Knight and Day

I’ve been in love with the Tom Cruise in movies since I fell in love with Top Gun years ago, and it broke my heart while I was in college and in star began to tarnish. Thankfully for me, his star has been glowing a little more in the past few years, first Les Grossman and Valkyrie and now it can continue with Knight and Day. Knight and Day is the kind of Tom Cruise movie that I adore watching, and for the life of me I cannot figure out why this movie is not burning up the box offices. Knight and Day is a spy romantic comedy for lack of a better description of the genre, and it works on every level.

June Havens accidently gets caught up in the path of government agent Roy Miller, who is trying to protect young genius Simon from a rogue agent – a rogue agent who has pegged Miller as the bad seed and has the agency tracking him, and now June, down. While June is the resistant passenger on Roy’s journey she begins to fall for Roy even though she’s never sure if his tale of conspiracy is a lie or the truth.

The reason this film works so well is because of James Mangold. This director has put to huge stars together with Cameron Diaz and Tom Cruise and yet neither outshines the other, and their chemistry is fun to watch whether they are sparring verbally with one another or being attacked.

I’ve complained a great deal about directors that can’t handle tonal shifts in their films, and Mangold deserves praise because the tonal shifts in Knight and Day are imperceptible. As a viewer you go from laughing to anticipating onscreen gunfire without ever noticing that the mood suddenly changed in the film, simply because the writer, actors and Mangold did their job well – so well it looks easy and forgettable.

This movie is built around the chemistry between Cruise & Diaz. As a director I don’t know if I would have put the two onscreen together simply because I would have been afraid one star would eclipse the other, but thankfully that doesn’t happen here. Even though the tale is told from June’s perspective Roy is never sidelined or forgotten, and Roy’s character never makes June’s seem less important. This is a marriage of perfect characters and actors and the film is much better for it.

As I stated, Knight and Day is a movie that makes me happy to be a Tom Cruise fan again. This film is a throw-back to adult comedies, action films and stories. It’s a good film that masquerades as a popcorn film and the best part about it is that Knight and Day is fun, and makes you want to spend another two hours at the movies just so you can see it again.

Director: James Mangold
Writer: Patrick O’Neill
Roy Miller: Tom Cruise
June Havens: Cameron Diaz
Fitzgerald: Peter Sarsgaard
Antonio: Jordi Molla
Director George: Viola Davis
Simon Feck: Paul Dano
Rodney: Marc Blucas
April Havens: Maggie Grace

June: The pilots are dead.
Miller: Yeah, they've been shot.
June: By who?
Miller: By me. No, actually, I shot the first pilot then he accidentally shot the second pilot. It's just one of those things.

Where the Wild Things Are

Max is trying to figure out the world around him and he’s very confused. His big sister whom he adores no longer give him the time of day and his mother is dating. When Max sees his mother kiss a man in their living room he acts out, throwing a fit for his mother and running out of the house; as he runs he goes further into the recesses of his imagination and discovers the land of the wild things. This is a land where the large, scary monsters are actually friends, and Max is king of it all.

When I was in film school a professor once told me adaptations weren’t so much about being literally faithful to the events, but finding and capturing the spirit of the story. The fact that Spike Jonze was able to fully capture the spirit of Maurice Sendak’s book and turn it into a fully realized feature film for Where the Wild Things Are astounds me. The book is all of 10 sentences about childhood temper tantrums, disappointment, anger and imagination and Jonze found a full length film in this; he turned it into a film about what it’s like to be a child without control over anything and being on the precipice of wanting to understand adult concepts and wanting to run away from change and anything that might actually make you grow up.

Despite being a brilliant film, Where the Wild Things Are will not be a popular movie. Like most films of its kind, people go into a movie like this and whether they are conscious of it or not they expect a glossy, happy children’s movie. Where the Wild Things Are is not that film, and it is better for it, but the fact that there is violence, scary moments, and that Max is a liar and sometimes a bully will turn people off. However, it is these things about the film and about Max that make the movie transcend from being a children’s movie and turn into a beautiful film experience. Through the course of a fight with his mother and a trip into an imaginary land Max completes a character arch, one that teaches him he can’t control the world around him no matter what he pretends and all that really matters is that his family loves him. This might be a simplistic character arch, but it is the arch of a child, and a child is what the movie and the book is all about.

Director: Spike Jonze
Writers: Spike Jonze & Dave Eggers
Max: Max Records
Mom: Catherine Keener
Carol: James Gandolfini
Alexander: Paul Dano
Judith: Catherine O’Hara
Ira: Forest Whitaker
The Bull: Michael Berry Jr.
Douglas: Chris Cooper
KW: Lauren Ambrose

Carol: It's going to be a place where only the things you want to happen, would happen.
Max: We could totally build a place like that!