Timely Movie Review: Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning

Posted on May 26, 2025 by Tom Garrett

*SPOILERS AHEAD*

The Mission: Impossible movie franchise has had a unique trajectory.

The first installment was a better-than-average 90s spy thriller that was mostly an updated, big-budget version of the TV show.  Built around Tom Cruise’s star power, M:I gets points for a few clever effects and an iconic infiltration scene (Cruise suspended in silence in an all-white room at Langley).

The second film tried to be something more, but largely failed: A so-so John Woo-directed outing that relied too much on slow-motion shots and a cartoonish villain with less nuance even than the first film.  Still, there were some fun action sequences—and, most importantly, the movie made money.

The third installment showed much more promise.  Philip Seymour Hoffman was superb as the villain, but, perhaps due to the lackluster second outing, M:I III wasn’t as profitable as either of its predecessors.

Still, there was some magic.  Ghost Protocol and Rogue Nation nailed the formula: exotic locales, insane Cruise stunts, better pacing than 1 or (especially) 2, a more robust supporting cast, including a larger role for Simon Pegg as Benji Dunn.

Fallout is probably the best possible version of this type of movie.  IMAX eye candy abounds, and Henry Cavill is a perfect adversary for Cruise, the first time the series gave Cruise a foil who, crucially, seemed like a younger, upgraded version of Hunt.  The film also cleans up one of the only negatives of four and five: the confusing status of Hunt’s relationship with his wife. Continue reading →

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Let’s All Make Fun of Tom’s Brackets (2025 Edition)

Posted on March 20, 2025 by Tom Garrett

I don’t even know who I am anymore.

Today, on the first day of March Madness, I voluntarily scheduled three different meetings for this afternoon.  Three.  And I never even thought twice about it.

The high school student who shared my classmates’ glee when the TV cart rolled into the classroom on the first Thursday and Friday of the tournament would shake his head in disgust if he could see me today, and not just because of my salt-and-pepper, jowl-y, middle-aged decline.  I’m not even the guy I was in 2019—the hero who reserved the large office building conference room so that I could display every game on enormous, wall-mounted monitors as my adoring colleagues and I watched them.

Instead, I am this broken-down husk of a sports fan who knows almost nothing about college basketball anymore, outside of the fact that my Richmond Spiders went a woeful 10-22, and that the SEC somehow managed to get 14 of its teams into the NCAA bracket.

Armed with the knowledge that the almighty committee believes the fourteenth-best team in the SEC is more deserving of a bid than the second-best team in the Atlantic 10, I feel much better about my decision to (largely) ignore college basketball before late March.

With all of that said, I’ve obviously created a bracket this year.  It’s below, and it might be the most conservative bracket I’ve ever picked.  If the #1 and #2 seeds don’t do well, I’m toast.  It’s almost more like a women’s bracket, with the top two seeds consistently advancing with little difficulty until the regional finals.

Speaking of, I’m even including my women’s bracket this year as a bonus.  That’s largely because my actual women’s bracket was in the 99.9th percentile last year until Iowa lost in the finals—and I still finished in the 84th percentile.  This luck-masquerading-as-expertise has emboldened me.

Except when it comes to the picks themselves.  I’m ultra-conservative on both brackets this time around.  My men’s semi-finals feature two #1 vs. #2 match-ups, with overall #1 seed Auburn winning it all.  My women’s Final Four has three #1 seeds, although I do stick my neck out by daring to pick a #2 seed to win the title, as I have UConn and Geno Auriemma collecting their 12th trophy.

I guess it makes sense that both brackets were equally reserved this year, since I watched about as much women’s basketball as I did men’s in 2024-25.

So, fans, enjoy these brackets, prepared by someone who is barely aware of the sport, and who, as he sits here late in the afternoon on the first day of the tournament, hasn’t even so much as turned his TV on:

 

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2024 Election Spoiler Alert!

Posted on November 5, 2024 by Tom Garrett

We’re nearing that most cherished of American civic traditions: the dignified, peaceful transfer of power that follows an uneventful, orderly election.

It’s a beautiful thing to witness, isn’t it?  Filled with civic pride and patriotism, I’ll cast my ballot today here in Virginia, waving to my fellow citizens as I enter and exit my polling place.  Wishing them a great day, I’ll smile and exchange a knowing nod with Americans whose own partisan preferences pale in comparison with the feeling of shared cultural norms and commonality during this most “holy” of secular rituals.

Ok, maybe that’s not exactly true, but let’s get down to brass tacks: who’s gonna win this thing?

I have some thoughts.  Five, to be specific.

1. Polls matter, but not when they’re this close.  Count me among those who question the reliability of polls in recent cycles, but I don’t reject polls per se.  What I mean is—I totally accept the science of statistical analysis and polling.  It’s just that every poll showing a virtual tie or a one-percent margin to either side doesn’t tell us much.  So, yes, we can say confidently that Harris is going to win Illinois and Trump is going to win Ohio, but polling alone isn’t helpful in indicating the ultimate outcome in the states that will determine the election.

2. Other, more marginal indicators (“tells”) do matter, I think.  Something new is happening in 2024.  I haven’t seen Democrats run toward Trump in any of the prior “Trump” election cycles, from 2016 through 2022.  Until this year, Democrats have always run away from Trump (and demonized him), rather than tying themselves to him or using him in a positive way.  But Bob Casey and Tammy Baldwin are doing just that.  To be clear, many Democrats (especially Harris) are obviously still running “Orange Man Bad” strategies.  But if these swing-state Dems in close Senate races thought Trump were a net negative, they wouldn’t dare invoke his name in anything resembling a favorable light.  That’s why I think Trump will win both Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, albeit narrowly.

3. “Trump,” as a political concept, has been largely normalized.  Even his critics would probably (begrudgingly) agree that the the median voter is now desensitized to the stylistic chaos and bluster that surrounds Trump.  I would go so far as to say that a decent percentage of voters who couldn’t stomach voting for him in 2016 now, eight years later, are either willing to hold their nose and do so, or actually find him amusing or likable and will enthusiastically support him.  Most of what seemed shocking in 2015 or 2017 or even 2020 has now been habituated by the American public.  Further undermining the apocalyptic warnings about Trump is the fact that we already have four years of data of him as president!  All of that matters, as the cries of “Trump is Hitler” don’t carry as much weight as they did in prior years—except to zealots and would-be assassins, I guess.

4. Media influence is at an all-time low.  This is not to say it’s nonexistent.  The media’s pivot from “Biden should drop Kamala” to “Kamala is a good candidate” as soon as she ascended to the nomination resulted in a significant popularity surge.  But people largely distrust the media, with even Democrats’ trust level slipping to 54 percent.  More importantly, independents are at a mere 27 percent (Republicans are down to 12).  This matters because slanted framing or blatant bias has less influence on voters than it did even just a few years ago, which helps Trump.

5. Social media suppression is less prevalent.  The well-documented suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election rightfully raised the ire of many.  And both the public and the companies involved learned an important lesson about trusting “experts” and suppression of speech.  Moreover, the purchase of X (formerly Twitter) by Elon Musk, coupled with the admission (and regret) by Mark Zuckerberg over Facebook’s role in content removal, have created an environment in which it is much more difficult for outside forces to suppress narratives unhelpful to their cause.  Just recently, the New York Times attempted a last-ditch effort to get YouTube to silence or punish heterodox / conservative content creators right before the election, using “evidence” of “misinformation” as the basis.  To its credit, YouTube didn’t bite.  I think the outcome would have been the reverse in 2020.

With all of the above in mind, I think Trump wins the election.  He overperforms in certain tight states (e.g. Nevada) and wins enough swing states to secure the Electoral College victory.  I’m not sure he’ll win the popular vote, but I am sure that this is the best chance he’s had to win it in his three bids.  This is the map as I see it:

What jumps out to me is how narrow Harris’ path is.  Trump could win a number of different swing-state combinations and prevail, while Harris more or less needs a sweep.  For example, Trump could actually lose Wisconsin or Pennsylvania in the above scenario and still win the election.  Likewise, if he wins both of them, he could absorb an upset loss in, say, North Carolina, and lose Nevada or Arizona, and still prevail.

For Harris, barring upsets in places like Georgia, she would need to carry Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.  And even that combination only gets her to 270 on the nose, with no margin for error elsewhere.

I have one final, bonus thought.  I sincerely hope I’m wrong about this part, but . . . depending on what happens over the next few days (weeks?  months?!?  God help us.), prepare yourself for a deluge of hypocrisy and flip-flopping by some of the loudest political voices on a variety of issues.

First, if Harris somehow wins the Electoral College with Trump winning the popular vote, expect all of the calls for abolishing or “reforming” the EC to abruptly vaporize as the politicians and academics who support such a move miraculously and simultaneously “re-think” their decades-long opposition.  For some reason!

More seriously, if Trump does win, many of the people who have been lecturing politicians and the public about “election denialism” for the past four years will suddenly revert to the posture they had when Stacy Abrams lost in Georgia in 2018, or when they tried to influence electors to change their votes and called Trump “illegitimate” when he won in 2016.

Election denial or undermining results may once again be framed as noble and virtuous.  Hypocrites will swiftly discover “credible” reasons why a victorious Trump either isn’t eligible to be president or didn’t actually win.  The media will dutifully amplify and corroborate these arguments.

They will also helpfully “retcon” much of what has been said on that topic over the past four years to make the hypocrisy more resemble a consistent, principled stance—similar to how they retconned the assertion that Harris ever had the unofficial role of “border czar” (perhaps “gaslit” is the correct term).

If that doesn’t work, aggrieved Regime members will likely craft a new narrative once Trump in office as to why his victory owes to “illegal” or “impeachable” conduct of some kind.  Rinse and repeat.

But, for many of the reasons stated above, I don’t think most of the public will buy it.

Good luck out there, my fellow Americans!

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Timely Movie Review: Deadpool & Wolverine

Posted on August 4, 2024 by Tom Garrett

*SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS*

Your experience with Deadpool & Wolverine will vary wildly depending on your expectations.

If you’re craving a strong story comparable to the upper half of MCU fare, albeit with more jokes, you’re likely going to have a middling time at best.

If you’re instead looking for R-rated violence, self-aware meta humor that often satirizes the MCU, and fan-servicing cameos aplenty, then you’ll be very happy.

The challenge for an MCU Deadpool was always going to be two-fold: one, would Disney allow an unabashedly R-rated character to exist in its universe?  I can safely report that the Deadpool we get this time out is every bit as raunchy and profane as the one we saw in the Fox outings.

Two, how do you incorporate a character like this into an existing cinematic universe that (She-Hulk aside) does not break the fourth wall?  Will the tone work, and, probably more importantly, does Deadpool as a character “break” the MCU?  Here, the results are inconclusive.

After watching She-Hulk, my final verdict was that the Disney+ show was watchable, but, despite crossovers with existing core MCU characters, it would basically need to be treated as non-canon.  To some extent, I wound up in a similar place watching Deadpool & Wolverine, but the film side-steps the issue a bit by having Deadpool interact almost exclusively with Fox Marvel characters.  His only extended interaction with an “Earth-616” character comes in a scene with Happy Hogan.

This scene makes little sense, by the way, as there’s no clear explanation for how Deadpool is even able to reach Earth-616 in 2018, aside from the assumption that Cable’s gadget from Deadpool 2 did the trick.  But that gap in the plot speaks to the larger point about this movie: the story really isn’t that important.  Nor is it intended to be particularly tight (and, trust me, it is not).  Deadpool is absurd by design, and the jokes work best as standalone meta comedy, rather than James Gunn-style, story-based humor.

As such, Deadpool & Wolverine winds up less as Deadpool’s bridge to the MCU (it really isn’t, in fact!) and more of an expletive-filled love letter to Deadpool fans, as well as a surprisingly sincere farewell to Fox’s now-dead Marvel universe.

The jokes are too numerous to mention, but my favorite actually comes in the opening scene.  While Deadpool takes cover behind a fallen treed, A TVA trooper gives a little speech informing Deadpool that he’s under arrest.  As the speech unfolds, Deadpool groans and says “Ugh.  Death by day player.”

Other favorites included Deadpool’s commentary on Gambit’s dialect coach, Elektra not lamenting the death of Daredevil, and Deadpool inexplicably wasting time by taunting Logan with gags through the window of the security door in the climactic scene.

Bringing back a host of Fox characters and actors was also a treat, especially Chris Evans, Jennifer Garner, Wesley Snipes, and Channing Tatum (finally getting to play Gambit).  Most of all, Dafne Keen returns as X-23 to provide tonal assistance to Hugh Jackman, who does almost all of the heavy lifting in this movie, acting-wise.

Ultimately, where you rank this film in the Deadpool franchise will depend on how much you value the “I-can’t-believe-Disney-let-them-do-that” aspect of many of the jokes, including barbs that gently criticize the current slump of multiverse-mired MCU films.  If that scenario sounds especially appealing to you, this entry probably winds up at #1.  Reynolds is a comedic home run, Jackman is a superb actor as always, and his constant annoyance with Deadpool is very entertaining.

For me, the original Deadpool is still the best.  It was not only very inventive, but it also had a much more complete story.  As noted, the story in Deadpool & Wolverine is an afterthought—basically a delivery system for more fourth-wall-breaking bits.  The story doesn’t really “fit” with any existing canon, but it’s probably not supposed to.  Example: Logan explicitly took place in 2029, but, for the sake of the “using Logan’s corpse to kill TVA troops” gag, it all implicitly happens in or before 2024.

Not only that, but the entire idea of an “anchor being” is painfully contrived, even by superhero movie standards.  However, without that contrivance, I suppose the movie can’t happen.

There’s also no real reason that Paradox pulls Deadpool out of his native reality in the first place.  He vaguely tells Deadpool he’s “special,” and that he’ll add him to the “sacred” timeline (616), but there’s no explanation beyond that.  This problem could have been fixed very easily by telling Deadpool that he has some kind of “meta-consciousness” that allows him to perceive events and realities beyond the one he occupies.

This would not only explain why Paradox wanted to save Deadpool from his universe’s destruction, it would also clarify the origin of Deadpool’s fourth-wall breaks in a way that makes sense and fits nicely within the existing MCU.  In a nutshell, Deadpool has the ability to intuit that there is a larger reality / other realities and reacts to that in real time.  To the other people around him, he simply looks slightly insane.  All of that would take care of the second problem I described above.

Given its minimal interaction with the mainline MCU, unless you count the TVA from Loki, I would even go as far as to say that Deadpool still hasn’t really joined the MCU.  We’ll probably have to wait until the next Avengers movie to see Deadpool truly join the MCU.  If nothing else, though, Deadpool & Wolverine was a funny, fitting send-off for the Fox Marvel universe.  And that’s more than enough.

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The Hitler – Trump Hypothetical, Revisited

Posted on July 14, 2024 by Tom Garrett

A few hours after Election Day 2020, with the notion of a “stolen” vote already the hottest topic in politics, I wrote a piece explaining why such an idea wasn’t ridiculous.

It wasn’t because I believed that the 2020 election was “stolen” (I don’t), or because I supported President Trump’s fiery, sometimes conspiratorial rhetoric (again, I don’t).  But what struck me was the claim by Trump’s critics that the suggestion of election improprieties was simply absurd and insulting.  I said the following at the time, discussing the classic ethical question of whether it is just to murder baby Hitler:

The crux of the [Hitler] question is whether it is ethical to kill someone when he is still an innocent child, long before he commits crimes against humanity.  Many people would say that the greater good absolutely demands it.  Others would say that there is no excuse for violating a core principle of morality, not even for Hitler.

Now consider a softer, if equally impossible hypothetical.  You can travel back in time and manipulate the elections of 1930, 1932, and/or 1933 in Germany to prevent Hitler’s rise to power. No killing is involved.  Just ballot and voter fraud.  And the hypo assumes that your scheme would be effective.  Would you do that?  I think we can all agree that a substantial percentage of the population would.

Now recall that we’ve been told for the past four years that Trump is essentially an American Hitler, or on the way to being Hitler.

While I find that comparison silly, the lesson here is that there are plenty of people who truly believe it’s apt to analogize Trump to Hitler.  From their point of view, present-day America is at the “1932 or 1933 in Germany” phase.

With all of that in mind, do you think such people would hesitate to adopt a “by-any-means-necessary” mentality in a close race?

I don’t.  Not for a second.

Emphasis added.  At the time, I was quite certain that continuing to equate Trump with a person widely recognized as the worst of the past century (if not in history) would result in more and more rationalization about what is ethically, morally, and politically acceptable to stop him.  Later in the piece, I added:

Again, these [vocal Trump critics in the media and the Democratic Party] are the same sort of folks whose proposed solution to alleged norm-busting by the GOP is to eliminate the filibuster, pack the courts, add a couple of new states to change the composition of the Senate, and, of course, abolish the Electoral College.  To repeat: they propose these measures as an alleged defense of norms.  They do so without a hint of irony.

What I didn’t anticipate at the time was that Trump would be attacked as vigorously by media and political opponents after he was out of office as he was while he was in office.  This makes sense in hindsight, as these folks clearly saw Trump as a continued threat, such that they needed to be relentless in their dogged efforts to prevent a second Trump term.

The obvious problem is that this relentlessness requires ever-escalating warnings, fearmongering, and, ultimately, tactics.  Our own American media and many politicians have demonstrated little reluctance to call Trump “Hitler” for the past eight years—and continue to do so.

Now, we’re here.  And I’m not sure what it will take to pull us back from the edge of the abyss before we fall in.

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A Gay (as in “Happy”) Father’s Day

Posted on June 16, 2024 by Tom Garrett

Dedicated and detail-oriented readers may recall a post from way back in 2011 about an advertisement that appeared in Time and Newsweek in 1961.  The ad featured my father portraying a medical student (which he was not).

For those of you too lazy to click, here’s the ad.

In that 2011 post, I explained:

The advertisements, smartly entitled “Doctor of Tomorrow,” promoted the A. H. Robins pharmaceutical company based in Richmond, Virginia.  The premise of the copy was that my father and the other man pictured in the ad were medical students practicing the art of drawing blood samples.  The ad makes the point that it takes many years for a medical student to become a quality doctor, then segues into a comparison about how the pharmaceutical industry takes years of research to develop quality medication.

Neither of the people pictured in this advertisement were doctors or even medical students in real life.  Apparently (according to my mom), it was illegal at the time for actual medical professionals to appear in advertising of any kind.

Thirteen years later, and I was doing an image search to see if there was a HQ version of that ad.  And I found one–sort of!

What I actually discovered was that a pseudonymous artist named “Joan Seed” had repurposed this ad for a piece of pop art that looks like this:

Well, then!

Have a very gay Father’s Day, everyone!  And don’t forget to buy the t-shirt!

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Let’s All Make Fun of Tom’s Brackets (2024 Edition)

Posted on March 22, 2024 by Tom Garrett

After a brief moment of glory derived from my championship-winning 2021 bracket, I returned to (poor) form in 2022.  In fact, my 2022 bracket was evidently bad enough that I decided not even to post my 2023 bracket.

That 2022 edition was wholly consistent with my futility in 2011, 2013, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019.  I now return to this woefully neglected blog and take a brief respite from my intermittent movie reviews to post the disaster-in-the-making that is my 2024 NCAA Tournament prediction.

As you can see by the helpful color-coding below, I endured a thoroughly mediocre first day, already losing one of my Elite 8 teams (Kentucky).  The odd thing is, I had zero faith in Kentucky, given their recent tournament struggles. I was actually more surprised that Dayton won than I was that Kentucky lost.

Yet, for some reason, I picked the Wildcats to go to the Elite 8.  Such is the mystery of the mind(?) of Tom Garrett.

Here, now, is my 40th-percentile-level prognostication:

 

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Timely Movie Review: American Fiction

Posted on February 8, 2024 by Tom Garrett

[**Spoilers**]

Upon watching the very fine trailer for American Fiction, one could be forgiven for concluding that the film is “only” a satirical look at modern racial and cultural norms about the “black experience” in America.  Something like 1987’s excellent Hollywood Shuffle may come to mind.

While American Fiction resoundingly, unquestionably succeeds in that examination, what the trailer doesn’t reveal is how much more there is to this film beyond that aspect.

Instead, the film is also fundamentally about family and the dynamics of a wide variety of interpersonal relationships, with the character of writer Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, played by the superb Jeffrey Wright, serving as the hub.

Impressive from the opening scene, in which an entitled, progressive, white college student named Brittany takes Professor Ellison to task for writing the title of a particular Flannery O’Connor short story on the class whiteboard, the film certainly highlights Monk’s frustrations with the world around him to hilarious effect.

That introductory conversation sets the tone for what’s to come, as Monk explains (in vain) that any examination of Southern literature of that time must necessarily include language and ideas that many contemporary students may find heinous.  After a bitingly funny exchange, Brittany leaves class and presumably complains, leading to a disciplinary hearing of sorts—with three white colleagues—that leads to an involuntary leave of absence.

This sequence tracks much of what we see in the rest of the film: self-anointed benevolent, “enlightened” white people (usually liberal white women) unwittingly and condescendingly dictating the boundaries of racial and cultural questions to Monk (and, later, to Issa Rae’s Sintara Golden).

Perhaps the sharpest example is a scene toward the end, in which fellow literary award judge Ailene Hoover (Jenn Harris), who has recently explained how important it is to “listen to black voices,” joins two other white judges in dismissing the objections of Monk and Sintara in naming the book Fuck as the award winner.

Fuck, of course, is the mockery of a novel that Monk secretly writes out of frustration with white elites and publishing houses that only seem to be interested in flat, stereotypical characterizations of black people.  Monk’s anger sparks retaliatory creativity after witnessing the acclaim for Golden’s runaway bestseller We’s Lives in da Ghetto.  This disdain leads him to write Fuck, originally titled My Pafology.

Even when Monk pushes boundaries to absurd lengths in an effort to sabotage the Fuck “monster” he’s created, his upping of the satirical ante only makes “woke” white literary and film executives more desirous of the story, tripping over one another to throw money at his alter ego, “Stagg R. Leigh.”

While all of the above is sublimely executed, none of it could be classified as “unexpected,” based on the trailer’s apparent central premise.  What was unexpected—delightfully so—is American Fiction’s exploration of Monk, his family, and his relationships with them and others in his life.

Continue reading →

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Timely Movie Review: Oppenheimer

Posted on July 31, 2023 by Tom Garrett

Christopher Nolan is my favorite director.  He is one of the few filmmakers whose name alone is enough to get me to the theater.  In fact, he may be the only one.

For example, although Damian Chazelle’s Whiplash and First Man are among my all-time favorite movies, even Chazelle’s brilliance on those projects wasn’t enough to get me to see La La Land, much less Babylon.

But “A Christopher Nolan Film” is enough of a selling point to prompt a ticket purchase.  That’s a curse as well as a blessing, though, as there is a straight line from the immense respect I have for Nolan to the temptation of unrealistic expectations.

So it was when I saw the first trailer for Oppenheimer.  It was then that I began a several-month conversation with myself in an attempt to keep those expectations in check.  Although I was largely successful, I still think Nolan’s very, very good movie probably came up just short of the movie that the trailer conjured in my overactive imagination.

Continue reading →

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Timely Movie Review: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

Posted on May 14, 2023 by Tom Garrett

*SPOILERS AHEAD*

James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 breaks a lukewarm streak for MCU films, partly because it doesn’t fit into the current run of Marvel fare.  Instead, it’s both a satisfying conclusion to a distinct trilogy and the true, final epilogue for the Infinity Saga.

There are no references to multiverse incursions or cameos from other Marvel IP to set up the next link in the Phase 4-5-6 chain.  Even the post-credits scene is a humorous snippet from Peter Quill’s new life on Earth, rather than an off-ramp into a new adventure connected to a larger story.  The film does conclude with a promise that Star-Lord will return, but only in a vague, 007-esque way, not with any specificity or connection to an upcoming film.

Rather, Gunn focuses on completing character arcs, especially that of Rocket Racoon.  More on that in a moment.  But the out-of-place feel of this MCU entry likely partly owes to the delay caused by Gunn’s firing and eventual rehiring.  Vol. 1 came out in 2014, followed by 2017’s Vol. 2.  Pre-production on Vol. 3 was well underway in 2018, with Gunn finishing the first draft of the screenplay just weeks before his firing.

Instead of having a film ready to go shortly after Endgame, we waited an additional two or three years for a Gunn-helmed Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.  It was undoubtedly worth the wait, as Gunn was able to bring each of the major characters to a point that felt natural and satisfying.

Continue reading →

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