Here’s a little high-brow cultural critique for you. Lauren and I were watching “Mission: Impossible 3” the other day. In general it was a lot more fun than I expected. After Tom Cruise broke down the wall between actor and personality, making it difficult to watch his films anymore, I decided to take a pass. But on a lazy Saturday one will make exceptions. Aside from Mr. Cruise, there was another jarring element though. They got really cute with the MacGuffin. That would be fine in a knowing film like “Ocean’s Twelve,” but was just plain out-of-place in this straight thriller.

The MacGuffin is the object that everyone chases in a book or film. The Maltese Falcon is probably the easiest example, but anytime someone is chasing “the microfilm” or “the plans for the bomb,” and it could just as easily be “the golden screwdriver” or “the ficus,” you have a MacGuffin.

Tarantino played with the concept by using the glowing suitcase in “Pulp Fiction,” but that was also a knowing reference to the old Mike Hammer movie “Kiss Me Deadly” in a movie all about movies. In M:I3 you have a completely serious, maybe overly serious, film where they decided to get cute about it.

They have a techie at Langley say, “Whenever people are looking for this stuff I always pretend it’s something that could destroy the world” (for some reason I recall that he mentioned ice-nine from “Cat’s Cradle,” but may just be imagining that).

Okay. Why not just say VX gas? Super-flu? The new gay-bomb?

It took me out of the film, which as I mentioned was hard enough to suspend disbelief for with the distracting presence of Tom Cruise. On the plus side, however, it got me thinking about one of my favorite books: “Hitchcock/Truffaut.” The concept of the MacGuffin is often associated with Alfred Hitchcock and it’s one of the many subjects of this extended interview conducted by the French director Francois Truffaut.

Anyone who studied film in college will have long-ago assumed that everyone on earth has already read this book, but it was given to me as a gift by a friend three full years after I left school and I hadn’t stumbled across it. Educational yet bizarre, funny and engaging, it also gives you a sense of how the perception of a career changes depending on its champions. Hitchcock = Film Master today, but he used to be dismissed as an artist, an ill-regarded Michael Bay churning out schlock. If you like Hitchcock or Truffaut, if you might actually care about understanding the difference between suspense and action, check it out. Mi3? Maybe on a lazy Saturday when you aren’t quite up for “Man of Marble.”

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