Movies

Not disavowed

By December 15, 2011No Comments

11

So is “ghost pro­tocol,” like, an actu­al THING in intel­li­gence ops, or is the sub­title of the new Mission: Impossible film just anoth­er example of screen­writers and mar­ket­ing guys smush­ing words togeth­er until they come up with a com­bin­a­tion that “sounds cool?” Somebody help me out here. In any event, the res­ult­ant film, which I reviewed for MSN Movies, is actu­ally a quite decent example of what some call a “pop­corn movie,” AND it actu­ally IS worth see­ing in the IMAX ver­sion if you can afford it. 

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No Comments

  • MW says:
    December 15, 2011 at 11:05 am

    I was going to skip this, but I for­got Brad Bird dir­ec­ted it and giv­en his work on “The Incredibles,” “The Iron Giant,” etc. I’m curi­ous to see what he does with this pic­ture (even if Cruise has the final word on the cre­at­ive side of things).

  • lazarus says:
    December 15, 2011 at 1:02 pm

    Funny you should men­tion. Henry Czerny in that review, Glenn. I remem­ber help­ing him when I was work­ing in retail about 6–7 years ago and was think­ing “Hey, it’s Henry Czerny!” and “I’m proud of myself that I remembered his name.”
    Nice guy.

  • colinr says:
    December 15, 2011 at 1:12 pm

    It sounds kind of internet‑y in a Live Free Or Die Hard way: “Their ghost pro­to­cols are tak­ing down all of the gov­ern­ments fire­walls, get their IPs to deploy tro­jan blogs across the twit­ter­sphere, stat!”

  • David Ehrenstein says:
    December 15, 2011 at 2:45 pm

    http://www.ehrensteinland.com/htmls/library/tomcruiseletters.shtml

  • Stephen Winer says:
    December 15, 2011 at 3:31 pm

    What every happened to Henry Czerny? Actually you can see him every week in the oddly pop­u­lar ABC series “Revenge”. Not that any­one in these here soph­ist­ic­ated environs would watch such a thing.

  • Mr. K says:
    December 15, 2011 at 3:33 pm

    Henry Czerny is cur­rently play­ing a sleazy cor­por­ate executive/asshole rich pat­ri­arch in ABC’s prime-time soap REVENGE. Madeline Stowe is also in it (and awe­some) as Czerny’s wife, so if you’ve been in the mood for a trip down memory lane, check it out.

  • Jaime says:
    December 15, 2011 at 4:00 pm

    Dunno about ‘ghost pro­tocol’ and its vera­city in re actu­al spy­craft, but John Le Carre cre­ated the term ‘honey trap’ out of whole cloth and it’s entered the spook lex­icon as a work­ing term of art. See this art­icle from March 2010:
    http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/03/12/the_history_of_the_honey_trap

  • Jaime N. Christley says:
    December 15, 2011 at 6:00 pm

    “So is “ghost pro­tocol,” like, an actu­al THING in intel­li­gence ops?”
    No.

  • JC says:
    December 15, 2011 at 6:14 pm

    How much of the film do you fig­ure was shot in the 1.44:1 IMAX format, Glenn? I’m see­ing it tomor­row (mostly for Bird’s dir­ec­tion and, well, that Dark Knight Rises pro­logue that pre­cedes it).

  • Glenn Kenny says:
    December 15, 2011 at 6:17 pm

    @ JC: THe pub­li­city mater­i­als say about 30 minutes, and I’d say that’s right.

  • JC says:
    December 15, 2011 at 6:26 pm

    Thanks a bunch for the quick response. 🙂

  • jbryant says:
    December 15, 2011 at 7:34 pm

    Being one of the less soph­ist­ic­ated par­ti­cipants here, I haven’t missed an epis­ode of REVENGE yet. It was­n’t very good the first few weeks, but I like Stowe, and it was a decent timekiller. Lately it’s actu­ally got­ten kinda good, with some fun, out­land­ish twists.

  • I.B. says:
    December 16, 2011 at 9:18 pm

    I regret I haven’t seen yet any of Bird’s films as dir­ect­or (nor any oth­er Pixar film, for that mat­ter… it’s not a mat­ter of avoid­ance like super­hero movies, but of for­get­ful­ness), but he may well be anoth­er of the unsung geni­uses behind ‘The Simpsons’ when ‘The Simpsons’ were still great (I stopped watch­ing around the 13th sea­son, and things had been down­hill for a while). It’s easy enough to focus on the screen­writ­ing, but when you con­sider the import­ant though subtle part played by fram­ing and com­ic tim­ing, and then listen in the DVD com­ment­ar­ies to all the decisions and ideas in those depart­ments com­ing from Bird, and you notice that he left dur­ing the 9th sea­son and you pro­ceed to ana­lyze and com­pare the fram­ing and com­ic tim­ing of the epis­odes after­wards… we-el, it’s not exactly a clear-cut case of auther­ism, but one starts to won­der if the change of show-runners was really the prin­cip­al reas­on behind the fall from grace.

  • Oliver_C says:
    December 17, 2011 at 4:26 am

    If you see only one super­hero (or Pixar) movie, see ‘The Incredibles’. I admit that’s the sort of hyper­bole you’d expect to find on a poster, but it’s close enough to the truth.