Double Your Movie Watching Fun With Host Peter Suderman

It's a two-course Peter day, with full portions served up at both NRO and Brainwash.

First up is my review of Mission: Impossible 3 at NRO, the latest action packed offering from tabloid megastar, Tom Cruise. Under the direction of Alias creator J.J. Abrams, the world's most famous Scientologist takes on that creepy porn movie assistant from Boogie Nights and the results are, well, shallow, incoherent, and pretty damn enjoyable. As a bonus, I use the review as a springboard to talk about modern ideals of manliness, because, hey, what's political film criticism without a little off the cuff cultural bigthink?

Near the end of Mission: Impossible 3, Tom Cruise, once again portraying globetrotting superspy Ethan Hunt, looks at his wife and exclaims, with a full dosage of megastar bluster: "I could die if you don't kill me." The line makes only slightly more sense in context. For make no mistake, Tom Cruise and company have no time for such niceties as reason and coherence. There are bad guys to kill, vehicles to crash, lives to save, and villainous plots to thwart—all of which are to be done with a maximum of gunfire and explosions. Yes, the summer movie season has arrived in all its fiery excess, and this year's first contestant is a haywire pastiche of movie star glamour and dizzy pyrotechnic wizardry—a $100 million buffet of Tom Cruise and fireballs.

Secondly (you're still here, right?), my official review of United 93 is up at everyone's favorite young conservative virtual rag, Brainwash. Yes, it's probably somewhat backwards to publish a reply to other critics before a review of your own, but what can I say? I'm a conservative from the South. Backwards is how we do it.

In a sense, United 93 works as an exercise in long form fatalism. Movies, of course, are always fatalistic in some sense--the ending is already determined, the final reel already shot. But there is a feeling that the events playing out on screen are not yet determined, and it is that inherent possibility that grips us. United 93 twists this feeling. We know that the plane will go down and the passengers will die, but the movie medium manipulates the uncertain hope we feel when watching a conventional film. The movie cannot help but dredge up hope, but like September 11 itself, we find ourselves powerless, fated only to watch and weep.