→ November 20, 2024
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Emilia Pérez.

Emilia Pérez has so much going for it that it seemed like a can’t miss – it’s a musical, it’s a redemption story, it’s about a trans person coming out and finding themselves, it’s a comedy. Unfortunately in trying to be all of those things, it ends up almost nothing at all. It’s an incoherent babblefest, salvaged only a little by its three main performances, notably that of Zoe Saldaña. (It’s streaming on Netflix.)

Saldaña plays Rita, a lawyer in Mexico who is disgusted by her work as a defense attorney, as she’s helping defend a man who killed his wife by arguing that she killed herself – and she doesn’t even get the ‘glory’ of arguing the case, as she writes the words and her dim-witted boss gives the big speech. She’s then contacted by the cartel boss Las Manitas, who reveals that he wants to come out as a trans woman, including undergoing gender confirmation surgery, and wants Rita to make all of the arrangements – including faking his death so she can begin a new life as Emilia Pérez. (She’s played in both incarnations by Karla Sofia Gascón, a trans actress from Spain.) Las Manitas was married, however, to Jessi (Selena Gomez), with two kids, and after transitioning, Emilia decides she can’t live without her children, so she poses as a wealthy cousin of Las Manitas and invites the them and their mother to come live with her, which goes off the rails when Jessi takes up again with her old lover Gustavo. Meanwhile, Emilia decides to make amends for her past by helping relatives of people presumed killed by drug cartels find out their loved ones’ fates, using her money and her connections to the underworld, becoming a popular hero for her efforts and her criticism of the authorities.

That would be enough plot to fill a ten-part TV series, but not only does Emilia Pérez try to pack it all into two hours, it does so in song. There are sixteen songs in the film, some of which are actually quite good (“El Mal,” sung by Saldaña during the gala dinner, is a real standout, and she nails it), although I’m not sure if “Vaginoplasty” ever really needed to see the light of day. The result is that a plot already stretched to translucency ends up so shallow that the film never actually says anything – even though it seems to think it has a lot to say.

The kernel at the heart of the story is fantastic: A drug lord fakes his death, comes out (privately) as transgender, establishes an entire new identity as a woman, and becomes a crusader against the violence of the drug trade and the government’s war on the cartels. That’s all this film needed to be an epic satire of the current state of Mexico, and Gascón would have been up to the task, as she’s perfectly menacing as Las Manitas, then entirely credible as a remorseful Emilia who uses the same determination that made her a successful criminal to become a serious reformer – even though the violent resolve is still there in reserve.

This isn’t that film, starting with the decision to make Rita the main character rather than Emilia, even though Emilia is in the title. Rita’s just nowhere near as interesting as Emilia is, not through any fault of Saldaña’s, but because she’s written so austerely, while Emilia is the one truly three-dimensional character in the film. Her trans status is more of a detail; it makes the plot work, but it’s not a part of why her character is so interesting. Emilia has the emotional depth and range that the other characters lack, and she should have been the central character, but the script has no interest in, say, exploring her emotional growth, or just her change of heart, or perhaps questioning whether she really understands the wrongs she committed. There’s a faint implication that she was just so deeply unhappy that it drove her to bad acts, but that’s pretty facile (if that’s even what writer-director Jacques Audiard intended) and I think could even lean into the whole “queer as mental illness” myth.

Saldaña is as good as she can be with a poorly written character, and when she sings and dances – she’s a trained dancer, which I admit I didn’t know until after I watched the movie – she owns the scene. Her songs look like scenes from a Lin-Manuel Miranda musical, in the best way: she grabs the camera with both hands and won’t let go until the song is done. And she gets just about all of the best songs, which is ironic with a pop singer elsewhere in the cast. It’s fun to see Gomez playing a vixen, even if the film doesn’t give her much time to vamp it up, and she barely gets to sing at all. She and Gascón are wasted by roles that don’t really make enough use of their talents.

The result is a film that is oddly boring for one that has some comic elements, a lot of song and dance, and eventually a big action scene. That last bit isn’t even that well earned, and leads to an ending that is an inexcusable copout where Emilia is no longer even in control of her own fate. That conclusion also underscores just how superficial Emilia Pérez ultimately is as a film: It has so little to say that it was completely fine resolving its plot with a figurative lightning bolt from the sky to wrap things up. What a waste of an opportunity.

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→ November 19, 2024
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Runemasters.

Runemasters is a cooperative tower defense board game for up to four players, with a solo mode, that is really, really hard to beat. I’m pretty impressed by the design, even though I honestly have no idea what a winning strategy would be. (I only played this one solo, and no, I haven’t beaten it.)

In Runemasters, players are “guardians” trying to defend a tower against incoming hordes of monsters. The players win if at least one guardian is still alive and the tower is still standing when the monster deck reaches the Dawn card, which is randomly shuffled into the bottom three cards during setup. The monsters attack via four paths, each with its own color, and only one guardian can guard each pathway. Each monster has two to four spaces on it representing “weak points,” and once players have filled those via attacks, the monster is vanquished. Don’t worry, more are coming behind it. The game goes back and forth between player turns and monster attacks until either the players win or they all die.

On a turn, the active player rolls four dice and then uses each one for an action of their choice. Red, green, yellow, or blue symbols allow the player to move to the matching pathway, or to put an injury token on the matching weak point of a monster in the path they’re guarding. Purple symbols let the player move to any pathway, or to deal an injury to a purple weak point. When a player moves their guardian to an occupied pathway entrance, they swap places with that guardian, which is a good way to get another player out of trouble. The white symbol lets a player use their special ability, which can include healing any guardian of one hit point, moving a monster to another pathway, or putting a shield on any guardian to protect them from attacks for one round. Discarding two matching dice allows a player to place a blockade on their pathway for one round, as it’s destroyed by the next monster attack. A player may discard any die entirely to charge up their superpower, which is active when fully charged (level 4) and then may be recharged and used one more time before it is done for the entire game.

Players start the game with 4 health points and 4 mana points. The health points are the things you need to not die. Dying is very easy, as it turns out; livin’s the hard part. Mana is more useful, and easier to get, as it’s the reward for beating every monster type except dragons. You can spend one mana to reroll as many dice as you like one time. If a monster is at the nearest space in a pathway (space 1 – pathways have 5 spaces and new monsters spawn in space 3) and your mana is full, you can spend all 4 mana points to destroy the monster immediately.

After each player’s turn, all monsters move one space towards the tower, if able – only one monster can occupy a space. A monster in space 1 then attacks the guardian guarding that pathway, dealing 1 damage. If there’s no guardian, the damage hits the tower, which has 4 or 6 health points depending on the player count. To spare you a little math, I’ll spell this out: In a four-player game, monsters will attack four times between your actual turns. This is a very efficient way to kill a guardian, since you only have four health points, so if there’s a monster in space 1 and someone doesn’t move you out of the way, you’re dead before your turn will come back around again – and that’s even assuming you have 4 health points left, which, let’s face it, you don’t.

There are different monster types with some different attributes to contribute a little more chaos to the game. Archers can attack from any space as long as there isn’t a monster in front of them. Warriors can’t be killed by rerolled dice. Wizards can’t be killed by the four-mana trick. Dragons’ weak points don’t have colored icons on them; you kill a dragon with three matching dice, or with the four-mana trick, after which you get 1 mana and 1 health point. There’s also a small Event deck that combines some good and bad rules tweaks to each round, and that allows you to calibrate the difficulty a little bit.

Since I soloed this game and recently did the same with Gloomhaven: Buttons and Bugs, I couldn’t avoid a comparison, and this game is far superior. It’s so much less fiddly to learn or play, even with some issues in the rule book (possibly a translation issue, although I found at least two errors around icons that were reversed in the rules). It’s also harder to beat, which I suppose will ultimately have a ceiling, but I was happy to keep banging my head against the tower wall for a while. It’s not my favorite genre or theme, but if you like tower-defense games, or want a good small-box cooperative experience, Runemasters is pretty solid.

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→ November 18, 2024
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The Remarkable Life of Ibelin.

Mats Steen was born with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a degenerative disease that would eventually kill him at age 25. When he died, his parents logged into his blog and posted a note saying that he’d passed away, including Mats’s father’s email at the bottom. Messages poured in from people the Steens had never heard of; they’d thought that Mats was isolated, spending most of his waking hours playing World of Warcraft – over 20,000 hours, by their estimates. It turned out that he’d lived an entire life online, building deep and real connections to people around the world while showing those people aspects of his personality that his own family rarely got to see.

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin (streaming on Netflix) is a biography of Mats, whose character’s name was Ibelin, but also a window into the digital world, where things become possible for people with disabilities that are shut off to them in the ‘real’ world. Even for able-bodied users, these online communities can become meaningful parts of their lives, going beyond the shared experiences of trying to advance within the game to the point where players open up about themselves and develop real attachments, platonic or romantic, to others they meet in cyberspace. It’s an emotional ride, even though you know from the start that Mats is going to die young, because the film follows his parents through their discovery that their son lived a much richer life than they knew – and that he helped many, many people he’d never physically met.

The story here does not lionize Mats, which would be an understandable impulse for a film whose subject is dead and who was disabled most of his life, but that honesty gives the story much greater resonance (and keeps it from turning saccharine). Mats was kind, mostly, but he had a temper and a bit of a mean streak, and he could be jealous, or heedless of others’ emotions. He did hurt others’ feelings, and we hear about that, and ‘see’ it through recreations the filmmakers commissioned using WoW graphics and the actual characters’ avatars. There’s an eccentric romantic story arc that might seem very weird to people who haven’t spent much time in online communities, but it tells us a ton about who Mats was, for better and worse, and if you consider it outside of the digital context, it maps pretty well to romantic relationships in the real world.

Ibelin really gets at a question I’ve discussed with many people over the last twenty-odd years: Are digital friendships real? I have always maintained that the answer is … they can be. (This, of course, was in conversations with people who think they can’t.) The friendships Mats/Ibelin had were certainly real, real enough that some of those friends he made in the game came to his funeral. The broader view, however, would say that these friendships were real because of their nature, not because of their medium. Mats and his friends discussed their lives and their emotions the way that people do in meatspace, and experienced many of the same feelings we do when talking to people in reality – or, say, on the phone. Their relationships were real because they made them real through their actions, so that when some of the players decided to hold a meetup – Mats didn’t tell them why he couldn’t come – those friendships and the feelings behind them carried over. The connections we make with other people are real, regardless of the medium, as long as we make them real. Ibelin’s life was remarkable not because he was disabled, or died young, but because he did so much with the life he had, validating, listening, caring, and being there for his friends, even though he never met a single one of them. It’s a simple film at its core, but illuminates such a universal theme that it works – and it’s punctuated by a scene from the game that is as life-affirming as anything they could have done in the real world.

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→ November 15, 2024
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Inori.

Inori is the latest title from Space Cowboys, publishers of Splendor, Jaipur, and the underrated Botanik, along with last year’s Spellbook, a Phil Walker-Harding game that really missed the mark for me. Inori looks fantastic on the table – I saw it at Gen Con, and received a review copy from the publishers as well – but it was also disappointing in the actual play, in large part because of the worker-placement mechanic.

In Inori, players make offerings to spirits by placing their markers on the offering cards available in that round, starting with three in the first round and increasing by one in each round, while players also gain another worker in each round as the game progresses. Placing a token gives you some immediate reward, usually tokens of a certain color, and if all spaces on a card are filled at the end of a round, the card is scored, with points going to each player who placed workers on it. If it’s not filled, players receive no points and the card is flipped to its reverse side. There are also spaces on the big tree that can take workers, which the first player to use can then tag with a specific color for the remainder of the game. After four rounds, the game ends, with the player with the most points winning.

I’ll be up front: the mechanic where cards don’t score unless all spaces are filled sucks. It’s one of the worst mechanics I’ve seen in a game in a while, and I don’t say such things lightly. I love board games, period. A bad day at the tabletop is better than a day without the tabletop at all. I rarely say that something is outright bad, but I have played Inori many times and I think this mechanic is bad. As it works, you can place multiple meeples on the card to fill it to make sure it scores, but you only score once regardless of how many meeples you have on the card. That’s a design failure.

There is some randomness to the game as well, as some spaces allow the player to take a rune that gives you a random reward that can range from extra tokens to the power to move already-placed meeples on the board. The problem with that aspect of the game is that it is quite easy to get a rune that’s utterly useless. There’s just too wide of a variance between the high end of what a rune can be worth and the low (which is zero).

I’ll back up for a moment and get back to the rules. On each turn, you place a meeple on an open space on a card or on the big tree, and you take the reward shown on the space – usually one or two tokens of a specific color. Each round ends when all players have placed all of their meeples, after which all cards that are full, meaning there is at least one meeple on every space, are scored. Each player with one or more meeples on a filled card scores one point per token of the card’s color that they have in their supply – the number of meeples is immaterial. Then the card is removed and replaced with a card of a different color. If a card is unfilled, players with meeples on it receive no points, and the card is flipped.

The scoring at game-end revolves around the great tree – you score each level of the tree, where each level has a color that’s been assigned to it over the course of the game, and then points are awarded based on which players have the most tokens of each color. It is likely that at least one color will remain unassigned, and thus won’t have any value at game-end. Your final score will comprise the tree scoring from game end, the points from cards in each round, and any points you might have gained from placing meeples on cards during the game.

I played a half game at Gen Con at the demo table in the Asmodee booth and saw a ton of potential in Inori, but having played the full game, I was disappointed. It just doesn’t work – the card-scoring mechanism is all wrong, and it makes the game something of a random walk. I wanted to like Inori, given its publisher’s history and the way it looks on the table, but it’s a miss for me.

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→ November 14, 2024
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Time’s Arrow.

Martin Amis’s 2014 novel The Zone of Interest, which was the basis for last year’s Oscar-winning film adaptation, wasn’t his first foray into Holocaust fiction; he explored the same subject in a very different fashion in 1991’s Time’s Arrow: or The Nature of the Offence, which is one of the most brilliant works of fiction I’ve ever encountered. The entire novel takes place in reverse, narrated by a second consciousness inside of a person who has just died – or un-died, and will go through life backwards through the eyes of our narrator.

Tod T. Friendly, as the newly alived person is known when the novel begins, is a doctor in the U.S. whose life will ravel across the pages, moving into his career, his carnal affairs, and eventually out of the country and back to his place of origin. While there is a big mystery that the nameless narrator is trying to figure out, he (I’m assuming a gender here) also discusses some of the most, uh, personal biological matters – but in reverse. Imagine defecation, but you sit on the toilet for the feces to go into your colon. You “eat,” but food exits your stomach and ends up on the plate intact. The narrator’s matter-of-fact descriptions of these and other mundane matters of life, such as any financial transactions, make the novel quite funny almost all of the way through … until, of course, we get to Tod T. Friendly’s younger days and our narrator has to make sense of the senseless.

Part of the genius of Time’s Arrow is in its construction; there has been plenty of fiction where time flows backwards in some fashion, with Memento (or maybe Irréversible) the best-known example. Philip K. Dick wrote something very similar in his novel Counter-Clock World, where time begins to flow backwards for everyone, so they live their lives in reverse. Amis’s conceit here is that the man we meet as Tod T. Friendly lived his life in normal, forward-flowing time; the narrator experiences it in the wrong direction, so he misunderstands causality and conceives wrong and often hilarious explanations for all sorts of events.

The other bit of genius is the same that Amis displayed in The Zone of Interest: he uses the Holocaust as a backdrop for a novel that simultaneously isn’t about the Holocaust … but it also is. It’s such a tightrope for any artist to walk, mining one of the worst episodes in human history for absurd comedy that also helps reveal things about the human condition. The Zone of Interest explored the banality of evil. Time’s Arrow shows how unthinkable the Nazis’ atrocities were: they make sense to our narrator, sort of, because he sees events in reverse. You have to turn history on its head to see any sense in it at all. Viewed normally, the actions of the Nazis, as a group or individually, are just inexplicable.

Time’s Arrow runs a scant 168 pages, which is probably about as far as you could take a gimmick like this, between the bathroom humor that populates the majority of the book and then the glimpses inside a concentration camp. There’s a limit to how far an author can go with either of those ideas – I certainly don’t want more scatological humor than this novel offers, and I don’t know how Amis could have spent any more time on the atrocities themselves without turning this into a very different sort of book. It is unique, and it works spectacularly well as a brisk, witty, often silly read that left me with deep unease and broader philosophical questions.

Next up: Anne de Marcken’s novella It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, the winner of the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize.

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→ November 13, 2024
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NYC eats, November 2024.

My work trip to New York didn’t quite go as planned, but I did eat well. My first stop was at San Matteo, a pizzeria on the Upper East Side that I found because my mom emailed me this Italian list of the best pizzerias in the U.S. (with other lists for other regions/countries plus a global one). I don’t agree with a lot of the list – excluding Pizzeria Bianco yet including Pizzeria Pomo is inexplicable – but I’ve been to 15 and all of them are at least a 55. I’ve got my work cut out for me, though. Anyway, San Matteo looks completely ordinary, like your typical New York Italian-American restaurant, with a massive menu that only gets to pizza on the last page. I got the porcini tartufo pizza, a white pie with fresh mozzarella, porcini mushrooms, Parmiggiano Reggiano, and truffle oil, as none of the red pies was especially grabbing me, although it didn’t matter – the star of this show is the dough, one of the lightest I have ever tasted on any pizza of any style. It is Neapolitan, recognizably so at the edges and with a damp center, but this dough was as airy as a meringue. It’s not that it has giant air bubbles; the whole texture is pillowy soft, yet doesn’t lose the slight tang you get from long fermentation. The porcinis were excellent – I’m glad they used those rather than cremini, as porcini have a ‘meatier’ flavor thanks to their high concentration of glutamates – and while truffle oil is generally a big meh for me, it was definitely good quality olive oil. They also make a very solid Negroni, still among my absolute favorite cocktails. (I’m becoming a Manhattan guy, though. I think it’s age.)

So by sheer coincidence, my sister, who lives in northern Virginia, was also in Manhattan for a meetup with some friends, and she texted me the pin of her hotel … which was at the same intersection as mine. There are over 100 hotels in Manhattan, and we happened to end up at two hotels located at literally the same pair of cross streets. Anyway, we had a lovely lunch on Saturday at Aragvi, a Georgian restaurant, by which I mean the country in the Caucasus, not the American state, although both seem to have a desire to roll back civil rights. Aragvi’s menu comprises traditional Georgian classics, and I think we ended up with three of the big ones, acknowledging that I’d never had Georgian food before and actually did a little reading before we went so I might know what we were eating. We started with a plain cheese khachapuri – extremely similar to the Turkish dish peinirli if you’ve had that – which is a baked bread bowl that had three cheeses melted in the center along with an egg yolk and a small knob of butter. I only knew one of the cheeses, feta, but the combination reminded me of a mixture of mozzarella and ricotta salata, and I think it’s an enriched dough given the texture and outside color. I’d eat this every day if it wouldn’t kill me. We also got a plate of cheese khinkali, which are Georgian dumplings akin to pierogis, shaped like giant xiao long bao – sorry, I’m not even sure what to italicize any more – with what I can only describe as ricotta inside. They were fantastic but absolutely enormous and our best efforts only got us through three of them. The final dish was chicken mtsvadi, and you’re god-damned right I copied and pasted that word from their website, grilled chicken thighs with the texture of smoked meat, served with pickled cabbage and fresh onions and parsley on one bit of lavash bread and a red sauce of unknown origin. (I think it was adjika, although it was a 0 on the spice scale.) This was a welcome change from all of the cheese we’d been eating, although I wish they’d brought more lavash or other bread to make eating the meat with the toppings easier. All told, though, I am now a fan of Georgian cuisine. They do also have a list of Georgian wines, and I got a white that, like Michael Scott, I couldn’t name for you. It was medium-bodied and kind of crisp, better than the full-bodied one the server had me try that had an overwhelming green apple flavor.

Moving along rapidly … Saturday dinner with a grad school classmate (wu-hoo!) came at Abbey Tavern, which is his favorite spot in Manhattan, and they do Guinness properly – it wasn’t too cold, so I could really taste the beer. Guinness is one of the only mass-market beers I would actively choose to drink, because I think it tastes good – it is more than an alcohol delivery device. And it goes well with fish and chips, which was my order, and which was also really solid, with my only real complaints being that 1) it was way too much food and 2) they didn’t bring malt vinegar, although to be fair I didn’t ask because we were busy talking. I hadn’t seen this friend since our 20th reunion back in 2019, and I missed the 25th because it was the weekend of my daughter’s prom, and while I was super bummed to miss the reunion I made the right choice. Back to the food, I demolished the fries, and ate two of three very generous fillets of cod, super crisp and well seasoned, as well as extremely hot when they hit the table.

Sunday morning was the day of the one game I went to, so I loaded up by walking the 15 minutes to Tal’s Bagels on the east side, which was on my employer’s recent list of the best bagels in the city, of which I had been to exactly none. (Zucker’s was my favorite to this point, and might still be.) I figured I likely wouldn’t get lunch at the ballpark, so I went all out with an egg, bacon, and hash brown sandwich (no cheese) on an everything bagel. You probably only care about the bagel, and the truth is it was fuckin’ awesome. I would eat that bagel every day. This is why I love New York – you eat stuff there that makes you think the rest of your life is being frittered away on subpar food. I don’t know if this is the best bagel in New York or Manhattan or in Midtown, but I know it satisfied my innate need for a real New York bagel. Also, not to get too far afield here, but I generally don’t ‘combine’ starches – potatoes on pizza is almost as much of an abomination to me as pineapple is – yet this one absolutely worked. The crispy hash browns offered a textural contrast to the soft interior of the bagel. Win.

My last meal before leaving the city came at Empanada Mama on the west side, and the company was Joe Sheehan, whom I’ve known for twenty-plus years but hadn’t seen since before the pandemic. Joe mentioned this is a longtime favorite of his, and as you may have figured out from reading me for years or just from reading this one post, I will eat almost anything if it is somehow wrapped in dough. I tried three different varieties and my favorite was the Bombay, a wheat-flour empanada filled with curried chicken and chickpeas. The curry flavor was light, clearly there but more of a supporting player, and the chicken and beans were balanced too, which is what I wanted since I also got the very meaty Reggaeton (filled with pernil, a form of roast pork). The corn flour-based rice-and-beans missed the mark a little because of the crust – the filling was fine but the texture of the crust was off for me. I was also pretty full before I even started that one, so keep that in mind.

For coffee, I went to two longtime favorites, Culture Espresso and Blue Bottle, the latter because I think their espresso is still a pinnacle of the form, with an inherent sweetness to their beans that few others can match. (Archetype in Omaha has hit that mark too.) I was a little disappointed at Culture, where the barista spooned foam into my espresso macchiato rather than pouring it – I know that’s almost a religious debate at this point, but I think you always want pourable foam. I’ve only seen the spooned foam as standard when I was in England and Wales in 2022, but to me a macchiato means poured foam. I suppose that’s more preference than anything else. Blue Bottle nailed it, of course. I’ve truly never had a bad shot at any of their locations in any city.

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→ November 12, 2024
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Woman of the Hour.

Woman of the Hour is the directorial debut for actor Anna Kendrick, who also stars in this loosely adapted story about the contestant on the TV show The Dating Game who chose as her date a serial killer – and probably narrowly eclipsed dying at his hands. I’ve never been a fan of Kendrick as an actor, but she shows significant promise behind the camera, elevating a script that overplays its hand repeatedly to make for a solid thriller.

Sheryl Bradshaw (Kendrick) is a struggling actress in 1978 whose agent books her a spot on The Dating Game, which often had its four seats – one woman and three bachelors – filled with would-be actors and comedians. It is her misfortune to have Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto), a smart, charming photographer who has already killed multiple women in sadistic fashion, not just as one of her three bachelors, but, as the film tells it, the most charismatic and suave of them. (One of the other bachelors on her episode was an unknown actor named Jed Mills, although the film never names him or the third man.) A huge portion of the film’s running time takes place on the show’s set as we watch Sheryl navigate the ridiculous process and deal with the obnoxious host (an underutilized Tony Hale) while Alcala keeps giving the best answers. It’s only afterwards, when the two meet off set, that Sheryl sees more of his personality and becomes sufficiently creeped out to call off the date – but not before their interaction takes a very scary turn.

Woman of the Hour actually gives Alcala a substantial amount of screen time, which establishes his character in important ways but also makes us privy to some disturbing scenes. It opens with a an unfortunately fairly accurate depiction of one of Alcala’s murders, where he strangled his victim, resuscitated her, raped her, and then killed her again, and later we see another murder and a kidnapping, also close to the true story. On the one hand, it shows the audience just what Alcala is capable of, and since most viewers will know going in – or could probably just guess – that he’s going to be her pick, it shows that the stakes are life or death. On the other hand, it’s macabre, and leering, not quite in a celebratory way, but in a way that ends up establishing Alcala as at least as much of a central character as Bradshaw.

Contributing to this imbalance is Zovatto’s performance; he makes Alcala’s ability to charm everyone, notably women, totally plausible, overshadowing everyone else on screen except when he and Kendrick are on opposite sides of the game show set. That’s also where the script begins to diverge from reality; the actual dialogue on the show was typically racy and oversexed, but in the movie, Bradshaw ditches the questions she’s been given and engages in witty, highbrow banter with Alcala while mocking the other two bachelors. It makes Bradshaw into a bit of an implausible heroine, while it shows a different Alcala than the one Bradshaw and viewers saw. The film veers further and further from reality, and more into unnecessary melodrama, right up through the text over the closing scene, which is a complete fabrication where none was necessary. (And yes, that especially annoyed me.)

This could easily have gone off the rails once the story gets the characters on set, where we get another subplot as an audience member recognizes Alcala as the man who she believes killed her friend. Kendrick handles the scene-shifting and the need to maintain the pace extraordinarily well for a first-time director – or any-time director. Once we’re on the show, the script tries so hard to ratchet up the tension, and Kendrick manages to keep it in check until the parking lot scene after the show, where the tension is real, and earned. It’s the best scene in the movie, one where so much happens without a word spoken, and takes this one woman’s bizarre experience and uses it to express something far more universal: the fear of violence that women face even in seemingly routine interactions with men, like a simple date, because of the pervasiveness of violent men.

Woman of the Hour could so easily have ended up a woman-in-jeopardy Lifetime movie in different hands. Kendrick wouldn’t have seemed like the person to steer it straight, but by taking a hyperventilating script just down a notch, she turned it into a more interesting and riveting film.

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→ November 11, 2024
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Stick to baseball, 11/11/24.

We updated my ranking of the top 50 free agents in baseball this offseason on Monday after all options were declined or exercised to reflect the actual free agent pool. My next article there will probably come when we have a big transaction.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter, covering my feelings on the election, on Saturday.

I locked my Twitter account earlier in the week due to the site’s change to allow blocked users to see your posts. At this point, I will only post links to my work there, and I’ll be more active on Bluesky and Threads. Of course, I’ll still be here, and in the comments under my articles on The Athletic.

And now, the links…

  • Multiple women have accused University of Florida men’s basketball coach Todd Golden of stalking and sexually harassing them, according to a report in the independent site The Alligator. The University received a Title IX complaint against Golden on September 27th.
  • A 13-year-old girl in Florida went to the police after she was raped by her adoptive father; the police didn’t believe her and charged her with lying. When he raped her again, she recorded it on her phone. Taylor Cadle, now 21, came forward this week in a PBS story on the police’s complete mishandling of the case.
  • Prof. Donald Fanger taught my favorite class at Harvard, Comedy and the Novel, where we read several novels I still love, including my all-time favorite, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. Prof. Fanger died this July at age 94.
  • France is prosecuting seven people involved in spreading the lies that led to the beheading of a French teacher who had shown an example of the cartoons from Charlie Hebdo that Islamist terrorists cited as their reason for murdering 12 people at the magazine’s offices in 2015. The actual killer was shot dead by police shortly after he murdered the teacher, Samuel Paty; this trial is about the online “hate campaign” that took place before the attack.
  • Trump’s Truth Social platform outsourced coding jobs to Mexico even as he threatened companies with retaliation for sending jobs outside of the U.S. American Second to Profits.
  • Elon Musk’s false or misleading claims about the election, including those about the major candidates, were viewed over 2 billion times, according to an analysis by CNN. I’m sure that had no effect on anyone’s voting choices, though.
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→ November 2, 2024
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Stick to baseball, 11/2/24.

My ranking of the top 50 free agents available this offseason is now up for subscribers to the Athletic; we’ve updated it now to reflect two players on the list coming off the board as their clubs picked up their options, adding two new players to keep it at 50. I also held a Q&A on the Athletic site on Friday to talk about the list.

For Paste, I reviewed Stamp Swap, a light new game from Stonemaier Games, whose products always have excellent components and art. The game play was meh for me – it was mostly stuff I’ve seen before, and in one case I think a mechanic just makes the game worse/slower.

I need to get another issue of my free email newsletter out soon, but got held up by the FA rankings and the relative lack of sleep I had thanks to the World Series.

And now, the links…

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→ November 1, 2024
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Music update, October 2024.

After all of that – by which I mean all the new tracks I listened to in the past month – October was one of the weakest months of the year for good new music. We did get two very strong albums that I’ve already featured on previous playlists in Katie Gavin’s What a Relief and Japandroids’ swan song Fate & Alcohol, and I’ve got a few left to work through. In the meantime, here are 24 songs that made the cut; as always, you can access the playlist here if you can’t see the widget below.

Waxahatchee – Much Ado About Nothing. A brand-new track from Katie Crutchfield just seven months after she released her latest album Tigers Blood … and this might be better than anything on the LP, which is really saying something.

Humdrum – There and Back Again. This is about as perfect a jangle-pop track as you’re going to find in this decade. Holy cow. I haven’t gotten to their debut album, Every Heaven, yet, but it’s next up in my queue.

Royel Otis – If Our Love Is Dead. The algorithms have been trying to convince me to like Royel Otis for a year, at least, but I just haven’t liked any of their songs all that much, or even remembered them. This track has a great little hook in the chorus, though. This indie pop due is huge in their native Australia, earning 8 ARIA nominations for their debut album PRATTS & PAIN; this song comes off the deluxe edition, retitled PRATTS & PAIN – It Ain’t Over Til It Ends.

The Tubs – Freak Mode. The Tubs are led by the former guitarist from Joanna Gruesome; Pitchfork’s review of their 2023 debut album Dead Meat referred to the “chiming sound of 80s college rock,” and it definitely has a lot of that sound – jangle-pop is back, baby – but this song has an incredible urgency to it that goes beyond those college-radio staples that didn’t stick except for their nostalgia value. It reminds me a little of The Dead Milkmen’s “Punk Rock Girl,” but more melodic and less annoying.

Momma – Ohio All the Time. Momma broke out a little in 2022 with “Speeding ’72,” which made my top 20 of that year, but it’s just been a few scattered singles since then. This new track is pretty solid, with a great hook in the chorus and a similar contrast between the sweet-sounding vocals and the ‘70s-style distortion of the crunchy guitars.

The Smile – Eyes & Mouth. The Smile’s third album, Cutouts, includes some tracks recorded during the sessions for their last LP, but the sound is so different – the three tracks I’ve heard so far are all way jazzier funkier, with much clearer influence from drummer Tom Skinner of Sons of Kemet and less of the mopey sound that Radiohead critics deride.

Black Doldrums – Hideaway. Darkwave trio Black Doldrums released their second album, In Limerence, in October, highlighted by this Bauhaus-y track driven by a twangy guitar line that almost begs for resolution.

Crows – Every Day of Every Year. I’m a huge Crows fan, as they come in somewhere between post-punk and hard rock; they should do a double bill with Kid Kapichi, who I unfortunately missed on their U.S. tour because I was out of town. Crows’ third album, Reason Enough, came out at the very end of September.

Kid Kapichi – Newsnight. Speaking of these lads, they released this track in October, one of four new songs on the deluxe version of this spring’s There Goes the Neighbourhood.

The Murder Capital – Can’t Pretend to Know. Sitting somewhere between punk and post-punk, this Irish group are more true to their style than their more ambitious and expansive countrymates Fontaines D.C. This track comes from the ongoing sessions for their third album, release date unknown.

Corker – Distant Dawn. Corker hail from Cincinnati, and this track sounds like a mash-up of Preoccupations and very early Killing Joke, complete with vocals that sound like they were recorded through a string connected to a coffee can.

Anxious – Counting Sheep. Anxious’s debut album Little Green House was one of my favorites of 2022, but then they dropped completely out of sight for almost two years. I was thinking about how they’d vanished a couple of weeks ago, only for this song to show up on my Spotify Release Radar a few days later. Serendipity, I suppose. Anyway, Anxious gets labelled as emo but they’re sharper and more interesting than just a revival of that subgenre. Their second album is due some time next year.

Sløtface – Quiet on Set. Sløtface’s latest album, Film Buff, is their first as a de facto solo project for vocalist Haley Shea, and the good news is that it’s on par with their previous two releases. If there’s a downside, it’s that there’s nothing new here, either; it’s really catchy pop-punk with witty lyrics.

La Sécurité – Detour. This Montréal-based “art punk” group released its debut album, Stay Safe!, in 2023, and returned last month with this throbbing, dissonant, and very dance-heavy track.

The Cure – A Fragile Thing. I read somewhere that Robert Smith wanted to go back to the Disintegration era of The Cure on this comeback album, and on this track, at least, he has succeeded. I think that’s their best record, so I may be biased in my opinion here.

Pastel – Leave a Light On (Velvet Storm). The last time I included a Pastel song, one of you commented that it was a blatant ripoff of The Verve; I don’t exactly hear that, but I get the criticism, and I think it’s as pronounced a similarity this time – although I hear more Primal Scream on this track.

The Horrors – The Silence that Remains. It’s a little ponderous, maybe a little pretentious, but Faris Badwan has earned at least some benefit of the doubt at this point. The Horrors’ sixth album and their first in nearly six years, Night Life, is due out in March.

Mindy Smith – Quiet Town. Mindy and I met in second grade in 1979, and we happen to share a birthday, although I’m a year younger than she is (I was the youngest person in my class). This is the title track from her latest album, her first one in 12 years, which also features “Jericho” and “The Hour of My Departure” (the latter with Daniel Tashian). I believe we are the only two members of our high school graduating class to have our own Wikipedia pages.

Lucius – Old Tape (feat. Adam Granduciel). A one-off single, for now, featuring the lead singer/guitarist of The War on Drugs; I saw both artists in September at the Mann in Philly, at which point Lucius’s Jess Wolfe was something like 11 months pregnant.

The Wombats – Sorry I’m Late, I DIidn’t Want to Come. This is mid as Wombats songs go, mostly because I think they’re capable of much catchier tracks, but I’ll take a mid Wombats song over a lot of other bands’ singles.

Orla Gartland – Backseat Driver. I wasn’t familiar with Gartland, an Irish singer-songwriter who released her debut album Woman on the Internet (great title) in 2021, until I heard this song, off her new album Everybody Needs a Hero. It’s a bouncy slice of indie-pop, slyly nodding at teen popstars but with lyrics that belie her age (she’s a ripe old 29).

WOOZE – Fantastic Fever. WOOZE is half of a defunct band first called Movie and then called Screaming Peaches; they put out a handful of songs, including the ridiculously fun “Mr. Fist,” then split up. WOOZE’s sound is more trashy glam-rock, although there’s still a danceable beat to all of their tracks. This is the best of the three singles I’ve heard from them this year, over “Sabre Tooth Spider” and “Weapons of Mass Seduction.”

Goat – Goatbrain. One of you suggested I check out the latest album from this anonymous Swedish fusion group, also called Goat; it was a solid tip, as I do like a lot of what they’re doing, blending sounds from various global music styles into a pretty cohesive whole, although the vocalists aren’t very strong and it holds the album back.

Blood Incantation – The Stargate [Tablet II]. Blood Incantation’s latest album Absolute Elsewhere is the most highly acclaimed metal album of 2024, and it is an impressive work of musicianship, comprising two songs, each in three “tablets,” running a total of 43 minutes and running the gamut from spacey 1970s prog-rock to Spiritual Healing-era Death. That latter bit means parts of the album are just unlistenable; the combination of blast beats and death growls just turns into noise to me, and I’m really here for the guitarwork anyway. This is the one track out of the six that is largely free of that nonsense, and despite running just five minutes, it gives you an idea of the stylistic range of the album.

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