Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One [SPOILERS]

I was quite looking forward to seeing the new Mission Impossible movie, as I enjoyed the last three instalments (the most recent one less so than the previous two, but still...).

It was 163 minutes long. Aaaaand - there was a five-minute sequence in the middle that was hilarious, and three or four other individual moments were quite good - but otherwise, it was mostly kinda boring...

( Cut for spoiler... )

Simon Pegg was still good value for money, though not in it nearly enough.

But the plot was absolute nonsense (I mean, you don't expect Mission Impossible movies to make sense, but still), to the extent that the first thing Dave said on exiting was that we needed to create a new term of measurement for it - mega-bobbins!

For the most part, it just wasn't as much fun as I'd expected and the action sequences were so many and so much on each other's heels that they lost any sense of grandeur or wow-factor.

Ah well - it was only part one, so we'll need to remember to probably not bother with the next one. Dave said he might go anyway, just because he's already invested three hours of his life to the story - but then I reminded him of the sunk cost fallacy and he decided he could just look up the plot on Wikipedia later...

The Lie Tree

After loving Gullstruck Island, I decided to listen to The Lie Tree, which is probably the most well-known book by Frances Hardinge - and I discovered it was already in my audible library, but that I'd only listened to the first chapter or so. I tried again while I was away in Devon recently, but unfortunately didn't get much further. I don't remember why I stopped before, but this time, it was my fault and not the book's - I'm really in non-fiction mode at the moment, so found I wanted to be listening to podcasts and watching reality shows instead of fiction stuff. Ah well - sorry, Frances! It's still in my library so I might end up coming back to it one day...