Cruise risking life and limb for the UK film industry
An adoring audience, a fawning interviewer (Edith Bowman) and a prestigious award. Welcome to Cruise control in which the British Film Institute bowed to the Gods of populism and commercial cinema by awarding the BFI Fellowship to Tom Cruise “for his contribution to the UK film industry.”
You might well wonder how such a prize is justified for an actor who has never made a film with a British director (unless you count Stanley Kubrick as an honorary Brit).
The prize is rationalised by virtue of the employment opportunities Cruise has provided to special effects specialists for his ongoing Mission Impossible enterprise. A bit of a shoe-in I’d say although it serves the purpose of gaining positive publicity while giving TC a platform to tell the world what a genius he is.
On February 13th, Tilda Swinton was awarded an Honorary Golden Bear for her lifetime achievement at the 75th Berlin International Film Festival. Her brilliant Acceptance Speech should be watched repeatedly and shared widely.
The timeliness of her impassioned plea for humanity is evidenced by the fact it came the day before JD Vance’s tirade spreading hate and scapegoating immigrants at the Munich Security Conference . As Tilda said: “it has perhaps never been more pressing to consider to weigh with reverence and maturity what sovereignty means to humans.”
She cleverly avoided naming the latest mob of enemies to freedom and human rights. Any caring person should know who they are. Her speech is also rooted in a firm belief that “Cinema can inspire a civilized world”.
There is always more than one side to a story. As Tilda points out, movies are great at showing this. She doesn’t give examples but Akira Kurosawa’s Rashômon (1950) sets the benchmark here. It is also demonstrated in the more recent Japanese movie Monster (2023) directed by Hirokazu Koreeda where we see the same dramatic events from the perspective of worried mother, a teacher and a young boy.
Without patiently and compassionately considering all points of view there is a very real danger that the world’s agenda is set by blinkered extremists as if no other possibilities exist.
To imagine no country and a brotherhood of man may be idealistic but hope must lie in the dream that such a Lennon-esque vision will endure long after “greed addicted governments” and “planet wreckers” are confined to history. Tilda imagines “a borderless realm and with no policy of exclusion persecution or deportation” and why ever not?
Isn’t being human meant to help those in dire need rather than create more barriers to liberty?
Mission Impossible 7 – Dead Reckoning Part One directed by Christopher McQuarrie (USA, 2023)
In MI7, multiple MacGuffins are imbedded within 163 minutes of action-packed nonsense which is designed to keep even the most severe ADHD sufferer fully engaged.
Its elaborate and deliberately confusing plot taps into two modern day fears : 1. That one day soon AI will come to dominate the world and, 2. That one day soon you won’t just misplace your house keys but lose them for good.
The mission for Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) should he decide to accept it (when has he not?) is to retrieve one part of two-piece cruciform key that looks like it might unlock a papal vault in Vatican City but which, when united with its other half, will allegedly enable access to world dominance. [Spoiler alert : you have to take preposterous premises of this kind of on trust].
Mike Leigh specialises in bitter-sweet films so that just when you think you’re watching a comedy the story twists. You suddenly realise you’re witnessing something tragic instead. This is never more true than in his latest film, Hard Truths , which ends with more questions than answers and more bitterness than sweetness.
A lack of resolution is not usually a problem for me but in this case I found the conclusion overly harsh. I didn’t expect a happy ending but I did hope for a finale that was less desperate. Everyone will have a different take on this and this is borne out by the fact that the universal acclaim from critics on Metacritic is not matched by users. Many viewers have reacted negatively to the complex character of Pansy played so convincingly by Marianne Jean-Baptiste.
A great cover, an interesting subject and a promising title but sadly the content of this book leaves a lot to be desired. The first of its seven chapters takes up just under half the book and is for the most part a well-informed, though often repetitive, essay on the topic. William Burns knows his stuff but seems unsure whether his pitch should be high (with quotes from Derrida / Nietzsche) or low (e.g. when complaining that the vagaries of memory “can be an extreme bummer”). The second half is mainly filler; a hotchpotch of lists, reviews and over-long interviews with obscure musicians. The focus of these pieces is very confusing. For instance, having established that Folk Horror was born in the UK, the author’s list of film recommendations contains summaries of recent American or global titles before ending with a quote from The Wicker Man!? A review of a Nick Cave concert in Brooklyn has no obvious relevance to the rest of the book. Worst of all, the book ends with an unseemly rant against the Toy Story franchise which is portrayed as being nothing more than a corporate exercise in mind control and is held responsible for “endless merchandising that has blighted the world for the last 20 years.” If you want to split hairs, Disney have been doing the same thing for much longer! Aside from bordering on the unhinged, this short but spiteful essay (in lieu of a coherent conclusion) ends the book on a very sour note.
