KallioWeHardlyKnewYe
Hey! We won!
- May 30, 2003
- 15,767
- 3,807
Taps. Another revisit from my youth. Military school kids take over their beloved institution after its leader accidentally kills a townie and the school is to be shut down. There's a surface level reason to watch this for movie fans. That's the now counterintuitive casting of a young Sean Penn as the moral center and a young Tom Cruise as an unhinged psycho. But the real reason to check this out is Timothy Hutton, who is the actual star. He's their young leader wrestling to do what he believes is right and honorable. (Penn and Cruise are the respective angel and devil on his shoulders). Hutton already had won an Oscar at this young age and would be nominated for a Golden Globe here. It's a really stellar performance of a complex, conflicted character who realizes too late that he might have been sold a bill of goods. These are kids playing dress up. Brash youth. We (and the older characters in the movie) see the oncoming tragedy. But they can't. Solid little drama. Oh, and there's a pretty good LOL when George C. Scott, as their mentor, bemoans how movies portray military leaders as being insane.
Inside Man. The first time I saw this, I had a weird hangup. I thought the preview gave away too much of the movie and when I sat down to watch it, things that I thought should have been held back aren't. Elements of the story that could be big third-act surprises are casually dolled out through the first hour. This annoyed me then. But I was stupid and wrong and judging the movie in my head, not the one on the screen. Finally coming back to it, I had a much greater appreciation for how sophisticated the story telling actually is. While the big surprise I thought I wanted might have been a great initial sugar rush, I don't know that it would have lasted. Instead, what they do here is much more of a gradual drip, a trail of crumbs. It does start revealing the who, why and how early, but it never gives you the full picture. Everything is really expertly spooled out in a way that drives momentum and satisfies in the end. I completely whiffed on that the first time. Hitchcock is always right.
Even beyond that I also let my annoyances cloud the most basic pleasure of this film, which is that it's stacked with real pros (in front of and behind the camera) who are giving it 100% Everyone is overqualified for this, which has every reason to be a generic paycheck job. But it isn't. They treat it as high class and it shows.
Inside Man. The first time I saw this, I had a weird hangup. I thought the preview gave away too much of the movie and when I sat down to watch it, things that I thought should have been held back aren't. Elements of the story that could be big third-act surprises are casually dolled out through the first hour. This annoyed me then. But I was stupid and wrong and judging the movie in my head, not the one on the screen. Finally coming back to it, I had a much greater appreciation for how sophisticated the story telling actually is. While the big surprise I thought I wanted might have been a great initial sugar rush, I don't know that it would have lasted. Instead, what they do here is much more of a gradual drip, a trail of crumbs. It does start revealing the who, why and how early, but it never gives you the full picture. Everything is really expertly spooled out in a way that drives momentum and satisfies in the end. I completely whiffed on that the first time. Hitchcock is always right.
Even beyond that I also let my annoyances cloud the most basic pleasure of this film, which is that it's stacked with real pros (in front of and behind the camera) who are giving it 100% Everyone is overqualified for this, which has every reason to be a generic paycheck job. But it isn't. They treat it as high class and it shows.
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