Wednesday 9 January 2013

2405 return to routine and two adventure films for teenagers

I have broken away from researching and writing about my Les Troyens experience on Saturday January 5th to commence  a writing for the week. In addition will write about Les Misérables in time for the film event on Friday morning. I will also write about other films and TV experiences and then when these writings are completed I will get back to 101 work priority.

It is 1.30 on Tuesday January 8th 2013 and the month is beginning to fly, away from me  in terms of being in control.  Yesterday as this morning there was a constant drizzle and dark grey skies for most of the day. I continued with the slow starts of recent days  staying up until around 1 am sometimes  even later. I got myself ready and had an early lunch with two poached eggs on toast before setting off for the post office to collect the packet  where I was still asleep when delivered at 8am on Saturday. The packet was the set  of mini Wii accessories- a golf club. a tennis racket, a baseball bat and a couple wheels plus the base unit to house the Wii controller. I had to pay £1 parking as all the loading space next to Argos and by the bus station were taken up although vacant had I waited. However a woman driver benefited with having an hour of time available. I then made my way to Hewarth and another £2 long stay parking charge.

I had intended to read the latest Time Magazine on the journey but left in the car so another read the latest issues in the week before the next New Year resolutions  appears to be failing. I exited at Monument station which is now closing at 8 each evening for work to progress on the escalators which are being improved. I went through the Eldon Square centre to Eldon Garden  to replace the toasted sandwich pouches  which I have lost. misplaced and made the mistake of buy two packs  believing they only contained one pouch despite the cost of over  £6 a pack. The day had not commenced well but I then found the Yorkshire building Society which saved a separate visit to Sunderland and parking there where I move a sum into my current account to cover the Christmas season extras and not make worse the Credit account balance which I aim to clear by a year May if not before along with the  major loan of recent years with  the  balance outstanding. The curse of being someone able to obtain almost unlimited credit because of my good record over many decades.

I hen headed towards quayside for the barbers but stopped at Wilkinson’s to  get some display folders and at the barber and found that the Assistant is also a Sleep Apnoea man so we had a good long swap of respective stories. He is married but his wife copes with the machine than his previous snoring which drove her to spare bedroom at times. He has been moved to a two year cycle check. Returning to Shields I went to Asda for some oven ready baguettes only to find that I missed out on a two for £1 offer because only one was left. I could not resist a packet of ready Ciabatta roles for £1 and enjoyed the rest of the Pâté, I had the other two with cheese and salami today. Yesterday evening very late I  tried out the toasted sandwich pouch with a mixture of cheese and salami and a  tomato cuppa soup. I am thirsty still and will have another small can of  Pepsi Coke and then return to Les Troyens.

On return from the day’s activity I needed a break watched the latest in the Mission Impossible series of films which Tom Cruise launched in 1996 followed in 2000 and 2006 with  II and III, and then in 2011 The Ghost Protocol with a fifth film  already reported to being fast tracked because  of the continuing commercial success.  The film loosely follows the original 1960’s and 1980’s TV series in which the lead male is given an assignment via a self destruct tape and the option of declining the mission. He is part of a USA clandestine operational unit directly controlled by a Secretary of State and whose existence will be disowned if a mission  goes wrong.

In the latest money making 130 mins production the story is complex as are the special tricks to understand and credulity has to be suspended from the outset. The film opens as a Mission Impossible agent is killed while securing information by a free lance female assassin Sabine Moreau. The until leader, Jane Carter, blames herself for the failure to spot and warn the agent of the approach of Sabine whose photo is on his hand communication device too late. She swears vengeance but is required to put this on hold and to free Tom Cruise from his Russian prison after he has killed a number of Ukrainians (I think) somehow tied in within the death of his wife previously. However he knows she is alive and her death faked in order to protect her position in the future.

A computer wizard Benji is able to take control of the cell locking and prison gate system of the maximum security establishment in Russia where Tom Cruise is imprisoned. Instead of following instructions he insists on also releasing a fellow Russian prisoner again for reasons mentioned in the film which I did not hear properly or now  remember. The escape works out and the freed Russian goes his own way.

The new assignment is for Cruise to pose as a Russian General and enter the Kremlin to seek the identity of a  mad Scientist known to be planning to launch an all out nuclear war between Russia and the USA in order to start the world again with the survivors.  Cruise needs Benji to bring his tricks to deceive the Russians with  false  documents and then persuade the guards not to notice that Cruise enters the archives. They are successful only for Cruise to find the information has been cleared and that before they are able to exit their position is compromised and worse still, a large part of the Kremlin is blown up by Cobalt, the mad scientist, in order to cover the fact he has secured the system  to Launch Russian Missiles except for the codes which is the information obtained by the assassin Sabine. Cruise is badly injured and taken to hospital where he is handcuffed by the Russian Secret Service who believe he was responsible for the explosion tantamount to an act of war by the US. Cruise makes a daring escape one of many improbably moments which makes this film.

His team have a sophisticated monitoring and control centre in a compartment of a goods train which he manages to board as it moves off. Relocated he meets up with his boss played by Tom Wilkinson and a research assistant who advises that because of the Moscow events the President has used the Ghost Protocol which is a fancy name for explaining as was explained to members of the International Henley Senior Management Course in the mid 1980’s that when a creative individual or Team crosses the line or is regarded to have crossed the line, as in this instance, you  put into place the mechanism  which proves/shows that the individual/team had no connection without your company or in this instance your government. They are out in the cold with no help or assistance although in the Henley real world scenario you and they had taken precautions, protections for such an eventuality for you would not want the individual to offer their services to another company or this instance government.

Unfortunately the arrival of Wilkinson is monitored and he is killed and the car dives into a river/canal/ when a dozen marksmen are on hand to continue volleys of shots into the deep. Of course Cruise works out how to escape and also brings with him the research man who becomes part of the team who agree to help Cruise find the man who set them up and the girl who killed the agent and stop their master plan.

The action takes places in Dubai in the tallest hotel in the world with team planning to again take control of the communications system and lead the two parties into separate rooms and here the level of sophistication in terms of gadgetry becomes extraordinaire including the ability to photo documents using eye placed lens and then scrambled the information so that the buyers have a false copy after which the plan is to follow the buyer and track down the rogue enterprise. The girl is also to be apprehended and not killed.

It all goes wrong of course when the tech man finds the only way to enter the computer system at the hotel is from an outside window. This involves Cruise using two magnetic gloves one of which fails. He succeeds but the problem is getting back which involves swinging and jumping into the created open window of a hotel room and just about being hauled in. In a melee with the enemy girl she ends up being kicked out of the open window. For some reason it is necessary for Cruise to pass the real codes to the enemy but the plan is to follow and capture the enemy leader and retrieve the codes and the launch device. This also goes wrong and involves a chase with cars and on foot but the chief villain escapes in a sand storm and on finding a passing truck. Cruise discovers that the man was using a super realistic false face mask

This brings us to the finale after Cruise has worked out, using the arms dealer brother of the man he freed from the Moscow jail, that the enemy propose to use the Satellite system of a lecherous Indian Broadcaster to launch Russian missiles at the USA. It is here that the story drops to below the acceptable. The villain wants total world annihilation to achieve lasting peace and instead of launching as many missiles as he has the means to do so he only launches one. Meanwhile Cruise and the girl are at a party being held at the home of the Indian Mogul where she allows herself to be  seduced to point where she is alone with him and gains vital information which she can pass to tech man and  research man who have entered the cooling system for the computer so as to redirect the missile(missiles) away from their targets. This of course goes wrong and the single missile launched and only explosion aborted within a second bouncing of a building into water where it is described as a meteor. The final act involves action between Cruise and the villain in one of the new fangled automated car multi story car parks.

Before closure there are two aspects to be covered. Throughout the adventure the Russian secret service is in pursuit of the man who destroyed the Kremlin and for a second the gullible have been led to believe  that the arms dealing brother of the man rescued from the Moscow jail has told them where to find Cruise, when it is in fact Cruise who has told the man to tell Russian security as a kind of back up and to eventually explain to them that they are on the same side. This works.

The other aspects is the research guy turns out to have been a former field agent who had been in charge of the mission in which the wife of Cruise had died. This he thinks debars him from becoming the fourth member of the unit after its reinstatement at the end of the film. Cruise explains that his wife had not died but disappeared in order to prevent her being used as a target in the future and in the closing moments he spots her in the distance and she spots him and they communicate their love for each other at a distance. Can‘t wait for the next episode can you especially if it is to appear in less than another five year Interval? It made so much money!

There was considerable similarity between the latest contemporary version of Sherlock Holmes which I view on Tuesday evening Sherlock Holmes  A Game of Shadows. This is the second of what I fear Will be an ongoing series which attempts to recreate Sherlock Holmes into a contemporary James Bond type figure. This is a typical Guy Ritchie film albeit dressed in an Edwardian pre 1914-1918 war atmosphere

The story of this second venture is a simple one, The arch criminal Professor Moriarty who is able to employ a minor army of villains and executed a number of key industrialists and secretly taken over their business while becoming a confidant of the British Prime Minister to an extent that he is invited to be part of the British delegation to a peace conference in Switzerland to prevent war between Germany and France.

Moriarty is there to witness the assassination of an Ambassador by someone who has been surgically altered to appear to be another ambassador who Moriarty and his henchmen have captured. This the villain misguidedly believes will result in a World War to the benefit of his now vast industrial empire of weapons and associated materials needed in such a conflagration. My main criticism is that unlike the Cruise film which although required an abandonment of credulity introduces some novel technology, this film has no redeeming qualities and poses situations which are absurd and silly. .It of course made a lot of money  with the weekend audience of young people who also  paid fortunes to watch  human wolves grapple with vampires.

The film has a number of sub plots to entertain the gullible audience.  The major one involves the  forthcoming marriage of Dr Watson who finds that Holmes has forgotten to arrange his stag night because he has become obsessed with trying go work out the connection between a wide range of world wide incidents and Moriarty. Instead he take Watson to a club in the company of his brother played  tongue in  bare cheek by Stephen Fry. With the purpose of meeting gypsy fortune teller whose life he believes is in danger  There is a prolonged fight scene and  chase of the Mission Impossible kind and the use of slowed down camera techniques introduced in the Matrix series and some Chinese martial arts  movies.

The film began with the relationship between Holmes and  an entrepreneurial female agent of Moriarty with the suggestion of sexuality brewing. She is eliminated off screen by Moriarty when he finds her disloyalty.  Before her demise Holmes acquires a message in the form of a sketch of a face intended for the gypsy woman he meets and saves at the London Club

Holmes manages to get a dishevelled Watson to his wedding who then appears to separate from Holmes for good on his way to honeymoon, marital bliss and a family. However Homes appears in the next compartment having worked out that Moriarty has a plan to kill the newly weds which for some unexplained reason will help to stop Holmes uncovering what the villain is up to. The scene is a ludicrous one and which ends with Holmes pushing the bride out of the train from a  viaduct over water where Fry is waiting in a boat having anticipated the event. She finds herself looked after at the home of Fry who goes about naked although it made clear his interest is only in men an aspect put in the film presumably as a sop to attract a homosexual and lesbian audience.

Holmes persuades Dr Watson that in order to protect his bride and enjoy an uneventful honeymoon he must first  help to uncover the Moriarty plot whatever it is. This involves travelling to France to the gypsy camp of the young women he encountered in London to try and understand why an attempt was made on her life. It emerges she and her brother were revolutionary anarchists but found the movement they had joined too extreme  (a contradiction in terms if there is one). She shows Holmes  a number of other sketches sent to her by her brother who she has not seen for over a year. Assisted by fellow gypsies she takes Holmes and Watson to where the anarchist cell operates and here they encounter a former associate of the girl who explains that they have come under the control of Moriarty and that he cannot break with the villain who has captured his wife and children. He commits suicide rather than participate in further bombing outrages for non political purposes. Holmes and co escape from the wrath of the other anarchists and make their way to the Opera where Holmes releases  this is not the location of the next bomb but the site from which a Lieutenant of Moriarty is to fire a shot to kill someone attending a birthday party at a location across Paris  timed with the explosion of the Bomb as a means of covering the assassination, (presumably the French did not undertake autopsies of all victims at this time). Although everyone at the party appears killed there are no body parts and gore at the scene.

They then discover that Moriarty has secretly taken over the German arms manufacturing company of the  assassinated owner and that Germany has closed it frontiers because of bombing. The group makes their way across country on horses with Holmes on mini horse because of his aversion to the creatures over which he has no control. There is a prolonged scene in which Holmes is captured with the intention of getting close to Moriarty and stealing the record of all his dealings and accounts which he keeps in a little red book about his person. This we later learn Holmes has passed to London  police with the code breaking information and where for some unexplained reason Watson’s wife helps the police to decode and gain hold of the Moriarty’s wealth in various safe deposit boxes.. Moriarty is made penniless with the British Government also arranging for  his title to various companies to be removed.  The group just about escape the arms factory although Homes appears to be mortally wounded but is magically revived.

Amazingly the gypsy woman is transformed to attend a ball at the Peace Conference meeting at a place located at the edge of mountainside. Moriarty and Homes play chess while the gypsy woman locates her brother with the help of Watson and stops the assassination. World War is averted. Moriarty accurately prophesises that the great powers are anyway moving towards a world war which he will benefit. As Holmes is injured he will be able to kill him and then set about revenge on  Dr Watson and his bride. No loose ends. The solution of Holmes is to take Moriarty with him off the mountain into the waters below. His memorial service is a national events( the bodies were not found and Watson and his bride go to Brighton for their Honeymoon and then settled down to married life. She brings to Watson a small package which when opened reveals to Watson that  Holmes is alive. in fact he is in room in disguise as furniture. I kid you not. Whereas Mission Impossible was enjoyable rubbish this film is rubbish  without enjoyment.`

I have recently seen two films for the second time but find that although the subjects are  of great interest based on true events I do not appear top have written about as films. The most important of the two is Casino Jack with Kevin Spacey and merits a separate piece of writing

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