TV/Movies Megathread

[CountDeMoney]

Tom Cruise. How that got missed is a mystery.

Not sure I see it.  He played the exact same character in Days of Guns and Top Thunder, but other than that he's picked a variety of roles.

That's why I wrote "10 years ago" in my post;  he's been rather diverse in his roles the last several years, turning point in his career being Magnolia.

But as far as his characters are concerned, they all followed the same motif:  cocky, surefire guy on top of the world and his game, meets adversity, has crisis of confidence, <insert optional chick here to help with said crisis if necessary>, has to start from scratch, transformation begins, he gets back on top with a greater perspective, fin.

Sure, Top Gun and Days of Thunder are the most obvious, but this formula works with Risky Business, Cocktail, Rain Man, Jerry McGuire, and yes, even A Few Good Men.

[CountDeMoney]

He's the same cocky prick with vast innate talent but who has problems with authority and often an inferiority complex, that he overcomes with a combination of determination and accommodation, in almost every movie he's ever been in, from Risky Business to Jerry Maguire to Mission Impossible 1, 2, 3 and Ghost Protocol.

I preferred my formula. 

[Ideologue]

He's the same cocky prick with vast innate talent but who has problems with authority and often an inferiority complex, that he overcomes with a combination of determination and accommodation, in almost every movie he's ever been in, from Risky Business to Jerry Maguire to Mission Impossible 1, 2, 3 and Ghost Protocol.

I preferred my formula. 

I'll let you know how Lone Ranger is, dude.

[Sheilbh]

I don't even think he's changed that much in the last 10 years. He basically still plays the Tom Cruise character - with the honourable and glorious exceptions of Tropic Thunder and Magnolia. If you compare his (or Will Smith's) career path with, say, Brad Pitt it shows how samey and safe they've been.

I mean what was his last big film, Jack Reacher? My lord

[CountDeMoney]

Actually, I thought he did a hell of a great job spoofing his secret agent persona in Knight and Day.

[Ideologue]

I'll let you know how Lone Ranger is, dude.

BREAKING: it was lame.

[Habbaku]

I mean what was his last big film, Jack Reacher? My lord

Oblivion, actually.  Much better than Jack Reacher.

[CountDeMoney]

I'll let you know how Lone Ranger is, dude.

BREAKING: it was lame.

I just knew Disney would fuck it up.

[Ideologue]

I mean what was his last big film, Jack Reacher? My lord

Oblivion, actually.  Much better than Jack Reacher.

Oblivion's the shit.  Fourth best movie of 2013 so far.

[Ideologue]

I'll let you know how Lone Ranger is, dude.

BREAKING: it was lame.

I just knew Disney would fuck it up.

Yes.

THE LONE RANGER (2013)

Go home, white man.  We don't need you.

When I sat down to write this review I accidentally typed The Long Ranger, and I'm tempted to just leave it at that.

The Lone Ranger difficult to critique meaningfully, because there are few things in this movie that screams wrongness. There's no break in the tracks that sends the whole machine screaming off into the abyss. But thirty minutes before it ends it finally gets to where it should have been thirty minutes after it began, and that a bad movie makes.

...Though other problems abound, this movie is a true failure of editing. Individual scenes are cut short before really landing their ideas or evoking a full emotional response. It turns that much of most tantalizing imagery from the trailer—John Reid waking atop a platform high above a mesa, John emerging from the grave, Silver riding through smoke, flame, and ember—is still only glimpsed in the full feature. Much, much more time is spent with long scenes of John and Tonto meandering as aimlessly as the script will permit, which is to say a very great deal. And Tonto can faithfully be counted on to always have one line too many, turning a half-decent chuckle into an eyeroll.

...Make no mistake, of course this is Tonto's movie and everyone involved knows it. It's so much Tonto's movie that the titular Ranger is a distraction in his own film. John Reid is a law and order type of the kind we certainly do need in the real world, but who is much-despised in cinema. He sticks to his effete East Coast elite principles long after the audience has been rendered comatose by their frankly unfilmic nature.  Perhaps the Lone Ranger of old was also not violent; this does not concern me, because this is a movie where one of the villains eats a man's heart, which I'm relatively certain was also not a standby of the original Lone Ranger program.

...Hammer is charming enough, but his character is a blunderer, a wet blanket, and a nerd, and I could not care less about his bullshit. Thanks to the Lone Ranger, this movie could more accurately be called Tonto Chained.

And don't think my Django parallel is just because of the temporal proximity, pitting the big Western of 2012 against the big Western of 2013, just because they (sort of) occupy the same genre. Django fearlessly explored the institution of slavery in the South; The Lone Ranger dips its toes, ankle, and gets about up to the knee in the moral quagmire of America's Western expansion at the expense of Indian natives and Chinese immigrants.  [That's the] tone issue with The Lone Ranger. Django has many silly things occur within its running time, but they arise naturally and the levity grows less frequent as we descend further into Calvin Candie's personal hell on earth. Ranger just kind of chugs along with its camp, but not camp enough, nonsense, while an accidental holocaust occurs in the background. This movie will graphically show a tribe being basically annihilated—our heroes don't stop the war that the conspiracy they're fighting is trying to start. Yet it never commits to anything, and really only has vague aspirations to being about the great horrors on the frontier.

...Of course, one shouldn't expect The Lone Ranger to be a serious film about race and colonialism. That's fine. One should expect it to be a rollicking action thrill ride; the entire point was to do Western as summer blockbuster. So the real question of the day is, where did the reported quarter billion dollars spent on this movie go?

...It's probably clear that I've never seen the old Lone Ranger serials or listened to the radio shows. I was always more of an planetary romance and science fantasy guy—Commando Cody and the like. That didn't stop me from being ready to love this Lone Ranger. Quite the opposite. Let me give you a piece of revealing background: the 1986 Flash Gordon is one of my favorite films. I mean, top ten-favorite. Probably top five.  Pulp fiction can make great cinema... The Lone Ranger needed to choose life and go for it, if they wanted to replicate (or, let's be realistic, approach) the artistic success of a Flash Gordon. They needed so much more than what they put into it.  Instead of Queen, it's yet another bland Hans Zimmer score that provides flashes of stimulation that go nowhere, and which at its best rises solely to the level of an Ennio Morricone-inspired cocktease.  Instead of Ming, it's a cardboard railroad baron.  Instead of Voltan, it's a gaping void (and when they had Stephen Root, too; you can feel the loss and heartbreak that Jimmy James in the Old West was so wasted).

Yet the final set-piece is fantastic enough, and is the true giddy action-camp I asked for in the first place. It has the power to rouse you from your stupor, even make you want to cheer, and the charitable could even forgive the two hours it took to get to this glorious point. But, it's never enough with these people: they decide to crap out a last line of dialogue that will just make you wonder, whether you loved the original shows or not, or even if you've never seen them or not, why they even bothered, if they hate the Lone Ranger so much.

C

[The Larch]

Well, the battles of Artemisium/Salamis deserve movies, but not ... this.

With Eva Green as warrior queen Artemisia of Caria!

They also want to reboot Terminator in 2015.

Possibly with The Rock in it! 

[Ed Anger]

I am so sick of the Rock. Not as sick of Michael Cera, but still sick.

[katmai]

I am so sick of the Rock. Not as sick of Michael Cera, but still sick.

You need to see "This is the End"

[Ed Anger]

I am so sick of the Rock. Not as sick of Michael Cera, but still sick.

You need to see "This is the End"

I'll add it to the list. 

[Darth Wagtaros]

Tom Cruise was great in Tropical Thunder.