Tag Archives: Tom Cruise

Oblivion

Liked Oblivion. Didn’t love it. It’s stylistically extremely appealing – the machines are fantastic – and the Icelandic locations are jaw-dropping.

Oblivion

Overall though, it just reeks of Tom Cruise’s overwhelming ego. He plays himself, basically – the inscrutable leather-jacket-and-raybans-wearing, motor-bike riding loner without an identity, without a past – a character we’ve seen him do again and again and again. Here he’s part of a two-person clean-up crew stationed on Earth. His partner is a creepy redhead woman he doesn’t love (hi Nicole!) and their joint role is to mop up after a thwarted alien invasion that’s resulted in full-scape evacuation to the moon Titan, fending off the last surviving Scavs and repairing fighting drones in the process. Throw in some Mad Maxy humanoids, a bit on cloning, some Super Intelligence, Morgan Freeman being Morgan Freeman, and a love story with a mysterious woman emerging out of hyper sleep, and you’ve got a miss-mash; it couldn’t really make up its mind whether it was a thriller, a psychological drama, an idyllic romance or some robust outdoor adventure. So, as I said, I liked it, just didn’t love it.

Jack Reacher

I’ve never read a Jack Reacher novel (surprisingly, given my lowbrow taste in books). I do however know that said character is meant to be a flippin scary dude of epic physical proportions. He is NOT meant to be dinky Tom Cruise. Having said that though, the first in the franchise of Jack Reacher movies (oh, I’m guessing, but you know it makes sense) is actually a pretty good film. My First-and-Only-One-True-Love Rosamund Pike plays a lawyer defending a man accused of a multiple public shooting, and Jack Reacher becomes embroiled in the investigation as it becomes clear that there’s a great deal more sinister at play. It’s more thriller than action movie, though the thumping is visceral, and the one liners are intelligent rather than sassy. Robert Duvall’s cameo is brilliant. Well worth a view.

But I have to comment on the locations. Jack Reacher filmed in Pittsburgh, which is all well and good – the riverfront in particular looks great on film. Pittsburgh’s been doing pretty well recently, scoring over $100 million a year over the last three years because of the State film incentive. But that’s not what was bizarre. Because there’s a scene fairly ealry into the investigation where Tom follows a meth addict back to his wooden-frame home on a bluff overlooking the city. And you know what? I swear it’s the exact same location used in Boys on the Side back 1995 where Drew Barrymore’s character kills her abusive boyfriend. I recognised the view from the porch first, but once inside the room layout is identical and entirely evocative of the earlier film. I love that about the movies.

Knight and Day

I went to see Knight and Day with a relatively open mind. I say relatively, because I think Tom Cruise is probably quite a sly and nasty piece of work. Also, the Redhead and Rose went to see the film on Friday and had pronounced it “Ho-Hum”; damning with faint praise.

So what can I tell you? Well, it’s one of those instantly recognisable spy capers: an unexplainable gadget of intrinsic value, cross purposes and betrayals and issues of identity, lots of CGI and a pair of protagonists who come to love each other via a series of outrageous action set pieces that occur in visually stunning places. Played serious, it could have been Mission Impossible. Luckily it’s not. In fact, aside from taking half an hour or so to get over the Tom Cruise ick factor, it was a pleasant enough way to wile away a Sunday afternoon in Belgrade.

As mentioned, the plot leaps from photogenic location to photogenic location: Boston to the Azores (actually Jamaica) to Salzburg to Seville (though quite why Austria was included as a plot point is a mystery – it’s kind of random.) Seville looks magnificent though – there’s lots of behind the scenes stuff online – including a great Access Hollywood insert here on the streets of Seville. Even nuggety little Tom seems decent enough, which – though I don’t believe or trust him for a nano-second – is a surprise.

Salt

I’m not an Angelina fan. I think beneath that glossy fat-lipped sheen she probably pupates and eats her young. But – in the same vein as, say, dinky nutter Tom Cruise or that shameless old hack, the devil’s own Nicky Cage – she has a perplexing level of success that brings her the kinds of film projects I’m loathesomely keen to watch.

In Salt, she plays an agent accused of being a Russian spy, leading to all kind of skop-skip-en-donder. It would have been so-so-yawn as yet another Tom Cruise film: the role was written for him. But whilst Angelina remains as likely a case for a Munchausen’s-By-Proxy diagnosis as I’ve ever seen, she will probably raise this above the norm.

Lions for Lambs

A zealous congressman launches a new military strategy designed to win the war in Afghanistan and details it to a lefty journalist. Two friends, soldiers involved in the operation, are caught behind enemy lines due to bad intel. Meanwhile, their former college professor tries to re-engage a promising but disillusioned student. These are the people and events of Lions for Lambs. 

The title refers (mistakenly) to a World War I quote about the brave sent to die by the capricious and the cowardly. In this Redford-directed, Cruise-produced and Redford-Cruise-Streep starring vehicle, the Lambs are clearly the vainglorious liars of the Republican party who dragged us all into a War on Terror without as much as a Gap Analysis to tell us where we were actually going and what we would do when we got there. This is a line of thinking that appeals to me immensely; sitting here at the far end of the planet, and not exactly plugged into to daily Security briefings at the Pentagon nor a particularly erudite student of military engagement, even I could have told you that Iraq had no wmds, that Saddam despised Bin Laden and there was (then) no Al Qaeda in Iraq, that the assault on the Taliban would be diverted and weakened by the opening of a second front, that incurious George is criminally responsible for the deaths of thousands of servicemen and women (let alone tens of thousands of Iraqis) and should be tried for his monumental incompetence and stupidity. There, I said it. And probably because of that, I quite enjoyed the film.

To be fair though, Lions for Lambs preaches (and I use that word advisedly – the film feels like a “message movie” adaptation of a couple of two hander plays written by someone trying to score political points) that we are all somehow responsible for the mess; the frat boy party animal for his cynical disengagement, the wizened hack for providing an unquestioning mouthpiece for the morally corrupt Bush regime, us, the audience, for sitting somewhere in between. Trouble is, as we’re being called to reconnect, we see the journalist quit, and once again we’re going in circles.

Lions for Lambs filmed mostly in California, with some establishing DC shots. The Afghan scenes played out in Rocky Peak Park in Simi Valley, CA – a popular hikers hang-out apparently.

Valkyrie

So Valkyrie has a fews things going against it; firstly, you know what’s going to happen in the end (and it ain’t pretty.) Secondly, the hero is a Nazi, which is always going to be difficult to pull off. And thirdly, it stars Tom Cruise, who’s an official loon and too barmy to be taken seriously in anything other than a straight-jacket. Quite remarkable then, that the movie turns out to be a tense, brooding Hollywood thriller about a piece of European history that’s been all but forgotten.

It’s premise is simple enough; in 1944, a group of conspirators lead by one-eyed, one-handed Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, placed a bomb in a briefcase in Hitler’s war cabinet room with the aim of eradicating Der Fuhrer and overthrowing the SS. We all know the bomb failed to do its work, and the movie recounts this moment in history well enough. But what’s more memorable – and in fact something of a revelation – is the nail-gnawingly taut aftermath of the blast, when the Good Germans so nearly, nearly pulled it off.

I enjoyed the film quite a lot – though these days I get distracted trying to work out how many local seamstresses would have been employed and how much business the local button manufacturer made, and how many construction crew got to work on the recreation of the Wolf’s Lair. I’m pleased too that the German authorities relented and allowed the filmmakers to use many of the original locations, including the Bendlerblock where von Stauffenberg and his cohorts were ultimately executed. It’s now a memorial to the German Resistance.

Tropic Thunder

I’m not quite sure what to make of Tropic Thunder - Ben Stiller’s raucous romp through Indochina (Zoolander meets Apocalypse Now). Some belly laughs (mostly covering my mouth going “Oh my god!”), some knowing smiles, a whole lot of “what now?”s. I got all of the jokes and everything; I just didn’t find them all that hilarious. Or maybe it’s because the comedy rollicks along so briskly, there isn’t time to let it all sink in?

The movie’s premise is simple; during the filming of a big-budget Vietnam war movie, several over-primped and self-obsessed movie stars are dropped in the middle of the jungle and forced to make their way home without personal assistants, TIVO or little bankies of cocaine. Along the way they fall foul of the Flaming Dragon drug cartel ruled by a vicious pre-teen thug with a bamboo whip and a penchant for a particular soppy Hollywood drama…..

Yes; no matter what you’ve heard, Tropic Thunder is not a throwaway, third grade-schoolyard style bullying of disabled folk but rather a sharp skewering of the vanity, vapidity and insincerity of Hollywood. And that’s a good thing, right? The cast is great – I have fondest memories of Steve Coogan as the hapless Brit director trying to contain the team of divas before – whump! – he steps on a mine, and a semi-naked, drug-addled, bleach blonde Jack Black strapped to a tree. Or the back of a buffalo. (Off set, the buffalo had a calf during filming they called “Little Jack” – I kid you not.) Downey Jnr would have been even better if he hadn’t lost me up front with a dreadfully fake Australian accent and Stiller of course is always Derek Zoolander – something for which he is still, just, forgiven.

I also secretly believe that Tom Cruise in reallife actually is just like foul-mouthed, fat-fingered Les Grossman; the fact that Tom in a fat-suit is a dead ringer for someone I once worked with made it all the more unnerving.

For a movie about fakes, it’s not surprising the team chose a fake Vietnam; the movie was shot on Kauai, where Stiller has a home. Locations included the movie’s two major set pieces, the Hot LZ and Flaming Dragon Compound. The Hot LZ – location for the tumultous opening “war scene” – was situated on an expansive valley of tropical land, part of the privately-owned 40,000-acre Grove Farm property. TheFlaming Dragon Compound where the movie’s final action sequence takes place was filmed a few miles inland, on set that was constructed over several months at the edge of Mount Waialeale. Mount Waialeale gets 350 rainy days per year – more rain than any other place in the world.

Wsbradio has some interesting production notes on the film; the Hot LZ explosion was apparently created with a 450 foot-long row of explosive pots filled with 1100 gallons of a 90/10 gasoline/diesel mix that were arranged across a field lined with coconut palm trees. In one take and at the flick of a switch, 11 cameras captured the controlled explosion that created a mushroom cloud fireball reaching 350 feet in the air. The entire staggered explosion consisted of 12 separate explosions, the full run of which was completed in 1.25 seconds.

Oh My God, Can You Rent the Colosseum?!

For a Locations junkie, I took my own sweet time to get around to blogging about Jumper, the Hayden Christiansen / Samuel L Jackson sci fi pic about a young man who learns that he has the power of teleportation. Given his special skills, it’s unsurprising that the movie’s locations include Paris, China, Egypt, the Sahara, Toronto, New York, Michigan, Tokyo and Rome.

Most impressive of these, the Rome Film Commission granted rare access to film in the Colosseum for three days.

Jumper

The New York Times reports this film-making coup to have been made possible by Rome Mayor, Walter Veltroni, “an unabashed cinephile with a soft spot for Hollywood glitz. Mayor Veltroni dined with Tom Cruise & Katie Holmes on the eve of their Italian wedding, and was primarily responsible for creating the Rome Film Festival, which took place for the first time in October. On the business front, his administration has streamlined the process for getting filming permits, and authorizes more than 2,000 shoots in the city each year.”

To make Jumper happen, the crew was required to keep equipment off the ground by using harnesses and to rely only on natural light for filming the Colosseum’s scenes.