Excerpts From A Cluttered Mind #11
The Tom Cruise Diet. Thunderbolts*. Alexei Sayle. Peter David RIP.
This week I have been mostly…
Watching…
Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning
Ethan (Tom Cruise), Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg) contemplate their chosen career, not for the first time.
There is a point in Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning, without giving any spoilers away, where the good guys follow instructions to reach a sea location, way up North, only to realise that the object of their search is in fact located as far away as it possibly could be while still being on this planet - diametrically opposite, literally on the other side of the world.
And for a second I genuinely expected the scene to go down like this:
Ethan - Okay team. It’ll take us a week to get there by sea and we haven’t got the time.
We’ll use that technology that Benji’s been working on to go the direct way.
I’m talking through the earth’s core. Benji?
Benji (looking slightly perturbed) - Well Ethan, we still have a few wrinkles to sort out regarding the heat baffles…
Ethan - Good man, Benji. Just make it happen.
And we would all have bought it, and loved it, because staying within the boundaries of what is realistic is not why we love the franchise.
Mission:Impossible. The clue is kind of in the title.
I’ve watched and loved all the MI films, but they do meld into one big monolithic action sequence where Tom Cruise performs stunt after stunt, each more dangerous than the last.
He’s jumped from a building… he’s hanging from the ceiling… he’s trapped underwater… he’s jumping from a plane… he’s jumping from one plane to another… he’s jumping from one building to another… is this where he breaks his ankle?… he carried on and completed the shot you know…
This man has more money than God, a lovely wife and kids, he’s more famous than any other actor in the world, but he still puts himself through all this.
And he’s a similar age to me. Now, I’m not particularly bothered about getting old, as I consider it to be better than the alternative, but if you put the two of us next to each other you’d say there was a much bigger age gap. How does he do it?
According to recent reports, rather than have main meals, Tom eats FIFTEEN “snacks” a day.1 . When he has to dine out, he tends to have steamed white fish and vegetables with no sauce or dressing. No booze either, which probably goes without saying.
The recommended list contains things like salmon, dark chocolate, raw oats, blueberries, ginger, broccoli, tomatoes, nuts and fruit, plus vitamins and minerals.
That’s another thing we have in common then. And if Tom says he loves popcorn, then I for one believe him.
Well, I don’t drink any more, I’ve never smoked either and I take a lot of vitamins and minerals.2 And I like all those foods, especially popcorn so maybe I could do this?
Then I got to the bit about him going to the gym every morning at 5:30 and I lost interest.
Shame, if it wasn’t for that I’d be all in on the Tom Cruise Lifestyle Diet.
So, thirty years on and eight films from the first movie in 1996, we finally have a conclusion, maybe. If they had taken that long over the eight Harry Potter films, we would only now be looking forward to the finale, with a 36-year-old Daniel Radcliffe trying to pass as a schoolboy.
Harry Potter And The Barre-Chord Prince? Nah, I got nothing.
Me and the missus and me have loved each and every one of these silly, oddly serious comic-books fantasies, and this one may be our favourite.
With some lovely callbacks to characters and scenes from the entire history of the franchise (which, remember, started not thirty but sixty years ago with the TV series) it’s a lap of honour, and rightly so given the majesty of this franchise.
I’m not quite sure how Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One can legitimately have a sequel called Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning though. They may well have decided to make it the last one (or to pretend to) halfway through filming, which would explain the returning characters and Tom’s odd pre-credits intro.
Or am I getting too caught up in fan conspiracy theories? Hard for a Doctor Who fan not to, sometimes.
The Mission:Impossible franchise has been compared to James Bond, but I don’t see it. There are no exploitative shots of women (there are plenty of Tom though!). There is violence but it doesn’t tend to be sadistic. There are very few corny jokes, indeed not many jokes and not much humour at all.
And then there’s THAT theme tune.3 Yeah, its the same one every time but, with the honorable exception of Louis Armstrong, I’ll take it over any Bond theme.
Thunderbolts*
Mistakes, mis-shapes, misfits. The Thunderbolts* team (L-R): Red Guardian, Ghost, Taskmaster, Yelena Belova, Bob, US Agent, Winter Soldier.
There have been more good films with asterisks in the title than you’d think.
M*A*S*H. Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex *(But Were Afraid To Ask). S*P*Y*S. *batteries not included. Little F*cker. Asterix The Gaul.
Thunderbolts* is a worthy addition to that fine list.
The 36th entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe4, T-Bolts* is written by Lee Sung Jon, creator of the Netflix revenge-based comedy thriller series Beef.
There are similarities here to DC’s Suicide Squad, albeit more dialled down on the outright villainy. The team comprises seven of Marvel’s lesser-known characters, some (notably Florence Pugh’s Yelena) familiar to cinemagoers from previous movies, some new to the screen. A key MCU rule being that characters are very rarely invented for the films, which of course means lots of internet discussion about which comic Taskmaster originally appeared in.5
Time is speeding up on an asymptotic curve as I get older, so the Marvel films seem to be coming round a lot quicker, and they have ALL come with hypey reviews along the lines of “Finally, Marvel have remembered to make movies!” “Best Marvel film for years!”
Well, here’s the thing.
Marvel films have been mostly brilliant (with a couple being merely good) ever since Captain America: Civil War ushered in Phase Three of the MCU, with the exception of the misbegotten Thor: Love And Thunder and the water-treading Deadpool & Wolverine.
And there isn’t the monolithic sameness there was in the preceding Avengers-heavy era. From Iron Man to Avengers:Endgame, the early years of the MCU was very much one continuing whitebread story, often epic but sometimes boring.
Since then we’ve had the Black Panther films, the Doctor Strange movies, Eternals, the Guardians Of The Galaxy trilogy, Captain America: Brave New World, Captain Marvel / Ms Marvel / The Marvels , She-Hulk, Moon Knight. All great concepts, and all with their own style.
These days, Marvel movies are showing the variety which made their comics roster so essential from the sixties to the nineties and beyond.
Thunderbolts* is not a return to form, it’s another excellent comic book movie from the House Of Ideas, with a couple of great twists along the way which I for one did not see coming.
Marvel is back! And how! This is definitely the greatest Marvel movie since… well, since the last one.
Listening To…
The Alexei Sayle Podcast (available wherever good podcasts are found)
“Your heroes always let you down, don’t they? I heard this week that Barney the big purple dinosaur has been arrested on charges of pre-historical sexual offences” - Alexei Sayle
With all due respect, that quote isn’t quite true.
Stand-up comediana, actor, writer, singer and political activist Alexei Sayle has been at the back of my head in various guises for well over forty years, and he remains relevant and angry to this day and has yet to let me down.
His current BBC Radio series, Alexei Sayle's Imaginary Sandwich Bar is well worth a listen - the same format of proper old-school left wing politics, surrealism and banging one-line gags that he’s always followed, but a lot less shouty and confrontational than when he was “the father of alternative comedy”, and therefore funnier.
He’s been putting out the excellent The Alexei Sayle Podcast for a few years which allows him to delve further and deeper into all of the above, adding in showbiz anecdotes with an impressive level of name-dropping.
No fake humility here, but definitely a lot of genuine humanity, with guests like Diane Morgan, Josie Long, Jeremy Corbyn, Omid Djalili and any number of professors of politics.
And for those of us of a left-wing inclination, yes it does look like there’s a hellscape out there right now, but it’s good to know we’re not alone.
Remembering…
Peter David, “Writer Of Stuff”
Ending on a very sad Marvel-related note. Comic-Book writer Peter David has died at the age of 68.
Best known for his twelve-year run on The Incredible Hulk, which incidentally included the first appearance of the original Thunderbolts team in 1997, and his work on Spider-Man, he had a long and feted career writing comics, prose books and TV screenplays.
The first time I noticed his name on a credit was his Babylon 5 paperback trilogy, which completes the story of bitter rivals Londo and G’Kar.6 It remains the best prose TV tie-in I’ve ever read. He also wrote many Star Trek:The Next Generation/ novels, including the excellent Imzadi which features Riker and Troi’s early relationship, often referred to obliquely on TV.
By all accounts, Peter David was a genuinely lovely man - by no means a given in the often-cutthroat comic book business. As a starstruck young fan at a convention book signing in the 70s he met Stephen King and informed him that his ambition was to be a writer. King inscribed the book “Good luck with your writing career”, and so impressed and inspired was David that he subsequently did the same for fans who told him the same thing. “Writer of Stuff”7 is his own description of himself by the way.
He’ll be missed but he’s left some superb stuff to read. Rest in peace.
Other posts you may like
Excerpts From A Cluttered Mind #10
Worth A Read #3 - Behold The Man by Michael Moorcock
Seven Films About People Who Dealt With Incarceration In An Individual Manner
Thank you. Come again.
If you’re thinking this means crisps and Haribo, think again.
I am one of the healthiest fat men in the world, to be fair.
The “bah-bah bup bup” rhythm of Lalo Schifrin’s composition is based on the Morse Code for the letters “MI”, two dashes for the letter M and two dots for the letter I.
Only 36? I know, right?
Avengers Vol 1 #195, May 1980.
Despite what Sheldon off of The Big Bang Theory thinks, Babylon 5 it was a superb show in its day, although the computer graphics have not aged well.
Not Alexei Sayle’s 90s comedy series, which would be taking the “everything is connected” theory to new heights.