Brent Spiner and Jonathan Frakes have a new podcast, Dropping Names with Brent and Jonny , which is terrific fun. Anybody who has seen them at conventions knows how good they are. The entire TNG cast was an extraordinary collection of good people who are genuinely decent and fun. It’s not a Star Trek podcast, but they have “resigned to fate” that Trek will come up a lot. Enjoy!

I like Christopher Nolan’s films, although I don’t spend days and weeks trying to figure them out. (I think even Nolan said Tenet is not supposed to make sense.) But this video on Inception does seem to provide the most conclusive interpretation about the ending: Well done, nerd!

I was surprised to see a second season produced of The Night Manager , ten years after season one. The original was a very slick adaptation of the Le Carré novel. About season two—well, I dunno. I’ve always been annoyed by sequels where the original wrapped everything up, the hero vanquished the villain, and then in the next one, the villain comes back and they do it all over again. What was the point, exactly? Terrific cast, though.

Thumbs way up for Adolescence , which I only now just watched. Wow, what an achievement—just as a piece of storytelling, to say nothing of the one-take construction. I think people are going overboard with the one-take thing ( Birdman , The Studio ) but this has to be the most incredible use of it. In the first episode, I was thinking, wow the VFX to stitch this together is seamless—well, there wasn’t any. It truly was one take per episode. Here’s how they did it . I will say

Thumbs up for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms , the newest Game of Thrones spinoff/prequel from HBO. I didn’t even know this was coming, or what it was based on. I saw a listing and thought, hey that looks like a Game of Thrones ripoff. The creators have wisely “gone small” and very successfully so, with a character-based story about a wannabe knight and his unusual squire. It recaptures the feeling of the early Game of Thrones seasons, with the lived-in world and medieval

I was rewatching Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home , as all of the Trek movies have cycled around on pay cable. It’s a reminder of the simple power of goodness and teamwork, and seeing people we like, who like each other, live up to their ideals. Ah, Star Trek, bless you. I remember when the late 1980s Star Trek movies came out and the critics and culture were just merciless about the aging cast. Old jokes, fat jokes, wig jokes—it was brutal. And now Indiana Jones is in his eigh

There’s a trailer for a new He-Man movie, which looks like a videogame (natch). But this is as good a time as any to remind everybody that the voice of the original animated He-Man was the same as Morris the Cat. True!

This won’t interest my film score peeps but it’s NFL playoff season and I discovered a podcast by Julian Edelman, former Patriots receiver, that I’m finding super fun and entertaining—“ Games With Names .” He has great guests from the Pats’ dynasty years and good stories.

I saw a YouTube video (natch) about what happened to Vimeo. It was pretty big 10–15 years ago but I barely use it anymore—and I’m not the only one: A shame!

Check out this very well done video of the top ten funk-jazz scores, per Chanan Hanspal on YouTube: Some of these I’m not very familiar with, I will have to check them out! I love this stuff.

I caught up with One Battle After Another and enjoyed it. It was a reminder how powerful it is when something is shot with real people on real locations. I’m sure there was VFX, out of necessity, but it was subtle. Nothing is more real than reality, especially when it comes to how cars, bullets and people obey the laws of physics.

The great star and icon Brigitte Bardot has passed at the age of 91. Deadline news item here . In her honor, one of the all-time great film themes, Le Mepris ( Contempt ) by Georges Delerue: I know Marty Scorsese agrees with me!

Deadline did a wrap-up of 18 canceled movies over the decades . What a crazy waste of money and talent. I wonder if any of them were any good? It’s more likely they were not, but you never know.

Merry Christmas, everybody. Have a wonderful day! Thinking of David Lynch, who is no longer with us this Christmas. My favorite holiday special!

Now this is my kind of Christmas music: the time Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly recreated David Bowie and Bing Crosby’s “Little Drummer Boy.” For reference: Watch to the end!

A friend posted this YouTube video about what it was it like to grow up in the 1980s. It’s totally patronizing, of course, but it was fun to reminisce: I definitely remember jumping things on dirt bikes and it didn’t take long before somebody suggested we jump each other!

Check out this reduction Patrick Suiter posted a couple of years ago of the Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban quidditch match by John Williams. I guess I missed it at the time? It would take me hours to go through it carefully. This movie is like the Empire Strikes Back of the Harry Potter movies—where all the choices work together to make the very best version of the franchise. It’s not even a matter of being “darker,” just in elevating everything into more mature

I stumbled on a YouTube video about one of my guilty pleasures, Logan’s Run . (Nothing guilty about loving the Goldsmith score, though!) Here’s a playlist to a series of videos meticulously trying to reconstruct the lost bits, using audio from a preview screening.

I was sorry to hear the news that Bob Burns has passed away. He was an institution in the sci-fi/horror/fantasy community— read here —and so generous and kind. I was given a tour of his collection in the early 1990s and it blew my mind the stuff he had, and how open and friendly he was in sharing access with likeminded fans. He and his wife Kathy (who passed a few years ago) were such gracious hosts. He also, by the way, was the person who rescued the stereo master tapes to T

Very sorry to hear of the passing of jazz artist Gordon Goodwin . He suffered a stroke while fighting pancreatic cancer. I emailed with him briefly when we were working on the Deluxe Edition of Star Trek: Nemesis ; he did the arrangement of “Blue Skies” for Brent Spiner at the Troi-Riker wedding. Super talented and super nice.