The Dead Drop

The Day of the Jackal (1973)

Fri, 30 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0500

The Day of the Jackal from 1973 is the original film version of Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 novel. It shouldn’t be confused with a couple of remakes — one in 1997 with Bruce Willis (just called The Jackal) and a TV version in 2024 with Eddie Redmayne.

It’s quite good, in an unique kind of way. There’s not a lot of action, because the entire film is essentially an asynchronous chase scene.

A terrorist group hires an assassin (”The Jackal”) to kill Charles DeGaulle (likely set in the mid 60s, since an early scene references an actual event). The entire film consists The Jackal preparing for the job and traveling across Europe to carry it out, culminating in the attempt itself.

This isn’t a mystery. You can see all sides at all times, but it’s a very tense game of missed opportunities and excruciatingly bad timing. It’s more of a “howcatchem” rather than a “whodunnit.”

The Jackal himself is weirdly affable. You’d expect him to be brooding or anti-social, but he seems like a really nice guy, which makes him even scarier.

Michael Lonsdale plays a French detective pitted against the villain. He’s credited under his real name of “Michel Lonsdale” here, as it was partially a French production. He would go on play Hugo Drax in Moonraker six years later.

It’s a weirdly quiet film. There’s not a lot of dialog and not much soundtrack or score.

There’s also an implied homosexuality plot point, which was likely pretty risque for the early 70s. I’m not sure if it was in Forsyth’s novel, but I remember the situation was recreated in the 1997 version and it was eventually re-shot because test audiences thought the victim was killed simply for being gay, when in the original, it’s clear he was killed because he discovered The Jackal’s identity.

Solid movie.

Bullet to Beijing (1995)

Wed, 28 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Bullet to Beijing is another Harry Palmer installment of the series that started with The IPCRESS File back in the 1960s. It was the first Palmer film in 30 years.

Unfortunately, it’s terrible.

It was supposedly filmed for theaters then released direct-to-video because it was so bad. Michael Caine has reported that filming this was the worst experience of his career, and he threatened to retire in the middle of it.

Harry is forcibly retired from the service about two minutes into the film, which seems weird. Then he’s flown to Russia by a mysterious employer and given the job of recovering a biological agent called The Red Death. At some point, he’s told that it’s on a train across Siberia to Beijing, so that’s where most of the film happens.

There were a lot of characters, and I’m not totally sure what they were all doing. At some point, it’s revealed that his employer is smuggling the weapon to North Korea, which got me wondering why he hired Harry in the first place? I couldn’t remotely figure out how the plot fit together and why everyone was doing what they were doing. To top it off, there’s a weird sequence in the middle which reminded me of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.

There’s some interesting casting. Jason Connery has a role (son of Sean), and Mia Sara is there too (Sloane from Ferris Bueller). I maintain that you could have completely removed these two characters and caused zero damage to the story. Incidentally, those two would marry a year later, until she divorced him and married Jim Henson’s son.

I rented it in HD, but the film quality was awful. And there’s a weird soundtrack which plays in the background of almost every scene.

Awful movie.

The Agency, Season 2

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0500

There are a lot of “sophomore slumps” in television, but the second season of The Agency just knocked it out of the park.

The focus of Martian in this go-around is two-fold —

To capture “Viking,” the American solider who turned traitor and is working with the Russian mercenary group Valhalla
To free his lover, Samia, from her abduction by the Sudanese (or is it the Iranians?)

This intersects with Daniela’s undercover work in Iran, which was an unfulfilled subplot in season one. And of course, there are lots of politics in the CIA’s London office.

Lots of supporting players get bigger roles this time, especially John Magaro as novice operative Owen, who gets in way over his head.

Season three is supposedly in development, but there has been no official announcement. I do hope it happens, because the season ended on a hell of cliffhanger.

Spy Role-Playing Games

Sun, 25 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0500

For no other reason than middle-age nostalgia, I asked Claude for a list of “spy-themed role playing games.” It gave me the following:

James Bond 007 (Victory Games, 1983). Widely considered the best of the era. Its “Hero Points” let players bend the story in cinematic, Bond-film ways, and it has excellent chase rules.
Top Secret/S.I. (TSR, 1987). TSR’s own revision of Top Secret, with a cleaner system and a pulpier, more action-oriented feel.
Espionage! (Hero Games, 1983), later revised as Danger International (1985). This is the Champions/Hero System engine applied to spies and mercenaries.
Mercenaries, Spies & Private Eyes (Flying Buffalo, 1983). It uses a Tunnels & Trolls-style engine and handles both detective and spy play.
Ninjas & Superspies (Palladium, 1988). Gonzo martial arts and gadget-heavy espionage using the Palladium system.

After a couple weeks prowling around eBay — and way too much money spent — I managed to accumulate them all. I won’t play them, I just like reading the rule books.

Give me some time and I’ll do some more analysis. I feel like the commonalities between different systems have some valuable things to say about how we frame spy fiction.

Pickup on South Street (1953)

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0500

It was about 9:00 p.m. and I wasn’t tired, so I asked Claude for a spy movie less than 100 minutes long. It suggested a few, including Pickup on South Street from 1953.

Turns out, the entire film is on YouTube, and has a running time of just 77 minutes. (Pete would be so happy…)

It was… okay. The “spy” aspect is just a MacGuffin — a pickpocket lifts a woman’s wallet on the subway. Turns out it has microfilm in it. She’s a courier for a traitor and everyone wants it back.

I mean, let’s face it, the missing thing could have been anything. But it was kind of interesting listening to people talk about the “reds” and the “commies.”

There are some good performances. Jean Meyer is the femme fatale (she would eventually marry Howard Hughes and drop out of public life). And Thelma Ritter was deservedly nominated for an Oscar for her supporting role as a seedy information source.

It was otherwise pretty forgettable.

Havana Syndrome

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Havana Syndrome is the claim that some enemy is targeting Americans with a futuristic weapon which is undetectable and which causes neurological damage to the victim. It’s so-named because CIA operatives in Havana were the first ones to report it.

Since first reporting in 2017, there have been additional reports from around the world. The CIA has officially sought to frame the reports as mass hysteria at best, and a money-grab at worst.

60 Minutes has been reporting on it for some time, and a new book was written by two of that show’s editors: The Havana Syndrome: Secret Weapons, a Government Cover-Up, and the Greatest Spy Mystery of Our Time

Frustratingly, there’s no smoking gun. There’s a ton of circumstantial evidence — something absolutely happened to these people — but no one has ever caught the perpetrators in action.

The NSA apparently abstained from a report discounting the attacks, which the authors interpreted as them having eavesdropping evidence they didn’t want to reveal but that couldn’t go on the record against. And, in the very last chapter, the authors write of a meeting with an unidentified source that says the CIA bought one of the weapons on the black market, meaning they’ve lied for years when they claimed these reports were baseless.

The book is well-researched, but as I said, you’re not going to find any clear answers here. It might be a long time before the truth finally comes out.

The Russia House (1990)

Mon, 19 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0500

There is not one second of action or violence in The Russia House. It’s a very slow burn — mostly people having tense conversations — but I loved it.

Set in the late 1980s, just as glasnost and perestroika were taking hold, Sean Connery plays Barley Blair, a drunken English book publisher with a thing for Russia. A woman tries to pass him a manuscript containing nuclear secrets, but it ends up in the hands of British and American intelligence. They use Blair to figure out if the writer is legitimate and if he has more information.

Connery is fantastic as the weary and reluctant hero, and Michelle Pfeiffer acts with a believable Russian accent as a young mother caught in the middle of warring intelligence agencies (she got a Golden Globe nomination for it). The Soviet spy is played Klaus Maria Brandauer, which reunites him with Connery seven years after they starred in Never Say Never Again.

It was the first film shot mostly on-location in Moscow and (then) Leningrad. The camera work is…luxurious. At the time, it was a rare look inside the country, just before the Soviet Union dissolved. The soundtrack is a spectacular combination of symphony and jazz which has been released multiple times as a standalone album.

Lovely movie. Absolutely worth the time.

Heineken Skyfall Commercial

Wed, 14 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I don’t know how I missed this James Bond-themed Heineken commercial from back when Skyfall came out. It’s funny, and the Doctor No cameo is witty.

(I might be dim, but I had to watch it twice to realize that the guy and Bond are wearing the same clothes, and it’s a case of mistaken identity.)

It’s on YouTube.

The Eiger Sanction (1975)

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0500

The Eiger Sanction is sort of a spy movie, but mostly a mountain-climbing movie.

First off, the title —

The Eiger is a mountain peak in Switzerland. It’s probably the most common image of The Alps, and its northern face is one of the most difficult ascents to climb (“Eiger” means “Ogre” in German).
“Sanction,” in the world of this movie, is an assassination.

So — you guessed it — Clint Eastwood has to kill someone while climbing up a mountain.

Eastwood plays the perfectly named Dr. Jonathan Hemlock, an art professor, mountain climber, and former government assassin (because, of course he is…). He’s brought out of retirement by the also well-named Mr. Dragon to avenge the death of an agent killed in Zurich while retrieving some microfilm. They don’t know which member of the climbing party is guilty, so Eastwood heads up the mountain with three climbing partners, any one of which might be his target.

The last 40 minutes of the film is spent on the climb, which is visually amazing. They shot it on location, and Eastwood did most of his own stunts (he was 44 at the time). One crew worker died during filming.

So, is it a spy film? I don’t know …ish? I think it mostly wants to be a mountain climbing movie, though there are a few nifty scenes of spy craft.

All in all, it was… okay, I guess. The plot is pretty thin, and Eastwood basically sneers through the entire film, but I didn’t hate it.

The Osterman Weekend (1983)

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Back in the mid-80s, I would see the VHS cover for The Osterman Weekend and it seemed very exotic. It had a enigmatic name and a woman with a crossbow on the cover.

Forty years later, I finally watched it.

…and it was awful.

It was Sam Peckinpaw’s final film, and it has a cast of recognizable names: Rutger Hauer, Burt Lancaster, John Hurt, Dennis Hopper, Craig T. Nelson (who was kind of unknown at the time), and Meg Foster (that 80s actress with the crazy pale-blue eyes).

Unfortunately, the movie didn’t make any damn sense.

Hauer is a TV talk show host who is led by the CIA to believe his three closest friends are spies for the KGB. They’re all coming over for an annual weekend get-together, and the CIA sets up surveillance cameras in his house to… honestly, I’m not sure what. I never did figure out the motivations for half the characters.

I wasn’t the only one. The film was poorly reviewed, mainly because the plot was confusing and had lots of holes in it. Apparently the Robert Ludlum novel it was based on was also fairly incomprehensible.

I never waited 40 years to be so disappointed. (Thankfully the crossbow did actually make an appearance, so it wasn’t a total loss for 12-year-old me…)

The French Illusion (2026)

Fri, 9 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I’ve enjoyed John Grisham books in the past, but he’s mainly known for legal thrillers. However, in the NY Times review of his latest book, I saw this:

Grisham has written dozens of books since his first, “A Time to Kill,” in 1989, but this is the only one that can be called an espionage novel.

Say less. I was reading it on my Kindle two minutes later.

…however, I missed the fact that this is book one of the “French Illusion Series.” I wish I had known that going in, because I was waiting for a climax that never quite came.

When a honeymooning couple is abducted in Paris, the CIA has to admit this is becoming a pattern, and they suspect some international terrorist is at work. They come up with a plan to lure the bad guy into another kidnapping where they can trap him.

As with all Grisham novels, it’s efficient, well-written and page-turning. But it doesn’t have a clean ending, which I wasn’t expecting. My Kindle was getting to 98% and 99% and I was thinking, “How is he going to wrap this all up?”

Well, he doesn’t. The ending sets up the next book in the series.

Still, it’s a good read.

Thrilling Cities (1963)

Tue, 6 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I saw this on the shelf at Barnes and Noble in the “Travel” section. Thrilling Cities was a travelogue written by Ian Fleming in 1963. I had no idea it was still being sold as new.

He had been writing the Bond novels for a decade and the films had just become very popular. The Sunday Times flew Fleming around the world to visit 13 cities to write about them and play off the popularity of James Bond.

The Wikipedia page has very detailed history of the book and Fleming’s travels (which he reportedly hated).

James Bond Day

Mon, 5 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Did you know that October 5 is “James Bond Day”? I didn’t, until everyone started talking about it today on Reddit. Supposedly this because Dr. No premiered in London on October 5, 1962.

So, take the day off work, have a martini, and blow-up the lair of an international terrorist. You know, usual holiday stuff.

Alias, Season 1

Sun, 4 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I plowed through Season 1 of Alias in record time, aided by a European trip involving 20+ hours in planes.

Some notes:

I thought the Rambaldi plotline came later, but it’s actually central to the first season. It takes on kind of a mythological quality — like James Bond meets Indiana Jones. There’s lots of talk about “artifacts” and “prophecy.”
Every episode involves one or more “missions” with Sydney jetting off to some country trying to find something or do something that has some tangential relationship to the overall storyline. Honestly, I kept losing track of where she was and why. You eventually just let it wash over you and accept that she’s in some exotic location breaking into some subterranean fortress for some valid reason.
I still don’t like the martial arts. Sydney gets into a fistfight every episode, and her style is very “kicky and punchy,” opposed to the more practical, grappling style that came into vogue as MMA got popular (think Jason Bourne). I just don’t find it at all believable that a woman that tiny could reasonably do what she does, and it takes me out of the story every time.
I enjoyed the Bradley Cooper plotline. He’s a journalist trying to uncover the truth, while being Sydney’s friend and not knowing that she’s a central part of it. I understand he gets demoted to recurring character at some point, which is unfortunate, because his plot is the most interesting and he’s a naturally likeable guy.
Every scene bumper has the name of the upcoming location with one letter in a reverse font. For a while, I kept trying to figure out if there’s some secret code involving which letters were in reverse font, but if there is, I couldn’t figure it out.
There’s a strong theme of parenthood through the first season. Sydney’s relationship with her father is central to the story, and her mother pops up quite a bit too. Additionally, Sydney’s relationships with Sloane and Dixon have some parental vibes to them. Sydney is everyone’s daughter, it seems.
Jennifer Garner emotes a lot. I can’t count the number of scenes that end with a shot of Sydney’s face looking stunned or hurt or confused or amazed or bewildered. She does a lot of acting with facial expressions. (But, she was nominated for four Golden Globes — winning one — and four Emmys, so I can’t complain too much.)

On to Season 2…

I Can See You (2023)

Sat, 3 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Taylor Swift made a pretty decent spy-ish movie with her video for I Can See You back in 2023. In it, Joey King and Taylor Lautner break into some compound to free a captive Swift while Presley Cash handles electronics back in the van.

Supposedly the story is a metaphor for how Swift “rescued” her master recordings from Scooter Braun. King and Cash had appeared in another one of Swift’s videos, back in 2010. Swift and Lautner dated briefly.

Here it is on YouTube.

Roger Moore on Alias

Fri, 2 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0500

To my surprise, Roger Moore showed up on an episode of Alias playing a spymaster named Poole… Edward Poole. He would have been 77 at the time and had last played Bond fully 20 years before.

In my imagination, he was still Bond, and still in the espionage game, just living under a different identity.

Bond-themed Connections Game

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

The New York Times Connections game had a Bond(-ish) theme today.

Here is the solution:

Starting with Month Abbreviations: Decent, Novelty, Octopussy, Septum

Securities: Bond, Future, Option, Stock

Gangster Movies: Bugsy, Casino, Donnie Brasco, Scarface

Things That Are Shaken (Not Stirred): Etch A Sketch, Martini, Spray Paint, Tambourine

Cloak and Dagger (1984)

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Cloak and Dagger is (supposedly; see below) a kids movie — it’s kind of a crossover into fantasy.

Henry Thomas (yes, the kid from E.T.) plays Davey, a kid who loves role-playing games, especially those starring his hero, Jack Flack. He also has a vidid fantasy life, imagining Jack in real-life. Jack is played by Dabney Coleman, who also plays Davey’s widower Dad.

Davey accidentally witnesses a real-life murder, the victim of which hands him a video game cartridge and a mysterious number. Now Davey is running from actual spies, but no one will believe him, except the fantasy version of Jack, who appears and coaches him through life-or-death situations.

This was released to theaters at the same time as The Last Starfighter. They apparently played in a double-feature. A prominent plot point of the movie is a video game called Cloak and Dagger. It was an arcade title at the time, but in the movie it appears to run on the Atari 5200.

For a kids’ movie, there’s a lot of wanton killing. And it’s not even implied — lots of people just straight-up get shot on-screen. Also, there’s a disturbing monologue by the main villain explaining to Davey all the different ways he’s going to shoot him to watch him die slowly.

I was kind of fuzzy on the “rules” of the magic. Jack is in Davey’s imagination… except for one time, when he’s not. And Davey’s Dad escapes from a certain-death situation, which makes me wonder if he was Jack all along?

Maybe I’m reading too much into this. But, again, the tone of the movie and the violence in it really seemed to be at odds. Still, it was a cute premise, and the opening scene with Jack on a mission is a laugh riot of spy cliches which ends with a pair of giant D12 dice rolling towards him.

Three Days of the Condor (1975)

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Three Days of the Condor is commonly cited as one of the best spy films ever made. I watched on a flight back from Germany, and I’ll concede that the reputation is well-deserved.

Robert Redford plays Joe Turner. He works for the CIA in New York under the cover of a “literary historical society” that reads books all day, and feeds them into a computer to determine trends and possible terrorist plots.

One day, he goes out to pick up lunch, and when he comes back, everyone has been shot dead. From then on, he’s on the run, trying to figure out why. He abducts Faye Dunaway’s character to get out of a tough spot, and she becomes an accomplice and lover along the way.

In classic spy fashion, Turner has no idea who he can trust, and no idea if his former employees are actually trying to kill him. He gets double-crossed a few times, and racks his brain to put together the pieces of what he was working on that might have threatened the wrong person.

The ending is quite good, with Turner thinking that he’s found a clean way out, but the last scene and dialog making you wonder if he’s just kidding himself and the apparatus that set him up might still be able to take him down.

It’s adapted from a novel published the year before (interestingly called Six Days of the Condor). There was also a 2018 TV series that ran for two seasons and 20 episodes.

The Man with One Red Shoe (1985)

Sun, 27 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

This is a comedy, but not a spoof. Spy, that I watched last week, was a spoof. It was character-driven — really just an excuse for Melissa McCarthy to be (very) funny. You could have dropped her into anything else and it would have worked the same.

But The Man with One Red Shoe is a comedy, driven far more by story than characters. The spy angle of the plot is what makes it work.

It’s an early role for Tom Hanks. He plays a violinist from Washington DC who’s mistakenly identified as a witness who will testify against Dabney Coleman’s corrupt CIA executive. Coleman’s team of spies is trying to investigate and neutralize him, while another team is trying to protect him. Both sides are working against each other, while Hanks’s character stays largely oblivious (he’s not actually what anyone thinks he is).

There are some great performances here, but it’s a genuinely inventive and interesting story that results in some unique situations. There’s also a funny subplot involving Jim Belushi going slightly crazy after unwittingly witnessing several espionage-related events.

And, of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the line that has for some reason become iconic in a circle of me and a couple friends:

Does anyone here remember how to kill a man?

I don’t know why that’s funny. It just is.

Spy vs Spy

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I was reminded today of Spy vs. Spy, the comic series in MAD Magazine.

I was a little surprised to find it dates all the way back to 1961 by a Cuban cartoonist living in exile. It’s been published continually since then. The original cartoonist retired from the strip in 1987, when he passed it on to several others. In addition to MAD Magazine, there was a Sunday comic strip for a period of time, and there have been book compilations, a cartoon or two, and lots of cosplay.

The two spies are black and white, but there’s no indication of which one is the good guy and which one is the bad guy. Apparently, in 1968, there was some note in a strip about the black spy being from the “east,” but that’s about it.

Considering the early start, this strip might have contributed to the “trenchcoat and fedora” cliche of the spy. Through the 40s and 50s, that fashion was mostly associated with detectives, not spies.

Spy (2015)

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Here’s the fun things about spoofs: they can embrace cliches. If a “serious” movie tries to be too much like something else, then it’s considered derivative. But a spoof has license to do exactly that — that’s the actual point.

Such is the case with the reductively named Spy. This is a Melissa McCarthy send up that puts her in Europe working as a CIA agent to… you know what… It doesn’t matter. The plot has something to do with a nuclear bomb, but who cares? The movie is basically a vehicle for McCarthy to be funny, and it absolutely succeeds at that, even if it falls short at pure storytelling.

Enjoying this will necessarily depend on how funny you find McCarthy (I personally find her hilarious), but there are supporting characters that contribute just as much. Rose Byrne is a self-absorbed femme fatale who steals every scene she’s in, and Jason Statham does a pitch-perfect parody of, well, himself, as a fellow agent who claims to have undergone some of the most inventive ordeals.

He’s worth quoting at length (read this as Statham yelling across a conference room; I know you can hear it…):

Nothing kills me. I'm immune to 179 different types of poison. I know because I ingested them all at once when I was deep undercover in an underground poison-ingesting crime ring… I once used defibrillators on myself… I put shards of glass in my fuckin' eye… I've jumped from a high-rise building using only a raincoat as a parachute and broke both legs upon landing and I still had to pretend I was in a fucking Cirque du Soleil show… I've swallowed enough microchips and shit them back out again to make a computer… During the threat of an assassination attempt, I appeared convincingly in front of congress as Barack Obama… I watched the woman I love get tossed from a plane and hit by another plane mid-air… I drove a car off a freeway on top of a train while it was on fire. Not the car, I was on fire.

This is not a sophisticated movie, but the humor isn’t entirely juvenile either. It walks the line pretty well.

There are some fun gags like the increasingly dowdy cover identities and names McCarthy’s character is given (cat lady Carol Jenkins; “I look like someone's homophobic aunt”), and a fantastic scene with Michael McDonald as a deadpan “Q”-type gadgeteer who issues McCarthy a series of gadgets under increasingly embarrassing guises (hemorrhoid pads spiked with chloroform and a poison antidote in a bottle labeled as a stool softener).

I watched this film on a flight to Frankfurt, and I’ll admit to laughing out loud a couple of times to the point where I became self-conscious that people were staring at me.

Alias (2001 - 2006)

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I’ve begun making my way through Alias. This was the show that made Jennifer Garner famous back in 2005. Up until the pilot, she had just done some bit parts in Felicity and Pearl Harbor. The show ran for five seasons and 100+ episodes.

Sydney Bristow is a UCLA graduate student recruited by a secret branch of the CIA. I remember the series being the classic format of a relatively self-contained episode in service of a larger story. The larger story here is whether the “secret branch” of the CIA is actually that, or if it’s a shadowy organization actually working against the CIA.

Sydney’s father Jack is played by Victor Garber. He’s part of the same organization… or is he? The pilot sets up all sorts of plot threads. What happened to Sydney’s mother? Why is she so angry with her father? How will she stay undercover after the agency inflicts tragedy on her? Will there romance between her and her journalist friend Will (an early role for Bradley Cooper) or the handsome CIA agent introduced in the ending of the episode?

There’s so much going on here that the second episode opens with a full minute of voiceover from Garner re-hashing all the exposition bundled into the 90-minute pilot.

If I thought too hard about it, I could probably find some plot holes big enough to drive a truck through. And I never quite accepted Garner as an action hero — watching her do martial arts just never struck me as genuine. Also, I remember that later in the series, the storyline got weirder, having to do with some mystical artifact or machine (the “Rambaldi” story arc).

But, for now, it’s a fun spy caper. It will take me a bit to get through the first season (for which I paid $24.99 on Prime Video), so expect an update then.

BMW Films

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Back in 2001, BMW made a series of short films that they released to the web. They starred a then-unknown Clive Owen as “the driver.” He was a guy who drove BMWs and… did stuff. Some of this was spy stuff, some of it was private detective stuff, but all of it was very cool.

The films were five minutes or so, and they got some named directors for this: I remember John Frankenheimer, Ang Lee, and Guy Ritchie (along with his then-wife Madonnna). Production values were sky-high — each film was a little action movie in its own right.

Given the rotating directors, all the films had a different vibe. There are straight-up actions films, some surreal drug-trippy films, a tender romance-ish film, a mystical film, etc. They all held complete stories, and it was fun to see how a director would tell the story.

I remember these leading to a lot of discussion about how Owen would have made a fine James Bond.

Here are two of them. They’re all scattered around YouTube somewhere.

No Way Out (1987)

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I’ve long-felt that No Way Out is one of the great overlooked spy films. Released in 1987, it was was early starring role for Kevin Costner.

Costner is Tom Farrell, a Navy officer working in the Pentagon. He’s sleeping with Susan, who also happens to be sleeping with the Secretary of Defense.

One night, the Secretary accidentally kills her during an argument about her other lover (who he doesn’t know is Farrell). He concocts a plan to find the other lover and frame him as “Yuri,” a rumored Soviet deep cover agent that has been operating in DC for years. The CIA can then kill him and resolve Susan’s death without the Secretary’s involvement ever being known.

The Secretary assigns Farrell to find the other lover… which puts him in the problematic position of running a manhunt of which he is the target.

You might think I’ve revealed too much, but I haven’t. It’s a tightly-wound thriller with great performances from Costner, Gene Hackman as the Secretary, and a young Will Patton as his scheming assistant who has an agenda of his own.

Top it off with a head-snapping twist at the end, and you end up with an amazing thriller that never quite got the renown that it should have.

Bond Intro in LEGO

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

This guy spent a lot of time recreating the Bond “gunbarrel” intro in LEGO. Some amazing ingenuity here.

Gardner Novel Set

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I finally got around to finishing my collection of John Gardner’s original Bond novels. He wrote 13 original novels and two movie novelizations between 1981 and 1996.

I've never been a huge fan of Gardner, but I stumbled on Seafire in a used bookstore a couple of months ago, then realized I was just three novels away from having the set. It took a few eBay orders, but I finally got it completed.

(And you can call it sacrilege, but I highly approve of Gardner putting Bond in a Saab 9000 Turbo. I've always had a thing for them.)

Eyes (2005)

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

If you blinked back in 2005, you might have missed Eyes which didn’t even last a full month. ABC filmed 12 episodes, but only aired five before yanking it off the air.

It was an hour-long drama about Judd Risk Management, a private investigation firm. So, it wasn’t espionage in the classic sense, but there was a lot of sneaking around.

It was an ensemble show. Tim Daly was Harlan Judd, who owned the firm, but he was surrounded by 7-8 other players with their own dramas, and a central plot point around how the troubled firm was going to survive and who was maneuvering for power over whom. It reminded me of a legal drama where ownership and partnership are the chess pieces.

But there were some neat spy-ish bits in the pilot episode: lots of surveillance, reconstruction of shredded documents, and general skullduggery.

I remember watching it on network TV when it came out and being surprised at how little it was marketed. Production values were sky-high, so I’m sure the show cost a fortune to make, but there was very little promotion of it — it just kind of appeared suddenly, and then disappeared just as quickly.

Probably for the best, honestly, because the pilot made it seem like it was heading into soap opera territory pretty quickly.

The episode is on YouTube, but is frustratingly missing the last two minutes of audio (which I remember being a montage over David Bowie’s Under Pressure… which, now that I think about it, is probably why it was removed).

Cover Up (1984 - 1985)

Sun, 13 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Cover Up lasted for a single season back in 1984, but it’s most well-known for how one of its stars died mid-season.

Danielle Reynolds is a New York fashion photographer. She’s married to Mark, an embassy functionary (but really a CIA agent) in La Costa, a fictional country south of the border. When Mark is killed in a car bombing, Danielle finds an ex-special forces soldier named Mac who just happens to be handsome enough to pose as a model, and they travel to La Costa to investigate. At the end of the episode, it’s decided that they will take Mark’s place doing missions for the CIA using their photographer/model cover story.

Mac was the centerpiece of the show — it was kind of a reverse Charlie’s Angels, in that respect. He was played by newcomer Jon Erik Hexum, and in addition to his impossibly good looks, he had a genuinely compelling screen presence.

Tragically, during the filming of episode seven, he was playing on-set with a handgun loaded with blanks. He put it against his head and pulled the trigger, not realizing that even though a blank doesn’t propel a slug, there’s still a short range explosion of propellant. The resulting brain damage left him in a coma and he was removed from life support six days later.

He was replaced with another hero, and the show finished out a 22-episode season, but it just didn’t have the ratings to get renewed.

The CIA boss is played by Richard Anderson, who was Oscar Goldman in the Six Million Dollar Man. And the main villain in the pilot is Louis Jourdan, who had played Kamal Kahn in Octopussy just a year before. The theme song was Holding Out for a Hero (RIP Bonnie Tyler) sung by Hexum’s girlfriend at the time.

Someone has posted the entire series on YouTube. As with most 80s TV transferred to digital, the quality is rough.

To Catch a Thief (1955)

Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I read somewhere that 1955’s To Catch a Thief was fairly spy-adjacent. I watched it this morning.

It’s got about everything you need: a very debonair hero in Cary Grant (he was 51 at the time), a beautiful girl in Grace Kelly (she was just 26), amazing locations on the French Rivera, elegant galas, classic sports cars, and intrigue around stolen jewels.

Grant is John Robie, a former jewel thief nicknamed “The Cat” who broke out of prison during World War II and joined the French Resistance. He became a hero and earned parole, then went straight. But 15 years later, someone has started robbing the idle rich in Nice and Cannes using John’s old techniques. He has to catch the real thief before the police come for him.

It’s probably as close to a Bond film as you can get without actually being about espionage. The love affair between Grant and Kelly is a little weird when you consider their ages, but it’s handled in typically vague fashion for the 1950s.

Parts of it were filmed on location, and the scenery is gorgeous. But I almost forgot it was a Hitchcock movie — it just doesn’t have that Hitchcockian vibe to it.