→ January 10, 2024
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Rye Lane.

Most meet-cute films are little more than cute, and often they’re just cutesy to the point of being saccharine. They’re date movies, or “date movies,” assuming you care more about the mood you’re setting than the caliber of the movie itself. It’s just not a genre associated with quality, which is why Rye Lane, streaming now on Hulu, was such an incredible surprise: It’s a genuinely great movie on its own merits, even though you know from the start that the protagonists are going to get together, in part because they’re both so realistically drawn and well acted. (Thanks to Chris Crawford, who ranked this among his top 5 films of 2023, for telling me about it.)

As the film opens, we see Dom (David Jonsson) crying in a stall in the all-genders bathroom at an art exhibition, when Yas (Vivian Oparah) comes in to use the neighboring stall, leading to an awkward conversation where Dom reveals that his long-term girlfriend left him for his best mate. The two reconnect outside of the loo and end up walking through Rye Lane Market for a few hours, bonding over their recent breakups, eating at a taco stand for the film’s best cameo, encountering both of their exes, and engaging in more hijinks. The love connection hits a few snags, eventually breaking when it becomes clear that one of them lied to the other about something significant, setting up the finish where, of course, they get together for real.

The actual plot of Rye Lane follows the typical story arc of the meet-cute or any rom-com, naturally limiting its upside. For a formula movie to avoid being just formulaic, the characters have to be credible and the actors in the two lead roles have to excel. Jonsson and Oparah are both superb and have clear chemistry, with Oparah especially strong playing the harder-edged and slightly more complex character, as Yas has the longer back story and her character starts with the blank canvas. The script, by first-time film writers Nathan Bryon and Tom Melia, keeps the two characters believable mostly by avoiding unnecessary details – they’re not idealized, they’re not living high on the hog, they don’t have ridiculous lives or impossibly perfect traits. If anything, they’re both appropriately screwed up given what’s come before.

And on top of that, Rye Lane is very, very funny. It’s a screwball comedy wrapped up in a date movie, calling back to classic comedies of the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood, throwing its two protagonists into a series of misadventures, some of which push the edges of credibility but all of which lead to hilarious results. The visit to Yas’s ex’s mums’ house, where the two women are having a cookout, is especially ridiculous and had me cringing in a good way from start to finish. The connecting thread is that one of them has a bad idea, and the other goes along with it (or is roped into it unwittingly), and then hijinks ensue. It’s hard to pull this off without turning the movie into a joke or just ending up with a bunch of unfunny situations. The script pushes the envelope without breaking it, and the two actors are so credible in their characters that the film never once goes off the rails.

A superb feature debut by director Raine Allen-Miller, Rye Lane really does the meet-cute as well as any recent movie I can remember. It’s a wonderful ride, even though you know the shape of the story arc, and where it ends is exactly right for its story and its characters. And in a year where best-of lists are dominated by some heavy dramas, Rye Lane is the perfect palate cleanser before your next three-hour watch.

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→ January 3, 2024
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The Holdovers.

Alexander Payne’s films often depict deeply flawed people in an empathetic way, almost challenging the viewer to root for them in spite of their awfulness – Miles Raymond in Sideways and Jim McAllister in Election come to mind. The Holdovers, Payne’s latest film and a return to form after Downsizing flopped, has a pair of these awful characters at the heart of its story, giving the viewer a window into each of them as they learn to develop empathy for the other – and for other people in general – that they’d previously lacked. (It’s streaming free on Peacock, or you can buy it on Amazon, iTunes, etc.)

Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) is a brusque, old-school instructor of Ancient Civilizations at the Barton School, a tony boarding school in Massachusetts, loathed by students for his ungenerous grading and general classroom manner. The headmaster, angry with Paul over another matter, assigns him to be the one teacher who stays over the Christmas break with the “holdovers,” five students who can’t go home for the holidays for varying reasons. One of them, Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), was supposed to join his mother and stepfather in St. Kitts, but gets a last-minute call that she’s going to St. Kitts alone with her husband on a delayed honeymoon, so Angus must stay on campus, and he’s not happy about it. It gets worse, as the other four boys get to head off on a ski trip, but Angus’s parents are unreachable (or just ignore the calls), so he can’t get permission to leave, stranding him with Paul, the head cook Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), and the janitor Danny (Naheem Garcia). Mary recently lost her son, a Barton alumnus, in Vietnam, as he couldn’t get a student deferment, with a stark contrast between his fate as a rare Black student at Barton and his many white classmates.

Paul and Mary don’t know each other very well despite both working at the school for what appears to have been about twenty years, and neither knows Angus at all beyond his time in Paul’s class. Once he’s the only student left, Angus starts to act up, with comical and serious consequences, which helps the two get to know each other beyond the classroom. There’s a holiday party thrown by another Barton staffer, a Christmas dinner with just the three of them, an unplanned field trip, a definitely unplanned trip to the hospital, and more seemingly minor events that allow David Hemingson’s script to reveal more layers to each of the characters.

The film takes place over the winter break of 1970-71, a time when men were men, by which I mean they weren’t supposed to talk about or acknowledge feelings. Paul and Angus are cut from that cloth, and just getting to the points where they do reveal an emotion or two, such as Angus’s comments at the Christmas dinner, is a huge challenge for both men; for Angus, as a teenager, it could be seen as a sign of weakness by his peers, while for Paul, the gruff exterior hides some inner disappointment that the film only hints at later on. Mary is more open with her feelings, although they come out a lot more at the holiday party when she’s had a few, and early in the film it’s clear that neither Angus nor Paul is comfortable with even her modest degree of openness. The parting shot of the two men is brilliantly awkward, and dead on for their two characters, especially in that time period.

Randolph seems to be the favorite right now for Best Supporting Actress, and while I’ve only seen one other potential nominee (America Ferrera, for Barbie), it is a tremendous performance in a somewhat limited role. Giamatti was somewhat infamously snubbed for Sideways, earning his one Oscar nomination a year later for Cinderella Man, and while I could see him landing another nod this year, I’m also a little curious if he can play a character who isn’t fundamentally an asshole. I could see The Holdovers getting both of those nominations as well as Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay (GoldDerby shows it as the favorite for the latter), but I’m not sure how much credit here should go to Payne as the director versus the other contributors. The script itself is smart and witty and a great example of showing people developing empathy in a way that also gets the audience to empathize with them. All three lead actors are excellent. I wouldn’t take anything away from Payne here, but it felt to me like the best thing he could do was stay out of the way.

It’s that empathy bit that makes The Holdovers a superlative film rather than just a great one. Getting viewers to side with characters who are unlikeable in tangible ways is a real challenge for writer and actor – not just rooting for them like some anti-hero, but to embrace them as three-dimensional characters who have serious flaws and may not even like themselves. All three actors meet this challenge, and the script puts them in the right situations for them to show the audience who and what they are. Trying to do more would have ruined the magic.

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→ January 2, 2024
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Past Lives.

Past Lives is the first feature from writer-director Celine Song, and became a surprise hit at the U.S. box office, taking in just over $10 million even though it has no stars in the cast and much of the film is in Korean. It’s small and intimate, with only three real characters, yet manages to explore the nature of love and identity as we follow two of those people from their childhood in South Korea to a meeting in New York 24 years later. It’s a wonderful film that barely strikes a single wrong note even as it moves through territory that naturally lends itself to sentiment and cliché. (You can rent it on amazon, iTunes, etc.)

Na Young (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) are 12-year-old classmates and academic rivals when we first meet them, but just as they seem to be falling for each other, Nora’s family moves to Toronto, after which she takes on the name Nora Moon. Twelve years later, Hae Sung finds her via a page for her playwright/director father’s latest movie, and the two strike up a very intense relationship over Skype and messaging, one that seems to be headed for something more serious until one of them calls it off due to their careers and the physical distance between them. A dozen years after that, the two connect in person, but the window for them to have an actual romance has closed, and they both have to deal with the weight of their memories and the lost connection to each other.

The title of the film refers to a Korean concept, inyeon, where people are connected over their lives or even multiple lifetimes, to the point that fate or providence is pushing them together. Nora and Hae Sung spend significant time in the film debating whether they have inyeon and are actually meant to be together, although in the end it appears that they don’t, as one of them falls in love with someone else. It would be romantic if it were true, but even Past Lives doesn’t take it as fact and in many ways subverts the concept with what it does to its two protagonists.

Beyond the love story, however, there’s a powerful meditation here on national/ethnic identity and the difficulty of assimilation. Nora left Korea at 12, learning English shortly before their trip, and then emigrated a second time from Canada to the United States. She works diligently to fit into western culture, including taking on a “western” name that non-Koreans could more easily pronounce or remember, in a familiar look at the immigrant story where the younger generation becomes American or Canadian or European and loses some or all connection to their country of birth or their parents’. When Hae Sung appears the second time, by which point they’re 36, she’s moved on with her life enough that his visit throws off her equilibrium, and over several days she becomes more uncomfortable with her feelings and with this intrusion of her past life into her current one. At first, Nora’s the cool one of the two, as she’s married and looks at Hae Sung with some pity because he’s not and it’s clear that he hasn’t entirely moved on. The more they talk, and Hae Sung becomes more open about his feelings, the more it rattles her, dredging up something she’s tried to forget or bury, whether it’s him specifically or something broader about her past.

Lee is a revelation in Past Lives, carrying large portions of the film herself because her character is the conflicted one and we see more of her without Hae Sung than the reverse. I’d only seen her previously in some guest spots on the new Electric Company, but I can’t say I remember her appearances. So much of the communication between Nora and Hae Sung is nonverbal, and both Lee and Teo Yoo are superb at expressing their feelings through gesture or facial expression – the ambivalence Nora feels when Hae Sung visits, her anxiety when he and her husband Arthur (John Magaro) meet, the feeling of being stuck between two people who can’t communicate directly so she’s the translator despite her feelings for and about both men.

The script takes Nora’s perspective more than Hae Sung’s, giving her character more depth while leaving him a little harder to grasp, which would mirror the way she’d view him given the huge chunks of time between their real and virtual meetings. We see more of her life outside of their interactions with each other than we do of his, with Hae Sung’s scenes without Nora mostly times he’s out drinking with his buddies. The Best Actress field is incredibly crowded this year, so Lee may not end up in the final five, but it’s an outstanding performance without which the film wouldn’t be as effective or as affecting.

I’ve seen references to Past Lives as romantic, but I don’t think that’s the apposite word here – it’s about romance, but it’s far more realistic than romantic. A romance might have forced the two together in some unbelievable plot twist or sop to the audience. Such a conclusion would have done a real injustice to the characters and the story here of the sacrifices we make in life and the difficulties many people face when leaving one family, culture, or country for another. Instead, Song weaves a delicate tapestry around her two main characters, maintaining the credibility with the viewer so that we can spend time pondering the what-ifs of this pair, and the what-ifs in our own lives – the relationships, romantic or platonic, that never came to pass because life got in the way. It’s a simple, quiet marvel, and beautiful right through the characters’ anguish when they meet for the last time.

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→ December 27, 2023
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Sea of Tranquility.

Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven was a masterpiece, a beautiful novel of humanity set in the most despairing, hopeless setting – the onset and aftermath of a global pandemic that causes society to collapse. Her follow-up, The Glass Hotel, had the same sparkling prose and characterization, but the story fell apart at the end, undermining the entire work. Her most recent novel, Sea of Tranquility, brings back one of The Glass Hotel’s characters and the fictional town that served as its setting, with an entirely new story that delves further into science fiction than Mandel has ever gone – and this time, she sticks the landing with a conclusion that ties the entire novel together and brings the reader back to the sense of humanity that set Station Eleven apart.

Sea of Tranquility begins in 1912, as the disowned grandson of an English aristocrat arrives in Caiette, British Columbia, after his exile from his family. While there, he walks into the local forest, but has a mysterious experience where he hears a violin playing – despite there being no one else in sight – and the world around him seems to go black. Shortly afterwards, a visiting priest asks him about the experience, but it appears that the priest may be an impostor. The story then jumps ahead a hundred years, then nearly two hundred, then about two hundred more, and there’s very little in common between the stories except for that impostor-priest person, who appears in different guises in each story. What ties them all together is the mystery that guy is trying to solve.

Mandel’s previous two novels leaned quite heavily on her strength of characterization, but that’s the weakest part of Sea of Tranquility, which might only have one true central character who gets a three-dimensional rendering on the page – that guy, who at one point in the novel is known as Gaspery. Instead, Mandel’s exploration of humanity, both what it means to be human (and whether we have free will) and how we treat one another, comes through an inventive plot device that doesn’t reveal itself until at least halfway through the novel. (You might figure it out before then, but I’m trying not to spoil it.) Crafting a story like this requires a fine attention to detail and an ability to maintain plausibility in the face of automatic disbelief. Mandel couldn’t manage this with a simpler story in The Glass Hotel, where her main character made more than one irrational decision that didn’t sit well with me, given what had come before for her character. Here, her central character’s actions, while not always entirely rational, are at least believable, and thus don’t get in the way of the broader story.

So much of Sea of Tranquility recalled David Mitchell’s magnum opus Cloud Atlas, another book told in pieces separated in time by decades or centuries, leaving it to the reader to connect them. In Mitchell’s case, however, the connections were tenuous, and only there for the audience, while the novel succeeded because he wrote each of the six sections (five of which were then split into two) in a different literary style. He also loves to bring back characters from previous novels, even just for cameos, something Mandel did in The Glass Hotel with some minor characters from Station Eleven. Sea of Tranquility lacks the grandiose ambitions of Cloud Atlas, but it’s also far more focused on its core themes and more effective in asking its questions about them. I may not answer Mandel’s main mystery question in the affirmative, but I found it easy to go along for the ride as she explores it.

Next up: I’m about halfway through Nurrudin Farah’s North of Dawn.

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→ December 24, 2023
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The Mission.

If you’re like me and are fascinated by geography – I would pore over maps and atlases as a kid, always finding something new and interesting, as if they were telenovelas – then you may be familiar with North Sentinel Island and its residents, the Sentinelese, one of the last ‘uncontacted’ tribes on earth. The island is part of the Andaman archipelago in the eastern Indian Ocean, and is part of India, which patrols the waters around the island and prohibits anyone from landing on the island or trying to contact the Sentinelese, who have in fact been contacted, but very rarely, and in the last few decades only by sanctioned anthropologists … and one very deluded American.

John Chau was 25 years old and a rabid fundamentalist Christian who believed in the nonsense doctrine that anyone who had never heard the Gospel would be condemned to hell. He read about the Sentinelese people online – how he first learned about them isn’t entirely clear – and decided that God wanted him to go preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ to them. The Sentinelese are extremely hostile to outsiders, and a few years prior had killed two fisherman whose boat drifted ashore on their island. Chau made several visits to the Andamans and approached North Sentinel Island several times, making contact with its people, before they finally killed him too – sparking mockery online of this idiot colonizer breaking several Indian laws to go shout, in English, to people who wouldn’t understand him, about his own superstitions, even though these people are well known to shoot arrows at anyone who comes near their shores.

The Mission, a new documentary from National Geographic, tells some of Chau’s story, exploring his life to try to answer the question of why a seemingly intelligent young man, raised in some privilege, would do such a profoundly stupid – and likely suicidal – thing. It’s riveting and infuriating, a severe indictment of the evangelical circles in which John traveled and the various people who enabled him to do this illegal, dangerous, and frankly inhumane thing, but I don’t think it adequately answers that fundamental question of why.

The North Sentinelese have good reason to fear and loathe outsiders. They were targets for slavers who saw the Andaman peoples, many of whom appear to be descendants of African migrants from several millennia prior, as chattel. British colonial authorities would take a break from subjugating what is now India and Pakistan to treat the Andamanese as a sort of circus freaks, with one measuring the sizes of their crania and genitals in the name of “science.” Any contact with people from beyond the islands also introduced the Sentinelese to pathogens to which they had no immunity. Since Partition & independence, India’s government has largely protected the tribes of the Andamans, some of which have chosen, in a way, to assimilate with broader Indian society, while the Sentinelese remain apart.

Where The Mission succeeds is in its depiction of the history of Christian missionaries trying to convert these ‘lost’ tribes, including an endeavor in Ecuador in the 1950s where the Huaorani tribe killed five white missionaries, but further efforts eventually led to the conversion of many tribe members and the subsequent deterioration of their culture. One of the experts who talks on camera is the linguist and former missionary Daniel Everett, who went to the Amazon to convert the Pirahã with his wife and children, but after several years lost his faith and became an ardent atheist, giving him a unique perspective on Chau’s religious mania and willingness to ignore all voices telling him not to do this terrible, dangerous thing. The film also interviews several of Chau’s enablers, including one group that specifically targets these uncontacted or low-contact tribes to spread the Gospel, regardless of impact on the people involved or risks to the missionaries, coming off very much like members of a cult. (Their leader claimed he posed no threat to the Sentinelese because we have antibiotics.)

Where The Mission falls a little short is in depicting Chau as anything more than a very naïve evangelical who started down this missionary path and didn’t seem able or willing to stop until he hit the bottom. His father is a psychiatrist who nearly lost his license for reasons that are only hinted at in the film, while his mother was the evangelical parent yet is barely mentioned here. It’s clear that at least some of his fervor came from his time at Oral Roberts University, one of the most evangelical and also one of the most homophobic/transphobic colleges in America, including one man, Bobby Parks, who was “Missions/Outreach Coordinator” at ORU until 2016 and still runs a nonprofit that uses soccer as a way to indoctrinate kids in refugee camps and other high-risk areas around the world. Parks appears to have been a Svengali to Chau, yet he declined requests to appear in the documentary or speak to its makers, so his exact role and level of influence is only implied. So how Chau went from a good student with a strong interest in the outdoors to a stark raving madman who hatched an intense months-long plan to invade North Sentinel Island remains unanswered.

I suppose my views on Chau and such efforts are quite clear, and I think he was both an aggressor and a victim here. I knew Chau’s story from this 2018 Outside story, which appeared in my links roundup on November 24th of that year, and which I think goes a little more into his own personal journey and at least asks more questions about how he got to that kayak in the Indian Ocean. (This Guardian story has more.) I know the documentary just left me fuming at how willing others were to waste Chau’s life, and how easily he fell into this downward spiral, where even his Christian faith, one founded on respect and love for one’s fellow man, led him to disregard the significant dangers he posed to the very people he was trying to save.

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→ December 18, 2023
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Spider-man: Across the Spider-Verse.

I was one of the few skeptics when it came to the first Spider-verse animated film, the Oscar-winning 2018 film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which I thought got too much credit for interesting animation and some great cameos but still adhered too much to the traditional superhero fight scenes to resolve its plot. However, this year’s sequel, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, is a banger. Not only do I think it’s going to end up the best animated film of the year*, it might be one of the best of all time.

* I haven’t seen The Boy and the Heron yet, and that’s already won some best-of-2023 awards as well.

We return to the story of Miles Morales, the Afro-Latino boy bitten by a radioactive spider, who discovers there’s a whole multitude of spiderpeople and even spideranimals throughout the multiverse, including Gwen Stacy, who we saw in the first film, along with some new characters who have formed a sort of transdimensional guild to try to maintain the various timelines and prevent the multiverse from collapsing. This film, like the first one, doesn’t worry too much about the cosmological implications and focuses on the story and characters – actually, it does better with the characters than the first film did – and plunges Miles right into a complex story that has some fight scenes but relies far more on character development. There’s a villain, The Spot, who of course has a very personal beef with the titular hero, although as the story progresses he fades somewhat into the background of the plot. If anything, it’s more of a mystery than a typical superhero plot, as something is wrong with the timelines and Miles is in a unique position to find out what’s going on.

The animation in the first Spider-Verse film was different from that in most animated films, mixing some hand-drawn elements with CGI, dubbed “2.5D” animation because it combined the 3D style of computer animation with the 2D style of traditional hand-drawn work. The innovation didn’t go beyond that, however, and at times it became a little tiring to watch because my eyes would struggle to figure out the perspective. This film really perfects the method, though, and both enhances it to give it that comic-book-plus feel while also exploring different artistic styles – each instance of the multi-verse, and each Spider-entity that hails from it, gets its own unique look and feel, making the entire endeavor a visual feast unlike any animated film I can remember. It’s not the ultra-realism of Pixar’s computer wizardry, nor the artistic marvels of Miyazaki’s work, but a cornucopia of colors, styles, and textures that would alone make the movie worth watching.

The story, however, is miles ahead – pun intended – of its predecessor. That film set up the main character, but the plot was garden-variety superhero stuff. We’ll have to see if the writers stick the landing in the sequel, but the story here is much richer, with more complexity to Miles’ character, some more depth to Gwen’s, and a plot that doesn’t depend on beating the bad guy up – in fact, they try that and it doesn’t work terribly well. I didn’t see the ending and cliffhanger coming, although I may be unusual in that bit, and even so I don’t think it would have altered my appreciation of the plot up to that point anyway. There’s some “how will he ever get out of this?” to it, but that part is uninteresting – of course he’s getting out of it – relative to the broader stories of how they’ll repair the timeline and stop the Spot. (An aside: Jason Schwartzman voices the Spot, and might have the best performance among the voice actors in the film. On top of his strong performance in Asteroid City, he’s fighting to change the opinion I’ve held of him since turning off Rushmore 20 minutes into it.)

My daughter, who has been a big MCU fan for years (although that’s tapering off), absolutely loved this movie other than the cliffhanger and long wait for the final installment, for almost all of the same reasons I did: the clever story, the two interesting characters, and the wildly innovative animation. I assume it’s going to win the big Best Animated Feature prizes this winter, although The Boy and the Heron might get a boost as Miyazaki’s farewell film (maybe), and I can’t argue with that. It’s at least a lot more deserving of the honors than the first film.

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→ December 14, 2023
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Hanamikoji.

I’ve owned the small two-player game Hanamikoji for probably seven or eight years now, and played it maybe twice when I first got it, but I set it aside and did what I unfortunately do with a lot of games I own but didn’t get as a review copy – I forgot about it. It popped up recently on Board Game Arena, so I got to play it a bunch of times, since a full game takes less than ten minutes, and I was reminded how elegant and great it is. It’s a capture-the-flag game, like Battle Line or Riftforce, with a simple scoring method and a strict set of possible actions that forces you to try to figure out what your opponent might be trying to do.

The theme of Hanamikoji isn’t that relevant except for the art, mostly by the wonderful Taiwanese artist Maisherly, who has also provided art for Walking in Burano, Realm of Sand, and Mystery of the Temples. The game itself is so simple you could make your own version with a bunch of index cards, although I would say just buy the game since it’s only about $17: The game has a deck of cards numbered 2 through 5 in seven different colors. The 2s come in purple, red, and yellow; 3s in blue and orange; 4s in green; and 5s in pink. A card’s frequency matches its value, so there are 21 cards in the deck.

Before each round, you shuffle all cards, remove one without showing it to either player, and then deal six cards to each player. The first player must draw one card and then take one of the four possible actions, which they will then not be able to take for the rest of that round. The second player does the same, and the play goes back and forth, with each player drawing one card and taking a previously unused (by them) action, until each player has had four turns.

In between the players sits a row of geisha cards, one in each color, and players will play cards to their side by the matching geisha to try to win each geisha’s favor with gifts. The four possible actions are to reserve a card to be played to the table at the end of the round (so a final, secret move); to discard two cards from your hands so they’re out of the round entirely; to present your opponent with three cards, where they choose one to play to their side, leaving two for you to play to your side; and to present your opponent with two pairs of cards, where they choose one to play and you then play the other. At the end of the round, you see who has more cards on their side of each of the geishas. Whoever has more cards on their side gains that geisha’s favor, and if the players have the same number on both sides, the favor doesn’t move. If one player gets the favor of four geishas, or gets the favor of three geishas worth a total of 11 or more (for example, the 5 and both 3s), they win.

If, as is most common, you complete the first round and neither player wins, the start player switches and you play a new round, but you retain the favor you won in the previous round, so if, say, you had the favor of the purple 2 geisha, and each player plays a purple card to the table, you would keep her favor. Play continues until someone meets either victory condition. If both conditions are achieved in the same round, the player with the 11+ points is the winner.

There are two tremendous strategic bits to Hanamikoji – when to use which actions, and predicting what your opponent might do. The order of your actions is entirely up to you, and in some sense depends on the cards you get. You may want to save the discard action until second or third, when you might already know some cards are worthless to you either way (e.g., the blue 3 geisha is already decided either way with two cards on one side, so the last card won’t change anything), but saving it till last might cause you to discard a card that would help you. Many players like to use the three-card action with three cards of the same color, since no matter what you get two and your opponent gets one, but that cedes the possibility of gaining control of two geishas rather than just one. The little decisions here go on and on in a way I find incredibly satisfying – like chess, but on a smaller scale.

Anticipating your opponent’s choices is, of course, inherent in lots of games with direct interaction, and here it comes into play in two ways. One is just trying to infer what geishas they might be trying to win, so you can choose where to parry and where to put cards to win your own geishas. You also need to understand their thinking, or at least try to do so, when choosing which cards to present to them in the three-card and two-pair actions, so that they’ll choose what you want them to choose. You can’t do this perfectly, since the card draws are random and you don’t see the cards they reserve or discard, but you can at least think about the odds of different scenarios. I love this part of the game, because, again, it’s a bit like chess, but with smaller trees of possible outcomes and a little randomness to help balance out small gaps in skill levels.

I’m due to revise my list of my favorite two-player games, and I have at least two newish ones in the basement to try (The Hunt & Broken and Beautiful, both from 2023) before I do so, but I think Hanamikoji has earned its way (back) on to the list. It’s so easy to teach, highly portable, has lovely art, and seems to be highly replayable, everything I’d want in a true two-player experience.

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→ November 21, 2023
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The Killer.

David Fincher’s Mank was a passion project for the director, but despite its critical acclaim and awards, it wasn’t a particularly enjoyable film, or even that interesting. His follow-up is both of those things, a neo-noir thrilled called The Killer that follows a hit man on his quest for revenge after a botched hit leads to an attack on his home and his girlfriend. (It’s exclusively on Netflix and in select theaters.)

Michael Fassbender plays the title character, whose real name we never learn; he uses a series of aliases that provide one of the movie’s best gags. The film opens with a long monologue from our antihero about the nature of his life and his work, all of it as he waits for his target to appear in Paris. The hit goes awry, and he’s forced to flee, but when he returns home he finds out that two people ransacked his (very nice) house in the Dominican Republic and violently assaulted his girlfriend. He works backwards from there to find out who the assailants were and who ordered the attack, and you can probably imagine what he does with each person he finds as he moves up the chain.

The Killer is all style and vibe, without trifles like character development or story arcs. You have to be on the wavelength of a genre film like this, just like you might with a mystery, and be comfortable with rooting for a ruthless, violent protagonist because he’s persuaded you that his cause is just. The opening scene is slow and meditative, but it’s probably three-fourths of the insight we’re going to get into the main character, because once he fires that single shot that sets the remainder of the story in motion, the plot never lets up.

One of the plot’s more curious aspects is that Fassbender’s character doesn’t kill everyone. He spares at least two people he encounters who he might have killed, one of whom wasn’t involved in the crime but could potentially identify him. He also doesn’t kill the dog, which is an interesting contrast to some of the people he does kill in what seems like … overkill is a poor word choice, I admit, but there’s one in particular that just didn’t seem necessary. Fassbender provides a voice-over through much of the film that makes us privy to his inner monologue, and thus to his personal ethos, and explains some of these choices, but there’s still some mystery left over to give you something to ponder after the film ends.

Fassbender, who had just one film credit between 2017 and this film, is superb in this role, entirely credible and chilling as someone with little to no moral compass and that ideal level of confidence that allows him to act like he belongs in every setting. The screenplay, by Se7en screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, gives that character nearly all of the air time, threading the needle between exploring the character and keeping him at arm’s length. Most of the other supporting performances are solid but minor, other than Tilda Swinton, who plays another contract killer, where I can’t decide if the role is ridiculous, or if she’s just playing it that way, or if I’m just reacting like this because she’s Tilda Swinton and I expect this from her.

Only one of the many confrontations the Killer has with his various targets turns into a fight scene – the rest involve a lot of talking, and then a gun happens – and it might be a tremendous one. I have no idea, because that scene is so unbelievably dark that I could barely tell anything that was happening, including whether Fassbender was hitting or getting hit. (Both, obviously, but I mean more specifically.) It’s part of a well-documented trend in movies and TV towards making everything too dark to see, but in this case it may have ruined one of the film’s best scenes. I can’t say for sure.

I’ve commented before that I can tolerate violence in film if it furthers the plot, but not suffering as entertainment, which is generally the idea in “torture porn” and slasher films. There is some extreme violence in The Killer and a couple of the kills are stomach-churning, so while I won’t defend its use of violence, I will say that the camera isn’t playing it for entertainment or laughs. Fassbender’s character kills in service of the plot, and it’s up to us to decide if we’re comfortable with some of them.

This isn’t as serious a work as some Fincher’s other films, but it’s a detour into a genre I particularly like (neo-noir, not murder and mayhem), and the lead performance really anchors the film. There’s enough moral ambiguity that it’s not strictly a revenge thriller, but it offers plenty of revenge and plenty of thrills, along with the slightly inscrutable antihero that neo-noir demands.

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→ November 3, 2023
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Nettle & Bone.

T. Kingfisher (the nom de plume of writer Ursula Vernon) won this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel for Nettle & Bone, a light fantasy novel that subverts many tropes of the genre while adhering to others as it follows its protagonist on a quest to save her sister, the Queen of the North Kingdom. It is a blast to read, with some wonderful side characters alongside our hero and a great balance of humor and darkness, although I’m not sure it has the thematic depth of some of the best winners of that honor.

Our hero is Marra, the youngest of three sisters in the tiny Harbor Kingdom, a city-state located around the midpoint of the coast between the Northern and Southern Kingdoms, protected by its strategic location and the desire of both neighbors to avoid having it fall into their rival’s hands. As the story begins, Marra’s eldest sister, Damia, is married to the young Prince and heir to the throne of the Northern Kingdom, but she dies in an equestrian accident before she can produce a son, so the Prince then marries the middle sister, Kania. When Marra goes to see Kamia as her sister is about to give birth, however, Kania gives her a cryptic warning, and subsequent events cause Marra to realize her sister is the victim of a violent husband. She finds a dust-witch to try to obtain a way to kill the Prince, which ultimately leads her on a journey across two kingdoms with a party that grows to four, not counting the chickens, and ends with a showdown in the royal chambers.

Nettle & Bone is a quest novel, and we get a classic adventuring party of a cleric, a fighter, and a couple of mages, roughly speaking, where the pleasure is in the interplay between these characters as well as the world-building. Kingfisher has a Gaimanesque knack for crafting weird and creepy magical realms, with more delightful settings here than I can count – very reminiscent of a well-crafted RPG campaign, but with the detail of a Neverwhere or Among Others, where you’re immersed in the scene even as the writer asks you to believe any number of impossible things. The goblin market is an obvious homage to Gaiman’s work, among others, but Kingfisher gives it enough unique flourishes that it stands on its own merits.

I absolutely tore through this book, and I’ve already recommended it to two strangers who asked about it when I was reading it in public. That said, I have two major criticisms of the book, although only one of them affected my enjoyment of the work. That one is straightforward – Marra is not that interesting of a character. Kingfisher sure as hell tries to give her some personality, but beyond making her a worrywart, she doesn’t have much to distinguish herself. She’s the observer of the action, a Nick Jenkins (from A Dance to the Music of Time), but all three of her companions on the quest are more compelling characters. Marra’s whole family is boring, honestly; Kania’s a cipher, her mother doesn’t even have a name, I think, and her father is somewhere else. Kingfisher’s strength may lie in creating side characters, which is a real skill and not something I wish to diminish, but the time we spend with Marra alone forms some of the least interesting pages in the book.

My second criticism of Nettle & Bone is an academic one, which is that I don’t see much of a theme here – and for many readers, that won’t matter at all. It didn’t affect my pleasure in reading the book, either; it’s great fun, I laughed quite a bit, and I enjoyed a lot of the time I spent with these characters and in this world. I usually don’t think much about deeper themes or meaning until a book is done, after which it’s often all I think about – what is the author trying to say? What might they want the reader to take away from the book? Marra is a strong female lead, and her world, like ours, is patriarchal, while two of her three companions on the quest are also women, so there’s no question the book has a feminist bent. Beyond that, however, I couldn’t discern any greater themes here. That’s fine for the average reader, maybe for the vast majority of readers, but if we’re comparing books for the purpose of an award like the Hugo, I think questions of theme and meaning do matter. That said, I haven’t read any of the other nominees yet, so I have no opinion on whether this book was worthy other than to say I loved every minute while I was reading it.

Next up: Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, a self-published, Kickstarted novel from 2014 that has spawned three Hugo-nominated sequels. I’m on page 10.

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→ November 1, 2023
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The Guest Cat.

I picked up Takashi Hiraide’s slim novel The Guest Cat on a whim at Midtown Scholar, the wonderful independent bookstore in Harrisburg, about a month and a half ago en route to a Senators game, drawn by the quirky cover, the small format, and the description that referred to the author as a poet, which if nothing else should mean the prose is interesting. It’s a strange, lyrical little book, lovely in its way, but also very much about grief and change, reminding me very much of the two novels I’ve read by Max Porter.

There is a cat, although the cat needs a host, and the hosts are a nameless couple who have no children and have what seems like a staid life in a Japanese city, working, living together, but without much spark or interest to their lives. The husband is our narrator, and describes the arrival of a neighbor’s cat who begins visiting the couple every day as part of its routine, once its owners have left for the day. Neither husband nor wife is especially fond of cats, or so they say, yet this cat, whom they eventually nickname Chibi, captures them both – especially the wife, who is just a wisp on the pages, surprisingly incorporeal in the husband’s telling. We know so little about her, which implies that perhaps he does, too, and he’s fascinated by just how much she cares for and about Chibi, even frying little fish just for the cat (I know people do this, but cooking explicitly for your pet is a bit much for me), and the cat’s visits eventually become a part of their quotidian lives. They even venture out, exploring the grounds where their cottage is, to follow the cat, meeting some neighbors and even gaining use of the main house as its owner leaves for a retirement facility.

Until, of course, one day Chibi doesn’t arrive, and the two of them find their highly predictable lives upended by his disappearance. To this point, they appear to have avoided any tragedies or other major events that might have derailed their lives – birth, school, work, death as the song goes – yet Chibi’s brief time in their lives jolts them out of their doldrums, and when he’s gone, they’re completely thrown. The journey, if you can even call it that, from that point to the end of the novel, pushes both husband and wife to reevaluate some of the givens in their lives and to consider life’s transience, and they end by making what are, for them, some pretty significant changes.

The novel also has a metafictional aspect, as the husband reveals that he wrote the novel we’re reading after Chibi disappeared, while the prose is spare but not austere, setting the scene with lithe descriptions of trees, rooms, and, yes, cats. The whole thing feels like a meditation, a small idea that Hiraide expanded into a broader commentary on how easily we slip into routines and lose sight of the brief nature of our lives. Perhaps he’s a cat person now, too, and is arguing that pets can give surprising meaning to our lives, making us appreciate the brevity of our lives because theirs are even shorter, or to see their carefree ways as a model for letting go and being free. I took it as a broader comment on the need for change in our lives, to avoid becoming stuck in routines and the drudgery of living day to day if we have the luxury and privilege to do so. The beauty in The Guest Cat, though, is in how such a simple fable can lead to a myriad of interpretations, and linger with you long after its title character has left the scene.

Next up: I’m more than halfway done with this year’s winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel, T. Kingfisher’s Nettle & Bone.

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