Mark Duplass in Safety Not Guaranteed.

Well, the year has just passed the halfway mark, and while it hasn’t offered a ton of big screen gems, there have certainly been some performances worth remembering. Below, I present my superlatives for the best performances of the half-year:

Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role: Mark Duplass, Your Sister’s Sister and Safety Not Guaranteed

In this duo of similarly-themed indie films, Duplass is a man-child crippled by emotional stasis. In the former, his depression causes him to make one relationship mistake after another. In the latter, he makes us believe that he can create a time machine and head back to 2001. And yet no matter what, we remain onboard with him.

Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role: Rosemarie DeWitt, Your Sister’s Sister

No one plays a screw-up as piercingly brilliantly as DeWitt, whether it’s onstage in Family Week or on Showtime’s sadly cancelled The United States of Tara. The fierce actress channels brittle fragility as Hannah in Sister. Watching her and Duplass together, you pray that whatever damage they may have done to their relationships with each other and with her sister Iris (Emily Blunt) is reparable.

Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role: Tom Cruise, Rock of Ages

Rock has such a silly premise, and is such a terrible movie beyond that, that it’s easy to disregard everything about it. Except then Cruise saunters in, rock star attitude coating lone star sadness, and provides a backbone for this weak crowd-pleaser. It’s not just that he filled the film’s loudest moments so wonderfully; it’s that he also provided the film’s quietest, most intense ones as well.

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role: Eva Green, Dark Shadows

Playing bad treated Green real good in Shadows, a weak TV update that gave her plenty of flaky baroque scenery to chew as she simultaneously seduced and antagonized Johnny Depp’s Barnabas Collins. This was perfect over-the-top acting, in which she both let loose without ever losing control. And it’s proof that great acting can be found regardless of role size and genre of film.

Here’s hoping there are more gems to discover in the second half of the year!

Photo Courtesy of Wiki Commons

The Tom Cruise/Katie Holmes divorce saga is already off to a dramatic start. Many people expect their divorce to be messy, but these two are already torn on where to hold the proceedings.

When Holmes and Cruise were together, they lived in Los Angeles, reports Reuters, but Holmes filed for divorce in New York where rumor has it she secretly rented an apartment in Chelsea.  Holmes’s divorce papers claim both are New York residents, according to gossip site TMZ. Cruise, on the other hand, may look to move the divorce proceedings to California, where he could potentially gain more leverage.

Holmes is more likely to get sole custody of the couple’s daughter, Suri, if the divorce takes place in New York, Fox 25 reports. New York judges are more inclined to grant sole custody if parents cannot agree on decisions about the child’s life, and it’s rumored Holmes fears what role Scientology may have on her aging daughter.

If joint custody is granted in New York, one parent cannot override the decisions of the other, also according to Fox. In California, parents are able to make decisions alone. Rumors that Holmes wants to protect her daughter from “brainwashing” before it’s too late are likely motivating her decision to legally end the marriage in New York.

Photo Courtesy of Wiki Commons

Clearly no one was in a rockin’ mood this weekend. “Rock of Ages,” the musical adaptation starring Tom Cruise, Alec Baldwin and Catherine Zeta-Jones, earned just $15 million over its opening weekend, the Huffington Post reports. It ranked behind “Prometheus” and even “Madagascar 3,” proving a star-studded cast can lose out to aliens and cuddly, animated lions no matter how sexy Cruise’s locks.

“Rock of Ages” is the story of a small town girl and city boy who meet on the Sunset Strip while pursuing their Hollywood dreams, says the movie’s official writeup. This is Cruise’s worst wide release opening since “Lions for Lambs” in 2007, the Post also reports.

—Alissa Fleck

In my next few posts, we’re going to take a look at a few of the cooler technologies featured in M:I GP to see how close they are to you:

Item 1: The Contact Lenses.

Seems that since he left the island, Josh Holloway has ditched his makeshift glasses for a sweet set of contacts. Those Heads Up Display (HUD) Lenses were the coolest, and, aside from the sweet car (see my next post), they win the prize for most obviously marketable gizmo. Transparent displays are nothing new. But how realistic is sticking that sucker on your eye? The quick of it is: Not very. But we’re on our way.

Researchers at the University of Washington recently completed a successful test of a contact lens LED display. Granted, the thing could only manage a single pixel and the pictures of it sitting on anesthetized rabbit eyes are a super bummer, but hey: Science! The point of this test was to prove that the technology is possible. It is. Now these guys will start figuring out how to implement multiple pixels and, hopefully, fix the whole “extended use could lead to lactate build-up and corneal swelling” issue.

For now, if you’re okay with not having a computer screen snug up against your peepers, here are a couple of gadgets that might do the trick:

According to a press release from the Recon Instruments team, astronauts out on spacewalks use paper checklists on their arms. Seriously? Paper? What a let down, astronauts. Thankfully, Recon invented this fancy, non-paper Micro Optics Display and NASA says they’re gonna give it a whirl. For us planet-bound humans, Recon sells these things in special goggles for skiers. The display shows the wearer graphical ski related data like speed, altitude, air time, and location (just in case you get a little too high up the slope). Also, with smartphone connectivity you can get calls/texts, hook up to GPS, and control your music playlist telepathically [not factual].

In a much more sinister, Big Brotherly, instance: Brazilian police are testing glasses that will allow them to capture the biometrics of 400 faces per second. The data is cross-referenced against a central computer storing some 13 million faces. If there’s a match the glasses will highlight the perp in Robocop Red for further crime-stopping. That’s just the most interesting feature. The glasses enable their wearer to identify a suspect up to 12 miles away! What? They hope to use these for quick response crowd control during the 2014 Olympics.

Item 2: The Gloves:

One of the most exciting scenes in the movie was when Tom Cruise Spidermanned (read: scaling walls) his way all over the Burj Khalifa. Apparently he was actually doing that. Tom Cruise was actually jumping around the 123^rd story of the tallest building on Planet Earth. Of course, while in the movie he was using these neat gloves, the actor was in fact hooked into all sorts of wires, harnesses, and safety machines. But if you were, say, an actual person without the aid of special effects, would those gloves work?

Lo! There are real immediate technologies that would make these gloves totally possible…soonish. For now the focus has been on building wall-climbing robots that use something called electroadhesion, a technology made possible by SRI International. Other notable SRI projects include the computer mouse, HDTV, the Internet, and, most recently, Siri.

Now look. I’m not going to pretend that I understand how this thing works. If video presentations are to be believed, the science behind this may work only when mumbled in a slow, heavily accented, monotone. The basic principle is the same as when you rub a balloon on your head and stick it to a wall. But here the balloon is a robot, and your hair-static is “a plurality of electroadhesive gripping surfaces, each having electrode(s) and each configured to be placed against respective surface regions of a foreign object.”

In August 2011, SRI received a patent for their electroadhesive system. It’s very dull and jargony and stuffed to the brim with exceptionally boring ways that this innovation could be used in the real world. Typically that’s what’s up with patents. Where it gets interesting—after eight pages of “the electroadhesive gripping system of claim [1-]28 wherein said first and second…gripping system…end effector…” yadda yadda—is claim 32 (of 33), “wherein said electroadhesive end effector resembles a human hand.” Bam!

According to the text, this “end effector” (i.e. Glove) would be used to help people with arthritis lift heavy bags. Actually! But, come on, if old people are lifting bags with battery operated gloves, then you know that Special Ops dudes are scaling the walls of evil somewhere.

To be continued….

By Armond White

Tom Cruise has gotten such a raw deal in the media that after the best films of his career (Minority Report, War of the Worlds, Lions for Lambs) he deserves to rise back to the top. But Knight and Day—an unabashed action vehicle—won’t take him there. Director James Mangold works with big stars but he doesn’t know how to put action together; he knows nothing about trajectories or vectors. The poorly filmed action and fight scenes are loud and blurry.

Yet Cruise runs—a joke from his ’90s heyday—and playing a can-do spy, he flirts with the equally flirty Cameron Diaz, who plays the civilian woman who Cruise’s spy protects from violent double-agents who are after a secret new energy source. Too bad Sydney Pollack and Robert Towne aren’t around to insist on characterization over personality. Knight and Day’s script is less efficient than Killers’; it’s just upmarket—but with the worst opening 20 minutes so far this year.

There’s no kinetic rhythm, no From Paris With Love energy or craft, no Jonah Hex wit—only a distorted, distended James Bondish marathon chase. When Cruise gives that Risky Business over-the-sunglasses look, his star wattage is re-energized. But he’s run out of auteurs to do right by his charisma and resolve. Cruise should look up Neveldine-Taylor.

–
Knight and Day
Directed by James Mangold
Runtime: 110 min.