Brian's Thoughts on Movies

The bond between humans and their dogs is difficult to explain though I will take a stab at it here.    Dogs are incredibly loyal and humans are attracted to the unconditional love that dogs offer, which is less complicated than that of other human relationships.   Dogs give their love based, partially on their breed, on humans who both feed them and give them attention.   I think the unselfconscious nature of a dog’s affection, and they playfulness they take so long to outgrow, is what makes them so popular as companions. Dog films are a popular form of entertainment I think because so many people own dogs.   Films about dogs tend to be comic, playing on a dog’s natural messiness, (Beethoven or Hotel for Dogs) or dramatic and cut right to the vulnerable emotions of the dogs and the owners who love them (My Dog Skip, Old Yeller).   Turner & Hooch is the rare film that has some of both though the finale of that mostly comic film seemed ill-fitting ...

All The Money in the World is the story of the 1973 kidnapping of J. Paul Getty’s grandson, Paul, in Italy.   Getty, an oil tycoon, at the time was the world’s richest man.   The film explores the kidnapping, its effects on Gail, Paul’s mother, and the protracted attempts by Gail and Fletcher Chase, one of Getty’s negotiators, to secure Paul’s release.   Getty’s response to the kidnapping is reminiscent of the 1996 film Ransom, in that he refuses to pay the ransom.   At first Getty is apparently being true to his notoriously thrifty reputation but he has another reason as well.   As he has 14 grandchildren he is afraid of setting a precedent for future kidnappings.   Quietly Getty assigns Chace the task of working with the kidnappers and also with Gail.   The relationship between Gail and Getty is strained because Gail divorced Getty’s son (due to a drug addiction) and took custody of the kids in return for refusing any kind of alimony.   Ga...

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 ...

“Remember this gun is pointed right at your heart”   “That is my least vulnerable spot”.  Renault in Casablanca A few months ago I caught a two part re-run of Magnum P.I. (the old Tom Selleck version).   In the episode Magnum’s wife Michelle, who Magnum thought was killed during the Vietnam War turns up alive in Hawaii.   Michelle is with her first husband who had also been thought dead when she married Magnum.   Michelle had discovered her husband was alive, faked her death so Magnum would leave Vietnam, gone back to him and is working with her husband on a vital mission.   Michelle’s heart still belongs to Magnum but after a reunion and a dramatic showdown at the end of the episode she and Magnum say goodbye so Michelle can continue to help her husband.   There are repeated flashbacks to Michelle and Magnum’s short but passionate marriage.   Magnum is badly wounded at the end of the episode both physically (he is shot through the shoulder ...

                                                                "Bond, only Bond"  Alec Trevelyan in GoldenEye GoldenEye, released in 1995, is pivot point Bond film.   GoldenEye, along with The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), and perhaps Diamonds are Forever (1971) came out after a divisive predecessor. As a result these follow-ups have had to bring in a general audience as the series might be in trouble if two films in a row underperform.   Now as a refresher, I am very fond of Licence to Kill (1989) but the majority of audiences did not like both the dark storyline and Timothy Dalton’s intense approach.   If the series was going to continue a reset w...