→ March 28, 2025
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Stations of the Tide.

Michael Swanwick’s Stations of the Tide won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1990, beating out one of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vor novels, Barrayar, and a William Gibson novel, The Difference Engine. Swanwick combines elements of fantasy and science fiction, including a significant amount of speculative writing that seems especially prescient today given the rise of (highly questionable) AI-powered bots. It’s a shame it’s undone by a trap that many white male sci-fi writers have fallen into: Swanwick is obsessed with sex, and writes about it like a teenaged boy.

Stations of the Tide takes place on a planet called Miranda, where the human civilization faces a catastrophic flood once a generation, for which they must prepare and evacuate while the ocean devours the land, destroying property but also helping renew the ecosystem. A rogue calling himself a wizard is promising residents that he can cast spells to help them survive the inundation, such as giving them gills to breathe underwater, and the interplanetary authorities suspect that he has absconded with proscribed technology stolen from them, so they send an agent, simply called the bureaucrat, to Miranda to track him down and retrieve it. This sets in motion a story that’s a blend between a spy novel and a paranoid thriller, moving through various settlements in tropical areas of Miranda that evoked Apocalypse Now for its contrast of a lush backdrop for social desolation.

The actual spy story within Stations of the Tide is its strength: The bureaucrat learns very early on that he can’t trust anyone, and his suspicions only deepen the further along he goes – except for any time a woman tries to seduce him, because he’s easier than Sunday morning. The small cadre of agents with and around him keep the circle of intrigue limited, as it’s clear early in the novel that someone has helped the wizard, named Gregorian, keep track of the investigation and the bureaucrat’s movements, but it’s not clear who’s behind it.

Swanwick’s speculations on technology include the use of holographic projections of people to allow them to be in more than one place at once, with the avatars able to act semi-autonomously and to even survive their creators. Not only does this allow the bureaucrat and his colleagues to work along several paths at once, but it allows the protagonist to operate across several (virtual) planes to try to figure out who’s double-crossing him. I imagine in 1990 this technology seemed fantastical, but today it seems possible, if undesirable, with Big Tech’s twin obsessions with LLMs and virtual worlds. Swanwick’s mind might have moved faster than his pen here, though, as his conceit of never using the bureaucrat’s name along with the fact that all of these officials using the technology are men can make it extremely confusing when real people and avatars are conversing.

The sex in this book veers from the unintentionally comic to the creepy, and it destroys the hallucinatory vibe that infuses most of the novel. Swanwick seems unable to conceive a female character who isn’t promiscuous, and the women in this book all exist almost entirely in their relationship to men. His descriptions of sex are awkward, at best, and betray the teenager’s fascination with anatomy over emotions, made worse by Swanwick repeatedly using the word “vagina” when he means something else. It reminded me of some of the worst sci-fi and fantasy novels I’ve read, like the later Dune sequels when Frank Herbert introduced the Honored Matres, or the first Game of Thrones book, or Snow Crash. Stations clearly came out in a different era, and it has aged extremely poorly.

There are some strong scenes in the book involving the bureaucrat and Gregorian’s agents, along with a reasonable climactic scene that uses something I probably should have seen coming but didn’t to resolve the final confrontation. Swanwick allows the bureaucrat to consider the moral implications of his actions and the authorities’ choices to limit technology transfer to these colony worlds, a theme that appeared here and there in the novel while becoming more prevalent near the end, opening up possible interpretations around paternalistic government, colonization, and regulations that tied the room together at the very end. It was enough to bump me up a half-grade or so, figuratively, to the point where I’d recommend the book if you don’t mind the bad sex writing. There’s enough suspense here to keep the story moving, and it turns out in the end that Swanwick did have some larger points to make. It’s not good enough to get me to pick up more of his work, but was worth the time I spent reading it.

Next up: Nell Zink’s The Wallcreeper.

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→ March 27, 2025
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Road House.

I don’t watch a lot of bad movies, by design. I’m not a professional critic, so I don’t have to watch any of them, and it’s only fun to pick a movie apart once in a blue moon. I’m not talking about when I watch an acclaimed movie and just don’t like it, but about a movie everyone kind of agrees is bad, one that shows the studio behind it thinks that audiences are dumb and will fork over cash for anything.

After seeing a few clips on TikTok from the movie Road House that made me laugh, I figured I’d give it a whirl, since it was free for me on Amazon Prime Video anyway. It’s a bad movie, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Dalton (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a former UFC fighter who now shows up at amateur fight nights as a ringer to make some cash; after one of those, he’s approached by Frankie (Jessica Williams), owner of a bar in the Florida Keys, who says she’s looking for a bouncer to deal with a group of thugs who are tearing up her bar night after night. Of course, he’s not interested, but after he tries to kill himself and bails at the last second, we see him arriving on a bus out in Frankie’s little town, where he’s greeted by a precocious teenager who runs a used book store with her dad, and then meets one uninteresting character after another before the fightin’ starts. Eventually, it turns out that the thugs aren’t just randomly harassing the Road House, but are doing so at the behest of an obnoxious nepo baby named Ben Brandt (Billy Magnussen), so Dalton’s in deeper than he thought.

There isn’t much plot here beyond that, and that’s fine; I’d argue that Road House would be worse if they made the story any more complicated. This is an action movie, and action movies need two things: action, and quips. Gyllenhaal turns out to be really good at delivering some funny soliloquies before beating the shit out of people; the screenwriters didn’t make him some sort of closet intellectual – when Frankie says that Hemingway once drank at the Road House, Dalton isn’t impressed and just says “good for you!” – but made him just smart and funny enough to make him an interesting character to watch. He’s got a back story, of course, and we get most but not all of the explanation, which is also fine because who cares? Not every character in every movie needs a tragic back story.

After Dalton dispatches the first wave of thugs, Brandt’s imprisoned father, irritated that his son can’t get the job done, hires a guy simply named Knox (Conor McGregor, who lost a civil rape case in November), who has several tattoos on him that read “Knox” in case he forgets who he is. He’s indestructible, extremely violent, and permanently smiling. He’s also got quips. Dalton can’t handle him the way he handled all of the Brandts’ other goons, so we’re heading for a final showdown between the two of them for the fate of the Road House.

Gyllenhaal is a blast in this movie; he looks like he’s having fun, and he’s got that brooding charm that’s a cliché across action films, but everything about the performance is restrained (other than the beatings, which involve a lot of mediocre CGI). There’s a natural cadence to his delivery that sounds even more authentic when he’s surrounded by people who either can’t act or were told to act like they couldn’t act; nearly everyone else in this film is just bad, even when delivering minor lines. There’s just enough depth to Dalton’s character to make him compelling, and to make you understand why he always seems to stop short of the critical hit in every fight.

I also regret to report that Conor McGregor is really quite good as Knox. The character is a psycho, and McGregor seems to have no problem whatsoever slipping into that archetype. I wonder why. His ridiculous swagger plays well in fight scenes and regular ones, and he’s pretty good at delivering the quips we expect from this sort of character. Even his gait is funny. The film’s a year old, so I don’t think this is a big spoiler any more, but Knox survives the film and I imagine he’s going to be in the reported sequel, but I hope they get someone other than McGregor to play him – or just make up a thinly-veiled version of him to be the new antagonist.

Everything else about the movie is kind of bad. The dialogue from any character other than Dalton is stilted and overexpository; nobody talks like these people and I’m not referring to their accents. There’s so much explaining how this particular hamlet is a small place and everyone knows everyone and things are different here that I assume the screenwriters (or whoever cleaned up the script) think the audience is even dumber than the usual one. Did you catch that the previous three bouncers Frankie used at the bar had names starting with A, B, and C, before capital-D Dalton? Or did you guess who the sheriff actually was before it was revealed? I was mildly grateful that they kept the obvious romantic pairing at a very superficial level – they chose to make Dalton fairly uninterested in the character, who I haven’t even mentioned because she is so boring, which would have just been a distraction from the main throughline anyway.

So yeah, Road House is a bad movie. But I was entertained the whole time. I didn’t even mention that there’s some great live music from bands playing at the Road House, often up there while there’s mayhem a few feet away, or that one of the thugs ends up part of a great running gag with Dalton. It’s the best bad movie I’ve seen in a while. (Oh, and I’ve never seen the original, if anyone’s curious.)

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→ March 26, 2025
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Adolescence.

For three episodes, the new Netflix series Adolescence delivers some of the best television content I’ve ever seen, both in writing and in performances. Each episode is recorded as one continuous shot, and walks us through a different hour (roughly) in a different day across the case of a 13-year-old boy accused of murdering a female classmate. That fourth episode, however, makes some curious editorial choices, shifting the focus to characters who probably don’t belong at the center of this kind of story, and even some strong acting can’t totally salvage the conclusion.

The first episode opens with two police officers, DI Bascombe (Ashley “Asher D” Walters) and DS Frank (Faye Marsay), as they prepare to storm a suburban house to arrest a suspect, 13-year-old Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper, in his first film role). We follow them in the police van to the station, through processing and the initial interrogation, and it’s only near the very end of the episode that we learn any details about the crime and why the police think he did it. The second episode, taking place two days later, focuses on the two cops and their investigation, particularly DI Bascombe’s interest in learning a motive. Because much of the theme of the series is the social difficulties that teenagers face as a result of social media, this turns out to be a significant episode for our understanding of Jamie’s potential motives and what his life was like before the murder.

The third episode is the big one, the one that’s going to win all the awards for writing and for its two actors, as nearly the entire hour takes place in a room at the juvenile detention center where Jamie is being held as he awaits trial. Briony Ariston (Erin Doherty) is an independent psychologist hired by his attorneys to provide a report on his state of mind and understanding of everything that’s happening; it’s not their first such appointment, so they can jump right into the conversation, and it becomes heated and intense as Jamey displays an inability to regulate his emotions that we haven’t seen previously. It’s a tour de force performance from Cooper, as the one-shot gimmick requires him to shapeshifter from petulant teenager into a demon who can’t contain his rage and frustration in a matter of seconds. It ends on an extremely powerful note, maybe the defining moment of the series.

That fourth episode, though, is a letdown, even though series co-creator Stephen Graham, who plays Jamie’s father Eddie, delivers a strong performance as this episode’s protagonist. The camera is on him, his wife, and their daughter for the entire hour, focusing on the aftereffects of Jamie’s arrest, which of course has upended their lives and made them pariahs in the neighborhood. There’s even a horrifying and too-accurate scene where a big-box hardware store employee recognizes Eddie and reveals that he thinks Jamie is innocent, citing a bunch of the counterfactual nonsense you might encounter in the Qanon-adjacent corners of the internet. It’s such a reflection of the world in which a third of the United States seems to be living, one totally disconnected from reality, willing to ignore the obvious facts in favor of lunatic conspiracy theories.

This episode makes a choice to center Jamie’s family, which continues a theme of the entire series, which is that the family of the victim, Katie, doesn’t exist. We never see Katie’s parents, or any grieving family members. The closest we get is her friend. This even echoes comments from DS Frank in episode 2 about how a murder like this tends to cast the spotlight on the killer, not the victim, only to have the victim and her family erased from the series, especially the last half. The entire focus in the final hour of Adolescence is on how hard this has all been on Jamie’s parents and his sister. And this has been done before: it’s the entire theme of We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lynne Ramsey’s excellent but almost unwatchable adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s novel about the mother of a boy who murders a bunch of his classmates at high school. That film is an incisive portrait of a woman tormented by guilt over her parenting, whether her decisions somehow led her son to commit this atrocity, whether she did enough to try to stop him when it was clear that something about him was off – and why her husband wouldn’t listen. Adolescence doesn’t grapple with its perpetrator’s parents at anywhere near the same depth, which is an acceptable choice if the script also chose to acknowledge that there is another family dealing with an even greater grief. Graham and his co-writer Jack Thorne chose instead to focus only on Jamie’s family, and that undercuts so much of what the series aimed to accomplish. There’s way too much good in the first three-quarters of the series for this particular choice to undo it; I just kept waiting for them to show Katie’s family, somehow, and the failure to do so took something away from the series for me.

(Apropos of nothing, I could have sworn Jemma Redgrave appeared in the initial scene of the raid on Jamie’s house, but she’s not credited anywhere. I’m curious if anyone else thought they spotted her.)

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→ March 24, 2025
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Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them.

Prof. Antonio Padilla is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist at the University of Nottingham who has also appeared numerous times on the Numberphile Youtube series, including this incredibly popular video where he shows how the sum of all natural numbers (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + … ?) is actually -1/12. It’s ridiculous – Padilla concedes that it looks like “a bit of mathematical hocus-pocus”, but the pudding is in the proof, or something, and he points out that 1) this only works if you’re adding all of the natural numbers, which means you don’t stop at any point, and 2) this sum appears in physics, where we don’t see infinities (and if we do, it’s a problem).

Padilla describes the interplay between physics and some numbers at both extremes of the mathematical scale, both the very small and the very large, in his book Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them: A Journey to the Edge of Physics, an intense but mostly accessible book that runs through nine distinct numbers, from zero to a googolplex to 10-120 to infinity, and uses them to explain some key concepts or findings about the nature of everything. He waltzes through the history of math – just about every famous figure there makes an appearance at some point, which will make you realize just how many great mathematicians ended up losing their marbles – and just about always finishes up somewhere in the realm of quantum physics, whether it’s things we know or things we think we know, or occasionally things we still don’t know. There’s even a chapter on the cosmological constant, which was in the news just this past week with the revelations that dark energy isn’t as immutable as we believed, which implies that the cosmological constant is, in fact, inconstant.

When Padilla is talking physics and cosmology, at either end of the scale, he’s engaging and by and large easy to follow, other than perhaps near the end of the book when he’s introduced the panoply of particles that populate the quantum world – all the quarks, leptons, and gauge bosons that we know or think exist – where keeping any of them straight was a bit more than I could handle. It doesn’t end up mattering much to the narratives of those chapters, as Padilla’s point is the relevance of the numbers in question, although I ended up a little frustrated that I didn’t entirely know what was going on at some points.

It’s the mathy stuff where Padilla struggles to communicate in a way that a typical reader might follow, and perhaps that’s just a function of the size of the numbers he’s discussing. The chapter on the number TREE(3), which is so large that we can’t even notate it, let alone comprehend it, ultimately lost me not in its prose but in its sea of notation. TREE(3) is much larger than the number of atoms scientists believe exist in the entire universe (around 1080, itself a number that we can’t easily envision), a number so big that the universe won’t “allow” it to exist – according to the Poincaré recurrence theorem, at least, which says that the universe will “reset” before TREE(3) happens in any sense of the word. Padilla uses TREE(3) to explain that theorem and the possibility that the universe is a hologram, that we live in two dimensions and only think we perceive the third, but by the end of that chapter I didn’t understand why TREE(3) got us there in the first place. (It doesn’t help that Padilla discusses all of this several chapters before he gets into string theory, which underpins the holographic principle, so we’re walking without a net for a while.)

Padilla is a gifted communicator, clearly, and his enthusiasm for the subject comes through everywhere in the book – it’s just that the topic itself is abstruse and assumes some familiarity with physics and/or with some branches of math like infinite series and set theory. He’s better at explaining concepts like particle spin, which he points out isn’t spin like what we’re talking about in baseball but an innate characteristic of a particle (any more than red or green quarks have those actual colors), than at explaining concepts like the nested powers of TREE(3) or Gödel’s incompleteness proof. It all left me with the sense that I’d enjoyed the book, but that the audience for it might be very narrow – you have to know enough to follow him through his various rambles through math and physics, but not so much that you already know all of this stuff. I was at least lucky enough to mostly be in the first camp, even though I got lost a few times, but that’s just because I love these topics and have read a lot of books about them. It’s not the physics I learned in high school, and not really the math I learned there either.

Next up: Michael Swanwick’s Stations of the Tide, winner of the 1991 Nebula Award for Best Novel.

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→ March 22, 2025
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Stick to baseball, 3/22/25.

I’m back from Arizona, and wrote five scouting notebooks while I was out there: on the Mariners-Guardians Breakouts Game (plus some Brewers notes), on the Giants-Rangers Breakouts Game (plus some Rockies/Angels notes), on the White Sox-Rockies and Reds-Brewers Breakouts Game (plus some Dodgers notes), on some Dodgers & Guardians prospects, and on some Royals & Rangers prospects. I wanted to do a Klawchat on the flight home but we were delayed an hour-plus and then I fell asleep a few minutes after takeoff.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: Teen Vogue’s cover story is a profile of Vivian Jenna Wilson, who happens to be the estranged daughter of Elon Musk, and who has some interesting things to say about her father and on the fight for basic rights for trans people.
  • M. Gessen, a trans immigrant to the United States, wrote in the New York Times about the “hidden” motive behind Trump’s war on trans rights – which isn’t that hidden, as it’s one of the first steps in the totalitarian playbook: Find a vulnerable minority and demonize them, casting them out of the polity, and then move on to the next one. One time it was the Jews (okay, more than one time). One time it was the Tutsis. One time it was the intellectuals. This time it’s trans people.
  • I watched Flow at home a couple of weeks ago, and my dog, who almost never looks at any screen at all, seemed to be watching it. Turns out I might not have been imagining it after all – dogs like that movie.
  • Two board game Kickstarters to highlight this week – Pirates of the High Teas, a light strategy game from a small publisher that tries to bring diverse designers into the space; and Misfit Heroes, a card-crafting game from Phil Walker-Harding.

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→ March 21, 2025
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Arizona eats, March 2025 edition.

The best thing I ate at any new (to me) restaurant this week was chicken, oddly enough. Mister Pio is a small Peruvian chicken spot in Arcadia that has a barebones menu: half chicken, quarter chicken, chicken sandwich, fries, drinks. The chicken comes with a side salad and aji verde sauce. The chicken is really incredible; I read online that it’s dry-brined with a mix of 21 spices (and then some) for two days, then it’s cooked for an hour and a half on a rotisserie over coals, but man, it’s just about perfect. It’s salty and deeply savory, and any fat under the skin has long rendered out, so the skin itself is paper-thin and just covered in flavor from the dry rub and the smoke, while the meat itself is extremely tender and juicy. The fries are fried to order (or at least mine were) and they’re properly salty. Mister Pio is only open noon to 8 pm, Tuesday through Saturday. Make a point of going if you’re anywhere in the vicinity – they’re less than 15 minutes from ASU’s park and not that much farther from Scottsdale.

Mensho Ramen is a Japanese chain that has three locations in California and now two in the Valley, one in Phoenix (where I went) and one in Mesa. Their menu is very simple, with just two broth types, one from chicken and one vegan, although the predominant protein across the entire menu is beef, specifically A5 Wagyu. I had their signature ramen, replacing the Wagyu with extra duck, although the pork was the best of the three proteins (there’s also chicken). This is really about the broth, which is as rich and savory as a typical tonkotsu broth, and the noodles, which are a little thicker than you might normally find, and are truly al dente. There’s less extra stuff in the bowl unless you chose more add-ins, but it doesn’t need anything more than the noodles and broth if the goal is flavor – and I say that as someone who likes all of the stuff you can typically add to ramen, like fish cakes or mushrooms or bamboo shoots. This is just exceptionally good, umami-rich broth, and I would guess it’s hard to mess up when you start with a base that good.

Uchi recently opened an outpost in Scottsdale, the seventh location of the award-winning sushi & Japanese restaurant by Beard winner Tyson Cole, whose first location is still going in Austin. (Now-disgraced Top Chef winner Paul Qui got his start there as well.) It’s a splurge meal to put it mildly, but this is some of the best raw fish I have ever had anywhere, and the best dishes I had during the omakase were generally the simplest. Highlights included the flounder, the Tasmanian ocean trout, the New Zealand king salmon, and their signature dessert called “fried milk,” which has a dark chocolate ganache, sweet cream ice cream, chocolate wafers, and little fried orbs that taste of coffee and whatever cereal they use that day as the coating. The worst dish was the grilled hamachi collar, which was an enormous portion but slightly overcooked and lacking much flavor on its own. It’s one of the most expensive meals I’ve ever had, so even saying “it was worth it” seems hollow, but at the least I can say that you are getting exceptional quality of ingredients for the cost.

Sfizio Modern Italian Kitchen is up north on the 101 just off the Tatum Road exit, run by a Calabrese chef named Rocco (of course). They make their pasta in house, so even though the pizzas looked good (baked in a giant oven right off the dining room), I had to go with the rigatoni alla vodka, which was delicious and different than any version I’ve had before. The sauce was extremely light in color and totally smooth, so I assume it used tomato paste or passata, and had no pork in it, coming with a dollop of fresh ricotta on top. I make it with onion, pancetta or guanciale (or bacon), hand-crushed tomatoes, and basil, so it’s a chunkier sauce with more texture. Vodka sauce isn’t a traditional Italian dish, and there’s a dispute over whether it’s even Italian in origin, so there’s no “right” or authentic way to make it. As long as you don’t overdo the cream, I’m probably going to like it. My friend and I split the focaccia starter, which comes with a delicious pesto-ricotta blend, but the focaccia itself was obviously made that day and served its primary function, sopping up some of the sauce that remained when I finished the pasta. The chef more or less forced me to try the tiramisu for dessert, and I appreciated the fact that it was less sweet than most varieties, with a little more kick from the rum. I do want to go back to try the pizza, though.

The Nach is a food truck parked inside the patio at the bar Sazerac downtown, around the corner from Futuro Coffee and the original (ish) Matt’s Big Breakfast location, serving al pastor, chicken, and shrimp street tacos, burritos, and quesadillas with a few additional items and sides. The chicken was better than the shrimp, with much more flavor to the meat itself, and I would definitely get the $2 guacamole as an add-on, which is more than enough to add to all three tacos and maybe have a little left over. The chicken was salty and slightly tart from its sauce, while the shrimp was perfectly cooked but under seasoned.

Beginner’s Luck is a new all-day outpost from the folks behind Citizen Public House and the Gladly, and eater.com recommended their breakfast in particular. I had their breakfast sandwich, as the server wavered when I asked whether she recommended that or the shakshuka, and it was fine, a good breakfast sandwich, a better iteration of the kind you get at First Watch or the like. I want to try a different meal there before coming to any real judgment but this wasn’t worth returning for breakfast beyond the cool space tucked in an alley just around the corner from Old Town.

I did play more of the hits, so to speak, returning to some old favorites. I went to Citizen Public House for the first time at least since before the pandemic; the menu has changed – the crispy salmon was outstanding, especially the sherry beurre blanc, and they still make the best Negroni for whatever reason – but the vibe is the same. Tacos Chiwas still has the best tacos I’ve had out in the Valley, but I went to Cocina Chiwas again and was disappointed in the food this time around. The menu is more beef-centered than I remembered, and the more vegetable-forward dishes I ordered were underpowered. Pane Bianco is now serving New York-style pizza by the slice, although the day I got there they had already sold out, so I had to suffer through their focaccia-style pizza, which was outstanding as always. Pizzeria Virtu was solid, although everything was maybe a half-grade down from the first time I went there. was I stopped in to Los Altos Public Market for one of their giant shortbread cookies and an agua Fresca, something I haven’t done in years but that I used to do every visit when I first went to ESPN and started coming to Arizona once and then twice a year. I did breakfasts at the Hillside Spot, Crèpe Bar, and Matt’s, as usual. I had coffee at Cartel (twice), Futuro (once, great space but you get some characters in there), and Giant (once), which is my favorite space to sit and write anywhere in the Valley, and Giant’s now using their own beans after they’d switched to ROC, a local roaster that goes darker than I like. I didn’t get to Valentine, which was recommended to me by two different baseball people, but that’s on the hit list for the next trip.

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→ March 20, 2025
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The Apprentice.

The Apprentice is a decidedly mediocre movie about a decidedly mediocre man. That man, who at the moment I write this is the President of the United States and is driving a serious constitutional crisis, is not boring, whatever you think of his behavior and professed beliefs. It makes it so hard to believe just how boring The Apprentice is, even when it’s trying its hardest to find something interesting in the story, often by humanizing its main character. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

The story begins with a young Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) trying to buy a decrepit building near Times Square with the intention of turning it into a luxury hotel, against skepticism from all corners – including his father, Fred, a real estate developer himself and a dead stereotype of the father who never likes anything his kids do. Trump happens to be in a private club where Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) is holding court, and Cohn, hearing Trump has just been accepted for membership, calls him over to meet him, clearly seeing business opportunities for the future. Trump turns to Cohn to try to get a gigantic tax break from New York City, which was in dire financial straits at the time, and Cohn extorts a city official to make it happen, setting off a decade-long business partnership where Cohn teaches Trump the secrets of his success, much of which you can see in Trump’s last decade in the political sphere, including repeating lies long enough for people to think they’re true and to never admit defeat regardless of the evidence. Along the way, Trump meets Ivana (Maria Bakalova), seduces her with his money and apparent largesse, has a couple of kids we barely see, watches his brother Fred Jr. drink himself to death, and pays very little to no taxes anywhere.

I’m obviously no fan of Trump’s, but there is plenty in his life story to provide enough fodder for an interesting biopic. The Apprentice is more of a connect-the-dots picture of Trump, giving a more intriguing picture of the last decade of Roy Cohn’s life than it does of anything about its putative protagonist, and seeks to explain Trump’s rise as a truth-denying right-wing politician as the result of his father not giving him enough praise when he was younger, leading Trump to become the sort of striver for whom no victory is complete and no success is ever enough. It’s simplistic and hackneyed, and means that when both men are on screen, Cohn is always the more compelling figure – something that is helped by Strong’s better performance, while Stan’s performance is an impersonation, one where you can’t forget that it’s just Sebastian Stan in a bad rug enunciating certain words the way Trump does. (Stan getting a Best Actor nomination for this movie is really ridiculous. Ethan Herisse of Nickel Boys was far more deserving, to pick just one actor from another acclaimed 2024 movie.) You’re not that likely to forget that it’s Jeremy Strong as Cohn, but there’s more depth to the portrayal here, especially near the end of Cohn’s life, as he was dying of AIDS (or a related illness) and still refused to concede that he had the disease or even that he might not be heterosexual.

There’s a thread within the movie that attempts to humanize Trump by showing the dynamics of his immediate family, including a successful father who belittles Fred Jr. for choosing to become a pilot rather than joining the family business and then belittles Donald for failing to live up to (perhaps unreasonable expectations). Fred Jr. is an alcoholic from the get-go in the film, but the script implies that their father drove him to drink, and he’s really here just for the one scene where Donald refuses to help him before he dies from the disease. This thread seems to imply that Donald Trump was, at one point, a regular person with some empathy and the ability to feel things like grief, fear, and sorrow, but that an emotionally distant and abusive father pushed that out of him and created an insatiable need for the tangible trappings of success – money, power, fame, and women – that eventually led him to run for President.

The Apprentice also makes a regrettable choice in showing Trump raping Ivana, based on her accusation in her divorce deposition, a claim she sort of walked back later. The issue isn’t whether it’s true, but whether it belongs in the movie: It doesn’t say anything about Trump’s character we didn’t already know, and the film isn’t otherwise interested in much of anything about Ivana or her marriage to Trump, so the result is it appears that the scene is included just to be controversial or lurid. If the script had spent more time exploring their relationship, which often seems transactional in the depiction here, maybe there would be some justification, but Ivana is mostly a prop and Bakalova is largely wasted in the role anyway. It just comes off as cheap, lazy writing in a script that has very little time for any women characters.

I find it hilarious that Trump and his organization tried to stop anyone from showing or distributing this movie – there is nothing here we haven’t heard before, and if anything it shows him doing the stuff his adherents believe he’s good at, like making deals and running roughshod over his adversaries. The film did come out, and hit theaters, and earn praise and award nominations, and it didn’t make a whit of difference. Most people already have an opinion of Trump that is set in stone; if the Access Hollywood tape didn’t dissuade his supporters, this movie isn’t going to do anything, either. It’s just a mediocre biopic of someone who, at this moment, is busy trying to hollow out the federal government and use what’s left to target his real and perceived enemies. Maybe after he’s dead someone will make a better film about his life and motivations. This ain’t it.

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→ March 19, 2025
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So Much Blue.

So Much Blue may be one of Perceval Everett’s lesser-known novels, as it hasn’t received a film adaptation or any major awards, but I suspect also because it doesn’t have any of the speculative or fantastical elements of his more famous or popular works. His prose and characterization translate beautifully to the realist mode, which isn’t surprising, and in this pensive work about a middle-aged painter dealing with the weight of memories and past failings Everett gives the deepest exploration of a character I’ve seen in the four of his novels I’ve read.

Kevin Pace is a painter, married with two kids, living what would appear from the outside to be a comfortable upper-middle-class life with the usual problems you’d expect to find in a story about a suburban family. Everett intertwines that present-day narrative, which includes a secret painting that Pace won’t show anybody, not even his wife or his best friend, with two narratives from the past: one from 1979 where he joins his best friend on a dangerous trip to El Salvador to try to find and rescue the best friend’s ne’er-do-well brother, and one from ten years before the present day where Kevin had an affair with a French painter about twenty years his junior.

The 1979 narrative is by far the most compelling of the three, as it’s part thriller, part buddy comedy, and is driven by the uncertainty of how it’s going to turn out beyond knowing that Kevin and his best friend survived. Yet the depiction of the affair is the most interesting because Everett avoids the two typical ways of writing about that topic: he doesn’t judge Kevin’s actions, and he certainly doesn’t condone them, but lets the character’s words and behaviors speak for him and the reader to do the judging. Kevin knows he’s doing something terrible, but he does it anyway and has to live with the consequences.

Those consequences are the real theme of the novel – what happened in 1979, where a ridiculous, foolhardy endeavor that starts with good intentions and eccentric characters ends in violence, and what happened in Paris both weigh tremendously on Kevin, with their impact threatening to unravel his marriage and family and to stall his career. The present-day narrative also has a significant event that forces Kevin to make a choice, and he makes the wrong one, again, even though in that case it seems like the right decision at the time, after which he has several chances to set things right and can’t bring himself to do it, a subplot that especially resonated with me.

Everett’s development of Kevin as a character across three time periods, each of which sees him change and grow in some sense (even if it’s not always positive), shows a level of craft I at least hadn’t seen in the other three novels of his I’ve read. There’s a depth of understanding of Kevin as a person, as a man, as a middle-aged man, and as a very flawed man who is still reeling from events that happened thirty years earlier, that rivals the character development in just about any contemporary novel I can recall. Whether you agree with Kevin’s choices, including the decisions he makes to keep things secret, or his own assessment of those choices, Everett’s depiction of all of Kevin shows incredible insight into the character and how people think and feel about complex situations.

As you might expect from the title, color is a recurring motif and symbol in So Much Blue, with that particular color coming up repeatedly, as the secret painting in Kevin’s shed contains various shades of blue, and he refers more than once to the fact that traditional Chinese had just one word for blue and for green. Blue itself can carry multiple meanings in art, from the  most obvious one, depression (is Kevin depressed? Is he hiding his depression from his family?), to the way painters use blue to represent distance, using more blue to show that buildings or other objects are farther from the viewer. Blue is also the color we associate with the unattainable; the sky is blue from the ground, but when we ascend a mountain or a building, we don’t get any closer to the blue, as it remains beyond our reach. The ocean is blue from a distance, but when we’re in the water, it’s clear. Kevin expresses an ambivalent relationship with the color even as he fills his hidden painting with it; is that a representation of his unfulfilled desires, a depression he wants to keep locked away, or his attempt to create distance between himself and the things he doesn’t want to remember?

Everett is approaching Ann Patchett as my favorite living American writer. She crafts incredible stories with beautiful, lyrical prose, filling the pages with believable and three-dimensional characters, while he ranges from the wildly inventive to biting satire to compassionate character study. It’s hard to believe all four of the books of his I’ve read all came from the same mind. He’s some sort of wizard.

Next up: I just finished Cho Nam-ju’s Saha and started Antonio Padilla’s Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them: A Journey to the End of Physics.

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→ March 18, 2025
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September 5.

September 5 takes the story of the murder of most of the Israeli Olympic team by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Olympics and tells it from a novel perspective: that of the ABC producers and staff broadcasting the Olympics to the United States audience. The shift makes it as much a story about journalism and about the way people react to crises in real time as a story about the attack itself, allowing the film to hold the tragedy at arm’s length without trivializing its impact, and the result is a true thriller even if you already know all of the details of the ending. (It’s streaming free on Paramount+ or you can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

We begin behind the scenes with what seems like another day of coverage, watching Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) decide to focus on the despair of one of the losing swimmers after one of Mark Spitz’s victories, along with a mundane argument about what events to air between Arledge and two of his lieutenants in the control room, Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro) and Marvin Baden (Ben Chaplin). Not long afterwards, several other staffers, including the translator Marianne (Leonie Benesch), think they hear gunshots, and soon afterwards the group learns of the attack and the first killings, leading to a series of decisions of how to cover the events – doing so with a staff and crew there to cover sports, not breaking news, and certainly not this kind of crisis – and how best to leverage their position to benefit ABC. The producers even resort to some subterfuge to get a staffer inside the police perimeter, stare down German authorities who storm the control room to shut them down, and try to learn the fate of the hostages – with the last leading to the one big mistake that the decision-makers make over the course of crisis.

I’m a sucker for a good journalism story, so September 5 is catnip to me, and this movie does an excellent job of keeping the tension ratcheted up to 10 while barely leaving the control room, driving almost everything through dialogue. The film was nominated for Best Original Screenplay at this year’s Oscars, and that’s its greatest strength – there’s no fat on this script, and even though the crisis unfolds outside of the room where our characters are, the film doesn’t lose the claustrophobic sense that comes with a movie in a single, enclosed setting. It’s also unusual in the way it creates so much tension through a story where none of the named characters are ever in any sort of peril

The script doesn’t quite pay sufficient attention to the human tragedy that drives the drama in the control room, however. There are some mentions here and there of individual athletes, and a discussion of the possibility that someone might be shot live on camera where his parents might see it, but by and large this is a movie about the people in the control room. You may argue it’s just not that kind of movie, or that its lean running time – which is just right for the story it’s telling – requires it to skimp on treating the tragedy as such; I think the script could have done more to humanize the events at its core, and in the process giving its characters more empathy in the moment, unless Arledge and Mason and Bader were all just extremely callous men in real life. (Marianne is the one member of the big four characters who isn’t based on a real person, but Benesch – who was outstanding in 2023’s The Teachers’ Lounge – is so damn good here that I didn’t mind the fabrication one bit.)

The three actors portraying the three real-life ABC employees are all solid, but Magaro – who was excellent in a secondary role in Past Lives and as a mentally ill man in Showing Up – is the standout here, in part because his character has some more complexity and ends up confronting the biggest decision of the day, the one that happens to go wrong for the group. Sarsgaard and Chaplin are solid, but their characters can seem inert by comparison to Mason or Marianne, who show more emotion and seem more attuned to the human tragedy taking place just a few hundred yards away.

This movie is just too much in my wheelhouse for me to dislike it; I was riveted for most of its 90 minutes, once the attack begins and the movie just kicks into drive, never downshifting until the last few minutes. I can recognize its flaws with some separation from watching it, but I was probably as engrossed in September 5 as I’ve been in any movie I’ve watched from the 2024 cycle. It’s so well-told and well-paced that I never had the mental bandwidth to consider what might be missing.

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→ March 17, 2025
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Interior Chinatown.

Interior Chinatown is one of the most inventive, unusual, and funny books I’ve read in the last several years. It’s as if Percival Everett wrote a book about the Chinese immigrant experience in America, while satirizing Hollywood’s special sort of pigeonholing discrimination for people of east Asian descent along the way.

Charles Yu writes Interior Chinatown as if it’s a film treatment – all of the daily occurrences in our protagonist Willis Wu’s life come through the lens of a police procedural called Black and White, starring a Black male cop and a white female cop who have the usual not-witty banter and unaddressed sexual tension. (It reminded me of those abysmal Bacardi commercials about a pair of spies or whatever they were named … Bacardi and Cola. I’ll let you guess which was the Black guy.) Willis is a Generic Asian Male who usually plays Background Oriental Male, but hopes to work his way up to Kung Fu Guy some day, a status achieved by his father, who is now a sad, drunken Old Asian Man. The lives of Willis and his neighbors in Chinatown are split between the way they act when they’re on screen, falling into accented English and stereotypical behaviors, and when they’re off it, both of which constrain their futures, seen through Willis’s parents. The one exception is Willis’s Older Brother, who was on his way to becoming Kung Fu Guy but left Chinatown to go to law school, disappearing from the scene literally and figuratively. Willis eventually reaches a breaking point with this life and demands a bigger role, which he gets, but when he’s killed on the show he has to take 45 days off before he can work again – which puts a damper on his budding romance with another character on the show, Karen Lee.

The whole endeavor is gloriously absurd and Yu never breaks with the conceit. Everything is theater, and written as such, right down to the font choice and the equivalent of chapter and section breaks. The dialogue from the show is spot-on with the nonsense we see on copaganda network shows, and even the Black actor/character points out that he’s pigeonholed in his own way. (Yu could have kept going – south Asian characters, Muslim or Arab characters, and so on, each placed in their own little buckets by oh-so-progressive Hollywood.) It’s quite a trick to make racism and discrimination funny; Everett has done it, Paul Beatty did it beautifully in The Sellout, but very few have pulled it off like Yu does here.

Yu uses the device of the TV show as a metaphor for the immigrant experience, and there’s a layer here I know I can’t fully appreciate as someone who’s not Asian and whose parents were born and raised in the U.S. The idea of parents giving up something of themselves to try to make their kids’ lives better, and the kids striving to do better than their parents did in a system that doesn’t want to let them do so, come through in the depiction of the TV show that won’t even consider Asian-Americans as anything but background players.

There’s also a hazard in finding a credible way to conclude any story this inventive, something Everett hasn’t always done (The Trees comes to mind), but Yu pulls it off by both talking fast and switching venues for the big finish. The whole novel moves quickly, as Yu’s prose is light and there’s a lot of white space on the pages anyway, but once we get to the last two sections things start flying even with more exposition from Willis and Older Brother. I bought it, at least, and could see how Yu might map what happens in the book to some of the more positive stories of second-generation immigrants here. I can certainly see why this won the National Book Award in 2020 – it’s a tremendous book and one that says something important and new about American life.

(I haven’t seen the TV series adaptation, which premiered on Hulu a few months ago.)

Next up: Speaking of Percival Everett, I just finished his 2017 novel So Much Blue and am now on Cho Nam-Joo’s Saha.

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