I know this is a commercial. I've intentionally watched commercials in pursuit of some artistic merit. This doesn't have that. But it's still adequately well enough put together to have a good time with my brother.

I did genuinely think he was going to die at the end, though, and I thought that would have been pretty bold! Maybe not ideal for the sponsors. But maybe yet! “Punk rock” as some corporate board member in the film calls it.

A live action cartoon. The smash cut to the neighbor, Kousuke (or something), who's a chimpanzee is just wild. The extended dance/song interlude of school clubs. Lovely stuff.

In the end, it does turn into a cartoon in more literal ways, as the characters get conveyed and moved around on top of some primitive 3D effects like paper dolls. It's this ending sequence that is perhaps most harmed by being too early to communicate a more coherent otherworldly space. But the very hand-drawn aesthetic of effects maintains the cartooniness from atmosphere to appearance.

Framing is everything. Watched this in theaters with a pre-screening drag show, and an extended introduction about the romantic chemistry between Brian and Dom and Brian's non-denial of his homosexuality.

And you know what? The way those two look at eachother before steaming ahead towards an doncoming train; I believe it.

Succeeds in distilling the series to what the last few have been building up to: a sublimation of all talents towards the worship of Tom Cruise. There are no real characters here besides Ethan Hunt, and he himself is barely a character. Instead, we get fawning tributes and pained longing gazes from a cast of only-potentially interesting people.

Paris is the best example of this transformation from riveting villain to furniture.

Before the screening, a trailer played proudly crooning “Rihanna is Smurfette”. Perhaps cinema isn’t worth saving.

Made significantly worse by having watched Unknown Pleasures the night before, and by holding Still Life in high regard. This uses the pieces of those films toward less interesting ends. I was jealous of my companion who’d never seen any of the films this draws from, and will have the pleasure of recontextualizing scenes later as she goes through his oeuvre.

It’s shocking the extent to which the (presented as) everyday can carry a cinematic gravitas. Both one-sided phone calls here (“Ms Hightower!”) are heroic, and of course the bad trip sequence and fakeout are peak comedy.

Examing the content, one quickly discovers that an underlying malady of almost all of the patients featured is loneliness. An absence of enough others to take care of themselves and their loved ones. This is especially evident with the man who declines overnight attendance so that his children won’t be alone, and the older woman who had nobody around to notice she’d collapsed.