Film Shorts: Valley Cinemas and Beyond

Showing at Valley Cinemas (VC): Fans of Tom Cruise and his action films will be pleased to know that Mission Impossible Rogue Nation is a good, solid, and entertaining, if still workmanlike, entry in the 20-year, now-five-film franchise. The actor can handle stunts, comedy, and other facets demanded by tentpole summer epics with flair, while the film itself mixes its action scenes with lengthy plot explanations in opaque dialogue. The premise is that a secret organization called the Syndicate is piggybacking on the MI team’s assignments and causing global political disruption, putting the unit in bad odor with the CIA, which doesn’t believe that the Syndicate exists. With the usual members in tow, and the addition of the lethal Rebecca Ferguson, Cruise’s Nathan Hunt must prove otherwise.

VC is (incredibly!) holding over Fantastic Four. This poorly reviewed film, the product of a “troubled production,” as they say in the biz, is indeed lousy. Released by Fox instead of Ant-Man’s Disney or Spider-Man’s Sony, it’s enough to make you appreciate the high production standards of the seemingly endless Disney Marvel movies. Based on the “Ultimate Marvel” series of comics appearing in the early 2000s, this is a revised origin story from the one older readers are used too, that is, the now teen-aged foursome go into an alternative universe for their powers rather than outer space, and Doctor Doom is a pal before becoming a villain. But it is still an origin story, and one of the most excruciating tedium this side of a bad economics lecture. Some stunt casting mixes up the races, and the young actors, though mostly unknown, have awards and praise in their background, while the credited director is himself a kid, one Josh Trank, who did the teen found-footage sci-fi story Chronicle – which basically tells the same story as Fantastic Four. The film goes from a set up about the nerdy scientist kid in grade school, then to a long talky sequence with the kid at the Baxter school for really smart scientists, then to the teleporting “suspense,” and then the movie falls apart, seemingly becoming two different movies at once, Wolverine and Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires, where the “fantastic” quartet fight Doctor Doom amid smoky fog and steaming craters. The lassitude of the film has to be seen to be slept through.

Your local RedBox service machine at 620 1st Avenue North near the Albertsons should be filling up soon with an array of great horror films. It Follows has a clever premise that reinvigorates the teen slasher genre; the hilarious New Zealand based What We Do in the Shadows is a mock-documentary about four irascible and irritable vampires who share a house; Burying the Ex isn’t as good as the previous two, but as the latest film by Joe Dante (Gremlins) it’s inherently interesting, with its premise of a horror geek having a clingy live-in zombie girlfriend and its wealth of horror film in jokes and references.

At Netflix later this week, there is debut of the wry humor of stand up comic Demetri Martin in Demetri Martin: Live (At the Time), and for cultists there is the eight-episode series (Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp,) a prequel to the much beloved summer camp parody that came out originally in 2001, and featured budding stars Bradley Cooper, Chris Meloni, Paul Rudd, and others. Most of them return to the Netflix original series to explore via pratfalls, romance, and in jokes the basis for the adventures in the feature film.