This franchise has from the very beginning felt the need to try to justify the need for Ethan Hunt and his team's spycraft, and it's always only partly succeeded. But it's generally been a very fun ride.
Some of its attempts to be timely misfire a little (it would play different had Harris won the election), but others hit home (the idea we're all living in a rapidly deteriorating social climate driven partly by unregulated AI).
You can tell the US military got their marketing wing involved, but you can also tell that many people who are great at the craft of filmmaking gave it their absolute all.
Cruise channels Buster Keaton, but there's also a Fred Astaire rotating set moment, and scenes that recall Dr. Strangelove, and plenty of other homages. It earns your attention and rewards the price of your ticket.
Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning is trying very very hard - to be a fulfilling conclusion to a series that was never conceived as a unified narrative, and to be a grand cinematic experience. The effort is very evident and for me it mostly succeeds.
If you use chatgpt or another large language model to create something and pass it off as your own you should be ashamed. That is a very shameful and embarrassing thing to do.
"I remember many of those earlier nights concluded in my basement, the walls trembling with the frenetic energy of raw passion and unfettered ambition."
Author @devinboss.bsky.social remembers Portland's 2020 racial protests in this powerful essay from BlackOut—available in print this Wednesday!
Me walking around the house humming the same 4 bars over and over making weird little movements as I come up with choreo ideas...
Saw Verdi's Falstaff with the family last night. I'd never seen a comedic opera before. Enjoyed it immensely.
And Thirsty Sword Lesbians - very much my favorite Powered By The Apocalypse game these days. They were all living in a post scarcity anarchist utopia and volunteered to defend it from invading space pirates.
CBR + PNK: PRDTR - a Forged In The Dark game where they were trying to escape a biosphere on Ganymede while being chased by an unstoppable invisible apex predator.
A D&D 5.5 Eberron game where everyone was a Paladin.
Kill Vlad - a Powered by the Apocalypse style game I'm designing with Doug, about raising a mob to depose a tyrant.
Spent the weekend at a TTRPG con in the Dalles. I ran 4 games and had a wonderful time:
A lot of people think they're "upper middle class" the same way more than half of drivers think they're better than average at driving. It's dumb misplaced competition that keeps us from facing a systemic problem.
So far, Nate Silver and Matt Yglesias have come out against this piece which means you know with 100% certainty that Ed is correct and you should listen to what he’s saying
Egger's Nosferatu was also sexy, but managed to be a critique of hierarchy and capitalism and patriarchy.
The least interesting question we could ask about Dracula is whether he got his poor fragile heart broken by his ded wife and is really just waiting for her doppelganger to be born and heal his sad feelings.
Finally watched Coppola's Bram Stoker's Oldman's Dracula... The production design in this is beautiful and Oldman as always is compelling, but I just can't get with Coppola's apolitical melodramatic romanticization of every narrative.
Rev. Barber, surrounded by police, praying in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda.
Rev. Barber, surrounded by police, praying in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda.
BREAKING: Police just surrounded Rev. William Barber, prominent activist and pastor, as he and others prayed in the U.S. Capitol Rontunda.
Police then expelled everyone (including press!) from the Rotunda to (presumably) arrest them.
I've covered protests here a lot. Never seen anything like it.
Children are people. Crazy I know, but it's true. youtu.be/iy53s5b3xkA?...
Moments when I can't calm my brain down and regulate my nerves/breathing were once so rare for me that I didn't know they could happen to me. I am not a fan.
Break a leg, everyone auditioning today!
When people break the law, and their actions are righteous and appropriate, we should applaud them. When people abide by or enforce the law, and their actions are repugnant, we should condemn them. We should never pretend the law is a moral dividing line.
Interesting subject of conversation tonight: what are 3 of the most important qualities you want in a friend?
If you appreciated Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, then you should read The Mushroom At The End Of The World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. If these two had been writing when I was teenager, I might have become an ethno-botanist.
