Month: May 2006

In theaters. 

If Mission: Impossible III had come out two years ago, before couch jumping entered the national lexicon, would it have been a different movie? Would I still have rolled my eyes when Tom Cruise screwed up his face in faux determination? Would the opening-night audience with which I saw the flick still have tittered when he ostentatiously proclaimed his love for a naive, girlish brunette? Would the movie still have felt slick but overwhelmingly silly, the story not of a superspy but of a superstar playacting at espionage?

Cruise’s primary strength as an actor has always been his charisma, and his shenanigans of late have damaged that critical attribute. If he fails to convince us of his sincerity and sanity when he's just being himself, how can he hope to do so when he's playing characters on the big screen?

On DVD.

I never know what to make of Preston Sturges. Wildly successful as a writer-director back in the 1940s, Sturges made a number of classic screwball comedies and is still considered one of America's great film directors. Everyone is supposed to love Sturges, and I just don't get him.

When I saw The Miracle of Morgan's Creek — a ribald middle finger to the puritanical Hayes Code — I sat dumbly through the pratfalls and outrageous antics. I considered Sullivan's Travels — Sturges' light-footed justification of his preference for comedies over "important" films — to be scattered and overlong. And now The Lady Eve, his absurdist take on the battle of the sexes, just alienated me. I didn't laugh much and spent the majority of the movie with my brow furrowed, trying to figure out how I was supposed to feel about what was happening on screen.