Tag / alec baldwin

by Jaime Rebanal

An Alternate Take: Mission: Impossible – Fallout is Exhilarating from Start to Finish

The “Alternate Take” indicates an instance where another writer on our behalf also wants to share their thoughts on a film previously reviewed on the site. You can read Chuck Winters’s review right here.

✯✯✯✯½

Six films already into the Mission: Impossible series and they may have already hit their peak – something I don’t really know if I can say I would have expected. It’s one thing to be impressed with how Tom Cruise still manages to remain as extremely physical as he does, but in Mission: Impossible – Fallout, he already manages to find a way to take this to a new level as he reunites with writer-director Christopher McQuarrie (his second film for this franchise) – and somehow what they already managed to create is perhaps the most exhilarating result out of what could have been made with the stories that the Mission: Impossible films could have set up. It already seems like a near-impossible feat, but given as all the stakes in Mission: Impossible – Fallout are raised as high as they can, it just makes the ride every bit as satisfying as you can imagine.

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by Jaime Rebanal

Mercury Rising – Review

✯

It’s easy enough to write off Mercury Rising as nothing beyond a generic action thriller from the 90’s. But it only goes to show another reason as to why Mercury Rising is absolutely terrible, because of its approach to rather sensitive subject matter. Maybe it isn’t so much for an outsider but my personal experiences having grown up with autism have only made me all the more critical of how films depict people on the spectrum. Given how perceptions of people like myself who struggle within their daily lives as a result of their mental health have been shaped thanks to media, it was certainly never easy and films like Mercury Rising aren’t helpful to our cause. These aren’t films that know down to the bone how we can be like, it just feels more like a deliberate sidelining for the sake of schlock.

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