It's an awfully tricky task for a director to make a film centered around gangsters, particularly those who are based on real-life individuals, while not glamorizing them or their actions. Just as the villain is often more interesting than the hero, the cinematic gangster is often more charismatic than the federal investigators whose job it is to hunt him down. Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather made the audience sympathize with, and essentially root for, a family of criminals. Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas took a slightly different approach, showing a decidedly less romantic view of the mob, and yet the film is still made with great style, energy and humor that it borders on glamorizing a bunch of mobsters throughout it's two and a half hour running time. Scorsese has always defended his approach to his depiction of the mob, indicating that he has to show the allure of this lifestyle or else it wouldn't make any sense as to why it's so appealing to these guys in the first place. That's a fair point, and it's a great film, but there's no doubt that this approach has also had the unfortunate effect of being misunderstood by certain members of its audience.
In early 2009, Taken became a sleeper hit in the United States. Directed by Pierre Morel, the film essentially reformed Liam Neeson's career from a dramatic actor to an action star almost instantaneously. Neeson himself stated that he didn't think it would be much of a hit at all, and would likely end up as a straight-to-video product in the United States (each of the three films have been produced in France). Audiences were very enthusiastic about this simple revenge story, although critics were a bit more lukewarm at the time. Naturally this kind of success would lead to a sequel in January of 2012, simply titled Taken 2 and directed by Olivier Megaton, with diminishing returns and a negative critical response. Still, the audiences showed up and, keeping in tradition with the release dates of the previous entries in the series, Taken 3 was released in January of 2015 to universal derision from critics, but still solid box office receipts. This is said to be the last installment in the revenge series, as the poster indicates "It Ends Here," and it's probably a good thing for that to be true.
It's hard to believe that the Mission: Impossible movie series has gone on for nearly 20 years now, with the first film being released in 1996 and directed by Brian De Palma. Unlike many other stars in the action genre who have struggled to maintain their box office glory over the years (Arnold Schwarzenegger being the prime example of this), Tom Cruise, now 53 years old, shows no signs of slowing down as an action star. With each new entry in this series Cruise has willingly put his own life at risk in order to entertain audiences, and his dedication is evident within the first 10 minutes of this film's opening. It's been well publicized on advertisements all over television and the internet, but it's worth mentioning again here that, yes, Tom Cruise does indeed hang off the side of an Airbus A400M cargo plane, at full speed, as it ascends up to 5,000 feet above the ground (and no, there's no stunt double). It's a genuinely thrilling and impressive opening sequence that rivals the best of those in the Bond series, and further proves how dedicated (or insane) Tom Cruise is to pleasing audiences. As a result, Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation is among the best action movies so far this year, second only to Mad Max: Fury Road.
Celebrating its 40th anniversary, Steven Spielberg's Jaws has recently been re-released for limited screenings around the country. An iconic American film if there ever was one, it's been credited as the one that started the summer blockbuster trend that continues to this day. Upon its release it was among the widest distributed films up to that point, shown on over 450 screens at once. There was a large marketing campaign that included several television advertisements and other tie-in merchandise. All of these things are now the norm for summer blockbusters that are released by major studios, but in 1975 this was pretty much unheard of. At that point the summer was the dumping ground for a number of movies, much like the months between January and April are now, and it wouldn't be surprising to read about how many industry insiders were predicting that Jaws would become a box office bomb based on its release date alone, not to mention its notoriously troubled production.
The disaster movie is among the most predictable kind that Hollywood can offer an audience. In the 1970s, at the height of their popularity, these kinds of films would attract A-list talent and end up becoming the highest grossing release of its year (such was the case with The Towering Inferno). More recent successes, such as Roland Emmerich's Independence Day from 1996 and The Day After Tomorrow from 2004, have only increased the scale and stakes of what audiences can expect from the genre, ranging from alien invasions to extreme global warming scenarios. Brad Peyton's San Andreas keeps the stakes big, but instead uses a somewhat plausible scenario (an enormous earthquake hitting the West Coast) and exaggerates it to an Emmerich-sized popcorn extravaganza. Unfortunately, Peyton's film was released at a time just shortly after recent earthquakes had devastated Nepal, and watching the San Andreas fault cause such huge amounts of destruction while audience members chew on popcorn can create an uneasy feeling in the theater.
To say that I had low expectations going into Terminator Genisys would be an understatement. The marketing campaign was less than inspiring, which included a laughably bad Entertainment Weekly photoshoot and a trailer that gave away the film's big twist (one of the promo posters did this as well). Add the fact that the film was slapped with a PG-13 rating instead of the R desired by fans of the series, as the first two films were, and things weren't looking too promising for the fifth installment in the Terminator franchise. In the weeks leading up to it's release, however, something came out of left field. James Cameron, the director of both The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, gave his seal of approval for the film in a featurette released by the studio, a clever marketing ploy that was clearly meant to win over the many skeptical fans of the series. In Cameron's opinion, this was the 'true' third film in the series, dismissing both Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and Terminator Salvation and saying that he believed this new film was the one that really honored his two originals. Now, it has finally arrived, and the question is: Does the film live up to Cameron's praise, or was he just doing it as a favor for Arnold Schwarzenegger and the studio to soften the negative buzz that had been building for months?
Recently there has been a new 4K restoration made for Carol Reed's classic film noir The Third Man, based on the screenplay by author Graham Greene (who subsequently published the work as a novella). The studio Rialto Pictures has released the film in a number of cities across the country for a limited engagement of this new restoration, and will continue to be shown until the end of the summer. I had never seen this film before, despite having heard so many great things about it over the years. I'm also a pretty big fan of Orson Welles, and he's the mysterious character on each poster (the one to the left of this paragraph being what's used for this recent re-release) so I decided to go check it out for myself. Luckily, as expected, I enjoyed it immensely and found the story to be engaging from the moment it began. Like any good film noir it combines a memorable score, morally ambiguous characters, and a very moody post-war Vienna as its backdrop for the story at the center.
