Dear Hollywood,
Please come up with a way to add emotional urgency to disaster/horror movies that doesn’t involve a crappy, indifferent father reconnecting with his children in the midst of a cataclysm. It’s been done to death.
Dear movie critics,
Please stop talking about how Hollywood cleverly casts Tom Cruise in roles that turn his limitations as an actor (which are legion, in my opinion) into advantages. It simply isn’t true.
Tersely,
David
Yes, we saw War of the Worlds this afternoon. As is usually the case in evil bug movies, I ended up kind of rooting for the aliens, at least in their desire to eliminate Tom Cruise’s character. Cruise is horribly miscast as a human. Those early scenes where he’s leaving his job at the dock were laughable, and Cruise looked like he was working the red carpet. In spite of some very exciting destruction porn, there were dozens of scenes where the audience was invited to remember that Tom Cruise is a big, blandly handsome movie star, plopped square in the middle of the frame, standing on a box, and looking every bit like an oil painting of himself.
If it hadn’t been for the spookily composed Dakota Fanning, the film wouldn’t have had any personal urgency at all. (It might have worked much better if Tim Robbins had played Cruise’s role. Okay, I’ll amend that to wish that anyone had played Cruise’s role, even Cruise.) But Fanning was great, the only actor on the screen who managed to convey the gravity and horror of the situation. She acted rings around Cruise, and at times she even seemed exasperated with him, which worked nicely for their characters’ dynamic.
The highlight of the moviegoing experience was the preview of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which is one of the few summer movies I’m tempted to see on its opening weekend. My partner wondered if they specifically made Johnny Depp’s Willy Wonka look like Michael Jackson. It seems like the kind of perversely funny thing director Tim Burton would do.
I wondered why anyone would open a family film on the same weekend that many children will probably be spending long hours inside with a copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. My partner pointed out that smart kids would probably talk their parents into hitting the movie, then stopping at the bookstore after.