TV And Films

The shows and movies I like (or don’t).

🎥 Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One

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Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One (2023): ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Tom Cruise may be something of a bizarre personality, but he and the people he works with sure know how to put together a great, big, ridiculous summer action movie.

While I’d watched the trailers a while ago, I must not have paid that much attention to them, as I didn’t realize (remember) that both Hayley Atwell and Pom Klementieff were in this; both of whom, of course, I’m most familiar with from the Marvel universe. Both are fun additions to the franchise; Atwell as a thief who gets pulled into the general shenanigans, and Klementieff as a henchwoman whose absolute glee at the destruction she causes is wonderfully infectious.

The action set pieces, as promised, are a blast. There’s a car chase that even got my wife (notoriously unimpressed by car chases) invested, and a huge set piece on a train that was as close to literally nail-biting as I’ve seen in a long time. And the Big Bad for this film (and the next, since this is a two-part story) is a clever approach, and rather perfectly topical.

The M:I movies may not be “great cinema” — but (with the exception of the second in the franchise) they’re reliable fun, and easily one of the stronger action franchises going right now, and this one keeps it all moving quite handily.

🎥 Missing Link

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Missing Link (2019): ⭐️⭐️⭐️

We realized after seeing the Laika exhibit at MoPOP that there were two films we hadn’t seen yet, so we watched this one today. It’s a fun film, quite cute, and had us snickering pretty regularly. Nothing amazing story wise, but the artistry and craftsmanship of Laika’s work is always worth watching (and fun to see things on screen that we’d just seen on exhibit).

📚 Mere Anarchy by Mike W. Barr et al.

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32/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Originally published as six eBook novellas, this series tracks a single plot line — a natural disaster on a non-Federation planet and the resulting aftermath and recovery — through decades, from just before TOS’s “Where No Man Has Gone Before” to just after the intro of Star Trek: Generations. It makes for a neat look both at the Federation’s long-term approach to working with non-aligned planets (after all, how often have we seen an adventure and then never heard of the planet or culture again?), and how the core TOS crew evolve over the years. This is helped by each novella being written by an author specifically chosen for their expertise in a particular era of Trek history. Definitely one of the stronger Trek omnibus stories I’ve read.

Me holding Mere Anarchy

Star Trek Collector’s Series by Dr. Pepper

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Here’s a fun little entry in my small and random collection of Trek stuff: A set of four drinking glasses issued by Dr. Pepper. They all have TAS artwork on the front, some technical or biographical information on the back, and have a copyright date of 1976.

Four drinking glases sitting on a bookshelf in front of a stack of TOS Star Trek novels. TAS artwork on the glasses shows the Enterprise, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy.

This set was found by my brother at a garage sale or antique store (I don’t remember exactly) a few years back and sent to me as a present. They’re great! Though they’re definitely display pieces, as I don’t want to risk damaging them…or the possibility of their using some sort of funky ’70s-era lead-based paint or some such thing.

Four drinking glases sitting on a bookshelf in front of a stack of TOS Star Trek novels. They are turned to show the text on the back of each glass, though it's difficult to read in this photo.

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📚 Somewhere to Belong by Dayton Ward

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30/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Taking place not long after the end of season three of Discovery (after solving the riddle of the Burn), this uses an adventure tying back to earlier Discovery moments as a framing device, but also nicely exploring an area that the show rather skips over: how the crew of the ship adjust to their new circumstances. There’s some entertaining lampshading of several DIS events, an interesting answer to why one of the alien races encountered in DIS were never seen in later Trek shows, and some very amusing movie night choices bookending the action.

Me holding Somewhere to Belong

Year 50 Day 31

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Me wearing a short-sleeve button-up shirt with a print that looks like rainbow paint was poured over and is dripping down the shirt. I'm leaning on my office wall. On the wall next to me is a rainbow-colored laser-cut wood plaque of the Vulcan calligraphy for Kol-ut-shan, or IDIC - Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.

Day 31: Happy Pride Month, take two—this time with color!

A friendly reminder: While I‘ve generally defaulted to “straight” as my most common shorthand, in conversations about such things, I’ve also been noting for decades that it’s “somewhere in the 80-90% range, depending on the situation and people involved”. But I’ve really never felt like “bi” applied to me, even if it might be arguably technically correct for anyone who isn’t a solid Kinsey 0.

So I think “statistically straight” is a good way to put it. All of my relationships have been with people who (at the time, and as far as I know, carrying into the present) were and are cisgender women, so a graphed trend line would certainly go that direction, but the totality of my experiences plus my awareness of my own self would definitely introduce some wobbles into that theoretical trend line — certainly enough for a qualifier of some sort on the “straight” designation. Hence, “statistically straight”.

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📚 The Weight of Worlds by Greg Cox

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28/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Kirk and Spock travel to another universe as the Enterprise crew try to counter an invasion by aliens on a religious crusade. The alien’s religion didn’t really make sense to me, their gravity-controlling weapons seemed to work mostly as required by the plot, and Cox’s referential style is as present as ever. (I feel like I harp on this, mentioning it in every review of one of his books, but it really stands out every time. He’s not a bad writer at all, he just has this stylistic quirk that likely doesn’t stick out nearly as much to some people as much as it does to me.) Not a bad adventure, but not top-tier, either.

Me holding The Weight of Worlds

📚 Unspoken Truth by Margaret Wander Bonnano

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26/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️

A Saavik-centric story, mostly set after the events of Star Trek IV, but with flashbacks to her youth. The first half of the book is mostly planetary exploration with a dash of mystery surrounding Saavik’s past; the latter half takes that mystery and becomes a somewhat odd spy story, with various disguised motivations. I found the latter half far less engaging than the first, but overall, I liked diving more into Saavik’s character and fleshing out some of the wider consequences of the Star Trek II/III/IV trilogy. Also, though not a comedic adventure, one brief mention of a character “stepping over a Thermian’s tentacles” in a bar did make me laugh out loud.

Me holding Unspoken Truth