This Email Will Self-Destruct 💥
Aronofsky summer, Cruise can't stop, and some very sick heists.
Hey film friends. Happy Memorial Day to all who celebrate. I saw a very long movie yesterday (it clocked in at 2:49) that I’ll be writing about later this week, but in the meantime, it made me think about how much I love a short film. Not an actual short, but a 90-minute (or less) movie-going experience. Really, it just reminded me how much I love Before Sunset, which is a cool 80 minutes long. So, if you’re looking for a perfect little cinema capsule to ease into the short week, consider giving Richard Linklater’s (arguably) best movie a try this evening.
Cheers, MB
In this week’s issue:
🏃 A summer movie that keeps looking better and better
💥 The near quaintness of Mission: Impossible
🏦 Five other great movie heists because heists rule
🚂 A brief cinema history lesson, and so much more
The Weekend Take: May 23-25💰
Say hello to the biggest MDW box office ever. Estimated to hit a cool total of $325 million by EOD today, we have two small fury rascals to thank for that in Stitch and Tom Cruise.
Not sure where my Friendship heads are at, but I’m amazed that a Tim Robinson-led comedy (yes, one that also co-stars Paul Rudd) might make $10 million at the box office. But hey, everyone needs to feel seen on the big screen I guess?
But First, the News 🗞️
• Dang, is it about to be Aronofsky summer? More realistically, it might be Austin Butler summer, but still, it’s been a minute since I’ve been this in on a movie after seeing the trailer. And yet, this team-up from the mind of the man who made Mother! and the guy who just couldn’t quit Elvis looks f*cking sick. We got late-90s NYC, Zoë Kravitz burning hotter than the surface of the sun, Daemon Targaryen taking us to Narnia, and the fake Hasidic tandem of Vincent D'Onofrio and Liev Schreiber introducing Butler’s baseball flame-out protagonist to matzo ball soup? I’m stoked.
• In the least surprising headline of the movie year, Tom Cruise Intends to Keep Making Movies Into His 100s: “I Will Never Stop.” And on top of that, director Alejandro Iñárritu described his upcoming Cruise movie as “A Wild Comedy of Catastrophic Proportions.” Not much else to say besides… sure.
• It was reported this week that Denzel Washington earned $35 million to star in Spike Lee’s new film, Highest 2 Lowest, which might seem like a lot because, well, it is. However, this year’s NRG poll, which surveys Americans’ movie-going habits across age groups and demographics, found that he’s also the #1 movie star on the planet when it comes to getting people to go to an actual theater. Odd then that Highest 2 Lowest will only be in theaters for two weeks this summer before moving to Apple+.
• Huge news for all my Chazellephants out there (yes, I made that up). First, his rumored Evil Knievel movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio is being put on hold, which is not great. Second, he’s instead moving forward with a mysterious prison movie that will likely star Daniel Craig and Cillian Murphy, which is great. If you haven’t seen First Man, go watch it. And if you like it, and enjoy fun, check out Babylon next. Also, it sounds like Leo dropped out of the Evil Knievel movie to prioritize working with Papa Scorsese again as he is quite ancient, which is probably the most wholesome decision Leo will make this year.
The mind behind Anatomy of a Fall is back. Writer/director, and certified sicko, Justin Triet’s new movie will apparently be “in English with some major star,” which sounds pretty rad to me. No word yet if Messi will be in this one, but I for one think that Triet should find some way to bring that very good boy into the fold. In case you didn’t click that link, Messi was the dog, not the actual boy. Don’t be weird.
A Way-Too-Short Review: Mission: Impossible 💥
In the most recent Mission: Impossible movie, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, Tom Cruise walks (and actually fights someone) on a biplane. Not only that though, he does so at a velocity that potentially should’ve killed him. In the previous Mission: Impossible movie, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Cruise rides a motorcycle off the side of a mountain and straight into a base jump, which at the time was referred to as “The Biggest Stunt in Cinema History.” In other previous Mission: Impossible movies, he performed an actual halo jump out of plane, climbed down the Burj Khalifa, and hung off the side of another plane as it took off. No for real, he actually did that. There was also the whole cliff-hanging thing and the motorcycle duel, the latter of which wasn’t quite so real, but was arguably the most 2000s thing to ever 2000.
In 1996’s Mission: Impossible, however, the most realistic stunt in the movie, and one of the most iconic cinematic moments of the past 40 years, simply involves Cruise hanging by a rope just inches above the floor, all while breaking a sweat ever so slightly. And you know what? It still kicks ass.
While the Mission: Impossible movies have continued to one-up each other over the past 30 years, shifting their entire marketing strategy towards the scale of the stunts (and whatever semblance of sense Cruise still has, dissolving in front of our eyes), there was a time when these set pieces were tertiary to the movie as a whole, placed politely behind the spy-craft of it all and the eccentricity of its star’s sheer fame wattage. But never the plots, because they don’t ever remotely make any sense at all, and in none of the Mission: Impossible movies are all of those things more true than in the one that started it all.
Mission: Impossible is a weird, psycho-sexual romp through the mind of a talented man put into extreme circumstances. Long story short, it’s a Brian De Palma movie, but one that also cost $80 million and made more than $400 million while launching a 30+ year franchise. It was also one of the first early 90s/2000s TV-to-movie success stories, transporting the sometimes-silly 1960s show into a contemporary cinematic era. It cemented Cruise as the movie star, set Ving Rhames up for life, and again, the Langley rope dangle is still elite, no matter how quickly Cruise learned to fly a helicopter a few years ago so he could do just that on screen. Young Cruise hung from that sealing, doing a metaphorical snow angle, so that old Cruise could break his ankle while jumping across rooftops and set world records for time spent holding one’s breath (well, until Kate Winslet told him to hold her tea).
This movie is so convoluted and odd, and gives way too much time to John Voight, who is also a bit convoluted and odd, but it sets the stage for what’s to come: the stunts, the weird chemistry Cruise has with his team, and our interest in watching one of the most peculiar famous people on Earth continue to push his mind, body, and sense of self to the limit. All while breaking a sweat, as he always does, ever so slightly.
The TL;DR
Rating: 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿
What is Mission: Impossible? The alpha, the springboard, the weird small idea that birthed seven overstuffed mega-ideas. It also features Emilio Estevez, who apparently prioritized this movie over D3: The Mighty Ducks as he thought he was playing one of the lead roles in Mission: Impossible. Oops.
Should you make time for this movie? I think so, it’s a fascinating little watch – both to see how far the franchise has come and to see what Cruise was like when he was still sort of a resident of this planet/reality.
What’s it have to do with now? Well, there is a new one of these movies out in theaters AS we speak (review coming soon). Otherwise, not much as this film is extremely 1996 coded.
What will you remember most from this film? The Langley heist. And how twitchy Cruise is. And maybe how hot Emmanuelle Béart was? Some combination of those three things for sure.
Five Other Great Heist Scenes from Movies Because Heists Are Sick 🏦
The Opening Sequence from The Dark Knight
Yes, I am a walking stereotype and I have accepted this. However, this is simply incredible stuff. Not only is it a cool heist that pays homage to Heat, but it introduces the Joker in such a fascinating way, both by his pawns delivering exposition about him and that startling image that sets the entire tone of the movie, but also the literal way in which it’s edited with each step in the actual heist floating into the next until we arrive at Heath Ledger’s first closeup in the film. This might be the single best sequence Christopher Nolan’s ever directed, well except for seven other candidates in this movie, or anything with Bane in this movie’s sequel. Or the nuclear test in Oppenheimer. Sorry, what were we talking about? Oh right!
The Bank Robbery Scene in Out of Sight (1998)
While the opening sequence of The Dark Knight is cool as a movie watcher, there’s nothing about the characters or events that occur in the scene that are actually cool. Instead, they’re all rather disturbing. However, this introductory scene in Steven Soderbergh’s somewhat forgotten rom-com crime classic Out of Sight, well, it’s the complete opposite. Before George Clooney was Danny Ocean, he was Jack Foley, a guy so smooth and likable that he essentially convinces the US Marshall who is after him, played by Jennifer F*cking Lopez, to fall in love with him rather than arrest him. This movie rules, but this first scene is iconic. Heck, maybe they both are.
The Nun Heist in The Town (2010)
Speaking of bank robberies (wow, we’re really three-for-three here thus far), this might actually be the third-most interesting of the three heists in Ben Affleck’s rather rad The Town, after the first one where they wear the crazy dreadlock demon masks and the Fenway job where they rob the Red Sox. But what the nun heist does have is 1) a great car chase through the North End, aka the least-subtle homage to Heat this side of The Dark Knight, and this moment of pure cinema. That’s all I really have to say about that.
The Laser Dance in Ocean’s 12 (2004)
Enough with the banks, ENOUGH WITH THE DOLLARS AND CENTS! OK, heard. Let’s pivot again to the world of art thievery because even though Soderbergh’s universe of Oceanic crime is full of great heists that always (kind of) make sense, only one of them involves Vincent Cassel doing capoeira to French techno while dodging security lasers. Also, the little heal click at the end? Great touch. I could never choose between the Ocean’s movies, and while there’s another very interesting heist in this very movie where Julia Roberts plays a woman trying to pass as Julia Roberts in order to potentially steal something from a museum… you know what, there’s no time. Wait, but what if there was…?
The Final Kick in Inception (2010)
We’ve always got time in Cobb’s house of dream horrors! There might be no single stretch in a blockbuster that can be better described as “hits blunt one too many times” than Inception’s final montage sequence of traveling up through the dream levels. Look at us, we started with some simple scenes of men robbing banks in masks, and now we’re talking about inserting false motivations into people’s minds in order to convince them to dissolve their father’s conglomerate so that a competitor can win. Corporate espionage, LFG! I don’t have much to say about this stretch from Inception other than it’s awesome, and yes, I know it’s the second Nolan shoutout on this very short list. Two Nolans, two Soderberghs, and one Affleck. Honorary mentions for Point Break, Heat, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Rogue One, but did any of them have Marion Cotillard singing a song by Édith Piaf, the same Édith Piaf that she once portrayed in an earlier film? Hints blunt one more time on top of the pre-existing too many times. I think not, my guys!
What the F*ck Is This Movie? 🚂
The Great Train Robbery (1903)
Guess what? If you Google “first heist movie,” you’re met with 1903’s The Great Train Robbery. And you know what? It’s a pretty good way to spend 17 minutes and feel a bit smarter about film history. Some background:
“The Great Train Robbery is a 1903 American silent Western action film made by Edwin S. Porter for the Edison Manufacturing Company. It follows a gang of outlaws who hold up and rob a steam train at a station in the American West, flee across mountainous terrain, and are finally defeated by a posse of locals. The short film draws on many sources, including a robust existing tradition of Western films, recent European innovations in film technique, the play of the same name by Scott Marble, the popularity of train-themed films, and possibly real-life incidents involving outlaws such as Butch Cassidy.”
You can watch the movie in its entirety right here, and let me tell ya, if the film’s director Edwin S. Porter could get a load of Inception, I think he’d need to be institutionalized. His benefactor, Big Tommy Edison though? He’d be like, “Oh yeah, makes total sense.”
Seen anything good lately (other than The Great Train Robbery? Are you also confused by John Voight’s entire existence? Do you also sometimes think about how you’d steal a certain work by Klimt when you visit MoMA? Let me know by responding to this email.