise is great in this. The shift in his attitude in the first film (which is now, unbelievably, almost 20 years old), where he accepts each sure-to-be-fatal task with a confident swagger, to this one, where he sighs and resigns himself to the next insane battering, is a good one.

Rebecca Ferguson, the putative but unconsummated love interest, is also good. Unlike Cruise, who like a true movie star plays himself (albeit to perfection), Ferguson is enigmatic. She's also interesting to watch, she's strong without being Hollywood's traditional version of female strong (boring leather-clad robot) and she does a neat jumping leg strangle.

Less successful is an action sequence underwater, because it looked too much like a computer game to me.

One interesting feature of this entry, which I'm not sure I like, is the winking at the audience. At one point the bad guy talks about Cruise in abstract terms as a manifestation of destiny itself. Several times the team's descriptions to one another of the latest bizarrely unique sequence of locks they have to break through verges on parody. Though I guess each heist has to involve doing something visually spectacular that hasn't been seen before, so it will get pretty ridiculous (M:I 19: "the only way in is through the guts of a crow, so we'll have to shrink you, and it will explode if it detects that you have lungs, so we will have to remove your lungs").

The increased involvement of Simon Pegg broke the fourth wall for me. I couldn't stop imagining how Pegg must have been pinching himself constantly as he shared scenes with Tom fecking Cruise. His mugging is a bit much, but I suppose the franchise is aiming to replicate a team feel.

That team dynamic is a telling return to the television set-up of M:I. Back in '96, Cruise was a massive opener, the biggest star in the world, and the M:I rights were used to give him and only him an action role. So the film opened with the rest of the team being promptly killed off. Now, Cruise isn't so robust at pulling in the crowds by himslf (a pity: I'm sentimental and weirdly protective about the Cruister's movie star status, plus he clearly likes to be liked, plus Edge of Tomorrow is tremendous) and the Fast & Furious films have shown the box office benefit of an action family. Hence the somewhat awkward appearance of Jeremy Renner and Ving Rhames, crowbarred in but no-one knowing quite what to do with them.  It can't help but feel like a bit of a cynical imposition. Ethan Hunt is a fair weather friend, I would say (the less said about his here-today, gone-tomorrow wife the better).

But it's still a good solid blockbuster.

Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation - Danny's Review

This is the fifth film in the series. I didn't really want to see it but nothing else started at the right time. I think for a blockbuster like this to be worthwhile, it has to be really good. It's not like some arthouse film you might find crushingly boring at the time then think of a week later; a Mission Impossible film is about instant gratification. It's got to be thrilling at the time. And this was not.

In the very first scene Ethan Hunt is hanging on to a plane, and his irritating sidekick Benji (Simon Pegg) is fumbling about trying to open the door. His slapstick efforts reassure the audience that there's no real danger here, and it's just a bit of fun. When Hunt does board the plane he finds some missiles and jumps off the plane with them. This scene has little bearing on the rest of the film, but it's justified as being part of a general plan for the evil boss to spread mischief and mayhem, which he continues to do. As far as I could tell, by the end we still don't know why he was doing this.

There's two standout action scenes. One is at the opera, where no fewer than four shooters are aiming at the Austrian Prime Minister. The other where the team rob a bank with Hunt diving into an water vault to change a security card. It's an exciting sequence, but you have to question the design of the bank. What do they do when they legitimately want to change the security cards, send down a diver? They are robbing the bank on behalf of the villain who it seems couldn't rob it himself; he needed the IMF (Impossible Mission Force) to do it for him.

So a couple of good bits, and Cruise is certainly a watchable star, but overall it does not hang together well. It's disjointed, with action scenes that don't move the story forwards then a burst of explanation. The chase scenes are dull. At least let's have Tom Cruise running really fast, like he does through the desert in MI:4. Another weak point is Ving Rhames, who pops up looking very much like a man with a contract to appear in all Mission Impossible films. Apparently this one had a lot of Chinese financing, which explains the extensive touristy scenes in London, including one shot featuring no fewer than six red phone boxes. There's also a Chinese name high up in the credits who does not appear at all in the film, presumably she was only in the version released in Asia to boost the appeal to that market.