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If I were a better planner, or simply more predictable, then this column would be directly tied in to last Sunday’s Oscar telecast. As it stands, you will have to wait until two weeks from now, for A Very Special Chapter Two, for that to happen. But I do believe in serendipity (the construct, if not the Cusack-Beckinsale New York City-set romance) and relevance was fortuitously placed on my doorstep. In checking out John Woo’s IMDb page for my write-up on Mission: Impossible II, I noticed that Woo’s most recent film, 2010’s Reign of Assassins, was snatched up for domestic release by The Weinstein Company.

This means that quite possibly it will never be released in theaters over here and will be quietly shuffled off to home video; and/or it will be heavily re-edited at the behest of Harvey Weinstein in order to alleviate any potential plot confusions that might cause American moviegoers discomfort and distress; and/or Woo (as co-producer and co-director) will be encouraged to chop out any multiple utterances of “Shit!” “Fuck!” or “Tits!” in order to secure a family-friendly PG-13 rating. This is neither the time nor the place for me to go into my long-brewing Glenn Beck-esque “crazy man” rant against what The Weinsteins hath wrought in their 20-plus years in the production and distribution business. I will simply address the Academy and the Governors Board and say: The Weinsteins were on the ropes. You brought them back from the brink with The Reader’s five nominations two years ago and now they have their Oscar mojo fully restored. Heaven help the next wave of foreign filmmakers looking for an “in” to the American market - if such a thing is even possible anymore.

This column marks both a first and (not as exciting for several reasons) a second. Woo is the first filmmaker I have featured twice (I wrote about A Better Tomorrow II back in August 2009) and this is the first time since one of my earliest columns — Scream 2 back in May 2009 — that I have been deeply surprised how much a fairly positive opinion of a film, flickering steadily over the years, has been snuffed out by a second viewing. I have seen the first and third Mission Impossible-s several times since their respective big-screen debuts in 1996 and 2006 and find that both hold up well, in my estimation (more on them in a little bit).

I had not seen M:I-2 since its Memorial Day weekend bow back in 2000 — a mere three weeks after I had gotten married and two months before I was set to move to NYC for graduate school. It's unclear whether I was still basking in the afterglow of the nuptials, the before-glow of continuing my education in lower Manhattan, or I was simply desperate to shed any lingering impressions of Battlefield Earth from my conscious thoughts.

Watching M:I-2 last week, in between rounds of keeping my son entertained as a rare late February snow day in Portland closed the public school system and his daycare as well, proved to be a disheartening experience. The first half is a cavalcade of references to Hitchcock masterpieces and the first Mission: Impossible, and the second half is either Woo on autopilot or Woo pushing himself past the point of parody (something I would not have thought possible) and back to an almost rote directorial style marked by recognizable Woo flourishes, but missing the giddy sense of “Can I top this? Just watch” filmmaking that make the best of his films both operatic and intensely moving.

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