Memorial Day weekend delivered a trifecta of worthwhile viewing options for large and small screens alike, regardless of your tastes.
Final reckoning for Cruise franchise
“Mission: …
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Memorial Day weekend delivered a trifecta of worthwhile viewing options for large and small screens alike, regardless of your tastes.
Final reckoning for Cruise franchise
“Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” is the eighth installment in the Tom Cruise-starring film series, which opens with Cruise himself thanking the audience for seeing it in theaters.
My opinions of the “Mission: Impossible” films have varied wildly over the past 29 years, since director Brian De Palma first took the classic TV series to the big screen in 1996.
What’s undeniable is the concern and commitment that Cruise has always invested in these films. At two hours and 50 minutes, “The Final Reckoning” is almost as much of an endurance marathon for the viewers as it is for Cruise, who continues to do his own stunts as IMF agent Ethan Hunt.
This extended running time is in spite of how many data-dense info-dumps are used to move the plot briskly from one exhaustively staged action set-piece to the next.
As cartoonishly extreme as the reality of the “Mission: Impossible” films has always been, its doomsday threat — a rogue AI manipulates digital media so much that no one can trust what they see or hear onscreen — has improbably become frighteningly plausible.
Simon Pegg, Hayley Atwell, Pom Klementieff and Ving Rhames contribute winning charm, as one would expect, while Esai Morales, Shea Whigham and a returning Henry Czerny sneer and snarl with a satisfyingly effective menace.
And the undersea stunt sequences manage to rival James Cameron in 1989’s “The Abyss,” still considered the gold standard.
Pee-wee from the beyond
“Pee-wee as Himself,” streaming on Max, goes surprisingly introspective with former children’s entertainer and cult celebrity Paul Reubens, a.k.a. “Pee-wee” Herman, who died in 2023.
I was in the grade-school target audience for “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” in 1985 and “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” in 1986, so seeing Reubens, without the “mask” of Pee-wee, through interviews that the documentary makers had filmed shortly before his death, felt like catching up with a fond childhood friend.
What comes through those interviews, likely more than Reubens himself had intended, is his intense need to control his own life story, public persona and artistic output, which made his two adult-rated scandals both tragic and arguably inevitable.
With Pee-wee, Reubens tapped into something profound and beautiful about the eternal child in all of us, filtered through several heavy layers of eye-catching ironic retro kitsch. The strain of playing a single note in his emotional spectrum was ultimately too much for him to bear.
What’s uplifting about Reubens’ legacy as Pee-wee is that, while his queerness had to be coded as camp to be accepted by mainstream audiences during the 1980s, his example made it more socially acceptable for generations of kids who followed — including one dorky little boy in Otis Orchards, Washington — to be their weirdest, most authentic selves.
For that alone, I owe Pee-wee thanks, and I only wish Reubens could have known the comfort of a deeper self-acceptance while he was alive.
Netflix offers ‘Fear’
“Fear Street: Prom Queen,” streaming on Netflix, continues Netflix’s small-screen adaptations of author R.L. Stine’s “Fear Street” series of young adult horror novels, following the three-part miniseries that debuted in 2021, whose tales flashed back to the years 1994, 1978 and 1666.
“Prom Queen” is another period piece, this time set in 1988, making it not so much just another stereotypical slasher flick as a slightly self-aware satire of the subgenre, albeit turbo-charged by huge nitrous oxide huffs of nostalgia for the late ‘80s zeitgeist.
I can’t guarantee this adaptation will please fans of Stine’s novels, since a few of them let me know their criticisms of Netflix’s previous “Fear Street” trilogy, when I gave it a positive review for the Shelton-Mason County Journal four years ago.
But speaking as someone who (shamefully) still hasn’t gotten around to reading the books, I continue to dig the supernaturally enhanced class warfare between the towns of Sunnyvale and Shadyside.
“Prom Queen” earns extra credit by tactically deploying former youth cinema stars, such as Chris Klein of “American Pie” and Lili Taylor of “Say Anything,” as adult authority figures who are clearly carrying some residual damage from their characters’ respective adolescences.
Like any good mystery killer thriller, “Prom Queen” introduces plenty of plausible red herrings to mislead viewers attempting to guess who’s knocking off all the senior prom royalty candidates.
And speaking as someone who came of age in that era, the dance’s soundtrack “is so choice,” as Ferris Bueller would say.