Movies I Watched in June, Part 2

Here we go, part two (of four!) recapping the movies I watched last month...


Re-watched this in preparation for the latest installment (and watched it with my old Out of Theaters compadre Billy Kulpa , who'd never seen it.) "Mission: Impossible" is the rare franchise you can argue gets better with each installment, if, that is, you swap the first and second. I've always been a fan of this one, which puts J.J. Abrams in the director's chair and delivers a lot more humor and character moments than the previous two installments, all the while making sure to include plenty of twists and put Tom Cruise through the paces in some impressive action set-pieces -- in other words, the template that was followed to the letter in parts four and five, and judging by the rave reviews, six as well. My favorite things about this one? First and foremost, it's Philip Seymour Hoffman as the badguy, proving that he would have made an excellent Bond villain (which, come to think of it, is exactly what he's playing here). I also love the building break-in in Shanghai, mostly for the fact that we don't see any of what Cruise actually does when he's inside and only catch up with him when he explodes through the window and plunges to the street. It's a great, fun way to keep things moving as the movie nears its climax. And, last but not least, I like the way they (a) dispose of Keri Russell's character in the opening, then (b) use our memory of that to generate suspense that the same fate is going to befall Cruise at the end. Obviously, it's not, but it's fun to worry that it will.


Watched it again on Netflix with the kid, who loved it a second time. It is a lot of fun, one of the most purely comic Marvel movies next to "Spider-Man: Homecoming" and the Ant Man films. I wrote more about it here , and if you'd like to hear about another movie from director Taika Watiti, check back next month when I review his excellent "Hunt for the Wilderpeople."


I've come to the realization that Edward G. Robinson is my all-time favorite actor, and movies like this one (which I'd never seen before) are the reason why. Released in 1935, just four years after Robinson became a star playing the brutal, almost feral gangster Rico Bandello in "Little Caesar," this film shows Robinson both playing off that character and revealing that he could play entirely different roles, meek men beaten down by life, the sort that he'd memorably depict in "The Woman in the Window" (review coming in the next post) and "Scarlet Street," two film noirs he made with Fritz Lang a decade later. In this comedy/drama, Robinson plays both notorious gangster "Killer" Manion and Arthur Ferguson Jones, a shy bank clerk who has the misfortune to be Manion's spitting image. Sure, it's a hokey plot and the machinations to keep things going get pretty outrageous, but where "The Whole Town's Talking" really succeeds is as a showcase for Robinson. He makes Manion and Jones seem like two genuinely different people, with Jones growing braver and Manion more desperate as the film continues. With some surprisingly convincing split-screen work (especially for 1935) it's easy to forget you're watching one guy and not two. The great Jean Arthur plays the shrewd co-worker who falls for Jones (despite the fact that he stole her photo and hangs it next to his bed ... yikes!) and the whole thing is directed by none other than John Ford, a few years before he'd make John Wayne (and himself) a screen legend with "Stagecoach."


I love the Coen Brothers, but I love this Coen movie more than any other, which astonishes some people. It's generally placed in the bottom of the middle of the pack (at best) by Coen critics and fans, which astonishes me because I think it's a damn near flawless movie, hitting every visual note right on the nose, packing the screen with perfectly cast actors (Robbins! Jason-Leigh! Newman! Durning! Mahoney! Campbell!) delivering note-perfect performances and, using a Frank Capra/Preston Sturges template to create a tale that, by its end, has genuine emotional impact and, believe it or not, a sort of almost cosmic wisdom with its constant references to cycles and circles, loops and hoops, from Norville Barnes' discussion of "KAR-ma" to the rounded plastic dingus that fuels the entire plot of the movie. And speaking of that dingus, the entire creation montage, set to Carter Burwell's reworking of Raymond Scott's immortal "Powerhouse," is possibly my favorite single movie sequence of all time.

OF ALL TIME.

Up next: An almost new movie and three fairly old movies, one featuring another performance from my favorite actor of all time, another featuring direction from my favorite, well, director of all time.