Deane Barker

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 just kind of let it wash over you at some point 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.
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 weird 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.

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

Bond-theme 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.

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 it’s very, very good.

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 white and black, but there’s no indication of which one is the good buy and which one is the bad guy. Apparently, in 1968, there was some note somewhere 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.

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Wed, 23 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I actually gave this one away before I read it. A friend gave me a copy, and I had talked to another friend about the same subject a couple times. I sent him a copy and told him we’d read it together and discuss it over breakfast.

Tim used to be an employee of mine, when he worked in tech. He since walked away from that and started a business that builds decks during the summer and does custom woodwork in the winter. This book was basically written for him.

I visited with my friend Jeff in Boston. We went to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and spent time talking about this amateur treasure hunt he had enjoyed. I thought he would like a book about one of the great treasure hunts of the 20th century.

My friend Tom is very conservative and pro-business. We have had a long-running debate over text message. We both respect each other’s opinions and thought processes, though we don’t agree on much. I knew he would love a book where The Left calls out The Left.

I visited my friend Seth in Northhampton, Massachusetts. He took me to three bookstores in their downtown, and I kept buying books I wanted him to read and giving them to him.

Shawn is a friend who loves military history. We used to be roommates, and I remember he had this set of Time-Life books about the Vietnam War in the living room. All the while reading this, I kept thinking he would love it.

My friend Noel works in tech like me, but maintains his own cars. He helped me change the oil and replace the brakes on mine, so we’ve had some conversations about the nature of mental work vs. physical work. This seemed like a perfect book to read together, so I got him a copy.

I sent a copy of this to my son, who — like the last person I sent it to — I also hope will read it with me again.

I had been talking with a friend about this book, so I sent them a copy. I’m hoping he’ll read it with me when I go back through it. He’s very theologically conservative, I thought he would enjoy it and we might come together on some points of agreement.

I have a friend who lives in the Hamptons who has been very hospitable to me on a couple occasions. I decided that anyone who lives on Long Island needs to have a copy of The Power Broker in their house. After he received it, he sent me a lovely picture of it on display in his living room.

I met a guy about my age at Wind River Ranch and had some nice conversations about books with him. He seemed interested in the same type of books as me, and these two books had really meant a lot to me in terms of figure out the last third of my life.

A twenty-something girl working at Wind River Ranch named Reagan was talking about how she was enjoying a book by David Brooks. I was encouraged that a young person was reading Brooks, so when I was down in a bookstore in Estes Park, I bought her another Brooks title that I had enjoyed.

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.

Book Review: The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy - What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny

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

TLDR: “Interesting, but highly speculative”

I did not read this entire book. I set out to “break” the book, like I did with Cooperation and Coercion a couple years back.

I read the cover material, the introduction, the conclusion, the index, then I went back through and read the first section of every chapter. And then I did a lot research on it.

The book is a little controversial. It was written in the late 1990s, and it introduced something called Strauss – Howe generational theory (named for the two authors).

The theory goes something like this –

History is divided up in to segments called “saeculums,” which are about the long human life – about 85 years. Each saeculum is divided up into four “turnings” of about 20 years. Those turnings proceed in order:

The High
The Awakening
The Unraveling
The Crisis

And then the cycle repeats.

The book is titled as such because when it was written in the late 90s, the authors claimed we had just ended an Unraveling, and we were headed into the fourth turning, which would be a Crisis.

This is somehow matched to generations. The generation someone grew up in falls into four categories:

Prophet
Nomad
Hero
Artist

Those “archetypes” correspond to turnings, and that’s what drives history.

…yeah, it gets a little metaphysical. Lots of people accused the authors of pseudo-science and a very selective view of history in order to get it to fit into their framework. It’s been called “unfalsifiable,” and therefore not valid science. Less complimentary critics have called it “voodoo” or “political astrology.”

But it also got a lot of press at the time, and a lot of people swear by the theory (it was recommend to me because the conservative pastor Douglas Wilson is apparently a big proponent of it). This was an updated version by one of the authors (the other one has since died), and he attempts to bring into the present and make present-day events fit the framework.

There’s also a documentary called Generation Zero (produced by Steve Bannon, of all people) that touches on some of the concepts. I watched it (it’s on YouTube), and it was interesting, but it’s more about the economic meltdown of 2008 (it was produced right after the housing crisis).

I didn’t buy all of it. I do believe that history is cyclic and events and the national zeitgeist tend to repeat, but some of the theory seems far-fetched. The book is a lot of examples trying to prove their theory. I skimmed quite a bit of it, and spent just as much time research the theory and other opinions of it.

It’s interesting and thought-provoking, but I wasn’t into it enough to spend 400 pages listening to people trying to prove that it’s true.

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.)

Book Review: Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World

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

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.

Book Review: What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

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

TLDR: “Very entertaining”

This is a fun book. It’s utterly pointless… but, that’s kind of the point.

The author created a popular web comic that gets passed around a lot in geek circles. At one time, he was a robotics engineer for NASA, so he has a scientific bent.

I have no idea how it got started, but people ask him weird questions, and he works very hard to provide them with scientifically accurate answers.

Some examples:

When, if ever, will the bandwidth of the Internet surpass FedEx? (meaning, if Fedex ever shipped nothing but hard drives filled with data, how much data would it ship?)
If two immortal people were placed on opposite sides of an uninhabited Earthlike planet, how long would it take them to find each other?
If you called a random phone number and said “God bless you,” how long would it be until you found someone who had just sneezed?

The book is very tongue in cheek, but the answers are real. The author does a lot of research about both the answers, and the variables for the questions. (Example: do the two wandering people know about each other? If so, then one of them should walk and the other should stay in the same place.)

Also, he includes some questions submitted by the readers of his comic which he doesn’t answer but which caused him a little concern:

If a Venus fly trap could eat a person, about how long would it take for the human to be fully de-juiced and absorbed?
If you saved a whole life’s worth of kissing and used all that suction power on one single kiss, how much suction force would that single kiss have?

He does a great job of explain things in ways I hadn’t considered. (Example: to stay in orbit, you don’t have to stay up; rather you just have to move sideways really fast.) And he supplements this with his signature stick figure comics that are more effective than anything more highly rendered would be.

Really fun book.

Code Name: Emperor (2022)

Tue, 8 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I watched Code Name: Emperor on Netflix. (That’s the English title, anyway — it’s a Spanish film. I watched it with English subtitles.)

It stars Luis Tosar, who is apparently one of the most popular actors in Spain (the only other thing I’ve seen him in is as the Big Boss in the Miami Vice movie). He plays Juan, some kind of intelligence agent — only once does someone refer to “The Agency.”

There’s are two plot threads, which confused me. A German couple is smuggling radioactive material, and Juan has been asked to find kompromat on a young politician. Those are two separate things, it turned out, but both of them play into a crisis of conscience that Juan is struggling with, which culminates in a monologue by a General about how military control and blackmail helps maintain the political order.

In retrospect, it was a little confusing. But it was compelling while I was watching it. There’s a romantic subplot which is genuinely touching, and Tosar does a great job embodying a weary agent who is questioning what side of the fence he’s actually on.

The Drunken Witness

Mon, 7 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I was reminded of the bit player from three consecutive James Bond movies who witnesses something surreal and subsequently questions his sobriety. He was uncredited, but IMDb lists him as “Man with Bottle” twice and “Man with Wine Glass” once.

The official YouTube channel compiled all three clips into this short video.

One hopes that he’s stopped drinking by now.

Masquerade (1983)

Mon, 7 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Masquerade was an attempt to bring the Love Boat/Fantasy Island format to espionage. It didn’t even last a full season back in 1983.

Rod Taylor, Greg Evigan, and Kirstie Alley were the three constants. Taylor was the head of “Operation Masquerade,” which was a program to use civilians in spy operations, ostensibly because the Soviets knew all about the “real” spies. Evigan and Alley played his lieutenants.

Then, in each episode, there were a crew of guest stars recruited for that episode only (you can see the Love Boat angle, right?). For example, the pilot movie has Earnest Borgnine, Cybil Shepard, Richard Roundtree, Rue McClanahan, and others. Each of them bring their own little subplots and conflicts, as well as some special skill that was critical to that week’s antics.

The plot of the pilot was a far-fetched plan to discredit a Soviet spy stationed in Paris so that he wouldn’t be selected as the new head of the KGB. The entire thing was absurd and more played for laughs than drama. (For example, at one point, Borgnine’s plumber replaces the water in the Soviet’s shower with gin, to make him appear to be an alcoholic. That’s why they needed a plumber on the team, naturally.)

Someone has posted the entire pilot movie on YouTube. It’s just over an hour, which means it must have been 90-minutes with commercials. The quality is horrible, but you can get the idea.

As a bonus, here’s a 30-second bumper promo for the next episode which shows Walter Gotell (General Gogol from the Bond films) doing his best Soviet accent (he was actually German).

Also, check out the opening credits and theme song. It’s an orgy of espionage cliches.

Red Sparrow (2013)

Sat, 5 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I got stuck in Boston due to weather, so I asked AI to recommend a spy novel. It came up with Red Sparrow, which was the 2013 basis for the movie starring Jennifer Lawrence.

I tore through the book in about 24 hours. It was spectacular, and I’m currently nursing a “narrative hangover” from it.

Here is my full review.

Minox Camera Book

Fri, 4 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I spent some time with an book devoted to the history and specification of the Minox camera. This is the tiny camera that you activate by squeezing it together. It’s a staple of Cold War spy movies.

It was a quirky book — one of those things that I’m glad exists, but that I don’t quite understand.

Here’s my review.

Book Review: The Red Sparrow

Thu, 3 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Fantasticly addictive”

This is a very, very good novel. I had a flight delay, so I asked AI, “Recommended a spy novel that I can read in three hours.” This was one of the results. I remember the movie (though I haven’t seen it) – I didn’t even know it had been a novel first.

To be clear, you’re not going to read in this in three hours. But you will read it compulsively, because it’s incredibly well-paced and tough to put down. It’s a “hangover” book – one that you can’t quite get out of your head, and your mind lingers in it, long after you’ve finished it.

Dominicka is an aspiring Russian dancer. When her career hopes are destroyed, she directs her rage towards becoming an intelligence agent in the Russian SVR and is eventually sent to become a “sparrow” – a honey-trap; a woman who seduces her target.

In this role, she ends up in Helsinki trying to compromise a CIA agent named Nate. This starts a whole sequence of events that pits the United States against Russia in wild chess game.

What’s interesting about the book is its lack of flashy action. There are a few scenes of violence, but they’re quick, realistic, and not at all cinematic. The core of the book is a strategic game between intelligence agencies. There are moles on both sides, and people are crossed and double-crossed to the point where sometimes you have to stop and concentrate on who knows what and when. There are a lot of scenes – and an entire plot thread – where two people know things about each other, and think the other person is ignorant of it, but they’re basically playing the same game from opposite sides. It’s… delicious.

It reminded me of John Le Carre, but in a good way (I’m not really a fan; see my review of A Legacy of Spies). It was very administrative – lots of talking, thinking, strategizing – but unlike Le Carre, it was never boring.

I loved it. I tore through it in one day. I barely even remember the two flights I read it on.

Movie Scene Map

Wed, 2 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

On the heels of Reading Maps, we have Movie Scene Maps, which appears to locate both plot locations and filming locations. The Bond movies never disappoint in terms of globe-hopping: here’s the locations for Casino Royale.

Book Review: Shop Class as Soul Craft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

Tue, 1 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500