"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Posts Tagged ‘Steven Zaillian’

Twister

Monday, May 11th, 2026

May 10, 1996

They’re scientists, but they’re cowboys. And they follow the wind. When they get the call they strut and they smile at each other knowingly as they hop into their Jeeps and trucks, slam on the gas and hurtle toward the danger, thinking nothing of it except ha ha, what a fun time we’re having here. They playfully exchange lingo-filled banter over the CB as they look up to the sky or down to the dots on their computer screens. They each have their own quirks and their own styles of musical accompaniment and their own ways of yelling “WAHOO!” in the face of God’s mighty wrath.

They are the wildpeople of weather, the maniacs of meteorology, the tornado terrorists, the thunder jockeys, the Doppler demons, the Hell’s Angels of nerds. They are the storm chasers, and they absolutely will not stop, ever, until they deploy their new device designed to release hundreds of small floating sensors into a tornado to measure it from the inside and obtain data that could potentially help improve early storm warning systems in the future.

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Clear and Present Danger

Wednesday, August 7th, 2024

August 3rd, 1994

More like CLEAR AND PRESZZZZzzzzzzz, am I right, guys?

Oh, am I wrong? Maybe I’m wrong. I’m not the best judge, because I’m a heathen when it comes to Jack Ryan. My dad loved Tom Clancy books, my wife and many of my friends consider THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER to be one of the all time greats, many people love this character, I just think that gene skipped me. But here we are most of the way through our revisit of the summer of ’94 and it feels like we’re low on traditional blockbusters, so I was kind of excited to see CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER. There are plenty of things to like about it, especially when discussing it, but unfortunately I found it mostly dull to watch compared to PATRIOT GAMES, which I somewhat enjoyed and respectfully labelled “Adult Contemporary Action.”

This, too, is for the older folks that want some of the fantasy of Exceptional Men Who Get Shit Done but without the classless excess of flying kicks or other cool shit. It begins by massaging the Adult Contemporary Action erogenous zones, showing people in uniforms operating various types of machinery on a submarine and a US Coast Guard vessel. The inciting incident is the Coast Guard boarding a suspicious yacht in the Caribbean and discovering its American businessman owner has been murdered by Colombians. Jack Ryan (Harrison Ford between THE FUGITIVE and SABRINA) is a CIA analyst who looks into it and discovers the American got offed by a cartel because he was laundering money for them and tried to embezzle some. (read the rest of this shit…)

Mission: Impossible

Tuesday, May 19th, 2015

tn_m-iI don’t know about you guys, but I have found that it’s weird watching Brian DePalma’s MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE for the first time since the 1990s. Tom Cruise sure doesn’t look 52 now, but he does look a little younger here than he does now. I kinda forgot he used to be like this. More fidgety and cocky, kinda smarmy, playing it really different from in the other movies, because he’s newer. His Ethan Hunt is not the leader, he’s the apprentice of the original TV series hero Jim Phelps (now played by John Voight), forced to strike out on his own, without his mentor or his team, for the first time. Yeah, he seems much younger.

Holy shit, this movie is 19 years old. That’s almost 20 years old. Which is alot of years in my opinion. And alot has changed. I forgot how different this series got over time.

I think MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE is unique among the summer blockbusters. It has a bunch of the usual qualities: it’s a big movie star vehicle, based on an existing “property,” climaxes in a noisy special effects-laden action spectacle, did end up becoming a franchise that’s still going today. At the same time it is a Brian DePalma movie, it doesn’t feel like he had to compromise anything. He got to take his style and his interests and experiment with them on a little larger canvas than usual. His gimmicky suspense sequences, twists and tricks are right at home with characters who elaborately deceive for a living. His POV shots put you right into the action when you enter a party as Hunt in disguise, but also they show up in the form of cameras actually worn by the agents to keep tabs on each other and, in one case, to mislead each other. (read the rest of this shit…)