the awesome/terrifying freedom

my best friends, shelly and heeth unite to save my neighborhood!

saw mission impossible this weekend.

i gotta say i had really high hopes for this film, as i am a big fan of jj abrams, and overall i think it's a pretty good film. the actions sequences are imaginative and exciting, and there's actually a (gasp) coherent plot! my only problems with it are minor, but i'm surprised that jj didn't catch them. don't worry no spoilers.

hoffman needs one more scene to give his arc as villain proper closure. as is, we feel slightly cheated, and i really think it's in the way a film disposes of its villan that determines whether we will tell our friends it's 'kick ass' or 'so-so.'

karen kohlhass taught me that variety is interesting, and must be scored and modulated like writing music. if you have a section that is 'big and fast,' you must follow it with any of the other options: big and slow, small and fast, or small and slow. abrams doesn't give the action enough time to breathe, to let us catch up, and to give us proper beats so that we can tell who's winning, where we are, what's happening. it wasn't nearly as bad as in most action films, but here we had three disctinct action sequences packed back to back with no room for breath. what happens is that the entire chunk of film gets filed away in our brains as one thing: loud action, got kinda boring. karen has made this theory the centerpoint of her entire philosophy of directing. she named her company 'big and slow.'



my absolute favorite use of variety, pauses, and breathing is the restaurant battle in kill bill 1. i could watch that masterpiece a hundred times.



though sometimes the need to break things up gets stilted and hokey, such as in M:I-2 (or all john woo movies) when the action suddenly freezes so that a flock of doves can fly through. (intersting that this film was promoted as "m:i:iii," when the previous was "M:I-2")