"Mission: Impossible" and the Deep State

Washington Post Opinions asked me for a piece about my favorite blockbuster franchise’s relationship to Washington. So I wrote about that, but also about my dad.

Radio, Radio: Multiversal Exports

The contemporaneous cape-flicks Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and The Flash are both riffing on a lot of the same ideas. I put together a fun radio piece asking if the concept of fictional multiverses has gone fully mainstream. it aired today on Here & Now, but you can listen right here.

Everybody Does It Bitter: A History of 007s Kvetching About Their Jobs

At the end of Casino Royale, the 1953 Ian Fleming novel that begat the James Bond legend, “the bitch [was] dead”… but the bitching had not yet begun!

Here, for The Ringer, is my deeply-sourced account of how no man who has ever worn the most famous tuxedo in movies has ever been happy about it for very long. Except Pierce Brosnan.

The 58-Year Mission: "Nobody Does It Better," reviewed for The Washington Post

Daniel Craig in 2006’s sublime Casino Royale, chronicling a formative mission for a wet-behind-the-ears 007.

I was a big fan of Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross’s two-volume Star Trek oral history The Fifty-Year Mission, so I fairly leapt at the chance to review Nobody Does It Better, their new oral history of the James Bond movies, for the Paper of Record. It’s not as illuminating or contradictory as their Trek books, though I was delighted to find some comments from my pal Matt Gourley within its (seven! hundred!) pages.

The Great Work Concludes: Side D of "Blue Wave Christmas" Hath Dropped

Here’s a rainy New Year’s Eve bonus for you, merrymakers: Side D of Blue Wave Christmas, the yule-mitzvah edition of my longstanding Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable series, has arrived, marking the conclusion of the most ambitious mixtape I’ve yet made. It’s long on merriment, long on obscurity, and long on length. That’s why I had to serve it to you incrementally. With this vestigal-tail chapter, some of the familiar voices from prior iterations have returned after mostly keeping mum so far this year. There are by my reckoning at least seven days of Christmas remaining, so I’ll leave you to it. You can find all four sides on this page. I wish for all of us a better 2019.

Holiday ephemera and etcetera. Seasonal exotica and erotica. Cuts so deep they’ll give you the bends. Cuts so Prime Jeff Bezos would deliver them to your door with two-day shipping, free, if I hadn’t already given them to you instantaneously and at my own expense.

Something Completely Different in Becoming Bond

One-and-done 007 George Lazenby in 1969's On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

It's a strange coincidence that Sir Roger Moore, 007 No. 003, died only about 48 hours after the premiere of the very funny Hulu documentary Becoming Bond, about one-and-done 007 George Lazenby — who, incredibly, landed the most sought-after role in showbiz (circa 1968) with double-oh-zero prior acting experience.

I'll never get tired of this real-life story. And the Bond flick that resulted, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, is in my Bond Top Five, way above of any of the Moore entries. Anyway, I wrote about all this for the weekend crowd. And I fan-casted Matt Gourley, again.

I wrote this piece quickly, and it occurred to me only after I'd send it off to my editor, the great Linda Holmes, that I might've mentioned the passage of the documentary wherein Lazenby explains the discovery that turned him from a failing salesman into into a successful one. He might've been talking about acting.