Susan Hated Literature

Dir: J.J. Abrams
Writ: Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, J.J. Abrams & Bruce Geller

• Tom Cruise - Ethan Hunt
• Philip Seymour Hoffman - Owen Davian
• Ving Rhames - Luther Stickell
• Michelle Monaghan - Julia Meade
• Jonathan Rhys Meyers - Declan

The trouble with M:I3 is that it is in essence a meh film. We all go knowing what to expect; gadgets, stunts, and Tom Cruise coming out a winner. And that is what happens in this film, so we can’t really complain. There is no real need to complain, because if you went to see this film expecting any more of that, well, then you’ve no one to blame but yourself.

M:I3 also suffers from having an annoyingly long name and a crap looking acronym. Is it MI3, M:I3, M:I 3, M:Iiii or any other variation? Who knows.

All in all I quite enjoyed this film. I didn’t expect much, and I got exactly that. Tom Cruise ran far too often, but it is The Cruise, and he is obliged to have at least 5 running scenes in ever major motion picture he is involved in. But the baddie was cool and evil in an unexplained 2 dimensional way.

The Julie character was annoying though. Just far too good. Only, she didn’t really have a character, she was just the “damsel in distress.” But plus points must be awarded for Jonathan Rhys Meyers, although he will always be the fella who shot Michael Collins, and his accent was very much stock oirish.

All in all, enjoyable trash flick.

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Another lesson in the importance of proofreading^[1] And once again this lesson is courtesy of the free newspapers available on the streets of Dublin. This time from the Metro. Because, however mental Tom Cruise may appear jumping about on couches, I doubt that he is insane enough to actually say^[2] to a newspaper source, what the Metro have as one of their mini-headlines:

Cruise: “I’ll eat baby after birth”

Yes, that’s right. The Metro are reporting that Tom Cruise is going to eat his baby after it is born. When in fact they mean that Tom is going to eat the afterbirth. Slight difference there.

All this talk of Cruise and cannibals reminds me. His cousin, freaky Ethan from Lost turned up in an episode of The Inside, playing…. a cannibal. A really overweight gross cannibal. I didn’t recognise him, but read that it was him later on.

And speaking of Lost:
Dear RTE,
telling people you are showing a double episode of Lost and then only actually showing a shitty-recap-thingy and then one episode is false advertising.
Please do not do so again.

Dear Makers of Lost,
We have actually been watching your crappy tv show, and so do not need to be reshown all those scenes that we only just fucking saw. We do have brains. We can remember what happened last week. We don’t need to turn on your show and watch the same scenes over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.
Enough with the recaps pretending to be offering insight.

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Dir: Stephen Spielberg
Writ: ]H.G. Wells, Josh Friedman, David Koepp

• Tom Cruise …. Ray Ferrier
• Dakota Fanning …. Rachel Ferrier
• Justin Chatwin …. Robbie Ferrier
• Tim Robbins …. Ogilvy

You know the way you go to see a film that you’ve heard is crap, you have these really low expectations so the film turns out to be quite good. Well, not in this case. I thought it was going to be crap, and was I ever right?
The start isn’t too bad. We see Tom “Brain Lesion” Cruise as a fairly crap parent. He’s not a bad Dad, he just isn’t good. He’s also an asshole, so you are sitting there waiting for him to “grow and learn” through the destruction of life as we know it.

The effects are great, the lightning, the tripods, the whole film looks really good. And Dakota Fanning is utterly believable as a slightly precocious child. And she reacts pretty much like you’d expect a child to react, crying out for her “Mommy”.

Plus the initial fears that it is the “terrorists” who have attacked. All great touches.

Still didn’t like the film though.
The audience never has to worry about any of the characters dying. Yes there is destruction, death and violence left right and centre, but those are all mere background figures. People we never knew and don’t care about. By focusing so much on Cruise and his kids I think the audience knows that nothing really bad is going to happen to any of them.

And so despite all the aliens, the blood, the violence, there isn’t really any tension.

Show Spoilers ▼

I could go on listing things that made me go “hmmmm” (in a bad way). Like the now useless cars all stopped on the streets, yet handily pulled in a little so that Cruise could drive by. Like being able to use a mirror to hide from the aliens. And you know that scene in the basket? Why didn’t all the other folks help the fella who got sucked up before Cruise? Why the sudden desire to help?

Lame.

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Remember when I mention Tom Cruise in relation to brain lesions (it wasn’t all that long ago), well, I came across this article in the Guardian (via In Fact. Ah) where they talk about the relationship between beliefs and lesions.

In people suffering from prosopagnosia, for example, parts of the brain are damaged so that the person can no longer recognise faces. In the Cotard delusion, people believe they are dead. Fregoli delusion is the belief that the sufferer is constantly being followed around by people in disguise. Capgras’ delusion, named after its discoverer, the French psychiatrist Jean Marie Joseph Capgras, is a belief that someone emotionally close has been replaced by an identical impostor.
Until recently, these conditions were regarded as psychiatric problems. But closer study reveals that, in the case of Capgras’ delusion for example, a significant proportion of sufferers had lesions in their brain, typically in the right hemisphere.”

But apart from that, the article also points out how beliefs can be created, and manipulated. Especially in times of stress.

The stress of the terror attacks on the US in 2001 changed the way many Americans viewed the world, and Taylor argues that it left the population open to tricks of belief manipulation. A recent survey, for example, found that more than half of Americans thought Iraqis were involved in the attacks, despite the fact that nobody had come out and said it.

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