Mission Impossible: Fallout could be a template for creating action movies. This is everything you want in a pure action movie, offering the same suspense, mystery, and comedic tones you expect from this top-of-the-line franchise. Tom Cruise (Born on the Fourth of July, A Few Good Men) reprises his most recognizable character (Top Gun came out over 30 years ago. Maverick is great, Ethan Hunt is the identifiable Cruise character, at least for anyone younger than 35). I’ve spent a good part of the last two decades knocking Tom Cruise for his choice of roles, wishing he would return to the types of roles that earned him three Academy Award nominations between 1990-2000. And honestly, at the time, I thought he was phoning it in for box office dollars. I understand an action flick here and there.
Category Archives: Vanessa Kirby
Me Before You (2016)
I saw Me Before You back in 1991. It was called Dying Young, and Julia Roberts was the star. It stunk. I am completely joking, but I promised myself I would use this as the first line of this review regardless. The truth is I didn’t see Dying Young until 2005. That part is actually true, but the real truth is that these movies aren’t even in the same league. Dying Young wasn’t as poor as I thought it would be, but I really don’t remember much about it. On the other hand, Me Before You was an extremely profound movie that I will remember from years on out. And I also believe it is a movie that showcased the range of Emilia Clarke (HBO’s Game of Thrones) and firmly planted her as a leading actress for the next 10-15 years. The film also introduced Sam Claflin to the rest of the world that has not seen The Hunger Games franchise, where he played the role of Finnick. Before I get firmly into the nuts and bolts of this review, I want to state that I was blown away by every aspect of this tear-jerker. While it was clearly designed to tug at our heartstrings, it felt completely authentic. It was carried by an absolutely superb performance by Clarke and backed up heavily by Claflin, who did just enough to play second fiddle. I remember seeing Brooklyn last year. Brooklyn was a movie that I adored, but I couldn’t understand it when I could hear the sniffling and see the watery eyes of all those sitting near me. In Me Before You, I understood it completely. There are a few quick and funny tidbits related to this movie that I thought I’d share:
- I thought this was another movie based on a Nicholas Sparks book.
- I kept getting this movie confused with Love & Friendship, the Jane Austin novel adapted for the big screen that came out around the same time as Me Before You. But, as I look at these two movies now, the only comparison was that I was convinced I wouldn’t see either movie at the time of their release.
- I was talking to a co-worker about Me Before You, and she basically spoiled the moving, telling me that she didn’t want to ruin it for me, but continuing to do so.
Free State of Jones (2016)
With his scraggly beard, yellow teeth, foreboding scowl, and deliberate limp, Matthew McConaughey’s (Amistad, A Time to Kill) portrayal of Newt Knight, a poor white farmer who led an extraordinary rebellion during the Civil War, is a far cry from the same man who was pigeonholing his career a decade earlier by playing the same character over and over in hit or miss romantic comedies like How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Failure to Launch, The Wedding Planner, Fool’s Gold, and The Ghosts of Girlfriends Past to name a few. McConaughey reinvented himself three or four years ago and re-established himself as a dramatic leading man with the likes of The Lincoln Lawyer, Interstellar, HBO’s True Detective, Killer Joe, Mud, and Dallas Buyer’s Club, for which he won Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role at the 2014 Academy Awards ceremony. While he’s had his misses recently (has anyone even heard of 2016’s The Sea of Trees?), he has continued to have the ability to pick and choose his movies, and, unlike his string of romantic comedies, he continues to branch himself out further and further.
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