Blown Away Mission

Storm Coming in Outside my Office Yesterday

Some really ill winds were blowing yesterday with powerful thunderstorms rocketing through the region. My wife hosted a bunch of neighbors from our old house in Charlton who fortified her for the experience. Buddy seems to handle storms a little better here in the big, still not a hero though. I was watching outside my office as the storms rolled in incredibly fast. I’ve always been a fan of getting as close to the storm as possible – something that drives my wife to distraction. My sister was not as lucky down in Rhode Island where a fierce storm tumbled a neighbor’s tree into their yard on top of both their pool and beloved deck. No one was hurt but I can’t imagine my sister getting through the rest of the summer without her daily dips in the pool.

Sister's Pool Yesterday

The storms abided enough late in the day to permit date night where we saw the latest in the Mission Impossible series – Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation. This is the best in the series with a well-constructed, intelligent plot and subtle humor poking fun at some of the earlier installments that doesn’t take away from the story. The IMF force is under attack from Washington bureaucrats as well as a mysterious crime organization that always seems one step ahead.

The series is justifiably famous for daring stunt work but this film takes them to an entirely new level. Cruise starts the movie out riding on the outside of a cargo plane during takeoff and it’s obvious that he did the work and wasn’t CGI’d in. This is the first of many stunt sequences that shatter the jaw dropping barrier and even a jaded movie goer such as myself was left in awe. You go into one of these expecting to be dazzled but they go well beyond that. The real revelation though was the female lead, Rebecca Ferguson as Ilsa. She was every bit the match for Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and was the reason this movie is clearly the best of the entire series and one of the best I’ve seen all year.

A few weeks ago I remarked that watching the movie A Walk Among the Tombstones felt a lot like reading a detective story set in New York City, one of my favorite genres. Lawrence Block has written a whole series of novels featuring the Tombstone’s hero, Matthew Scudder, starting back in the 1970s. The master himself, Stephen King, heaped praise on Block’s work and I’m surprised I’ve never sampled him before. I started at the beginning and just finished the first in his Scudder novels, The Sins of the Fathers.

Scudder, a former policeman, working as an unofficial private eye seeks justice for customers while paying penance for a young girl accidentally shot in a shootout he was involved in while a still a policeman. In this first case a father comes to him trying to find out about his recently murdered daughter and this leads Scudder down a path learning about the lives of two dead young people. He learns in his very workmanlike manner of a dark truth and seeks justice in his own way. While the book, written in the 1970s, is obviously dated it remained a very good read and Scudder a very likable, flawed hero. I’ve already started with the second book.