Day 74: Wandering around Capitol Hill on a nice warm summer evening as I wait for the Mercury to open its doors. Lots of people out at Cal Anderson Park enjoying a gorgeous summer evening.
🎥 Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One
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.
Year 50 Day 73
Day 73: Movie time! We went off to see the latest Mission: Impossible film, and really enjoyed it. Tom Cruise may be a rather bizarre personality, but boy does he (and the people he works with) know how to put together a great, big, ridiculous, summer action movie.
Fun fact: This is the first movie I’ve seen in the theater since Star Trek: The Motion Picture!
(Of course, that was the 40th anniversary re-release of TMP, back in September 2019, not long before the pandemic shut everything down. But still! It’s an entirely true statement!)
For the mask-conscious: At this point, there were only two other people in the theater, and we were having some pre-movie snacks. Once we were done with those and more people came in, our masks went on. Even then, there were fewer than 10 people, including us, in this showing. Early Friday matinee showings are great, even for opening weekend movies!
Year 50 Day 72
Day 72: Nothing fancy today — just flopped out in a pile of brightly colored pillows on our basement couch watching this week’s Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, followed by silly reality television.
Year 50 Day 71
Day 71: Today I got to do first aid/CPR training. My partner was a little stiff and not very talkative, but at least they didn’t complain when I practiced chest compressions on them.
Year 50 Day 70
Day 70: Waiting outside one of our classrooms before getting a low-vision student set up with an Enhanced Vision Acrobat magnifying device so they can better participate in their class. It’s a fairly simple device — a screen with a camera that can be directed at the table to magnify papers, or around the classroom to zoom in on the instructor, whiteboard, or other students — but it makes a big difference. And reminds me a lot of a very similar (but much lower-tech and not at all portable) device that my grandma used as her vision deteriorated over the years that I would play with when we went down to visit them.
Year 50 Day 69
Day 69: Time to get back into the evening exercise routine. No real goal other than just being a little more active. The actual doing isn’t necessarily fun, but it always feels good to be in the habit of doing a bit of this regularly.
Year 50 Day 68
Day 68: Out at a park for a picnic and evening performance of Romeo and Juliet by GreenStage, one of the Seattle-area Shakespeare in the park companies.
Year 50 Day 67
Day 67: A treasure of ours — a vintage pachinko machine that my wife inherited from her grandfather, who brought it back from when he was stationed overseas with the Navy. We’re not sure of the exact age (somewhere between the ’50s and the ’70s), but it was mounted in a wall of her grandparents’ house when she was growing up, and got lots of play from all the grandchildren. She inherited it a few years ago, we spent some time cleaning it up, and now it’s mounted in a wall of our basement. The mechanics work decently, though some of the bumpers have degraded and could use replacing, and someday I’d love to see if I can get the electronics working too. But even if that never happens, it’s fun to take a few shots when we walk by.
🎥 Missing Link
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).