I hear that Tom Cruise showed up at the Tribeca Film Festival this week to screen Mission: Impossible III. I didn’t see any trace of him though – he was crisscrossing the city making appearances everywhere, with no one knowing where he’d show up next. Of course, my press badge – which ranks just below “schmuck” on the importance meter here – was not going to get me any info on the guy’s whereabouts anyway.

I caught the movie though at the media screening here, and it is a notch above the typical summer spectacle, with some great action set pieces and, as our man Brent Simon has pointed out, a refreshing willingness to break with the conventions of the genre in a way that the James Bond films rarely have. But ultimately M:I:III doesn’t go far enough in this direction, and its weak final act devolves into standard issue action movie nonsense. “Clear!!!”

On the opposite end of the spectrum today, we have The Hip Hop Project (also known as Word.Life), the excellent documentary at Tribeca about a group of inner city kids who channel the difficulties of their upbringings into their music. Led by Chris Rolle, who was orphaned in his native Bahamas when still a baby and to this day struggles with the emotional consequences of that abandonment, the group faces the challenges of not just creating music, but also stepping beyond the negative aspects that, Rolle believes, too much of hip hop embraces. In the process, the kids learn about respect and self esteem, and it’s a damned inspiring journey, no matter how cheesy that sounds.

And to think, I only accidentally saw this film when I thought I was screening Wordplay, which is about the people behind The New York Times crossword puzzle. Word to your mother, Word.Life rocks. Ahem.

Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register.