When I told my friends I saw the latest Mission Impossible movie, every single person laughed. Did they think I was seeing this movie just to be funny? The film has the fabulous title Ghost Protocol, in an era when even movies for college professors are entitled Attitude or Delicate — generic one-word descriptions no one can remember.
Is Brad Bird a real person? (He’s supposedly the director.) Sounds like a pseudonym. For one thing, his name is almost a palindrome.* Tom Cruise co-produced this spectacle, which is essentially a training film on fighting evil. (True, there’s a convoluted plot centering around a Russian mastermind named Kurt Hendricks with an IQ of 190, but that doesn’t matter.) I felt myself becoming temporarily super-powered, watching Ghost Protocol. My power derived from Tom Cruise, I am sure. And his powers, of course, ultimately flow from L. Ron Hubbard, preceptor of Scientology. And what was L. Ron Hubbard’s inspiration? He visited Buddhist lamaseries in the Western Hills in China in the late 1920s, "watching monks meditating for weeks on end" — according to the New Yorker. Thus Ghost Protocol directly connects us to the highest Buddhist practice.
What is the essential secret to fighting evil? Just keep going — even when it’s too late. Sometimes you can win after it’s too late. And do your own stunts, even if it means clinging to the side of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.
*Okay, it’s more of a double-anagram, but most people don’t know what that is. A true palindrome would be "Brad Drab," or "Dribble, nine lb. bird!"