Episode 582: Summer Movie Preview 2018
In this episode, Tyler and David discuss the upcoming summer movies as well as the nonexistent ethics of either tweeting or talking in a movie theater.
Recent Theatrical Reviews
Recent Home Video Reviews
COMMENTARIES
PREMIUM EPISODES
I’m just super excited that I’m genuinely super excited for two summer sequels, Mission: Impossible and Mamma Mia! I don’t even know if this has happened before.
On the naming of the mission:impossible sequels, I seem to remember around the time that Ghost Protocol was released that people were making noises that Tom Cruise would be removed from/leave the franchise with Jeremy Renner’s character becoming the protagonist from then on.
Perhaps part of the thinking behind chaning the naming convention from numbered titles subtitled names was to help draw the distinction. 1 to 3 are the Ethan Hunt movies, and everything after that is, (performs a google search) the William Brandt series.
Jon Turteltaub is brilliant IMO, arguably the funniest director working and more auteur than journeyman. His filmography reveals him as something like Walt Disney’s Paul Verhoeven – intelligent and ironic knockoffs of genre flagships (Home Alone, The Sixth Sense, Da Vinci Code, Silence Of The Lambs).
I may have laughed harder at the National Treasure 2: Book Of Secrets trailers than any I’ve seen – “It’s a book, a book of secrets – in the desk, you hit the thing, and it pops out!” (paraphrased)
The ironic self-awareness is dead obvious in the cash handoff sequence in 3 Ninjas and the slow clap in Cool Runnings (which is the canonical slow clap). I’ve been meaning to do a Medium post at length on both him and Stephen Herek, who is also overlooked.
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure does have some of the best time travel. It all loops around on itself without anything feeling pre-ordained! I totally understand the critique of how Looper handles time travel though, i.e. you can get your finger cut off in the present and your future self (who has been sent back in time and is now in your present) will see their finger fade away. I don’t love the time travel logic in Looper, but it is sort-of explained with the idea that timelines can be altered. We even see two different timelines play out: one where Bruce Willis is sent back and JGL kills him, and the one where Willis escapes. Willis even starts losing his old memory after the “split” and has trouble remembering his Chinese wife.
I think filmmakers have trouble both fitting a certain simple looping time travel logic (as seen in Bill & Ted and La Jetee) in their narratives, and they get hung up on feeling like it takes away their characters’ agency. It can be tricky to make whatever your character does mean anything if we and/or they know they’re already going to do it.
If you’re looking for another movie with very good time travel logic, watch Timecrimes. Everyone seems to love it – and while the logic seems to work out very neatly – I can’t ever really get behind the actual movie precisely because the character is such an idiot who is forced to do stuff via the simple fact that the narrative had him do something in one timeline and now the film needs to have him play it out.
Fuck me, I think I was an episode off. Gonna post this on the “Clever Movies” episode page.
Guess you can’t post the same comment twice on two different posts! Oh well.