The Incredibles 2 (5/5 Stars)

 A benefit of animation is the ability to stop time. Bart Simpson has been the same age since 1989. Here, the time between original movie and sequel was a full fourteen years. However, thanks to the wonders of technology, The Incredibles 2 starts immediately after the first film ended. Now, you will know exactly what happened when the villain Underminer (looks like a mole) burrowed beneath the city with a big drill to rob several banks. The human actors certainly look older but all they lend here are their voices and those are the same. Actually, there was a casualty. The young boy who voiced Dash in the earlier movie had to be be replaced by a different young boy. Still everyone else is back. Craig T. Nelson voices Bob Parr/Mr. Incredible, Holly Hunter voices Helen Parr/Elastigirl, Samuel L. Jackson voices Lucius Best/Frozone, Sarah Vowell voices Violet Parr (the author Sarah Vowell did not turn the ingenious bit of casting that landed her this part, and her first role in a movie, fourteen years ago into a voice career, The Incredibles 2 is her second role), and the Director Brad Bird again voices Edna Mode that tribute to old Hollywood costume design.

The Incredibles 2 is above all an action film. The superheroes fight villains and do so at regular intervals. At the beginning of the movie, they fight the Underminer together. The collateral damage from this fight has superheroes banned again (the bank after all was insured, so if the Incredibles had done nothing, things would have turned out better). As the government program is terminated, a billionaire philanthropist steps into the void. This man is voiced by the incorrigible excitement of Bob Odenkirk, perfect. The billionaire believes that superheroes have an image problem. He proposes that they wear cameras on their clothes and present their best sides first. By that he means, only Elastigirl and not Mr. Incredible because she wrecks less things while saving them. Mr. Incredible comically fights to hold onto his dignity and Elastigirl goes on to save runaway trains and fight villains every twenty minutes or so in spectacular display.

Meanwhile, Mr. Incredible is relegated to taking care of his family. Never has such a task been presented in such a heroic light. Those who are old enough will remember when American education “changed math” much to the chagrin of old men trying to help their sons with their homework. And can you really help a teenage girl deal with anything? The most pressing problem however is the toddler Jack Jack who is budding with new random and frightening superpowers. The movie’s best moment has to be when Jack Jack fights a raccoon, who starts the fight with way too much confidence and is continually surprised by the toddler’s more and more dangerous capabilities. Jack Jack is taken at one point to Edna Mode who goes crazy with the creative possibilities of a super-suit for such a superbaby.

The Incredibles franchise is notable in its slightly conservative tone. The first movie took swipes at bureaucracy and personal injury attorneys. The Incredibles 2 continues on this thread. This can be seen first in the billionaire’s modern liberal idea to present superheroes in a more favorable light by not highlighting the white man (I say that this discrimination is from a conservative point of view because it presupposes that the movie’s world would find a woman to be more acceptable than the white man. We all tend to see ourselves as the victim). That poor white man, it really hurts to not be wanted. At another point, the villain of the story, the Screenslaver, presents a very compelling reason for why it wants superheroes to remain illegal. Screenslaver posits that when there are superheroes around, normal people become complacent about their place and situation. Why should they try to better themselves or fight back when they can just call on superheroes to save the day? Superheroes, this villain reasons, make people weak. This is essentially an argument against patriarchal, i.e. big, government. The movie is not completely about this point. It is very funny and action-packed, but it is notable that a kid’s movie would so articulately make this point (even if, you know, the villain is ultimately vanquished). Pixar is a company that contains a multitude of voices.

Pixar has unfortunately gotten so successful they feel compelled to make sequels for their best films, i.e. most of them. If they were a less successful company, this movie may have been made ten years ago. (Instead it had to first wait for sequels of Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc., Toy Story, and Cars (twice) to be made). The Incredibles 2 is notable in that it is better than the first one. It is as funny and action-packed (perhaps more so) but also has a better villain and a better point to it. After fourteen years, and a stupid amount of other super-hero movies produced in the meantime by other studios, this sequel had much more to say about the genre than it had before. Give Pixar another Oscar. I most likely won’t see a better animated movie this year.

p.s. Samuel L. Jackson currently has the record for most box office receipts for movies he has acted in, $5.589 billion dollars to be exact as of now. He just reswiped this record from Harrison Ford, $4.963 billion dollars. How did he do it? Well, apart from being a reliable work-a-holic, he is also a big team player. He added substantially to his record this year with supporting roles, first in Avengers: Infinity War and now as Frozone in Incredibles 2.

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (5/5 Stars)

See Tom Run.

The plot of Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol is ludicrous. There is this rogue Russian ex-general who has gone insane. We see about a 30 second newsreel footage of him giving a speech in parliament about the necessary weeding out a thermonuclear war would play in furthering the course of human evolution. Given that logic he has been attempting to steal nuclear launch codes and to start a full out war between Russia and the United States. To this end he succeeds in framing special agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and the IMF for the bombing of the Kremlin in Moscow. The crazy man, played by Michael Nyqvist, spends most of his time running away from Tom Cruise who is running away from the Russian police. He is an undeveloped bad guy that functions less as a real person and more as a MacGuffin which enables the plot to go from high stakes scenario to high stakes scenario. Halfway through the movie I stopped caring. What became obvious to me halfway through the movie was that I was watching some of the best and well-made action sequences since “The Bourne Ultimatum.” I’m not even sure I wanted the guy to get caught because that would have ended the movie, which was ceaselessly thrilling. A critic may rationalize any viewpoint but cannot ignore involuntary bodily functions. For example, all laughter during a comedy no matter how low or stupid the jokes are must be admitted. In this movie, I can report that my stomach churned several times in the same way it would if I were on a roller coaster at Magic Mountain. This is a great action movie and worth watching just for the thrills. Do not wait to see it on video. See it in a theater and try to see it in IMAX.

It makes sense that the director of “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol,” does not have any previous action movies under his belt. In fact he doesn’t have any live action movies under his belt. Instead the director Brad Bird is an alumnus from Pixar. He directed such animated movies like “The Incredibles” and “Ratatouille.” This becomes obvious because unlike so many action movie directors, he has put in the effort to competently storyboard, shoot, and edit his action sequences. Everything is super clear, the laws of physics are obeyed, and the action proceeds logically but not predictably. I hope that this movie makes a lot of money and inspires other action movie directors to try a bit harder at their craft. Or at least let it be shaming. They've been one-upped grandly by a cartoonist. 

The coup de grace sequence in this movie involves Tom Cruise (as special agent Ethan Hunt) scaling the side of the Burj Dubai (the tallest building in the world) with these special gloves that may or may not functionally work. I don’t know how they did it safely but what is on the screen is seriously freaky stuff. That of course, is only part of a movie that includes several car chases (one in a dust-storm), fistfights, and suspenseful spy stings replete with some seriously cool gadgetry and large explosions. All of this is done exceptionally well. 

In fact, it is shot in such a way, that it is obvious that the stars are doing actual stunts. For instance, Tom Cruise is clearly racking up some serious mileage running as fast as he can in plenty of scenes. And there he is doing the actual fight choreography in several fistfights. You can tell because the camera shots are far away enough and have long enough duration to tell. As far as the stunts on the Burj Dubai are concerned, well the producers made sure there were several featurettes online showing Tom Cruise on the outside of the building to quell any suspicions that it was some stuntman doing it or that it was shot in a green room and the outside added later. He really is there. I consider this as counting toward some top-notch acting. What's more is that Cruise and the other characters actually look scared, surprised, or concerned for their lives when really crazy shit starts to happen. I have seen too many movies where nobody seems to notice large explosions or machine gun fire. I find it far more effective (and dramatically correct) when characters notice just how dangerous something is. Case in point: Tom Cruise's face when he drives his car off a platform with a hundred 100 meter drop. Give that guy an Oscar Nomination. That's exactly the facial expression he should have. Let’s see Meryl Streep do that.

The IMF team works very well both as an action ensemble and in another degree as a comedy team. Tom Cruise gets the plum action jobs but that doesn’t mean that Jeremy Renner (from “The Hurt Locker”) doesn’t have some good scenes as well (a particularly good one involves him infiltrating a super computer by jumping into an oven hoping that some magnets work (it makes sense in the movie)). Paula Patton for her part lands the starring role in the movie's best fistfight with a lady baddie played by Ley Seydoux. Rounding out the group is Simon Pegg providing computer tech savvy and his usual humorous self. Most of the situations are so tightly wound that the comedy pitches thrown to Pegg are routinely knocked out of the park like softballed lobs. One of the best moments in the movie has Pegg walking into a room and saying, “That was not easy, but I did it.” This gets a huge laugh. That sort of reaction can only be accomplished by having one of the most death-defying stunts in the movie happen right before that. Pegg's humor cashes in on the suspense consistently. I would go so far as to say that this is the best Mission: Impossible movie that has been made. I'm glad they made it. 

One thing that is noticeably absent in this particular installment of “Mission Impossible” is any hint of sex. In this, it follows the trend in American action movies in particular. There once was a time when James Bond had a pretty swinging lifestyle. You can’t say that about the Daniel Craig incarnation. And when did Jason Bourne have any time for that sort of thing. In this movie, Tom Cruise gets as close as a longing glance from several blocks away. Just saying. 

Ratatouille 07/21/07

I personally don't care much for baseball. Never watch it, probably never will. But for hours, I could listen to Billy Crystal talk about it. It's not so much the baseball that's interesting, it's the excitement and intensity that it conjures up in fanatics such as Crystal. That I just love. This movie has that in spades. Though it's not baseball it's cooking.
The film is about a rat named Remy, voiced by somewhat known comedian Patton Oswalt, who loves food and dreams of being a chef. There is something so special about this charachter that its intoxicating. I just couldn't get enough of him. He not only loves food, he raves about it, he'll even risk death to get into the kitchen of a famous restaurant and cook something up himself. The way Remy delights in food fuels the entire picture. This is a smart, intelligent, funny, fantastic, beautiful and moving movie. and it works even if, like me, you know very little about cooking.
There's a fantastic scene when Remy is cooking a mushroom on a weathervane and is struck by lightning. He tastes the mushroom, finds it delicious and decides he would want to do it again. And then another great scene when he tries to get his family of rats to stop eating garbage, and taste real food. But not just scarf it down, savor the peculiarites of taste in different flavors. And another great speech at the end by a food critic that is downright poetic and spine-tingling. These are fantastic roles, and this movie is probably a lock for best animated feature. I feel comfortable saying that in the middle of July. 
The movie was written and directed by Brad Bird, same man who did The Incredibles. Although the Incredibles has more mass appeal, this is a superior film. Not just for animation, but film in general. Only problem it might have, is that I wouldn't say it's geared specifically toward kids. There's plenty of slapstick but still the movie's heart and soul has a refined mature palate. This is probably a film that parents drag their kids to see not vice versa. Other than that, Pixar has added another classic film to its already spectacular film canon. I don't care what the next film is about, I will be in line already. As Ego, the film critic, gleefully says with full confidence in the chef at the end, "Surprise me."