My Ten Favorite New-to-Me Movies of 2021

It's that time of year when the world tells everyone who will listen just what they fell in love with over the past twelve months.  I already shared my top ten lists for books on my book blog, so it's high time I share my movie list too, eh?  Here are the ten movies I liked best of all the movies I watched for the first time in 2021.

1. Calcutta (1947).  A wary pilot (Alan Ladd) gets mixed up with a dewy-eyed dame (Gail Russell) who was engaged to his recently-murdered best friend.  One of Ladd's best noir outings, and the first of his movies to hit the top of one of my end-of-year lists!  Can you believe that?!?

2. Knives Out (2019).  A wealthy mystery author (Christopher Plummer) dies, and everyone in his large and weird family (Chris Evans, Jamie Lee Curtis, et. al.) suspects everyone else of having killed him.  Only an enigmatic private detective (Daniel Craig, whose southern accent is not as bad as I was led to believe) has any inkling of the truth for a long time.  My husband and I were so wrapped up in this movie that we watched the whole thing after our kids went to bed one night, staying up until midnight (very late, for us) to finish it.

3. Letters to Juliet (2010).  A lonely girl (Amanda Seyfried) on a pre-wedding trip to Italy gets caught up in a little band of women who answer love-advice-seeking letters written to Shakespeare's fictional Juliet.  She ends up helping answer a decades-old letter, which leads an elderly woman (Vanessa Redgrave) to arrive in Italy seeking her long-lost love (Franco Nero).  My favorite thing is that I grew up watching Redgrave and Nero play Guinevere and Lancelot in Camelot (1967), and they're a couple in real life too, so seeing them together again here is just marvelous.

4. Against All Flags (1952).  A roguish naval officer (Errol Flynn) pretends to be a pirate in order to infiltrate a pirate stronghold, only to find himself falling for a strong-willed, lemon-tongued Pirate Captain (Maureen O'Hara).  Jolly good fun.

5. Since You Went Away (1944).  A mother (Claudette Colbert) stays home and cares for her daughters while her husband is away fighting WWII.  I wish I'd seen this when I was in my Joseph Cotten phase because he is just yummy here.  Not that I still don't have a soft spot for him, because I do, but... you know what I mean.

6. Little Women (1949).  Meg (Janet Leigh), Jo (June Allyson), Beth (Margaret O'Brien), and Amy (Elizabeth Taylor) March do some growing up during the American Civil War with help from their mother (Mary Astor), their next-door neighbor (Peter Lawford), and a kindly German professor (Rossano Brazzi).  Probably never going to be my favorite version of this story, but I really liked Allyson and O'Brien in particular.  Again, wish I'd seen this when I was going through my Peter Lawford phase because he's at his most charming in this.

7. The Moonstone (1996).  A young woman (Keeley Hawes) receives a fabulous jewel for her eighteenth birthday, but it disappears, and she suspects the man she loves (Greg Wise) of having stolen it to pay off gambling debts.  I was kind of disappointed by the 2016 BBC version, so I sought this one out, and I'm so glad I did!  Much better.

8. No Time to Die (2021).  James Bond (Daniel Craig) grows up.

9. Chicago Deadline (1949).  A news reporter (Alan Ladd) finds a girl (Donna Reed) dead in a cheap rooming house, finds her address book before the police do, and goes around trying to figure out what her life was like and why she died so he can write an article about her.  It's pretty noir, but not deeply dark.

10. News of the World (2020).  A man (Tom Hanks) who travels around reading the news aloud to people in small, far-flung Texas settlements takes on the job to delivering a child (Helena Zengel) back to her family.  She's been rescued from her Kiowa captors, but she'd lived with them for so long she only speaks Kiowa anymore, and she's obviously got a lot of trauma in her past.  So does he, and the two bond during the journey.  I like stories of found families, lost and damaged people helping each other heal, and westerns, so... yeah, totally dug this movie.

"No Time to Die" (2021) -- Initial Thoughts

No Time to Die (2021) gave me something I've never gotten from a James Bond movie: a hero.

Don't get me wrong -- I've thoroughly enjoyed many James Bond movies, and loved several.  I am a fan of the franchise, overall.  But James Bond has never been an actual hero for me.  His movies deliver adrenaline-fueled fun, and that's all I need from them. 

I'm not sure what I think about No Time to Die overall.  I think it was a little longer than necessary, and I still haven't figured out a couple things.  Which means I just need to watch it over again, that's all.  A second viewing will determine whether I quite like it, or just kinda like it.

But I know I loved one thing.  I love that James Bond got to be really, truly my hero for the first time that I can really remember.  Oh, he always gets to play the hero: stop the bad guys, save the day, put himself into harm's way for queen and country.  But that's different than actually being my hero.  

The moment that made him my hero is kinda spoilery, so maybe don't read farther if you're caring about spoilage.  Go see it, come back and read this after, etc.

You see, James Bond gets to do something in this movie that he often fails to do:  he saves the girl.  Yes, I know there have been Bond girls who've survived to the end of the movie before.  They don't all die.  But back in GoldenEye (1995) when Alec Trevelyan taunts Bond about all the dead women he failed to protect... he's onto something.  A lot of Bond girls die in a lot of Bond movies.  And it's usually somehow Bond's fault -- he's usually just a little too late.

So, it was a big and exciting moment for me when James Bond put the woman he loves, another woman, and a little girl into a raft and sent them away to safety.  Because, in that moment, he became the truest, highest, realest kind of man.  A real man who will shield and shelter women and children with his every resource, including his own life.

And that woman he loves?  She does what real women do:  she realizes the gravity of the situation and accepts his protection.  She does not pretend she doesn't need his protection or his help.  She does not scorn it.  She does not protest at all.  He offers to send her to safety, and she goes.

Did I then cry?  I did.  I got tears of pride and joy in my eyes, watching James Bond become, at long last, my hero.  That moment was worth the price of admission, the price of my popcorn and Coke, and the slightly overblown runtime.  I was so thoroughly happy.  Well done.

"GoldenEye" (1995)

I have so many wonderful memories surrounding this movie.  It's the first James Bond movie I ever saw all the way through, aside from a couple parts my parents would skip for us.  This is probably why Pierce Brosnan remains my favorite Bond.  Judge all you like -- I'm sticking with him, and it's all because of GoldenEye.  It's my favorite Bond film too, even though I do recognize and acknowledge that there are better ones.  Don't care; I love this one.

So, when I was a kid, my dad would get the old James Bond movies out of the library if he was taking a sick day.  He didn't get sick often, but everyone gets a cold or the flu once in a while, him included.  And he loved the old Sean Connery and Roger Moore 007 movies.  Once he was feeling better, and no longer contagious, a lot of times he'd show my brother and I the stupendous opening sequence to whichever 007 movie he'd gotten this time.  I must confess I don't even know which movies some of them go with, but I have great memories of Bond ski-surfing, jumping off cliffs, etc.

Now, my dad never liked Timothy Dalton as 007.  But when the new guy named Pierce Brosnan took over the role, Dad rented GoldenEye when it came to the video store.  If you remember life with video stores, then you know this was about six months after the movie was in theaters.  We had it rough back in the '90s, kids.  It was another three months or so before we could buy our own copy on VHS.

Happily, my dad really liked this movie and this 007.  And before he took the tape back to the video store, he showed my brother and I the opening sequence.  I still love it so much.  James Bond (Pierce Brosnan) bungee jumps off a dam.

He and 006 (Sean Bean) infiltrate a Russian chemical weapons facility and set a bunch of bombs.  They engage in witty repartee and buddy jokes.

I fell in love with Pierce Brosnan right here:

And I fell in love with Sean Bean right here:

That first viewing, I almost liked 006 better than 007.  I mean, his name was Alec (James and Alec are basically my two favorite guy names -- I loved them being the names of these two cool buddies!).  He had a lot of sarcasm, and I reeeeeeally liked his voice.  But if you're at all aware of who Sean Bean is, and what generally happens to him in movies, you know what comes next.

Yeah, they shot him in the head, and he's very, very dead, and it matters very little whether stone or lump of lead -- it is very, very certain that he's very, very dead.  (I may have loved that line from Gilbert and Sullivan's musical The Yoeman of the Guard a little too much.  I use it whenever I can.)  And so 007 blows the whole place up and escapes.

Oh, the feeeeeeeels!  I've cried so much over 006 dying.  More than once.  This was the first thing I ever saw Sean Bean in, and it was before he had died in quite so many movies, so I totally wasn't expecting it, I was expecting that this would be a snarky buddy-comedy James Bond movie, and then nope, death to 006.

In fact, my dad let us watch just that opening sequence many times over the course of several months before he ever showed us the whole movie.  So I got really attached to 006 and 007, and that whole opener remains my favorite part of the film.

But the movie does continue after that part, and eventually my dad had watched it often enough to know where to skip things and mute bad words.  So I finally got to watch the whole movie.  After my beloved opening sequence, nine years pass for Bond, and then off we merrily go to London, where we meet the new M (Judi Dench), who is... (drumroll please)... a woman.  Edgy stuff.  A woman ordering James Bond around!  Sounds really lame now, but this was kind of a big deal twenty years ago.  Like, I was sixteen at the time, and I found the new M very scary.  I didn't like her.  She yelled at James Bond too much.  Nowadays, I absolutely love her, and Judi Dench is one of my favorite actresses, but at the time... she scared me.  Kind of a lot.

Anyway, James Bond gets sent out on a new mission.  All about hackers in Russia and a missing electromagnetic pulse device and a nuclear space weapon, the usual exciting, high-tech, implausible, delightful stuff James Bond movies are made of.

Plus, we meet up with a Russian computer programmer named Natalya (Izabella Scorupco).  She's smart, she's sassy, and she's the Bond Girl of the day.  I like her much more than most Bond Girls because she doesn't just fall into Bond's arms immediately, and she's got a lot of guts.  She generally doesn't need rescuing, and is one of the first strong female characters I genuinely admired.

We also meet up with freaky-deaky hit-woman Xenia Onatopp (Famke Janssen), so named because we have to have some kind of weird double-entendre-laden name in here somewhere, it's kind of a rule.  She kills people a lot.  In strange ways.  Hers are the scenes we had to skip when I was a kid.

And then there's Boris (Alan Cumming), who steals every single scene he's in, even away from Pierce Brosnan.  Even away from Sean Bean.  He is one of the funniest characters I've ever seen, and my family still quotes him to this day.  "I am inVEEEEEEENcible!"  Yeah.  Get the biggest kick out of him.

SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!!  Lots of spoilers.  Spoilers and more spoilers and still more spoilers.  Okay, maybe not that many, but I'm going to spoil a big plot twist, so skip to below the picture of James Bond and Natalya if you don't want to be spoiled.

I think GoldenEye holds the distinction of being the only movie in which Sean Bean gets two death scenes.  First he got shot in the head in the beginning, but he didn't actually, he was just staging his own death.  Now he's the bad guy orchestrating everything, and man, when I found that out the first time, I was sooooooo angry.  And so happy.  Happy that I got more Sean Bean to watch!  Angry because he was the bad guy now!  All the mixed-up feelings a teen could feel.  Because I'd gotten so very, very fond of him from watching the opening sequence over and over and over before I saw the whole movie, and now I felt very betrayed.  Much like James Bond feels!

Of course, Sean Bean has to die at the end.  He's the Bond baddie AND he's Sean Bean, so it's required.  Sniffle.

Is this movie family friendly?  Not really.  Xenia Onatopp kills people by squeezing them to death between her thighs, sometimes during sex.  There's some bad language, there's a good bit of violence.  Like I said, my family always censored parts of this -- in fact, we permanently censored our VHS copy by recording over several scenes.  We recorded bits of a documentary about building castles over them, and from then on, my brother and I referred to the process of censoring scenes in any of our family's movies as "castle building."  I miss being able to do that -- you can't "fix" movies on DVD like you could on VHS.  In fact, I own three or four movies on VHS I refuse to replace with DVDs because I want the edited versions, not the originals.  Sigh.

This has been my entry for the 007 Blogathon hosted by MaddyLovesHerClassicFilms.  Be sure to drop by her blog to find links to the other entries.

My Ten Favorite Action Movies

So, I've decided I love too many "action/adventure" movies to lump them all together, and I'm going to do lists of my favorite superhero, sci-fi, fantasy, and war movies separately.  Which means these are all pure action movies about people without super powers or magical abilities that are battling other real people, not robots or supervillains or evil wizards.  Yes, such movies exist!

1.  The Fugitive (1993)

Dr. Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford) is wrongly convicted of his wife's murder, escapes, and goes hunting for the real killer while U.S. Marshal Sammy Gerard (Tommy Lee Jones) hunts for him.  My second-favorite movie of all time.

2.  The Bourne Identity (2002)

Amnesiac Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) races across Europe, evading unknown pursuers, seeking answers about his past, and falling in love with a quirky stranger (Franka Potente).  The movie that changed my mind about Matt Damon.  And based on one of my favorite books.

3.  A Knight's Tale (2001)

Poor William Thatcher (Heath Ledger) pretends to be a knight so he can win jousting tournaments and feed himself and his friends (Paul Bettany, Alan Tudyk, and Mark Addy).  Rollicking good fun, with a crazy soundtrack and some awesome jousting scenes.

4.  Conspiracy Theory (1997)

Paranoid cab driver Jerry Fletcher (Mel Gibson) convinces the woman he loves (Julia Roberts) to help him uncover a conspiracy.  I think this is the first thing I ever saw Patrick Stewart in other than Star Trek:  The Next Generation.  It manages to be twisty and tender, creepy and sweet, all at the same time.

5.  The Three Musketeers (1993)

Young d'Artagnan (Chris O'Donnell) just wants to be a Musketeer, but he ends up embroiled in unmasking a plot against the king.  His three Musketeer friends (Kiefer Sutherland, Charlie Sheen, and Oliver Platt) are hilarious and awesome too.  I actually like this better than Alexandre Dumas' book!

6.  GoldenEye (1995)

James Bond (Pierce Brosnan) battles his ex-partner (Sean Bean) to save Britain from an electronic meltdown.  The first thing I ever saw Brosnan, Bean, and Judi Dench in -- and I became a total fan of all three.

7.  Master and Commander:  The Far Side of the World (2003)

Captain Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe) leads his best friend Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany) and his ship's crew on a quest to capture a dastardly French ship.  I'd read all of Patrick O'Brian's novels about Aubrey and Maturin before the movie came out, and I spent a lot of my time in the theater whispering to my brother about how perfectly everything matched the books.

8.  R.E.D. (2010)

Retired black-ops agent Frank Moses (Bruce Willis), his new girlfriend Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker), and a bunch of his old pals (Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren) and enemies (Brian Cox) team up to figure out who's trying to kill them, and why.  Hilarious from beginning to end.  You guys wanna get pancakes?

9.  The Hunt for Red October (1990)

CIA analyst Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin) tries to convince his superiors that a Russian submarine captain (Sean Connery) wants to defect.  Still the best Jack Ryan movie, and since I love Harrison Ford but only like Alec Baldwin, that's saying something.

10.  Romancing the Stone (1984)

Romance novelist Joan Wilder (Kathleen Turner) goes to South America to rescue her kidnapped sister and ends up having a grand adventure with the help of a stranger (Michael Douglas).  Rollicking good fun, and all the parts that have to do with being a writer crack me up to no end.

"Skyfall" (2012) -- Initial Thoughts

When I got in the car to go see "Skyfall" this morning, Adele's theme song for it was playing on the car radio.  An auspicious sign, eh?  I'd really never heard it all the way through, and I quite liked it.  I haven't really jumped on the Adele bandwagon, but if anything would tempt me to, it would be this song.  (Watch the official video here.)  It harkens back to the great Bond movie themes, the ones you can belt to the rafters like "Nobody Does it Better," yet also reminds me a lot of the songs for GoldenEye and Casino Royale.   Quite the heady mix, and it got me very much ready for a sweet, adrenaline-laced ride.  I hoped I wouldn't be disappointed like I was last time around.

And I wasn't.

:-D

Skyfall is not as sleek and insouciant as Casino Royale.  However, it is also not as clunky and glitchy as Quantum of Solace.  It is cheekier than both of the previous Daniel Craig outings, but also more heartfelt.  Stop reading right here if you don't want spoilage, because I am going to spoil a whole lot of stuff, and if you haven't seen this yet and really want to, you are gonna be mad at yourself if you read the rest of this post.  Trust me, just close the browser tab and come back once you've visited the theater.

Okay, you've been duly warned.

Linger here and gaze at your own peril.  You could drown in those eyes.

Let's begin with the opening sequence, shall we?  This one is jam-packed, with a car chase, a motorcycle chase, and a good, old-fashioned fist-fight on top of a train.  Which goes on to involve an excavator -- I kept thinking how I can't wait for Dano to be old enough to watch movies like this, because he would love the whole excavator part (if it wasn't for all the shooting going on during it, I'd show him that part just cuz it'd probably make him laugh in glee).  But this opening sequence deviates in one very important way from all other 007 movies (at least, the ones I've seen), making it very clear that this movie is going some different places.  James Bond does not win.

In fact, he doesn't even come close to winning, though through no fault of his own.  He gets shot by his own teammate, thus raising the question of just who we -- and he -- can trust.

But, obviously, he can't have actually died only ten minutes or so into the movie.  When he returns, he's haggard, he's haunted, and above all, he's not entirely sure he's up to this job anymore.  In other words, he's quite delicious.

Look who needs a hug!

M tries her best to bolster his (and her) confidence, a new Q arms him (and delivers my favorite line of the movie:  "Were you expecting an exploding pen?  Because we don't really go in for those anymore."  I laughed and laughed), and dear James gets sent off to Shanghai after the guy who killed off another agent at the beginning of the movie and stole, well, basically the equivalent of the NOC list from Mission:  Impossible (1996), but hey, new MacGuffins are hard to find these days.

I knew, from reading reviews of this movie, and interviews with various people involved, that they were bringing back some of the quips and bon mots that had mostly been missing from the last two movies.  I was expecting to laugh, and I did, quite a few times.  I was not expecting, however, that I would cry.  I don't think I have ever cried during a James Bond movie.  But I cried at the end of Skyfall.  Because M dies, cradled by Bond in a sort of reverse Pieta that was hauntingly filmed and achingly well acted.

Which brings me to the subject of Sam Mendes, who directed this.  I've seen two of his previous movies, American Beauty (1999) and Road to Perdition (2002).  I didn't care much for the former, but the latter is one of my favorite neo-noir movies, and it made me hope a great deal that Skyfall was not going to have the crummy camera-work and wonky pacing of Quantum of Solace.  Again, I did not hope in vain.

Remind me again why you drove me to the middle of nowhere, Bond.

I have to think that the dead guy in the bathroom at the beginning of this is a nod to the way Daniel Craig's character died in Road to Perdition, and it made me grin.  Also, the last part of the movie, where James Bond and M go on the run, just them and a car, reminded me a great deal of the father and son on the lam in Road, only with the "son" driving and protecting and planning.  Even the ending, with them confronting their pursuers in a house miles from anywhere, had echoes of Road.

Okay, anyway, Skyfall has lots of great nods and winks to the classic 007 movies, from the Aston Martin with the ejector seat and machine guns, to a bunch of Komodo Dragons circling around under a walkway, very like those sharks from Thunderball (1965).  It also as the creepiest 007 movie bad guy since... um... since Christopher Lee in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974).  (And that's saying a lot, since we all know Christopher Lee = Ultra Creepy.  When he wants to be.)  Javier Bardem's Silva is creeeeeeeepy, and I don't mean just cuz he hits on Bond in the creepiest way he can manage, or because he can take out his top teeth.  He exudes creeeeeeepiness and is scary in the that-guy's-brain-is-a-bag-full-of-cats way you can't figure what he'll do next.

Only a crazy person would wear that shirt, amiright?

Actually, speaking of Loki, they put Silva in a glass prison cell that had me instantly thinking of the cage on the helicarrier where Nick Fury stashed Loki.  And also of Magneto's plastic prison in X-Men and X-2.  Hmm.

Anyway, by the end of the movie, we have a new Q, a new M, and a new Moneypenny.  But the same Bond.  Whew, cuz I like the way Daniel Craig fills Bond's tuxedo (literally and figuratively), and I'm not in any hurry to see him replaced.

Oh, and also, is Albert Finney ever anything less than delightful?  I can't believe how many UK acting heavyweights are in this movie!  Finney, Dame Judi Dench, and Ralph Feinnes... I kept expecting to see Ian McKellen pop up somewhere.  Guess I have to wait for next month for my Gandalf fix, though.

One last note -- kudos to the filmmakers for staying classy and not letting this devolve into soft porn.  All (all!) the love scenes faded to black at appropriate moments.

In sum, is this my new favorite 007 movie?  No.  I still love GoldenEye and Casino Royale best.  But I look forward to seeing this again.  (From Redbox or something, Cowboy -- stop panicking!)

Day 08 - The best opening/closing credits

This is such a tough one for me, I've spent all day ruminating on it.  And I've decided the niftiest opening credits I can think of are for 2006's Casino Royale.  I love the somewhat retro feel to them, which is appropriate for a reboot of a franchise that began in the 1960s.  And I love how the cartoon characters shatter into card markings -- it's just nifty.  Instead of describing it, here, just watch it yourself if you want:



As for best closing credits... they may not be the best, but I love the funky claymation closing sketch during the credits for A Life Less Ordinary (1997).  You can watch them here on the animator's website.

Note to 007 filmmakers: stop trying to make James Bond into Jason Bourne!!!!! If I wanted to watch a Jason Bourne movie, I would have stayed home and watched one. I go to a Bond movie expecting a sleek, stylish ride in an Aston Martin, not a turbulent jouncing in somebody's old Jeep. I realize the Bourne movies are fantastically successful, but that doesn't give you a reason to copy them -- Casino Royale was fantastically successful too, on its own terms.

WARNING: LOTS OF SPOILAGE BELOW!!!

So yeah, I went to see Quantum of Solace yesterday. And it had its fun points, for sure. The Wondrous White Pants made another appearance, to great effect. There was a motorcycle. Daniel Craig is 100% enjoyable as Bond. I like Dame Judi Dench so much as M, I want to adopt her as my snarky great-aunt.

But most of the action sequences were a big disappointment. I know the herky-jerky, in-your-lap camera style is supposed to make us feel like we're in the thick of the fight or car chase, but these were shot so close and cut so quickly that I couldn't tell what was going on a lot of the time, and that's not cool. Even in the second two Bourne movies, which this seemed to be copying, I can still tell what's going on. In Quantum's opening car chase, I could barely tell who was chasing who. And during the fight on the scaffolding, I literally could not tell which guy was Bond and which was the baddie. And that's not just uncool, that's bad directing and editing. Never confuse your audience like that, people! You will only annoy them.

Also, the plot was kinda scattered. I love the tight focus of Casino -- it feels like riding a racehorse through a tunnel. Quantum feels like running a three-legged race on a golf course. It's way shorter than Casino, but feels longer.

And hey! Beating the snot out of people using an everyday object is Jason Bourne's turf! I think the number one thing that bugged me about this movie was the fight where Bond kills the guy with a cuticle scissors. The whole thing, from the guy bursting through the window through the death-by-manicure, just reeked of copying Bourne. Grr.

And I kept wanting the bad guy to be played by Sam Rockwell instead of this Mathieu Amalric guy -- Rockwell could've pulled off the skeezy thing with more fun and zeal.

That said, it's a fun romp, and it served the very important purpose of defunking me out of a seriously cranky mood. And it had the Wondrous White Pants. But it gets two Warheads for dragging in the middle.

Bah. I've been meaning to blog about so many things lately. Like Casino Royale (loved it -- Daniel Craig is an acceptable James Bond) and Superman Returns (it was okay -- but Brandon Routh made James Marsden seem dashing, mysterious, and cavalier....). But instead I'm going to just link to a sunny, light, almost happy Nickelback video! The one for "Photograph", of course ;-)

UPDATE: They yanked the "Photograph" video from YouTube, but here's a cool live version done in some tv studio. It doesn't rock as hard as the regular version, but I like watching them play live too. And I'm finally getting used to Chad Kroeger's shorter hair.

Dad and Grandma O. are here for a couple days, on their way to points west of here. So Cowboy and I had supper with them last night and hung out for a while at their hotel. And tonight I had supper with them again, and then Daddy and I went to see Mission: Impossible 3!

I liked it. I liked it almost as well as the first one, and waaaaaaaaaaaay better than the second. The first one was sizzlingly original, while the second one was too informed by The Matrix and used too many identity-switches. This one is more informed by the Bourne movies, with wham-bang collisions and the use of random common objects as weapons (both a pen and a phone receiver, ala Bourne), but with crunchier fights (I do like the mind-altering swifty fights of the Bourne movies, but this was a movie about losing blood and getting hurt, so those wouldn't have worked).

M:I and M:I 3 are kind of like James Bond got buddies and some street smarts, lost his unrufflable tux-clad exterior somewhere along the way, but retained his gadges and panache. If that makes any sense. I'm tempted to rewatch the first one tonight, to see if it's as shiny as I remember. It's been several years since I watched it...