BFG Podcast #110: 'Mission: Impossible–Dead Reckoning, Part One,' 'The Witcher,' and Milan Kundera

This week's podcast is alive and well! Host Neal Pollack welcomes Michael Washburn to talk about everyone's favorite 90s dorm-room novelist, Milan Kundera. But Kundera was about far more than a 30-year-old undergraduate vogue, Washburn argues. He was a perennial Nobel Prize candidate whose best works laughed in the face of totalitarian oppression and showed a deep warmth and humanity. He understood the human condition as well as any writer has, and was a legitimate heir to Franz Kafka, but without Kafka's austerity. We bid him a fond goodbye.On a lesson serious note, 'Mission: Impossible–Dead Reckoning, Part One' is here. Stephen Garrett and Neal both hate the overwrought, nonsensical AI-oriented plot, and Tom Cruise's over-publicized motorcycle stunt doesn't impress Stephen. But there are some fun action set pieces they both like, and Neal is maybe a little over-enthusiastic about Cruise's many beautiful platonic female co-stars. But that's just par for the course in this ridiculous but fun summer action extravaganza that no one is taking particularly seriously.And no one is taking the new season of 'The Witcher' seriously at all. Scott Gold joins the The Witcher's disappointed fanbase in lamenting the overwrought politics storyline and the lack of monsters for Henry Cavill to fight. And once Cavill leaves the cast for season 4, The Witcher is going to vanish into the pop-culture mists pretty fast. Unlike this podcast, which covers the cultural waterfront now and forever. Enjoy!