giornata, 6/5/25

the trick is not minding

Playing catch-up a little bit with my giornata, my Thursday weekly media diary, covering whatever I read, watched, or listened to in the last week. So this time we’re covering vaguely two weeks! This feature is for paid subscribers, but the first one of the month is free!

Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning (2025, dir. Christopher McQuarrie)

Fran Hoepfner

reminded me this Richard Brody tweet when I was telling her that I basically like every Mission: Impossible about the same. I’m not trying to be contrarian when I say that I have a grand old time with II, the most consistently maligned of the series and also think Fallout, probably my actual favorite, is a little goofy.

I saw Rogue Nation in theaters on a date with someone whose face I can’t remember, had no memory of it other than the underwater scene which really freaked me out.¹ But then I saw Fallout in theaters during the halycon days of “MoviePass” “working.” I felt like I couldn’t drive home after I saw it, I was so buzzed on the film.² They just all basically work on me and I’m happy when one of them is in theaters and I can go see it a bunch.

Now, I’m prone to call things romance novels that are decidedly not romance novels. I love to do this incorrect labelling for rhetorical purposes. But I don’t think any Mission: Impossible movie is romance novel. All eight of them are magic tricks.

Some other things that are also magic tricks as explanation: Glengarry Glen Ross, Sammy Davis, Jr. doing an impression of Laurence Olivier on the Dick Cavett Show in 1971, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Swing Time (Fred and Ginger in Top Hat? Romance novel), the Reaganing episode of 30 Rock, specifically Kelsey Grammer saying “And I should know, I’m Frajer,” poems, generally, are more likely to be magic tricks than romance novels.

I find romance in things about process. These things can be very earthy, bearing witness to the effort makes them transcendent. Magic tricks are about the sublime from the jump, the effort has to go unseen, meaning the effort below the surface is manifold.

The tidy sheen of Mission: Impossible movies make them magic. Imparted to me from every time I’ve read the Ricky Jay profile in the New Yorker, the appeal of great magic tricks cannot be simply how they are “done.” When I watch Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants, the “how its done” usually comes to down to “Ricky Jay was a virtuoso at handling cards.” Theoretically someone could explain to me the moments of misdirection, or how he senses the order of the cards by feel and rhythm, or how he remembers long sequences of pattern. But if that were explicated, would I be less impressed? No, I’d probably just be exhausted by someone trying to steal the magic from me.

In the profile, a magician friend of Jay’s relates a trick Jay pulled on him and says “Did I figure it out? Well I was fooled at the time. I felt stupid, but it was nice to be fooled. That’s not a feeling we get to have very often anymore.” Tom Cruise is spoken about in similar bygone era terms: “our last movie star,” “our last A-Lister.” All the breathless Mr. Movies behind the scenes content reveals to us the “momentary how” of these stunts, but we’re trusting him one last time to take our breath away anyway. The “how” of it all involves a life time devotion to all things people joke about with an edge of sincerity when it comes to Cruise: his death drive, his relationship with Scientology, the manic PR machine that helps us forget about Suri and Katie. You have to be tricked by the mirrors a little bit to be on board.

When I see a Mission: Impossible, I get fooled and how nice it is.

Star Wars (1977, dir. George Lucas)

There are few people whose taste I trust more than

Ben Empey

(@bempey on TikTok, where he is most active right now, social media wise. Chronicling his work on starting a movie studio!) When I am unsure why a movie didn’t work for me, he often articulates it and I often find myself inspired to watch things by his suggestion, always to great satisfaction.

He watched Star Wars at some point in May and I thought “oh I should rewatch Star Wars” and then on Tuesday I saw a man wearing a Darth Vader tee shirt on my commute home and finally Did the Work.

ben on letterboxd

I am largely agnostic on Star Wars, outside of just liking movies that are fun. I disclosed in a footnote in this month’s non-romance, romance that my favorite has always been Attack of the Clones, which came out when I was 10, maybe a dispositive factor in anyone’s “favorite Star Wars.” My sister, six years younger, has a much more comprehensive knowledge of what is Going On in these movies, so I ask her a bunch of questions every time we watch them: “how are Owen and Beru related to Luke?” “did R2 get memory wiped too?” “shouldn’t Han be worried about Jabba” “shit, I forgot Yoda isn’t in this one.”

what if I told you I almost bought a prom dress inspired by this dress and my date dumped me and I insisted that my parents get me another dress that was directly inspired by Miss Havisham

I always forget how silly and petulant everyone is in these movies. It is fun to watch Alec Guinness do “I was in Lawrence of Arabia btw” acting while Marc Hamill affects a whine to his voice that makes him sound like Dakota Fanning as a child. The droids outsold—CP30, my beloved, you will always be famous.

Rebecca (1940, dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

Speaking of silly and petulant. I mostly remember Rebecca as a “serious” Hitchcock, like Psycho or Notorious, as opposed to a “silly” Hitchcock, like The Lady Vanishes or To Catch a Thief.

But with an audience, this was kind of a riot. It’s populated with those British house mystery characters also make up The Lady Vanishes who say funny British things about cricket and class politics that American audiences³ can chuckle at without much context and Joan Fontaine’s eyebrow acting is so pathetic (complimentary), it is hard not to giggle at every revelation of Laurence Olivier’s melodrama. (Speaking of, I frequently had my head in my hands over how handsome he looked. Two of my local theaters are playing Wuthering Heights (1939) later this summer and I’m just going to be verklempt).

Mrs. Danvers is one of the great characters of all time. But I love Mrs. van Hopper, the unnamed second Mrs. de Winter patroness in Monte Carlo. Every line from Florence Bates is sillier than the last. Highly recommend reading her Wikipedia page. A dame!

Champions League Final, PSG-Inter (5-0)

A routing. I had no real rooting interests here either, other than Donnarumma and Luis Enrique from PSG both compelling me and a vague understanding of why Serie A football struggles to work outside of Italy.

I would like to watch more Serie A next season (I say this every year). I intend to be catholic in my rooting interests, at least until Federico Chiesa signs with a team.

NBA Conference Finals

Unfortunately, my minute rooting interests (Knicks/Wolves) were beaten in both Conference Finals. But the Sixers not being in the playoffs has made the NBA playoffs infinitely more fun this year. Every year I try to get into the NBA and I find the Sixers’ narrative so incredibly demoralizing (Tyrese Maxey, I love you forever) that I just get bummed out.

I currently have no stake in the Thunder/Pacers, but I’m prepared to root whoever so that we get seven games, unless someone wants to make a pitch to me. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, of course, is Kentucky Wildcat, which does compel me.

1. I have a pretty debilitating fear of drowning.

2. I think of this bit from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn all the time:

"I was drunk myself, once."

She lost her anger in curiosity. "Were you, Neeley? Honest?"

"Yeah. One of the fellers had some bottles of beer and we went down the cellar and drank it. I drank two bottles and got drunk."

"What did it feel like?"

"Well, first the whole world turned upside down. Then everything was like-you know those cardboard toots you buy for a penny, and you look in the small end and turn the big end, and pieces of colored paper keep falling around and they never fall around the same way twice?

Mostly though, I was very dizzy. Afterwards I vomited."

"Then I've been drunk, too," admitted Francie.

"On beer?"

"No. Last spring, in McCarrens Park, I saw a tulip for the first time in my life."

"How'd you know it was a tulip if you'd never seen one?"

"I'd seen pictures. Well, when I looked at it, the way it was growing, and how the leaves were, and how purely red the petals were, with yellow inside, the world turned upside down and everything went around like the colors in a kaleidoscope-like you said. I was so dizzy I had to sit on a park bench."

3. Hitchcock’s first American movie!