Summary: Today we have another guest post by film critic Locke Peterseim, reviewing Edge of Tomorro

Summary:  Today we have another guest post by film critic bahia de los angeles real estate Locke Peterseim, reviewing Edge of Tomorrow . He shows how it provides a mirror into which we can see ourselves, in effect a riveting documentary about modern warfare (as we see it from the homeland). Battle scenes crammed full to the frames with CGI armament and hyper-gritty destruction splayed out against a backdrop of overblown escapist realism. It embodies everything and signifies nothing. It s almost the opposite in nature of films made during WW2. Post your comments about the film and this review!
Battle is the Great Redeemer. It is the fiery crucible in which true heroes are forged. The one place where all men truly share the same rank, regardless of what kind of parasitic scum they were going in. Words we find inspiring bahia de los angeles real estate on the screen, showing our lack of self-confidence and fears of inauthenticity. It s a common attitude bahia de los angeles real estate held before wars (e.g., before WWI).
I once reveled in mocking and deriding Tom Cruise for the obvious reasons: the shallow All-American Super-Jock swagger; the intense self-deprecatingly positivity; the mish-mash of film choices from soggily pretentious Oscar-lickers ( Born on the Fourth of July, Rain Man, The Last Samurai ) to cloying, image polishers ( A Few Good Men, Jerry McGuire ) to silly popcorn pandering ( The Firm, Mission Impossible bahia de los angeles real estate , and of course Interview with the Vampire ).
Even when the actor took otherwise admirable steps to try something relatively daring with Eyes Wide Shut and Vanilla Sky , it still felt like the ridiculously handsome bahia de los angeles real estate and charismatic quarterback slumming it in the theater department’s avant-garde spring production. (Like Glee ’s Finn, without all the overdosing.) (To be fair, Kubrick reduced Cruise to a prop, but Kubrick reduced nearly all his actors to props.)
In the midst of this came the one truly brilliant Tom Cruise performance—the bahia de los angeles real estate only post- Risky Business role that shows actual acting ability, as opposed to the usual wind-up charm masquerading in dress-up costumes as “Serious Acting!”
That was in P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia , and of course the irony there is that Cruise is so genuinely good in it because he appears to show us a glimpse of what I suspect is the Real Thomas Cruise Mapother IV: A vicious, bahia de los angeles real estate insecure huckster constantly attacking at full speed to hide the dark emptiness within. In other words, his best came from simply letting slip the carefully constructed mask for a moment.
And of course there was the whole Scientology thing that frankly became so entwined bahia de los angeles real estate with Cruise’s career and persona that it was impossible to tell if he was an actor who benefited from a made-up, sci-fi, long-con “religion” or a made-up, sci-fi, long-con “religion” spokesman posing as an actor to boost his sales of L. Ron’s starter kits.
But then a decade ago came The Loopy Melt Down on Oprah’s couch, a moment that in hindsight now feels utterly created. (As well as working in tandem with the advent of YouTube to usher in the rise of the Internet’s Celebrity Fuck-Up Meme Machine.) There soon followed the Katie Holmes contractual marriage and the firing of his PR team so Cruise could freely spread the Scientology gospel. (At the time it wasn’t unthinkable that the actor saw himself as Hubbard’s heir apparent to eventually run the Cash-Register Church.)
And yet lost in the gossip shallows was the fact that the film Cruise was supposed to be promoting from Oprah’s couch that summer turned out to be mostly pretty bahia de los angeles real estate great (at least for the first two acts): bahia de los angeles real estate Spielberg’s War of the Worlds .
While Cruise had done his usual decent job in the previous bahia de los angeles real estate summer’s highly bahia de los angeles real estate underrated bahia de los angeles real estate Collateral (one of the rare times the actor’s played an outright villain), there was something almost baptismal about the Oprah debacle and the summer of Cruise live-mic nuttery that followed. The All-American Boy stood up and showed everyone that he was, in fact, an even more beloved trope: The All-American Nutjob.
That turned bahia de los angeles real estate out to be freeing — both for Cruise and us, the audience. We didn’t have to pretend anymore that he was a Great Actor (he never was) or that he made Important Films (they never were). It allowed Cruise to simply be what he had always really been: a crazy Hollywood Creation. (Albeit still a dauntingly charismatic and devastatingly handsome one.) After decades of calling Cruise a bat-shit fraud from the wilderness, once he revealed himself as exactly that, suddenly I could truly appreciate the ridiculous amount of admirably incandescent Star Power he brings to the silliest of roles and truly enjoy his Big Hollywood Movies.
Sure, Knight and Day and Oblivion are soggy misfires, but most every Cruise film since War of the Worlds has crackled thanks to the Cruise Effect (as well as some solid director and writer pairings): The last two Mission bahia de los angeles real estate Impossible bahia de los angeles real estate films were genuine shallow fun; Valkyrie is another underrated crackerjack thriller; and while Lee Child fan’s would be loathe to admit it, Jack Reacher was a solid flick.
(Yes, Rock of Ages is a celluloid horror that doesn’t even work as High Camp, but bad as it and he are, Cruise’s Axl-Jagger rock-god ridiculousness is an absolute riot for all the right and wrong reasons at once.)
These post-Oprah movies all have one thing in common: Whether he’s playing a blue-collar father, an aristocratic German saboteur, an international super spy, or futuristic hero, he’s still Tom Cruise, Movie Star. And that works so much better for me on-screen than Tom Cruise, Serious Actor.
The only significant difference bahia de los angeles real estate is that with a writing polish from Cruise’s latest go-to screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie (the sharper-than-average writer of Valkyrie bahia de los angeles real estate and writer-director of Jack Reacher and the next Mission bahia de los angeles real estate Impossible flick) and some ace direction chops from obsessive-artiste-craftsman Doug Liman ( The Bourne Identity, Mr. and Mrs. Smith ), Edge of Tomorrow fires and hits on more cylinders than most of the other products off the Cruise assembly line.
The fact that Edge of Tomorrow is the first action film in a while that manages to paradoxically look both like it has something to say (it doesn’t) and knows how to say it (it does), has led video-game armchair warriors, geek-hyped fan-boys, and desperately needy critics to proclaim the flick quite a bit more (“an action masterpiece!”) than it is, which is a suitably fast-paced and sure-handed enough popcorner to shine out from among the usual incompetent, slap-dash, action dreck.
Based (much more closely than PR-cruising Cruise seems willing to cotton to) on the Japanese “light” (young adult) bahia de los angeles real estate novella All You Need is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, Edge of Tomorrow gives us Cruise as Cage, an unctuous military propagandist who, in a near future where Europe has been overrun by unstoppable alien invaders, suddenly finds himself strapped into a cumbersome battle-mech suit and air-dropped into the front line of a massive D-Day-like landing at Normandy.
Cage, whose PR talent lies in convincing young people to sign up as cannon fodder in an unwinnable war, is a useless soldier himself—frozen with fear as he tumbles onto the beachhead, he barely finds his gun’s safety before he’s ignominiously KIA.
The novel idea of a Tom Cruise character who’s innately inept at doing the sort of bang-bang action stuff we’ve come to expect from him is a mildly amusing one, but quickly Cage undergoes a more typical Cruisian sci-fi bahia de los angeles real estate gimmick: Thanks and alien goo infection, post-battlefield-death, he pops back up a day earlier in the time stream, reliving out the same events, only this time armed with a bit of painfully earned foreknowledge (including how to turn the safety off) that helps him get a little further bahia de los angeles real estate up the beach before he’s killed again and resurrects once again a day earlier.
Eventually Cage hooks up with a super-soldier named Rita (Emily Blunt, having a grim cast-against-type ball) whose past victorious alien-smashing efforts had not only made her one of Cage’s PR poster soldiers bahia de los angeles real estate in the propaganda war, but were once (but no more) aided by the same repetitive time-looping accident Cage himself bahia de los angeles real estate is now experiencing.
And so it goes over and over for Cage, trapped by an alien time-loop into a sped-up and butt-kicking version of Nietzsche’s Eternal Circle – better known to present-day pop-culturists as the Groundhog Day Thing or that “time is a flat circle” business Rust Cohle was going on about over a cut-up beer can in True Detective .
On the other hand, video gamers will instantly recognize the narrative as a cinematic manifestation of how first-person shooters are played: by dying over and over ad nauseum , each time coming back with a few more learned repetitive patterns tucked under your weapons belt to help you make it a little deeper into the gameplay. The film itself looks and feels like a futuristic shooter; battle scenes crammed full to the frames with CGI armament and hyper-gritty destruction splayed out against a backdrop of overblown escapist realism.
Drenched bahia de los angeles real estate as much in dark humor as visually stimulating battle mayhem, it’s all very clever and quite a bit of guilty fun for the first hour or so — the sight of Tom Cruise dying over and over again is worth the price of Milk Duds.
Naturally, bahia de los angeles real estate there are some storytelling cheats along the way. Though the plot makes it clear that only Cage remembers each “reset” time loop and therefore is the sole character who can truly “grow” emotionally throughout the course of the film, the audience (and filmmakers) can’t help but ascribe artificial layers of personal depth to Rita— our perceptions bahia de los angeles real estate are skewed by our familiarity with this type of movie’s tropes, so at each reset time frame, bahia de los angeles real estate we don’t feel her as a blank-slate cipher she would be. Neither the script nor Blunt make us believe Rita truly doesn’t already know Cage each new day.
Though certainly no masterpiece itself, Sakurazaka’s bahia de los angeles real estate book at least toys with that theme of artificial interpersonal connection and delves much deeper into thorny existential questions