Content tagged with “movies”

I’ve always loved the opening scene of the original Mission Impossible. It was set in Prague, and it was the perfect mix of action and intrigue.

As luck would have it, I found myself in Prague a couple years ago, and I spent an entire day tracking down all the shooting locations I could find. (I thought this was novel and original, but it turns out a lot of people have done it.)

I put my pics, and the corresponding frame from the movie, into this Google Doc.

I watched The 39 Steps, which is a Hitchcock movie from 1935. It’s considered one of the classic spy thrillers.

A man in London runs into a woman who claims to be a spy who has uncovered an intelligence network in Scotland. She’s on the run from assassins. Before long, the man is accused of her murder, and he has to flee into Scotland to find whatever she uncovered and prove his innocence.

It’s quite good for its time. The final sequence is really well-done and brings it all together. And I’m no expert on Hitchcock, but there’s a lot of signature style from him in there (including a brief cameo).

I’m not sure if I missed it, but I wasn’t quite sure which side was the bad guys here. This was 1935, so I imagine it must have been the Germans…?

Syriana from 2005 is my favorite kind of movie: it has lots of plot threads that overlap and come together in different ways. I learned that this style has name: hyperlink cinema.

Unfortunately, a side effect of this style is that the film was wildly complex and hard to understand. While I was watching it for the first time, I was only barely understanding the overall plot mechanics and why everyone was doing what they were doing.

Over a decade ago, I found an interactive “plot explorer” tool for the movie that let you visually follow different threads on a digital surface. It’s here, but it was created in Flash, which hasn’t been relevant or supported on the web for years, so it doesn’t work on my browser.

Helpfully, the creator also converted it to a static image. It shows all the different groups and how they intersect, explaining what their individual motivations are which can help you figure out the plot.

(It’s worth mentioning also that Syriana has an awful torture scene which is probably the biggest impediment to me ever re-watching it.)

Chases are all over the place in spy movies, but the second car chase in Ronin is one of the best on film. It’s a BMW and a Peugeot through the streets of Paris.

It’s very realistic (except maybe for a weird amount of sparks). There’s no musical soundtrack for most of it, just more than seven full minutes screaming engines and scraping metal. Robert DeNiro looks like he’s on the verge of a stroke from start to finish.

6 Underground is a guilty pleasure. It combines Michael Bay with Ryan Reynolds — maybe the two most un-subtle people in Hollywood.

The movie is unapologetically ridiculous, but I always thought it did a great job with exposition. There’s a lot of backstory to get through, and it nicely weaves that through a set of flashbacks.

The plot isn’t terrible, but it’s essentially just a framework to hang 4-5 action set pieces on.

This is a not a “good” movie, in the traditional sense, but it’s wildly entertaining. Every shot is visually stunning and the action is well-choreographed.

I shut my brain off and re-watch it a couple of times a year. I just don’t tell people about it.

Here’s a short video about Daniel Craig’s screen test for Bond (it says 2006, but Casino Royale was released in 2006, so it had to be earlier than that). There’s a voiceover from Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson about how much they wanted Craig for the role.

Then, towards the end, you see and hear the scene they’re doing — it’s the “I’m the money” scene between Vesper and Bond (”…every penny of it”) that was on the train in the film but is being done on a hotel room set for the screen test.

Vesper is played by someone other than Eva Green. I’m not sure who is playing Craig’s haircut.

M’s speech to Bond in GoldenEye has to go down as one of the great monologues in the Bond movies. Pierce Brosnan was the new Bond, and we had a female M in Judi Dench, which people weren’t so sure about, but this one scene likely laid every concern to rest.

I especially love it when Bond says “point taken,” thinking that would defuse the situation, but M just goes right on to tell him how she’d be perfectly happy to “send a man out to die.” And this was after she deliver the now-classic, “sexist, misogynist dinosaur; a relic of the Cold War.” And let’s not forget the symbolism of when M summarily dismisses Bond’s suggestion about the bottle her “predecessor” kept in the office.

Bond’s responses are key to the exchange too. Beyond the dialog, he has some facial expressions and pauses that really sell the idea that he’s dealing with something completely new.

The scene is utterly brilliant, and it launched one of the greatest character portrayals in the Bond movie canon. I’d never say GoldenEye was one of the top-tier Bond films, but it was exactly the film that the series needed at the time it came it out, and Dench was exactly the supporting actor that Brosnan needed to land on his feet.

Chief of Station was a bit of a miss. It’s well-filmed, on-location in Budapest, and even has a bit part for a former Bond girl (Olga Kurylenko was Camilla Montes in Quantum of Solace). It opens with a nice scene of tradecraft, which makes up for a particularly uncomfortable torture scene later on (a la Syriana, but worse).

However, I just don’t think Aaron Eckhart is that great of an actor, and a lot of the story depends on him (apparently, Alec Baldwin was originally cast in the role). Plus, the writing was just kind of tired. Nothing interesting to see here, honestly.

Doug DeMuro reviews the Jaguar XKR from Die Another Day, currently on display in the Petersen Museum. Better yet, he drives it on Los Angeles city streets, complete with a mounted gatling gun in the back. (Spoiler: other than the body shell, it’s not a Jaguar at all…)

Though not technically a “spy,” The Thomas Crown Affair does lurk on the periphery. I loved the Pierce Brosnan version from 1999, and it looks like we’re getting a new one from Michael B. Jordan.

Letterboxd has published its Top 100 Spy Films. It’s a pretty good list. Happy to see two of Daniel Craig’s Bond films quite high (before any Connery film, notably), along with Rogue One (if it included TV, then Andor would no-doubt be up there too).

Thunderbolts seems like a really odd choice, but No Way Out is an absolute favorite of mine.

Haywire is fully 15 years old, back when Gina Carano was known only for MMA , hadn’t done Star Wars, and hadn’t made the tweets that got her canceled.

It’s not a bad movie at all. It’s directed by Steven Soderberg, and it shows. It’s very moody, very stylized. And the soundtrack is by the same guy who did Out of Sight and the Oceans series. It’s very much got the same vibe.

What’s amazing is the cast. It’s got some heavy hitters in supporting — and some very small — roles: Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Channing Tatum, Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor.

All throughout, I knew what was happening on a small scale, but I didn’t understand why. Carano was running, fighting, and shooting a lot, but… why, exactly? Turns out, I wasn’t just dumb, because the plot isn’t clearly explained until the last five minutes of the movie.

As for Carano, this was her first “real” movie, and I alternated thinking she was pretty stiff one minute, and thinking she wasn’t half bad the next. Well, it turns out a bunch of her lines were dubbed (by Laura San Giacomo, no less), so that might explain the uneven-ness of her performance.

Still, not a bad movie. Worth watching.

Argylle was not a “good” film, but it was inventive and amusing. It’s basically a big spy parody, with a pretty decent twist in the middle that I didn’t see coming. But it’s way, way too long, at two-and-a-half hours.

Also, it absolutely bombed at the box office. Made less than $100 million when it had to make about $500 million to be considered successful. We were supposed to get a crossover/shared universe with Kingsman, but that’s certainly not going to happen now.

Honestly, I like Henry Cavill in about anything spy related. He should of been Bond.

Jack Ryan, Ghost War was very paint-by-numbers. I enjoy John Krasinski in the role, but there was nothing in this film that was interesting. Even the action sequences were tired.

I liked the prior series format, because a plot could develop over eight full hours of story. This is only about 90 minutes, and the plot is about an inch deep. Even with that, honestly, I had a hard time figuring out what was shooting at who and why.

Not great.