Films on the Whim
Collateral: This was one of the best movies I've seen all summer. It's slick, smart, and makes no apologies about its holier-than-thou dialogue. I admit Tom Cruise looks off-putting with gray hair and a shark suit, especially in the TV spots and the trailer. But I think that's part of why the movie works. Five minutes into the movie, you forget this is the Tom Cruise playing the suave, bad guy. Same with Jamie Foxx. His glasses make him look like a vulnerable, cheapskate cabbie and not some tough black guy who can kick ass. Mark Ruffalo is completely unrecognizable as the LAPD cop. Really. I wouldn't know it was him unless I looked at the cast list.

The best parts of the movie are where Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx just sit in the cab and psychoanalyze each other while Foxx drives through the empty LA streets at 3 am. They talk only to kill time, but they have such surprising insight into the other person's deepest desires. As the night goes on, the relationship gets more complicated because they start to depend on each other. They're both in deep shit. But they know they absolutely need the other guy to get out of it. So by the end of the night, on some subconscious leve, they care about what happens to the each other. It's like a variation of the Stockholm syndrome.

Man, I wish Tom Cruise played the quiet, cold-blooded bad guy more. He's quite convincing. You can tell he concentrated on his acting more than just looking good and getting the cool lines right. Kudos to Michael Mann. He had the Cruise/Foxx chemistry tweaked just right and shooting the whole thing couldn't have been easy. And there are a lot of funny parts to break up the gravitas of it all. The ending bothered me a bit, because it was so awkward and faked. But whatever. It's a wrinkle I can gloss over.

Princess Diairies 2 Okay, this was like the icing on the cake. It was funny, I guess. But it was mostly physical comedy that kids and teenyboppers love. Lyso was laughing her ass off. It wasn't even like Shrek, where the adults understood all the inside jokes. To be frank, I was a little bored because the movie was pretty cliched and mundane. I blame it on Collateral. It was a tough act to follow.