Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol **

Director: Brad Bird
Cast: Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Paula Patton, Simon Pegg
Michael Nyqvist, Vladimir Mashkov, Samuli Edelmann, Léa Seydoux
Anil Kapoor, Josh Holloway, Tom Wilkinson

To say plot is unimportant in Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol would be like saying that Tom Cruise isn't trying too hard to prove he still matters. The film pretty much is an altar to why the 49-year old is as relevant as 20somethings who spend entire movies running to-and-from explosions showing their toned pecs and virile grins.
Cruise is back to play Ethan Hunt, in the fourth movie in the Mission: Impossible series -which have always suffered from a lack of homogeneity in terms of artistic vision - this time around he faces a crazy Russian scientist Hendricks (Nyqvist) who has decided to single-handedly start a nuclear holocaust.
Hunt and his team, conformed by tech genius Benji Dunn (Pegg who's here just for comedic relief), kick-ass agent Jane Carter (Patton) and the mysterious William Brandt (Renner), trek all over the world trying to stop Hendricks.
From skyscraper climbing in Dubai, to seducing loony lotharios in India, the film's major concern seems to be just how crazier and over the top can the situations get. At first, watching Cruise jump from Russian hospitals and survive explosions is a bit fun, but in a movie where even the title credits are too much, you have to wonder if they will ever stop and smell the flowers.
The action gets to be so much that the film can't help but end feeling like a live action version of Spy vs. Spy (wait, that already exists, right?) or a parody of an action movie.
When the team figure out they have to hack a server room in Dubai, Brandt reminds them that it's located in "the tallest building in the world", and you can't help but think "of course", before rolling your eyes and sipping on your diet soda.
For all its insanity which is unarguably well choreographed by the brilliant Brad Bird, the film can't help but feel utterly joyless at times. It's easy, and perhaps right, to blame Cruise for this feeling, given that this is his show and he must've been in control of everything that went on in it.
The supporting cast is quite good but more often than not you feel that they are just in it because they want to fit in with the popular kid. Patton for example, shows she has superb action heroine skills, but the story reduces her to being a "woman", meaning an agent with a brilliant future who can't help but fail because she gets her period. Renner similarly gets stuck with a shady character just so he won't be able to steal the movie from Cruise. Even if he's poorly written, the wonderful actor still plays Brandt with a wink.
It's slightly pleasant to see Cruise in top form, trying to atone for his lunacy period by doing what he always did best: entertain. Too bad he is so eager that he decided to employ every single trick in his hat. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol could've been an action landmark, instead it satisfies itself with being distracting.

Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire **1/2

Director: Lee Daniels
Cast: Gabourey 'Gabby' Sidibe, Mo'Nique
Paula Patton, Mariah Carey, Lenny Kravitz

"Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire" is the kind of movie that would get made at an NGO to encourage donations for the issues it features. Like those movies it would choose a harrowing topic mostly unknown, or ignored, by society and then invite audiences to make a change.
It would be like a documentary of sorts because it would draw its inspiration from real life, but concentrate on the more dramatic elements to achieve its purpose and very much like those movies, it would never be meant for the people featured in it.
In this movie we have the tragic story of an overweight, illiterate sixteen year old from Harlem called Precious (Sidibe), she's recently been impregnated by her father for the second time and suffers constant verbal and physical abuse from her domineering mother Mary (Mo'Nique).
Precious escapes from her world by daydreaming and seeing herself as a famous entertainer. Things get better for her when she starts going to an alternative school where she becomes her teacher, Ms. Rain's (Patton) protegee.
Set in the late 1980's the movie features a remarkable sense of environment and subtly introduces subjects like AIDS and the slow, but steady liberation of homosexuality.
But as liberal as the movie wants to be, its director grounds it on values that only appeal to the most conservative crowds (again, people who would provide hefty tax free paychecks to the charities the movie asked them to).
It makes Precious and Mary extreme African American stereotypes that spend their time eating pig's feet and fried chicken.
"You plan on putting some food in that frying pan?" asks Mary more concerned with the fried than the food part.
And when Precious spends a day with Ms. Rain which she reveals to be something like they would do on television, she does so by relinquishing her personal biases after she learns that Ms. Rain isn't only a smart saint, but also a lesbian.
This preaching of faux liberal values as the ultimate savior would've reduced the movie to complete cliché if it wasn't for the work of its amazing ensemble.
Sidibe is a natural talent who inhabits this young woman with no regards to how even the screenplay mocks her. She makes Precious ignorant, but willing to learn and dying for the kind of love even she would agree she doesn't know.
While Mo'Nique's monstrous Mary is the work of someone fully compromised with her character, not so much in the uglification as in the attitude; watching her stroke her wig while she dances in her living room is a perverse spectacle not because of her hairy armpits and disdainful unkempt self, but because she doesn't even care about them.
Hard as they try though, Daniels is almost working against them, making Mary throw Precious a television set (only to realize later what she'd done and be sorry for the TV not her daughter) and leaving the black people with lighter skin tones (Patton, Kravitz and Carey) to do the rescuing.
Daniels major problem is his confusion regarding character development and audience expectation. He tries to make Precious a neorealist heroine (quite literally in a scene where she imagines herself as a character in "Two Women" complete with Italian lines and English subtitles) when she has already mentioned that she can't even follow Ms. Rain because she talks like people from TV channels she doesn't watch, which again makes the whole "Two Women" episode bizarre because that would be one of those channels.
This isn't a movie about Precious, this is a movie about what Daniels thinks Precious would think of herself and as such it seems he's the one who has issues to deal with.