Ever since the horror of the second installment, I’ve been looking for reasons to stop watching the Mission: Impossible movies. (And, as I’ve described in detail, the erosion of my confidence in the franchise began even earlier.) But something always keeps bringing me back. In M:I 3 it was J.J. Abrams and Philip Seymour Hoffman [...]
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I’m at a point now where I’m not actively looking for new TV shows to follow. There just isn’t enough time in the day, and anyway I have a backlog of series to catch up on via instant-streaming or discs. But dangit, it’s pilot season, and I just couldn’t resist taking a look at a [...]
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J.J. Abrams’ Super 8 (2011) is unabashed Steven Spielberg nostalgia, recalling the feel of E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It’s clearly an homage, and a successful one — but it left me, perhaps illogically, feeling mildly disappointed that it hadn’t shown me anything new. Set in a small town in Ohio in [...]
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I’ve been both looking forward to and dreading this review ever since I saw the Spy 100 list. Mission: Impossible (1996), the famed Tom Cruise vehicle rebooting my favorite television series of all time, had a tug-of-war reaction on me when it was released, by turns impressing and depressing me. I’m pretty sure I watched [...]
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I woke up in the middle of the night with a Cairo-scratch on one arm and my mind roiling with a weird kind of negative writing energy — cool ideas gestating, but also a nagging dread about my ability to realize them. When my mind starts churning like that, there’s no sense trying to go [...]
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On Saturday we met up with friends at the Arclight to see J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek reboot. In general, I’m not a big fan of reboots* — every successful reboot, I think, “validates” Hollywood’s tendency to greenlight old ideas over new ones, sigh — but even so, I have to admit the Star Trek reboot [...]
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