NO! I Am Not Talking About Either The Film Or The Television Series
I refer, of course - O so obviously!- to "Mission Impossible", which Your Humble Scribe encountered as a television series back in the Seventies, when he was as tall as he is nowadays yet about one-third the total body mass. I only saw the iteration where Peter Graves was the Impossible Missions Force leader. Art!
It had a great Lalo Schifrin score, too. The premise is that the IMF is a deniable, arms-length agency of the South Canadian government, whose agents can and will be thrown under the bus if captured or killed, especially the former. There is a core team, who are occasionally supplemented by 'specialists', including at one point Leonard Nimoy, who was probably grateful to get out from under the stultifying (if profitable) mantle of Mister Spock. Art!<Imagine cool theme here>
As I recall, one of the IMF's schticks was that they never resorted to lethal force - it was more in their duplicitous and manipulative manner to coerce other people to do the un-aliving thing. I remember one supposed 'ambush' they set up, with a blank firing attachment and Barney (black dude above) shovelling boatloads of expended cartridges around the 'gun' position. Bullet strikes were simulated with remote-detonated blobs of explosive putty. It all looked very convincing, espe
ANYWAY that's not what I meant, and -
What's that? The film series? <sighs dramatically>
O okay. Conrad has only seen the first of the MI films, which was HORRIFYINGLY LONG AGO in 1996, and we might even have it knocking around on a DVD somewhere. Art!
Tom: hardest working man in Hollywood
That's not mere hyperbole; TC is known to give nothing less than 110% commitment to a film, none of that prima donna 'I'm too special to give a s' stuff, and studios remember people like that.
Where were we?
O yes. MI 7 has been out in cinemas for about a week now, opening early in the week, which is a bit odd as usually films come out on Thursday or Friday. Art!
Here you see Tom and his motorbike part company in mid-air, as motorbikes are not known for their aerodynamic performance. Don't worry, he has a parachute. Conrad wonders what the insurance people on set were thinking when they saw this stunt being done; Tom probably had them locked in their trailer with the door lock superglued shut.
ANYWAY here's a Snip of MI 7's box office takings.
This is what a successful film looks like when released abroad across the globe <coughcoughIndyFivecoughcough. You can see the International gross is twice that of the domestic South Canadian takings, which is a good thing if you're Tom Cruise. The other thing that sustains a film at the box office is the informal description 'legs', meaning that it sustains a consistently high level of attendance over time. Briefly put, it continues to rifle pockets week after week. Art!
Things are not quite as simple as this, however; the studio only gets back a certain fraction of the box office. This might be as high as 50% in South Canada, or as low as 25% in the Populous Dictatorship. So, hypothetically, a film that cost O say $330 million to make, a figure chosen entirely at random with no ulterior motive <coughcoughJamesMangoldcoughcough> would need to hit $750 million at the box office to break even. And if it's daily take had dwindled to $3 million then that's never going to happen. Hypothetically.
ANYWAY of course - obviously! - none of that is what I really wanted to talk about, since by "IMF" Conrad very obviously means the International Monetary Fund.
You may be too young to remember the raw chaos that Ruffia descended into when the Sinister Union rolled over and died. Conrad remembers seeing an expatriate return there and being delighted to be able to buy a smoked apple (don't judge). His culinary joy was tempered by a citric babushka who informed him that said apple would have consumed her entire weekly wages. Art!
This plonker was still waiting in the wings
Things got so bad that in 1998 Ruffia had to apply to the IMF for a loan to tide them over the bad times, and they were granted $21 billion, $5 billion of which was promptly stolen. Clearly, kleptomania is a long-rooted problem in Ruffia.
Having been stung once, the IMF is refusing to have anything to do with Ruffia ever again, which is another reason Cuba is in deep doo-doo - they got an IMF loan in the Sixties, reneged on it and are now on the brink of economic apocalypse, with the IMF blocking all their calls. Well done the IMF!
Ooops. I appear to have pontificated rather a lot. O well it's all gloriously readable stuff.
"Zombie Apocalypse"
Finally finished watching this last night and there are, inevitably, plot holes one can drive a fleet of Greyhound buses through. You can forgive a lot in a low-budget zombie film - hey hey Kubrick it's not - but one can expect a few adhesions to reality. Art!
Now you know where "Army Of The Dead" got it's tiger zombies from.
The thing that made Conrad jib was the information that a ship was going to ferry survivors from the mainland to the island of Catalina.
Except NO! because the deliberately induced EMP effects had destroyed every electronic and electrical system on the planet.
Of course, I might be overthinking this .....
"City In The Sky"
With no way to avoid an Earth-bound holocaust, the Doctor and Ace are trying to find out if the delicate orbital environments are capable of surviving.
More prosaically,
the Doctor wondered which, if any, of the Bernal spheres might be armed. No human weapon yet devised could do more
than scuff the Tardis, true, but he didn’t want to try and materialise inside a
sphere full of hostile and aggressive strangers. He looked at the readouts to see if
transponders gave any clues to which nations had built which station. One display struck him: “BranMan01”. Unlike transliterated radio codes in
Cyrillic, Japanese, Chinese, Esperanto and French for the others.
‘What are those three not carrying any
description?’ asked Ace, a worthy question that deserved an answer. Peering closely as if to interrogate the
monitor screen in person, the diminutive Time Lord hemmed and hawed for several
seconds. He looked and then used his
index finger as an indicator.
‘That -’ pointing to one slowly pulsing
blue blip on the screen that lacked any transponder code ‘ - and that - ’
pointing at another similar blip ‘ are incomplete space habitats. That - ’ and
he tapped a less coherent, oval trace, ‘ - happens to be the Trojan
Asteroids. Space junk. Rocks in orbit.’
‘Eeny-meeny miny mo?’ suggested Ace, to an
amused snort.
‘Hah!
No. You know, when the first
Arcology finally reached completion, wags christened it the “
‘Oh, I get it. “BranMan01”. Hmm.
The future’s sense of humour needs a bit of work.’
There is nothing as subjective as a sense of humour, Ace
You What?
Conrad was scanning the BBC's News website for anything that might spark his imagination and an item, and came across this. Art!
This sounds like a title put together by AI. Or, as David Bowie (and I think J.G. Ballard) would do, it sounds like bits of sentences cut up and thrown into the air, to be assembled upon landing as with the I Ching.
What? What what what?
NO! I will not be clicking on it. This particular sidebar item seems to be the living definition of 'clickbait'. But - it might elevate the blog in search terms, so there is a silver lining.
Finally -
Where's this heatwave that's supposed to be sweeping Europe? Conrad has been sitting all day long in front of his work laptop, whose monitor handily displays things like the ratio of the Australian dollar to the pound sterling, and warns of 'high pollen', or 'heavy rain', also the temperature. It's not budged beyond 14º all day long, dipping to 13º at times. Your Humble Scribe ventured into Lesser Sodom in the early evening, and at no time could you call it even 'warm', let alone 'hot'.
Conrad blames Brexit. AND the pistachio harvest from the Sanjak Of Novi Pazar.
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