May 04, 2006
mission: impossible III
Cherie's "I'm Ready" — written by Kara DioGuardi, sung by Cherie, urgency courtesy of Foreigner — is as close to perfect as a pop song gets, and yes, that includes the Beatles and Nellie McKay. But the formal interest isn't its perfection. It's the possible relationship between its perfection and the singular fact of how few seconds there are in the song in which the melody isn't being sung: twelve seconds to the first verse (which turns out to be a lifetime); 0 seconds between verse and chorus; 0 seconds before chorus leads back to verse; less than two seconds between second chorus and bridge; 0 seconds between bridge and chorus, 0 seconds before the chorus repeats to outro. Once it starts, a total of two seconds that are not led by the vocal line.
Mission: Impossible III, by the same token, approaches being a perfect movie, in a way that makes perfectly cllear how much a perfect movie leaves to be desired. Someday, someone with a copy of the DVD will determine how many of this film's 126 minutes are not part of an action sequence — less than a dozen, one suspects. Perhaps an equally viable analogy is the format of a Squeeze song or Tom Waits' "Ol' 55," with a chorus so long, each part unfolding the next from what at first seems like a last gesture, that one despairs of ever arriving at its end, and gives onself over to the craven pleasures. In M:I:3, one can be certain that a long swing from one Shanghai megastructure to the next will lead into a long tumble down a canted glass face, a slide which is also a gunfight by the way, and leads directly to the grabbing of the macguffin and ensuing base-jump into a busy street, a quick game of human Frogger pursuing dropped item through traffic which inevitably shifts into the latest in car chase technologies...
Amidst all this activity, sugarhigh!'s favorite moment came when Tom Cruise descends dramatically into the Vatican's da Vinci-coded catacombs; we love it when movie stars sneak down there, and the fact that he does not run into Tom Hanks for a drawn out battle involving Israeli Army kung fu and laser cats is perhaps the least believable thing about the movie.
Posted by jane at May 4, 2006 11:35 AM | TrackBack