Mission Impossible 8: Final Reckoning: Firing on More Than All Cylinders

Well, as much as I really enjoyed the seventh Mission Impossible with Tom Cruise (MI: Dead Reckoning) when I streamed it on Paramount Plus this past May, and said I'd be back soon with a review of Final Reckoning (which was Part 2 of Dead Reckoning), which was opening soon in theaters and I intended to see ... well, the beaches on Cape Cod were just too tempting.

But I did manage to see MI: Final Reckoning tonight on Paramount Plus, where it started streaming yesterday, and I thought it was great, for all kinds of reasons.   Here, without spoilers, are some of them:

• As the eighth and (at this point, at least) the final Tom Cruise MI, Final Reckoning did a fine job of bringing into play elements from the previous seven movies.  I guess my favorite was bringing back the Phelps story, which made this eight-movie arc even more a direct descendant of Mission Impossible on television, where of course the story was born with Phelps in command.
• I said in my review of Dead Reckoning that the enemy being AI made Ethan Hunt more modern than Bond (at least so far).  In every Bond movie, an evil human being has been the prime enemy.  There were evil humans to be sure in Dead Reckoning and Final Reckoning, but the worst of the villains indubitably is an AI.   Thus not only did Final Reckoning delve into Terminator territory, you can throw in Tron, and while we're at it, War Games and lots of other literally bloodless arch-villians as well.   
• To be clear, as I've been saying in lots of places these days, I'm not concerned about AI replacing us, destroying us, or anything that's been a favorite of fiction at least since Karel Čapek's R.U.R more than a century ago.  And I like those fictions a lot -- but they're fictions.  And as far as fiction about AI goes, I prefer Asimov's robots/androids, who sometimes do us harm, but also do us a lot of good.
• Final Reckoning has some powerful star power.  Tom Cruise's Ethan Hall is a truly memorable character, because he's well written and as well as well acted.  Same for the MI team, both in Final Reckoning and the previous MI movies.  And I have to say Angela Bassett as US President was superb, as well all as all the other heroes and villains that play out a taut story in which millions if not billions of lives are at stake.  (It was also great to see Tramell Tillman -- Severance! -- in charge of a crucial vessel at sea.)
• And the action scenes are first rate in every natural environment on Planet Earth, that is, land, sea, and air.  In those scenes, Hunt is every bit as impressive as Bond.
• I'll just also say that in the midst of all this action, Final Reckoning has a deep and impressive moral core.

If I have any disappointment, well, Cruise has made clear that this is his last Ethan Hunt story.  I hope he changes his mind.  And gets the recognition he -- and everyone associated with this movie -- amply deserve.

See also Mission Impossible 7: Dead Reckoning: Well Beyond Bondian ... Mission Impossible 6: Fallout: Better (These Days) Than Bond ... Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol

Paul Anka: His Way: The Right Way (Except for One Missing Song)

My wife and I saw Paul Anka: His Way, a 2024 documentary, last night on HBO.  Why did we wait so long to see it?  I don't know. Probably because we weren't paying enough attention.

I've been a fan of Anka since 1957, when I was in 5th grade in PS 96 in The Bronx, and Anka had a great hit, "Diana".  Joel Iskowitz, Jordan Axelrod, Steven Auerbach, and Paul Gorman were in my class.  I started an acapella group, Little Levi and the Emeralds.  I don't think we sang much of "Diana" -- we were more into The Five Satins, The Harptones, and The Del Vikings -- but we sure loved it.

Anka explains and demonstrates at the beginning of the documentary that the ease of playing those 4-chord songs -- C, Am, F, G -- when he sat down at the piano was what drew him into singing and then writing.   And he progressed in extraordinary ways, writing "My Way" for Sinatra, the Johnny Carson theme song, and even some songs with Michael Jackson.  He also wrote "It Doesn't Matter Anymore" for Buddy Holly and "She's a Lady" for Tom Jones, and those are just a fraction of the more than 900 songs Anka has written!

Of course, no documentary can play even small parts of most of that number of songs, but the question always arises (for me, at least) of what songs would I have liked to hear and see Paul Anka perform in His Way?  And, yes, there is one, in particular.  It's a song that played a crucial role in Amazon's adaptation  (by Frank Spotnitz) of Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, which ran for four seasons (2015-2019) and helped establish streaming as the titan it is today,  The first episode of the second season in 2016 opens with an extended mise-en-scène of protagonist John Smith's (Rufus Sewell brilliantly portrays Smith) young teenage son Thomas getting off the school bus and walking into class.  Everything seems so normally, happily, suburban American, as Thomas Smith (good job Quinn Lord) looks at the girls and walks into school.  We begin to get a disquieting taste of this alternate history in which the Nazis beat America in the Second World War when we see the Nazi insignia on Thomas's arm and then a kid in the class asks Thomas how many slaves George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had.  Thomas Smith then looks at a girl in the class in that certain way, she looks back at him when he isn't looking, but the joy of that budding teenage romance is shattered to pieces for the TV viewer when Thomas is called up to the front of the class to give a Nazi pledge of allegiance that he does with pride.  

Now, this is one of Spotnitz's best conceived and realized scenes, and he hammers it home playing Paul Anka's 1960 hit song, "My Home Town," loudly and softly in the background until Thomas begins the pledge.  This is an upbeat, zestful song, brimming with the enthusiasm and pleasures of living that is a hallmark of Anka's music, especially his early recordings -- the perfect background for the unnerving perversion of American life that the Nazi conquest has wrought.

So, yeah, I missed "My Home Town" in Paul Anka: His Way -- especially given the steps to fascism our country is currently taking -- but the documentary is titled "His Way", that is,  Paul's way, and/or the movie's director and writer John Maggio's way, not my way, and as I've been known to say to someone who tells me that they would have had a character in one of my novels do or say something different than what I had them do or say: hey, go write your own novel. :)   And all in all, there's not much I would change in this rendition of Anka's incredible inspiring life and journey.  At 84 years old, he's still going strong, hasn't reached the top of the mountain yet (as he says), and I'm looking forward to hearing and hearing about the rest of the climb.

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