Brian's Thoughts on Movies

The Mission Impossible movies have each used a different top director (and in the case of J.J. Abrams created one) and as a result each film has a distinct look and style.   Christopher McQuarrie, who wrote and directed Rogue Nation, returned for this film.   McQuarrie has worked with producer/star Tom Cruise a lot over the past decade and the two deliver what I feel is one of the action films ever made. Mission: Impossible - Fallout faced two major challenges.   The film was in development in 2016 and then cancelled briefly as Cruise renegotiated his deal with Paramount, hoping to mirror a deal he had made with Universal for a planned franchise of monster movies.   Eventually they came to terms but it almost cost the production McQuarrie since he had assumed the project was off and moved his family away from London where production had been planned for.    The second challenge was that Cruise broke his ankle about halfway through production doing a j...

“History is written by those who have hanged heroes” Robert the Bruce (Angus McFadden) in Braveheart. Mel Gibson is a singular talent whose personal troubles denied us as an audience some great work over the past decade or so.   Gibson has a character actor’s versatility combined with leading man looks and sensibilities.   As both an actor and director he has a taste for challenging characters and period based epics that tell violent stories.   During the peak of his popularity in the late 1980s to the mid-2000s Gibson starred in and/or directed many innovative and yet accessible films.   As an audience member I can usually separate an actor’s personal lives from their work (ie I can still enjoy Kevin Spacey’s work in House of Cards and Superman Returns but it does help that he plays a lot of villains).   However I was distressed both by Gibson’s anti-Semitic remarks and some vicious voicemails that were made public years ago.   Without knowing the ...