My 2025 Youtube Playlist

I apparently skipped doing this feature in 2024, which means you're getting a bumper crop this time.

My yearly Youtube playlist is mostly made up of media ephemera that's difficult to categorize, and the only thing they really have in common is a strong musical element.  Still, I think they're worth taking a look at and writing about.  This batch contains some real obscurities, including music videos, promotional material, song numbers, and even a fanedit.  Here we go

The Disney Sunday Night Movie - "The Disney Sunday Night Movie" was an anthology series that ran on ABC from 1986 to 1988, featuring a mix of made for television movies, Disney classics, and occasional promos for other Disney projects.  This is where some real Disney obscurities like "Fuzzbucket," "Fluppy Dogs," and "Splash, Too" originally aired.  I've included the version of the opening sequence that I remember from 1986, which remains prepended to my VHS recording of "Robin Hood" in perpetuity.  

#1 Spice - So, Zohran Mamdani had a rap career in the 2010s as Young Cardamom.  No, I'm not making this up.  Here he is with Hussein Abdul Bar (HAB) on a track featured in the Disney film, "Queen of Katwe," which happened to be directed by Mamdani's mother, the great Mira Nair.  Mamdani also produced and curated the soundtrack for the film.

Handlebars - This has a good claim to being one of the most influential fanedits (fanvids? fanworks?) ever made, when you're talking about Western fandoms anyway.  Created by Flummery (Margie and Seah), "Handlebars" is a profile of the Tenth Doctor from "Doctor Who," set to "Handlebars" by Flobots.  The escalation is fantastic, and as many people have pointed out, this video was made before the Time Lord Victorious stuff happened, making it very prescient.  The video premiered at Vividcon in 2008.  

Ask DNA - Here's the opening sequence of "Cowboy Bebop: Knockin' On Heaven's Door," featuring jawdropping animation by BONES co-founder Toshihiro Kawamoto.  Kawamoto was the character designer and animation director for both the series and the movie, and is one of the key creatives responsible for the way "Cowboy Bebop" looks.  "Ask DNA" was composed by Yoko Kanno and is performed by the Seatbelts, featuring Raj Ramayya's vocals. 

Across the Universe - The Fiona Apple cover of the Beatles track was released as part of the "Pleasantville" soundtrack in 1998.  The accompanying music video was directed by Apple's then-boyfriend Paul Thomas Anderson and features an extended version of the scene from the movie where the local townsfolk destroy the local diner.  And Anderson ensures that it looks gorgeous.

Dr. Demento's 20th Anniversary - In 1994, Comedy Central aired the full Dr. Demento 20th Anniversary Show, featuring all our favorite novelty songs being performed by people who I'm delighted to discover are real human beings.  There's Tiny Tim, Benny Bell, and "Weird Al" Yankovic of course.  But did you ever think you'd see a live performance of "Monster Mash" with Bobby Boris Picket or "The Purple People Eater" with Sheb Wooley?  As a Demento admirer, finding this was like unearthing buried treasure.

I'm Just Ken - This song remains one of the greatest things to have come out of the "Barbie" movie.  Here's the Christmas version with Ryan Gosling and Mark Ronson.  And here's the GWAR cover.  

Real Cats Drink Milk and Block City - Here are two of Al Jarnow's many, many animated shorts that he made for "Sesame Street" over four decades.  These two in particular are stop motion pieces from the early 1980s that are among the earliest pieces of media I ever remember seeing.  The music is by Jonathan Larson, and according to Jarnow's notes from  his website, the cat featured in "Real Cats Drink Milk" is named Banana. 

The Annotated Colbert Finale - Thank goodness for Slate for still having a copy of the closing sing-along of the final episode of "The Colbert Report" from 2014 still hanging around on their channel.  And it provides such helpful annotations too.  Yes, that's Henry Kissinger, George Lucas, and Cookie Monster among the notable celebrities who agreed to participate in one of the most bizarre sendoffs any fake late night pundit has ever received.  Whatever Colbert is cooking up for this final episode of "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert," he has a lot to live up to.

And finally here's They Might Be Giants, appearing on the Tonight Show With Johnny Carson in 1990 to play us out with Birdhouse in Your Soul.

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My Favorite John Carpenter Film

Some films take a while to find their audiences, and some directors aren't appreciated until they've essentially retired.  So it is with the 1982 version of "The Thing" and its director, John Carpenter.   Audiences at the time were looking for optimism and affirmation, and were not in the mood for a bleak, paranoid horror thriller set in Antarctica.  However, in the years since, "The Thing" has gone from box office bomb to cult favorite to one of the undisputed horror classics.

I want to talk about the special effects up front.  Rob Bottin put himself in the hospital for exhaustion due to his extraordinary efforts to bring the creatures of "The Thing" to life.  Though initially criticized as too gruesome, his work set the bar for prosthetics and practical effects for the next decade.  It's hard to describe film without just eventually reciting a litany of violent horrors, each building upon the last.  There's the head that removes itself from a corpse, grows spider leads and runs away.  There's the torso that suddenly grows teeth and bites a guy's arms off.  Then you've got the blood testing and the dogs and the flamethrower scenes, all of them horrifically spectacular thanks to Bottin and his team.  The impact of the monster effects has lessened over time, but the amount of work and effort that went into them is still visible in every bloody frame.  One of the many poor decisions that doomed the 2011 remake/prequel of "The Thing" was using CGI effects instead of practical ones.  

Much of what makes "The Thing" so effective is its simplicity.  You have twelve men in an isolated research outpost who are attacked and killed one by one by an alien being.  You barely know anything about them except their last names and occupations, and the monster could be impersonating any of them.  Aside from Kurt Russell as the lead, the cast is made up of career character actors, including Keith David, Wilford Brimly, and Charles Hallahan.  It's easy to forget they're actors as the bodies pile up and we realize that nobody is safe.  John Carpenter was wary of stepping on the toes of the Howard Hawks adaptation of the same material, "The Thing From Another World," so the story was stripped down to the basics, with a focus on the bare mechanics of survival and the paranoia of dealing with the doppelgangers.  We are shown where the alien came from, but nearly everything else about it is a mystery.  The climate is inhospitable and the monster is clever.  The action and suspense are pushed to the forefront, and a happy ending is not in the cards.

Long before I saw "The Thing" I saw its influence on other media.  So many movies and shows about doppelgangers, isolated standoffs, implacable contagions, and creepy crawlies have been trying to capture that same sense of dread and disaster.  The echoes of "The Thing" are everywhere, from other horror movies like Daniel Espinosa's "Life," to Quentin Tarantino's snowbound western, "The Hateful Eight" - which also borrowed the Ennio Morricone score for "The Thing" for good measure.  The gory excess of the alien transformations broke some boundaries, but what really lingered in the cultural consciousness was the nihilism of facing a monster that could only be defeated through the cold obliteration of every living thing we see in the movie.  John Carpenter would return to Lovecraftian cosmic horror several times over the course of his career, but never with as much impact.  

Carpenter is often described as a genre filmmaker, which is fair, as he gave us classics in several different ones - action-comedy, horror, satire, and science-fiction.  If I hadn't written about "The Thing," my next choice would have been "Starman," another film about an alien on Earth that is a complete tonal 180 from "The Thing."  Most of his films were dismissed as B-movies and schlock upon initial release, but are well loved decades on.  And Carpenter did have his share of hits, helping to ensure that he had a long and fascinating career that included tiny indie projects and major studio films.  "The Thing" was one of the studio films, which gave him the resources to create a nightmare vision of grotesquery on a scale that had never been seen before.  And frankly, nobody has really matched it since.

What I've Seen - John Carpenter

Dark Star (1974)

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)

Halloween (1978)

The Fog (1980)

Escape from New York (1981)

The Thing (1982)

Christine (1983)

Starman (1984)

Big Trouble in Little China (1986)

Prince of Darkness (1987)

They Live (1988)

In the Mouth of Madness (1994)

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The Nostalgia Documentaries

I've noticed that several of the prominent documentaries I've watched over the last few months fall into a specific category, and seem to be targeting the same audience.  These are documentaries that spotlight performers and entertainers who became prominent in the 1970s and 1980s, with narratives that largely serve as retrospectives of their careers.  This includes "Pee-Wee as Himself," "Cheech & Chong's Last Movie," and "Devo."  Though biographical documentaries have always been common, lately it feels like everyone from that era is getting one.  Over the past few years we've had documentaries about Val Kilmer, Anthony Bourdain, Sly Stone, Christopher Reeves, Steve Martin, Albert Brooks, Jim Henson, John Candy and multiple Beatles tributes.  Plenty more are on their way soon.

Now, some of these documentaries are very good.  "Pee-Wee as Himself" stands out as one of the best, not only because it reveals Paul Reubens' private life and struggles as a persecuted gay man in the 1980s, but also because of the adversarial relationship that Reubens had with the documentarian Matt Wolf, which is on display in their interviews.  However, most of the others follow a similar pattern of either having the documentary subject reminisce about their life and career, hopefully offering an entertaining personal account of what it was like to live through their successes and failures, or if they're deceased, piecing together this information through interviews with their friends and family.  There are a few that fall into the category of exposes or tell-alls, like the Martha Stewart and Bill Cosby documentaries, but these are fairly rare.  

Instead, most of the nostalgia-centered docs are all about evoking good feelings and providing an excuse to traipse down memory lane.  I've been fascinated with some of these, because these celebrities come from an era where I was aware enough to understand who they were, but often too young to really grasp the historical context in which they existed.  "Cheech & Chong's Last Movie," for instance, did an excellent job of not just getting across who Cheech and Chong were in their heyday, but the counterculture of the '70s that they were a part of.  I also like the framing device of the two old stoners going on one last imaginary road trip together, occasionally picking up other interviewees as their passengers.   Alternately, I have a much harder time with music documentaries like "Becoming Led Zeppelin" and "Pavements" because music culture remains ever elusive for me.  I think you have to be an existing fan to really appreciate what they're doing. 

Fundamentally, there's nothing wrong with spending a few hours listening to Steve Martin or Lionel Richie tell stories about the good old days, but I do feel that some of these biographical documentaries get awfully indulgent, to the point where some of them are pretty obviously just vanity projects.  The more ambitious, hard-hitting historical documentaries are much more rigorous about their research, and often much more critical of their subjects.  I prefer the documentaries where the subject is deceased, because the filmmakers are often willing to paint a less flattering portrait, with more shadings and more nuances.  One of my favorite documentaries remains "Mr Best Fiend," Werner Herzog's wonderfully candid look at his tumultuous friendship with the Austrian actor and madman, Klaus Kinski.  

I love seeing extraordinary individuals getting the spotlight, and learning more about what was really going on behind the scenes for certain moments in pop culture, but I find myself raising my eyebrows more often lately when I learn who the subject of a new documentary is.  I'm not going to name specific names, but it often feels like if one documentary about a particular performer is successful, everyone in their cohort is suddenly next in line.  Frankly, not everyone needs a documentary, though in the vlogging age I suppose there's the material for anyone to make their own.

It's going to get very interesting in a few decades when we're all old enough to be nostalgic for any years where social media was active.  I guess I should just enjoy this era of nostalgia docs while it lasts.  

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My Top Ten Episodes of 2011-2012

Below, find my top ten episodes for the 2011-2012 television season below, in no particular order.  And a few spoilers ahead, including that one episode of "Breaking Bad." 

Game of Thrones, "Blackwater" - The first real "Game of Thrones" battle episode feels positively small scale now, especially considering the way it was contrived to skip most of the expensive battle scenes because we stuck to Tyrion's limited POV.  But still, what an event!  Cersei gets to be maternal, Tyrion gets to be inspirational, and at this point getting so many disparate characters in kinda close proximity to each other was something to cheer about. 

Parks and Rec, "The Comeback Kid" - It's the one with the ice rink.  Leslie launches a comeback push for her city council campaign while Ben takes up claymation and Andy and April adopt a dog.  And all of this culminates in a trip across a slippery frozen arena, set to Gloria Estefan's "Get on Your Feet," that is one of the most hysterical things that "Parks and Rec" ever came up with.  By this point in the show's run, the laughs could come from anywhere.  And they did.

Breaking Bad, "Crawl Space" - The emotional lowpoint of the fourth season, where Walt gradually comes to learn how badly things are going with both his allies and his enemies.  The tension ratchets up as the danger grows and Walt's options shrink, until there seems to be only one way out.  The final shot where the axe drops is one of the best of the entire series run, capturing a chilling moment where Walter White seems to have gone over the edge at last.  

Community, "Remedial Chaos Theory" - Witness the birth of the darkest timeline.  This is truly an episode for the nerds who are willing to patiently sit through the first few cycles of the story, which are fairly similar to each other, in order to reach the chaotic joys of one-armed Jeff and evil Abed.  Stuffed with meme-worthy lines, references, and in-jokes, the episode breaks all the rules and is one of the best examples of the experimental side of "Community." 

Mad Men, "Commissions and Fees" - Jared Harris's performance as Lane Pryce was one of my favorite parts of "Mad Men."  This episode is his swan song, a bleak, wintry farewell that has some truly heartbreaking scenes and existentially unnerving imagery.  This is also very much a Don episode, where we watch him take care of business with the understanding that a few wrong moves will put him in the same boat as Lane.  And the Jaguar shade is legendary.  

Girls, "Pilot" - I didn't like "Girls" much from what little I saw of it, but I always appreciated the pilot episode, where we're introduced to the exasperating Hannah Horvath, who has a very long way to go on her path to maturity.  From the very beginning, her awfulness and her privilege are clear, but I was also struck by the candidness of how she's portrayed.  I was also relieved that the production values were better than Lena Dunham's feature, "Tiny Furniture."  

Sherlock, "A Scandal in Belgravia" - This episode set off a storm in the fandom about the sexuality of the characters and the show's treatment of the female characters.  This version of Irene Adler is incredibly sexual, self-contradictory, and ultimately a fantasy ideal of a love interest for Sherlock Holmes.  And there's nothing wrong with that in this context.  I still count this as one of the best episodes of the show - juvenile sure, but awfully entertaining.    

Louie, "New Jersey"/"Airport" - What I loved about "Louie" was Louis C.K.'s ability to capture very specific moods and tones.  In this case, a misadventure strands him far from home, forcing him to call up a friend for a ride in the middle of the night.  And this leads to one of the best things I've ever seen special guest star Chris Rock do, acting as the disappointed, responsible adult who lectures Louie all the way home on how he's too old to be acting this stupid.   

Doctor Who, "The Girl Who Waited" - The quality of "Doctor Who" was hit-or-miss in every era, but I stuck around for the occasional episodes like this, the ones that told time travel stories that really took advantage of the show's fantastic concepts and characters.  Here we meet an embittered version of Amy Pond who was forced to wait too long for her rescue - creating a moral dilemma for the Doctor and Rory as they try to find a way to resolve the situation.  

Black Mirror, "15 Million Merits" - Finally, the episode that began my obsession with "Black Mirror," back when it was a Channel Four production.  I accidentally stumbled across a pirated version on Youtube, and thought it was a web series.  I didn't know who Daniel Kaluuya was, or Jessica Brown-Findlay, and I'd never heard of Charlie Brooker.  I just knew that the episode was one of the most effective pieces of science-fiction I'd seen in ages, and I wanted more.  

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About That "Dexter: Resurrection"

Spoilers for "Dexter" and "Dexter: New Blood" ahead.

The original "Dexter" series aired on Showtime back when I had no access to premium cable television.  I only watched the first few seasons, which I liked, but nothing after the fourth season - the one with the Trinity Killer.  However, I definitely got wind of the franchise's ups and downs over the years - the botched ending of the series with Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall) becoming an Alaskan lumberjack, the 2021 sequel miniseries, "Dexter: New Blood" that tried to give him a more dignified exit, and finally last year's "Dexter: Original Sin" prequel show.  I didn't watch any of these, but I was finally persuaded by good reviews to give the latest entry in the "Dexter" saga, "Dexter: Resurrection," a fair shot.  And I'm thrilled that I did.

I had absolutely no trouble getting up to speed with what Dexter Morgan has been up to for the past ten years, which comes down to trying his best to stop being a serial killer.  In "Resurrection," however, he's back to bad habits.  Dexter goes to New York City to help his now adult son Harrison (Jack Alcott), who has gotten himself mixed up in a murder.   Inevitably, Dexter becomes an active killer again, despite becoming friends with his new landlord Blessing (Ntare Gumo Mbaho Mwine), and despite the warnings of Dexter's deceased father Harry (James Remar), who hangs around as a personification of his conscience.  Unfortunately, Dexter's ex-pal Angel (David Zayas), is also in town intent on proving that Dexter is a murderer once and for all.  He's helping the detective in charge of investigating Harrison, Claudette Wallace (Kadia Saraf).  Dexter also inadvertently stumbles into a peculiar group run by the billionaire Leon Prater (Peter Dinklange) and his formidable henchwoman Charley (Uma Thurman). 

"Dexter: Resurrection" feels like a series reset to get the main character back to his original status quo, but to the credit of returning showrunner Clyde Phillips, it does a good job of showing how Dexter naturally arrives at this point, and emphasizes that he has changed over the years.  This ten-episode first season spends a lot of time helping Dexter process all the drama and upheaval he's been through, and getting his priorities straightened out.  He wants to be a good Dad.  He wants to be more human and connect to other people.  At the same time, the show treats the audience to a ton of new kills, new serial killer rivals, callbacks, fanservice, and guest stars galore.  This is easily the most star-studded "Dexter" project to date, with Peter Dinklange absolutely stealing the show every time he's onscreen.  I am sorely tempted to write a spoiler post for this season, just so I can gush over some of the other performances, but I'll leave you to discover those for yourselves.

One very good choice was cutting down the complications in Dexter's life so Harrison is his main concern.  They have an interesting relationship to watch, and Jack Alcott has no trouble shouldering the plot for long stretches, thankfully.  I also like the move to a New York setting, which puts Dexter out of his element, but creates all kinds of new opportunities for culture clashes and new character dynamics.  Dexter's past is always on his mind, and sometimes in his face in the form of Angel, but being in New York gives him a chance to shed some old baggage and sort out what he actually wants moving forward.  Dexter's snarky internal monologues were always a fun part of the show, and here they're snarkier and more entertaining than ever.    

And really, that's what caught me the most off guard about "Dexter: Resurrection."  It is so much more fun than I remember the original "Dexter" being.  The macabre, winking opening sequence may be gone, but that same toothsome verve keeps rearing its head throughout this season, which features all kinds of wild twists, loads of black humor, and cheerfully implausible things happening in every episode.  Sure, you could nitpick the plot holes, or you could suspend disbelief and just enjoy watching Dexter outsmart his adversaries with improbable smarts and foresight, narrowly getting away again and again.  And unlike a lot of other sequel series and legasequel series, the formula still works great here.  I hope to see more of Dexter Morgan and friends soon.

  

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About That "F1" Movie

I will preface the following remarks with the disclaimer that I know almost nothing about auto racing, race cars, or what distinguishes Formula One from any other type of racing.  I know that it's not a casual sport, with most of the cars and teams being sponsored by major auto manufacturers with deep pockets.  And fortunately, this is pretty much all you need to know going into "F1," aka "F1 the Movie."

Joseph Kosinski has proven that the success of "Top Gun: Maverick" wasn't a fluke, and he's done it by making a film that establishes a pretty clear pattern of how Kosinski makes a hit.  You make a movie in a nearly extinct action sub-genre, put an aging movie star at its center, have the story be about passing the torch and one last shot at glory, and pretty the whole thing up with cutting edge movie effects to amp up the spectacle.  It's not just a matter of putting Brad Pitt into an F1 racing movie, but boiling all the tropes of racing movies down to their most basic forms and presenting them in a shiny new package.  The version of F1 we see depicted onscreen is very idealized - women and minorities are conspicuously represented - as the U.S. Air Force was in "Top Gun: Maverick," with any political or cultural barriers to entry only vaguely alluded to.  And since the movie couldn't have been made without the participation of the FIA, the governing body of F1, that's no surprise.

I'm also certain that the racing itself doesn't remotely resemble what actually happens on a real Formula One race track.  Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, a maverick racer-for-hire who is constantly using dangerous tricks and stratagems to gain an advantage.  He's recruited by an old racing teammate, Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), as a last ditch effort to save the floundering newbie APXGP team, which Ruben bankrolls.  The team's other primary driver is the talented, but green Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris).  They also have the risk-averse Kaspar Smolinski (Kim Bodnia) as team principal, and F1's first female technical director, Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon), in charge of the cars.  Sonny joins the team and promptly clashes with all of them, but also provokes them to do better.  We watch as they figure out how to work together over the course of an eventful season, chasing victory despite many defeats and setbacks.  There are injuries, disqualifications, ghosts of the past, and plenty of interpersonal frictions.  There's also a secret saboteur in the mix, naturally.  

The pieces of the movie are all very artificial and very familiar, but this isn't a bad thing.  All the old tropes work to the film's benefit, and "F1" turned out to be exactly what I wanted in a summer movie blockbuster.  The performances, the filmmaking, and the execution of all the predictable twists and turns are fantastic.  "F1" is absolutely the kind of movie that you want to see on the biggest screen possible to really immerse yourself in the experience of watching all those beautifully staged race sequences where the cars are barrelling down the track at unfathomable speeds.  There's a first person POV sequence in the last race that is downright breathtaking to behold, and DP Claudio Miranda should be up for every cinematography award in a few months.  The script is bare bones and the characters even moreso, but you buy that Sonny Hayes is getting away with all of this because it's Brad Pitt, looking as handsome and  charming as ever.  And Javier Bardem is a pro at making the implausible behind-the-scenes troubles seem plausible, because he's terribly convincing every time he announces that something else has gone wrong.

"F1" is a sports movie, but it's also a process movie.  What I appreciated the most was getting an up-close and detailed look at the cars and the racing, even if much of it was romanticized and cleaned up for the silver screen.  Half of what sells the racing is spending so much time with dedicated professionals behind the scenes who are obsessed with improving their race times by mere tenths of a second.  It's sitting in on strategy meetings, board meetings, and press conferences.  It's watching APXGP lose race after race, but learning a little bit more each time.  Kosinski embraces being a maximalist storyteller, and ensures that the sizable budget is well spent.  Unlike a lot of other movies this summer, you can see every dollar onscreen.  "F1" is also a long movie, but it earns its running time, and in the end the filmmakers earn the happy ending that could only happen in the movies.  

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Rank 'Em: "Mission: Impossible"

I'll start off with the caveat that I don't count myself as a "Mission: Impossible" fan.  I've seen most of the later movies only once apiece, and there are several I just flat out dislike.  However, when the series was good, it was good, and some of these entries definitely deserve a few kudos.  So here, from best to least, are my rankings of the "Mission: Impossible" movies:

1. Ghost Protocol (2011) - It's all set pieces.  And it's all set pieces orchestrated by Brad Bird, who is so great at balancing action and character and humor.  There's a playfulness to this installment that works so well for me, and helps to set the franchise apart from all the other spy franchises of the time.  And while Tom Cruise is indisputably the star, the team is great - Benji is promoted, Jeremy Renner's William Brandt makes a fun newbie, Paula Patton is a delight, and everybody gets their moment.  

2. Mission: Impossible (1996) - The franchise kickoff is very much a '90s Brian DePalma thriller, and barely feels of a piece with the rest of the series.  It's much more grounded, much more twisty, and doesn't care if the audience can keep up with it.  Still, it delivered the big set pieces as well as anybody.  This is also the "Mission: Impossible" movie where Tom Cruise's ego is the least on display, even though this is the first movie he produced.  I wish we'd gotten a few more entries like this one.  

3. Mission: Impossible III (2006) - After a nice long hiatus, this was a pleasant surprise.  J.J. Abrams isn't great in the director's chair, and the script has some groaners, but what distinguishes this movie is that it has one of the franchise's truly great villains: Owen Davian, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman.  Also, Ethan Hunt' relationship with Julia is the only romantic relationship in the series that ever really worked for me, even if it still feels like Cruise is trying too hard to seem like a human being.  

4. Rogue Nation (2015) - The first of the Christopher McQuarrie directed films that set the formula for the rest of the series.  It feels like it was originally planned as a grand finale or a potential handoff point to another leading man, which might be why it comes across as so celebratory and satisfying.  Rebecca Ferguson makes her first appearance as Ilsa Faust, and the opera sequence is a franchise highlight.  This is also the last "Mission: Impossible" film where I felt the humor worked for me.

5. Fallout (2018) - Here's where I'm going to get in trouble.  I have absolutely no beef with the action sequences or the spycraft or the performances in "Fallout."  This is the one with Henry Cavill and his mustache as the main villain, and he is impeccable.  However, this is also the one where the attempts to sell Tom Cruise as a romantic lead were so grating that it completely took me out of the movie.  Some view this as the pinnacle of the franchise, but it's when I started looking for an escape hatch.  

6. Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) - That title is just hilarious in retrospect.  I enjoy Hayley Attwell as the new love interest, but the movie is a bore whenever it's not in the middle of one of the action sequences.  Fortunately, the ones in this movie are pretty good, and especially the train crash.  However, I take exception to the AI doomsday plot, which is just badly written science-fiction that doesn't feel like part of this universe.  Audiences weren't pleased either, going by the box office.

7. Mission: Impossible 2 (2000) - The motorcycle duel!  The gratuitous slow motion with doves!  Thandiwe Newton looking all winsome!  Bellerophon and Chimera!  It's the John Woo entry into the "Mission: Impossible" series, and it is goofy and ridiculous, and it presages a lot of the franchise's worst habits.  There's Cruise already showboating shamelessly in the opening sequence.  There's the gratuitous use of mask reveals.  I have a soft spot for this one, but I won't pretend it's any good.

 

8. The Final Reckoning (2025) -  I didn't like it.  I think it's good that we're done for now.  

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