Weekly Roundup 06/15/2025
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Light and Magic Season 2, Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning
I went to a trivia night last week and one of the team names was “Fuck ICE and Fuck Trump” and everyone cheered for them. I knew that the second Trump presidency was going to be hard and filled with cruely and depravity, but I don’t think even I could have predicted this. Although, it doesn’t shock me. I’ve always felt like California was the only state that I wanted to live in and, even though I’m not natively from LA, I feel quite proud to live here. Needless to say, Fuck ICE, Fuck Trump, and Fuck the rich. I’m proud of the protesters. Even though I’ve given up on the idea that kindness and goodness can win the day, I hope that the people who haven’t can beat these fuckers.
Why did I write all that? Well, it’s how I feel and with my city under attack, and the very idea of democracy under attack, it’s hard to get into the mood to write anything. Obviously you should know by now that my depression is often triggered by outside influences that I cannot control, so I end up just sitting there thinking World War III is going to break out instead of doing something that makes me happy like writing. It also feels selfish to write about a Predator movie when my friends are being criminalized and my neighbors are being taken. But thats what the Felon in Chief wants, he wants us to feel hopeless. But like Ken Napzok said on The Blathering last week, “the Joys are important.”
Was this too personal? Putting a cap on the feelings isn’t always easy for me. Still trying to find that line. Fuck Trump.
So feel free to skip to anything you want.
What am I working on/Thoughts on that work
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Thoughts
Weekly roundup
Light and Magic Season 2
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning
My Multi-Doctor piece is now on Substack
What Am I Working On?
The only change from last week that I have here is that I’ve got a first draft of my Predator: Killer of Killers review. I don’t do movie reviews often, especially of movies that I like, so this is a little challenging. I like how it’s turning out so far. I have the urge to write many more pieces so I hope I can get them done. I also have the makings of a review of the new How To Train Your Dragon. I envy the people who do this as a career and can get reviews written before the movie comes out.
Weekly Musings
Official Season 3 Trailer | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
Mere days after this trailer dropped, Paramount officially announced that Star Trek: Strange New Worlds will end with a shorter fifth season. Now I have pieces of a damning look at the series so I’ll just keep this to the trailer which I thought was pretty good overall.
But I’ll get my negatives out of the way. Way to much Kirk. At this point any Kirk is to much Kirk. Like this guy needs to get the hell off of the Enterprise. I do not like how they’re doing this set up for Kirk to eventually take over the Enterprise. There’s a big focus on that in this trailer and now that we know that it’s ending, I feel even stronger about the fact that these writers don’t seem to care about the characters they created, they just want to set up the original series. That goes for Scotty and Chappel’s future husband that I don’t care to learn the name of.
Otherwise, it looks like a lot of fun. Lots of fun returning aliens and it looks like there will be more for the other characters to do, maybe some silly episodes where we learn more about each character. I like the Enterprise, and I like this crew so I’m looking forward to the season.
Next week, I’ll talk about the new 007 game or the new Star Trek comic that was announced.
Weekly Roundup
Light & Magic Season 2
Directed by Joe Johnston
I really felt that the first season of the show was one of the best docu-series’ that Disney has comssioned. Really shined an interesting light on the history of VFX and how ILM was at the head of that story. By contrast, with only three episodes in season 2, I felt that it was quite sad. As the first season showed a triumphant rise in a brilliant new art form, season 2 shows what was left behind and how that art form became abused.
I loved hearing from all the artists that no longer worked for the company and how they struggled through the Star Wars prequel series and losing the model shop. Also, apparently Masi Oka is a VFX artist and I had no idea, so that was fun to learn.
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (Spoilers)
D: Christopher McQuarrie / W: Erik Jendresen & Christopher McQuarrie
The Mission: Impossible franchise is one of my favorite franchises, for sure top five with Indiana Jones, Star Trek, Matrix and Predator. I’ve been eagerly waiting for this entry, even before they decided it was going to be the “final” adventure for Ethan Hunt. But it’s honestly a bit disapointing. I really liked Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning. I thought it was a lot of fun, with excellent set pieces and really clever uses of its main antagonist, the Entity. I say that because this is a weaker entry. Look it’s still top five Mission films, but if it is the end of the road, then I was hoping for a more triumphant end.
Mission films are interesting in the sense that Ethan is unshakable in his faith in humanity. He trusts that everyone he knows will do the right thing at the right time and he’s always right. Normally that’s not an issue for me, but this time it got to me. Because Ethan is away from his team for most of the run time of the film, I started to feel his faith becoming more like a plot contrivance. He meats multiple characters in this film where he’s standing around a table and asks them to trust him and they do. All because he’s Ethan Hunt.
The biplane sequence wasn’t even the best sequence in the movie. That honor goes to the incredible submarine sequence. That was so tense and I loved it so much. The biplane sequence is good but it lost some of it’s impact because the marketing spent way to much time on it. That’s obviously not a movie problem, it’s a marketing problem.
Three paragraphs and I haven’t even mentioned by biggest problem! It’s the editing. It’s badly edited and the film assumes that, not only have you not seen the last Mission film but that you haven’t seen any Mission film. So whenever something is mentioned, it’ll do a quick cut to either what they’re referencing or the scene they’re referencing. This happens every single time. Like they explain the mission and the consequences of failing the mission multiple times, with the same quick edits. It was annoying. Also there are way to many scenes that start with Ethan waking up and it made me think that he was in some kind of virtual reality created by the entity. That was not the case so it remains just a weird thing that this movie does.
Finally, Gabrial is a bad villain. We never get any sense of why he was important to Ethan, but he’s probably the weakest villain in the McQ era of the franchise. Just all set up with little pay off. His death is one of the better ones though. The entity also just kind of looses what made it so terrifying in the last film, making it underwhelming also.
There’s a lot of good in the movie though. The action is great, Tom Cruise is great and so are his team. There are threads that don’t pay off from this movie or the last one, but there are plenty that do in way that I quite liked (There’s one baffling thread that I still can’t believe doesn’t matter). There’s even a major death that shocked me and had me in tears.
Recently Posted
One of my favorite pieces I’ve ever written. I’m glad I got the words to explore why I loved these two comic series so much.
