You might like a few of these short (~3 min each) old clips of Freeman Dyson talking about Oppenheimer. He found him disappointing and didn’t particularly like him, except at the end of his life, after he was beaten down.
Oppenheimer comes up occasionally starting with this clip through #85 in the playlist. Dyson actually calls him a bigotted (not sure what he meant by this) old fool. Dyson had a great sense of humor and was pretty easygoing, liked by everybody afaik. I have to take it seriously when he says something like that about a person.
Well, that’s physics. Or do you mean praise of the movie?
Watching these clips again. #84 he talks about a reprimand he got from Oppenheimer because he and David Bohm liked to eat at a black-owned restaurant. Princeton in 1948.
Yeah the first half (character intro) is almost independent from the second one (actual mission) from a strict narrative pov (but to me the time taken before dropping you into the hellhole is also part of why it works so well). Did you like the second part at least ?
He was more known in the theatre before Seinfeld. He had already won a Tony around the time Seinfield was starting, which is no small achievement. If Seinfeld had never happened he would have at least had a long successful career in the NY theatre scene.
Liked Dead Reckoning-Part uno. It is intentionally funny in spots, the villain was interesting (as far as these things go), and thought the sequence in Rome was great. The train sequence was really cool too, but also maybe a bit repetitive in a sense. Would still recommend tho.
I agree. I’ll add that Pom Klementieff stood out because it seems like no one gave her any notes. All the women in Mission Impossible are of a type, let’s say statueque, where she’s very svelte. Mission Impossible villains are supposed to be serious and stone faced and she’s hamming it up. They’re supposed to wear serious suits and she shows up in a Halloween costume. They’re supposed to talk on and on and she almost never says a word the whole movie. To the movie’s credit they never really explain any of it.
this is a great shout-out. totally agree and even the NY Times review talks about her performance in a similar way saying
the most memorable villain proves to be a Harley Quinn-esque agent of chaos, Paris (Pom Klementieff), who races after Ethan in a Hummer and seems ready to spin off into her own franchise.
And the lack of dialog isn’t surprising if you consider the performers were apparently working without a script (this may have been mentioned up thread)
“We didn’t really have a script,” Simon Pegg, who plays Benji Dunn revealed to HOLA! USA. “Obviously [Christopher] McQuarrie is the director, he is also the writer. And so he knows the shape at least of it, and the large of the set pieces,” he explained. “It would always be ‘Oh today you’re gonna learn how to drive a boat in Venice,’ that was surprising, that kind of stuff was surprising.”
Pom Klementieff, who plays Paris, explained that “the story is always changing,” and the cast would have “ongoing conversations” with Tom Cruise and McQuarrie. “There is kind of a vision for it, but you kind of discover it in the moment,” Vanessa Kirby said, talking about her experience playing Alanna.
Think you’d also enjoy this article on how they craft the movie not around the script but around the stunts.
Planning a Mission: Impossible stunt starts at the drawing board. Eastwood, McQuarrie, and Cruise brainstorm ideas for setpieces that “would be really cool for the story” but also offer the kind of visual spectacle the Mission: Impossible movies have become known for, Eastwood says. “What would the audience want to see? What would be really cool that fits within the character in the story?” Then they factor in prep days, shooting days, and Cruise’s training schedule. They get advice from experts in the field, build a schedule — if it’s for Cruise, it’s a shorter training period because he “learns at a much higher rate than just your average person,” Eastwood says — and get to work.
Eastwood’s team is already developing new camera systems and equipment for Dead Reckoning Part Two. “We don’t look at what’s on the shelf, we never have,” he says. “It’s constant R&D, constant. And I think you’ve got to be on that level to do a Mission film. You’ve got to be thinking way outside the box in order to evolve.” One major sequence in Dead Reckoning Part Two has already been shot, Eastwood reveals. He can’t say any more about what the sequence was, except that they shot in his home country of South Africa, and that it is “breathtaking.”
I forget where I read a separate interview with McQuarrie where he said he films MI without scripts because he learned early on that while a script helped him as a newb, MI does best when he builds huge set pieces and then figures out what dialogue or character based scenes will connect those sequences into a seamless story AFTER he sees the action scene footage. He needs to know what kind of experience that footage can create for audiences before he crafts story and dialogue to enhance how well the audience becomes primed for those scenes.
Critical have said the seams are sort of showing in Dead Reckoning thanks to this strategy, but on the other hand, a 9/10 movie is still a 9/10 so who cares.
Even if it required the partial destruction of a historically treasured polish bridge
Yeah, I liked all of it. I’d seen Wages of Fear before, so I knew what to expect. This one still succeeded in ratcheting the tension up even higher in a lot of places.
Saw MI:7:DR:1 today. It was a lot of fun, but I will take a little bit of a contrary position. Let’s compare to Skyfall. Was the action in MI:7 better? Probably, but not by a lot. I’m my book this goes to show that doing a stunt “for real” doesn’t necessarily make it more exciting (or more cinematic). Was the story in Skyfall better? Yes, by a long shot. In 5 years, which would I rather rewatch? Hard to say at this point.
My current MI ratings have 6 as the best for action and 1 as the best for story.
ETA: the opening scene on the submarine was excellent and a great addition to that genre
