→ April 23, 2025
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Surely You Can’t Be Serious.

My favorite movie when I was a kid was Top Secret!, the third feature and second studio film from the writing team of Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker, who were, of course, responsible for Airplane! and the greatest television series of all time, Police Squad! I actually didn’t see the full Airplane! until much later, probably because my parents thought it was stupid … and it is stupid, gloriously so, and so much of it still holds up today.

Jim Abrahams died in 2024 at age 80, but not long before his death, the trio collaborated on Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!, a hilarious recounting of the making of that movie and their lives and careers up to that point. A friend suggested I track down the audiobook, which you can get on Apple Books or Amazon, because it’s read by the authors with a huge cast of people reading their own reminiscences from working on the film – including stars Robert Hays and Julie Hagerty – and comedians who remember how influential the film was in their lives and careers. Even Michael Eisner and Barry Diller, both studio execs who were there as the film was greenlit and produced, chime in. It’s a blast, not just funny, but fascinating because of how the trio recall coming into the movie business as rank amateurs, having to figure it out as they went along while also convincing established actors to go along with a script many of them didn’t understand until they saw the finished product.

The three men were childhood friends from Wisconsin who naturally always gravitated towards comedy, and while in college in Madison they created a playhouse where they put on sketch-comedy shows, eventually settling on the name Kentucky Fried Theater. They took that show to Los Angeles and turned it into a movie called, of course, Kentucky Fried Movie, written by ZAZ and directed by a then-unknown John Landis, who went on to direct Animal House because of his work on this film. They’d already started work on the film that would become Airplane!, which was built around a spoof of a mediocre air-disaster film called Zero Hour, from which the trio cribbed not just the framework of the story but entire bits of dialogue. The resulting movie was like nothing else, packed with jokes, non sequiturs, sight gags, puns, wordplay, and an inexplicable shot of a topless woman, and it was both a huge box-office success and a turning point in the history of comedy.

I rewatched Airplane while about halfway through the book, and most of it is still pretty funny, probably because so many of the jokes are just silly, like the one that provides the title of the book, the “The hospital? What is it?” running gag, and several of the visual jokes that it would be pointless to describe. It’s hard to watch that film, then or now, and think that some of the main actors, like Leslie Nielsen, Lloyd Bridges, and Robert Stack, were seen as dramatic actors incapable of comedy. They all nail the deadpan style that ZAZ wanted, and it’s essential to the film that they do so. Only Bridges really does anything overtly funny, when he sniffs glue; the others are just reciting ridiculous dialogue like it’s Shakespeare. There are a few jokes that sound dated now because they refer to something contemporary to the film, and a few that you probably just couldn’t tell today due to changing norms, although I was pleasantly surprised to see how little in the film might truly be offensive by today’s standards. I’m sure someone could find offense with a lot of what’s in Airplane!, but it’s all pretty tame compared to modern comedy; maybe Captain Oveur’s lines to Joey wouldn’t make the cut, but they’re just so stupid I found it hard to see them in that light. (The movie was on Hoopla, available through my local library.)

I’ve never been anywhere near the movie business, so much of what the book describes is new to me, even though I’m sure much of it doesn’t apply now, forty-five years later. I also couldn’t get enough of hearing the actors describe what it was like reading the script and working on the set; the book still has quotes from some of the older actors who died well before the book came out from previous interviews, just read by a narrator, and they’re almost all interesting. Most of them didn’t get what the script was; several had to be convinced by a loved one just to take the offered parts.

I wish the main part of the book hadn’t ended with Airplane!, although we do get one Top Secret! Fact, around the origins of that film’s “skeet surfing” scene. (I didn’t know that film was a box-office bomb; I was eleven when I saw it, and I thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever watched.) There’s also a three-part epilogue where each of the writers talks about his career and life after Airplane!, which goes off the rails at several points, including one of them veering into some weird anti-science territory. You could probably skip that part, as none of it has much of anything to do with why you’re here. The rest of the book is either funny, interesting, or both throughout. The only catch is that if you haven’t seen Airplane! … well, what’s wrong with you?

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→ April 22, 2025
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Uprooted.

Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 2015, inverts the usual formula for the “chosen one” story about a child who turns out to play an extremely important role in a history-changing event, and whose powers are critical in the way that event unfolds. The protagonist here, Agnieszka, isn’t even the one her village believes is going to be chosen by the local wizard, called the Dragon to serve as his apprentice, and she’s hardly the sort of student the Dragon was hoping for, but her presence there sets off a broad, violent conflict that will determine whether their society can survive or will be overrun by the sentient forces of the Wood. It’s smart and vaguely subversive of the traditions of this trope, although it becomes unspeakably violent in the resolution in ways I found hard to stomach.

Agnieszka lives in a small village near a dangerous forest called the Wood that acts with malevolence, corrupting anyone who enters it or eats its fruits or leaves and causing them to commit violence against anyone around them, like automatons under the Wood’s command. She’s chosen to become the next apprentice to the Dragon, the wizard for this particular part of the kingdom, a stern, cold man who takes a young girl under his tutelage every ten years or so – but after they leave his service, they never return to their original villages. Once Agnieszka gets to the Dragon’s tower, however, one of her friends from her village ends up corrupted by the Wood, which would normally require her execution to protect the rest of the valley, but Agnieszka finds a spell that might remove the corruption from her friend. That in turn attracts the attention of the crown prince, whose mother disappeared into the Wood many years before, and who demands that the Dragon and Agnieszka come with him into the forest to find and rescue the Queen.

Much of what Agnieszka does – or what happens to her – is a combination of circumstance and her own tenacity, making her an interesting lead character but not a terribly complex one. She’s driven by a simple sense of right and wrong that is fundamentally humanist; she refuses to sacrifice a single life, ever, even if it has the potential to save many other lives down the road. Some of this is wisdom, as she realizes the path of killing everyone corrupted by the Wood has no end to it, as it doesn’t stop whatever force underlies the Wood’s endless thirst for territory, but Novik defines Agnieszka more by the high value she places on an individual life. Again, it makes her interesting, but not very deep.

The Wood ends up the more intriguing character, so to speak, although I got a bit lost in the explanations of what exactly is behind the Wood’s sentience and its Anton Chigurh-like drive to kill anything in its path without regard for anything about the victims. It’s a better exercise in world-building than character development, saved by the fact it’s well-written and mostly well-paced.

The body count in Uprooted is enormous, enough to make George R.R. Martin jealous; it’s most likely a comment on the futility of war of any sort, but Novik’s tone towards the massive losses of soldiers in the last two conflicts borders on the callous, and it’s out of sync with Agnieszka’s almost single-minded focus on saving any individual life she can. This was ultimately what turned me against Uprooted, even though I enjoyed most of the read; it just devolves into pointless violence, with one scene that recalled the trench warfare of World War I, and there’s no real point to any of it. Characters climb over piles of dead bodies to continue the fighting, and often don’t even understand why they’re doing so. It’s just too far removed from what powered the first three-fourths of the book. I wouldn’t recommend against Uprooted, but in the end it just didn’t get over the line for me.

Next up: Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, winner of last year’s Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

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→ April 21, 2025
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I’m Still Here + top films of 2024.

I’m Still Here won the Oscar for Best International Feature this year and earned nominations for Best Picture – becoming the first Brazilian film to do either of those things – and a nomination for Best Actress for Fernanda Torres, who delivers a commanding performance as a woman trying to hold her family together after the disappearance of her husband in the police state of Brazil, 1971. Based on the true story of Eunice Paiva, whose husband Rubens was arrested, tortured, and murdered by the secret police, it shows their beautiful, happy family, and the ways in which Eunice has to swallow her fear and grief to move forward and raise their four children without him. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

As the film opens, we see just faint signs of the terror to come, including a scene where the Paivas’ eldest daughter, Vera, is in a car with friends when they come up against a police roadblock. They’re forced out of the car and roughed up a little as the cops search for “terrorists,” mostly people suspected of engaging in any sort of activities opposing the dictatorship. Rubens is a former congressman who participates in clandestine, peaceful activities like passing letters to families of disappeared people – dissidents or innocent people – and coordinating with other like-minded people. They don’t seem to see any risk in their actions, but, of course, one day the secret police come knocking, taking Rubens away and barricading the Paivas in their house for what appears to be a day or two, after which they then take Eunice and another daughter in for interrogation as well. (Vera has gone to study in London and live with another Brazilian family that fled the country out of fear for what was coming.) The daughter is released in a day, but Eunice is kept for nearly two weeks, during which she’s tortured and asked to inform on her husband.

Eventually, she’s released, and begins to try to fight through the judicial system first to find out where Rubens is, and then later to get the state to admit they kidnapped and killed him. At the same time, she has four children, three girls and a boy, to raise, while the house’s breadwinner is gone and she finds herself unable to even cash a check because he can’t sign it or call to confirm. The hour or so spent in this time period is by far the strongest, as it focuses entirely on her, and all of the burdens placed on her as a mother, a de facto widow, a dissident, and more. It could be a metaphor for modern motherhood and all of the things we ask mothers in western societies to be, including how we ask them to hide or subjugate their own feelings to take care of their families (which reminded me of Jess Grose’s excellent book Screaming on the Inside), although I don’t know if that was intended, since the source material is the Paivas’ son’s memoir, a best-seller in Brazil about ten years ago.

After about 100 minutes, the film jumps forward 25 years to 1996, when Eunice gets word that the death certificate for Rubens has been found. By that point, she has returned to school and become a lawyer, while also making a name for herself as an activist for the families of the disappeared, making this a public event as well as a deeply personal one. Then we get a second flash-forward to shortly before Eunice’s death, a scene that is sentimental and doesn’t need to be in the film at all, although it allowed director Walter Salles to reunite with actress Fernanda Montenegro, who starred in his acclaimed 1998 film Central Station … and who happens to be Torres’s mother.

Torres just is this film; the whole endeavor hinges on her performance and she is superb. Any time she is on screen, she owns it – and the glory is in how subtle Torres’s performance is. There are no big, showy scenes, no giant outbursts, no soliloquies. Had she won the Oscar over Mikey Madison, I wouldn’t object; they’re the two best performances I saw in any 2024 movie, regardless of gender. No other character has half as much to do or matters a tenth as much to the credibility of the story. Once Rubens disappears, you’ll probably suspect we’re not going to see him again even if you don’t know the true story, at which point the script hands everything to Torres and asks her to carry it … which is pretty much what life did to Eunice Paiva, come to think of it.

I would have given the Best International Feature award to The Seed of the Sacred Fig, another film about life under an authoritarian regime, but this was the second-best of the nominees and of all eligible films I saw from 2024. And, if you’re curious, here’s my mostly-final ranking of the best movies I saw from 2024. I haven’t seen No Other Land, but I think that’s the only film out there from the 2024 cycle that might crack this list. I’ve seen 43 movies in total that were Oscar-eligible or were released to streaming in 2024, to give you some perspective; #43 was The Apprentice.

1. Anora
2. Nickel Boys
3. Nosferatu
4. A Real Pain
5. The Seed of the Sacred Fig
6. The Brutalist
7. September 5
8. Hard Truths
9. Sing Sing
10. Daughters
11. Kinds of Kindness
12. Memoir of a Snail
13. I’m Still Here
14. The Room Next Door
15. Sugarcane
16. Challengers
17. I Saw the TV Glow
18. All That We Imagine As Light
19. Kneecap
20. Rebel Ridge

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→ April 19, 2025
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Stick to baseball, 4/19/25.

I posted my top 50 prospects for this year’s MLB Draft and then held a Q&A on the column, along with a draft scouting notebook on Jamie Arnold and the NHSI tournament, all for subscribers to the Athletic.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Creature Caravan, a fantastic new game from the designer of Above & Below and Roam.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: The New York Times has a story on a man held captive by his stepmother for twenty years who only recently escaped by lighting a fire in his room. The now 32-year-old man weighed just 68 pounds when he was rescused by firefighters. It is a horrifying read on an unimaginable crime.
  • GQ profiled activist-journalist turned Congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh and her efforts to revive the corpse of the national Democratic Party. I don’t know if she’s even likely to win a primary if the incumbent in the district where she’s running, 80-year-old Jan Schakowsky, decides to run for a fourteenth term, but I’m hopeful her efforts and the very favorable media coverage so far encourage more young liberals to run.
  • The Philly Inquirer’s Will Bunch writes that when (if) this is all over, all of these officials responsible for human rights abuses – like sending innocent men to rot in El Salvador prisons – must be tried for crimes against humanity.
  • The right-wing claim that illegally deported Salvadoran man Kilmar Abrego Garcia was a member of the MS-13 gang comes from a crooked cop. So far we have seen no other evidence supporting the claim.
  • Kavitha Davidson writes about how Pat McAfee’s decision to drag a college student on his show over a false rumor is just the tip of the sports-media iceberg. The smearing victim is suing multiple outlets who went after her; Barstool already issued several public apologies, while neither ESPN nor McAfee has said anything about their mistake.
  • My alma mater did the right thing, for once: Harvard declined to comply with Trump’s demands, including ending all diversity efforts and a million other ridiculous things, after which he threatened to revoke the university’s tax-exempt status. The Times has the story on why the university decided to fight. I donated to them for the first time in years and said it was specifically because they chose not to capitulate.
  • RFK, Jr., is using a new study on autism rates to push his false narrative about vaccines. This came on top of his extremely derogatory comments about autistic people that claimed they were just burdens on society, unable to work or pay taxes or enjoy life.
  • A guest columnist for the Seattle Times wrote about why airline passenger behavior seems to be getting worse; it’s more assertion than argument, but I share the feeling that these are becoming more common. Playing audio loudly without headphones has gone from near-never before pandemic to at least once every day I’m at an airport. It happened on Friday, in fact.
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→ April 17, 2025
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The Girl with the Needle.

The Girl with the Needle was Denmark’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, making the final cut to be among the five nominees even though it presents real-life serial killer Dagmar Overbye, who took payments from desperate women to adopt out their babies, only to murder the infants instead, in a somewhat sympathetic light. It’s dark, strange, and extremely creepy, playing out like a horror film where the main character is never truly in danger herself. (It’s streaming free for Mubi subscribers, or you can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) is a garment-factory worker in Denmark during World War I, married to a soldier who she presumes is dead, as there’s been no word from him in a year. She’s evicted from her rooms when the film opens, but when goes to her boss to try to get help obtaining widow’s benefits, he takes advantage of her and she becomes pregnant. Her husband returns from the war, disfigured from battle, and she sends him away because she believes she’s going to marry her boss. He reneges, of course, and she loses her job, after which she tries to perform an abortion on herself with a giant needle while in a public bath, only to have Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm) stop her and potentially save her life. Karoline has the baby with Dagmar’s help, at another job the older woman helped her find, and she pays Dagmar to give the baby to another family; when she can’t pay all of what she owes, she goes to work in Dagmar’s candy shop and helps convince other women to give their babies up as well, until she becomes suspicious that Dagmar isn’t what she seems.

The story itself is sort of beside the point; Dagmar is a real person, apparently quite infamous in Denmark as the serial killer with the most known victims in the country’s history, so clearly the film will end somehow with her arrest. Instead, director and co-writer Magnus van Horn focuses on the relationship between the two women, telling the New York Times that he chose to find “finding the humanity in these horrible deeds,” which is a bold strategy, given what Dagmar was doing. (There’s no direct violence in the film; the only murder that takes place on the screen is hidden from our and Karoline’s view.) That choice means that the film can only succeed or fail on the quality of the script and of the two lead performances.

The two women, both decorated actors in Denmark, deliver strong, compelling performances, particularly Dyrholm, who can be completely terrifying but also capable of surprising, often sudden bouts of empathy. The script depicts her murders as the result of a nihilistic view of the world, where in her mind these babies would go on to lives of suffering, poverty, and abuse, and a belief that she is actually helping the women she’s conning. (I couldn’t find any evidence that the real Dagmar Overbye was like this; her defense at trial was that she was abused as a child as well.) She’s initially cold to Karoline, helping her in some tangible, discrete ways, before eventually taking her in and bonding with the younger woman, as does Dagmar’s young daughter, Erena.

Van Horn lays the atmosphere on a bit thickly, however, and it ends up diminishing the film by going too far. The entire film is shot in black and white, and the streets are filthy – sooty, muddy, diseased, anything you can think of to increase the sense of bleakness and despair. The beginning resembles a misery-porn remix of Fantine’s story in Les Misérables, to a predictable level, until Karoline attempts the abortion, after which the story becomes something new and much more interesting; the first third or so of the movie is nothing you haven’t seen before. It needs Dagmar’s character to at least give us something new, even if it’s shocking; because Dyrholm plays her as someone who appears to exist on both sides of the edge of madness, the moment she arrives in the film the pace picks up, while it also allows us to get away from a story that keeps kicking Karoline in the teeth. Two hours of that would have been unbearable. Once the real plot begins, it’s still dark and unsparing, but a far more intriguing story, and a better watch due to the two strong leads.

(I still haven’t seen the winner of the Best International Film category, the Brazilian film I’m Still Here, but it’s loaded up for my next flight; of the other four, I’d put this second, behind the German submission The Seed of the Sacred Fig.)

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→ April 15, 2025
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Raleigh-Durham eats, 2025 edition.

I had one of the best meals of my life in Raleigh last week, so much so that I opened up my Notes app and started writing down every restaurant that made me say the same thing, ending up with about 15 of them (which will eventually become a post here) of which I could remember the names and the meals. This dinner came at Figulina, an Italian restaurant that focuses on fresh pastas and a lot of traditional ingredients, while the recipes run the gamut from the very traditional (a straight pasta alla carbonara with guanciale, the ideal cured pork for that dish) to the modern. Chef-owner David Ellis was previously chef de cuisine at Ashley Christensen’s Poole’s Diner, located just a few blocks away. Every single thing I ate was superb, the cocktails were also outstanding, and the service was just exemplary across the board. I even thought about going back a second time on this trip to try more things before I realized that was a little silly and also I didn’t have time.

I ordered a little out of my usual comfort zone because I figured this was a rare chance to try some things I don’t eat often or even see much on menus. For a starter, I had the salt cod tartine, and if you gave me two of those it would be the most divine and complete lunch. I like baccalà, the dried salt cod pioneered by Basque sailors and still popular across southern Europe, although I had to acquire the taste. This dish mixes the salt cod, which is rinsed and prepared to remove the preserving salt and reduce the fishiness of the flavor, with artichoke leaves, parsley, onion, some extremely good olive oil, and a light touch of vinegar and serves the combination on a thick slice of crusty bread from nearby Boulted Bread. It was bright and balanced, with the cod present in the flavor but not overwhelming with its saltiness. I’ve had salt cod a few ways, but never like this, and actually never in a cold preparation that I liked.

For my main, I had the cappelletti with gorgonzola dolce, served with walnut pesto, fig mostarda, and fresh rosemary. I don’t care for blue cheese in general, not on principle but because I have never become accustomed to the signature flavor of those cheeses, which my palate (and my nose) will forever interpret as “spoiled.” My bartender assured me that the filling of their pasta was a mixture of house-made ricotta and gorgonzola dolce, and that the blue cheese flavor is subtle because there is so much else going on in the dish. (I also knew that if I was ever going to like or tolerate a blue cheese, it was probably gorgonzola dolce; dolce means sweet, and this cheese is aged far less than most blue cheeses, so it’s nowhere near as pungent.) I took the leap of faith and followed his advice to try to get every element in each bite – one of the little hats of pasta, a good bit of the walnut sauce, and some of the dollops of fig mostarda. He was right about everything; I’m struggling to describe the overall flavor because it contained such a broad array of different flavors and notes that worked together so that, no, you don’t get a big hit of blue cheese or of the vinegar in the mostarda. The best comparison I can offer is the perfect cheese board, where you pair a creamy young cheese with a fruit paste and some toasted nuts, but with the glory of fresh pasta involved too. And rosemary. Their menu changes often but I hope this one sticks around for the season.

I have largely been skipping dessert while traveling because I just don’t need it or even crave it like I used to, but given how good the first two items were, I had to give it a look. They had three desserts, one of which held no interest for me and the other contained an ingredient that I’ve had an allergic reaction to twice (although I’m not sure it was the culprit), so I settled on the Bakewell tart, a very not-Italian dessert that I only know because my wife has made it a few times. Figulina’s version was traditional, and rich, so much so that I had just half and … uh … had the rest with lunch the next day. I think it was less sweet than others I’ve had, but I’ve found that’s typical in a lot of fine-dining desserts.

Then there were the cocktails … I told the bartender that I enjoy a Negroni, but that I saw they had an extensive collection of amari (potable bitters, like Montenegro and Cynar), so would he be interested in concocting a negroni-like drink for me? I’ve done this now and then at bars and always get a good response, plus I get to try new things. He did, and it was good … but the better drink was their Escape from Manhattan, containing barrel-aged Conniption gin, Mancino rosso sweet vermouth, and Cardamaro. Cardamaro is a cardoon-based amaro, similar to Cynar but less artichokey; the Conniption gin is 94 proof and is aged ten months in bourbon barrels, although to be honest I’m not sure that last bit is a good thing in gin. Anyway, it was sort of a cross between a Negroni and a Manhattan, but better, less sweet than either drink, with some nice bitter notes and a strong base of herbal flavors. (I’m pretty sure he used Cardamaro in the Negroni riff he made for me as well.)

Anything beyond that will probably seem a bit anticlimactic, I suppose. The second-best meal I had was actually tacos from a gas station in Cary – Taqueria La Esquina, which runs a decent-sized kitchen in a Shell station. I tried their pork al pastor and chicken, which both come with cilantro and grilled onions, with the pork the better of the two; both were good but the chicken was a little dry, while the pork retained its moisture and generally had more flavor to it, although neither was spicy at all. Their menu runs a little heavy on red meat, so it’s not ideal for me (I don’t eat beef at all).

I found them because they were just up the street from Milos, a little coffee shop that has just ordinary espresso drinks with Illy beans but offers single-origin pour-overs from different roasters. I’m still a big fan of Jubala over in Raleigh, but Milos is closer to the USA Baseball Complex, which is often where I’m headed anyway.

Located right in downtown Durham, Bar Virgile does classic cocktails and a simple gastropub menu. They do a classic daiquiri, just rum, lime, and simple syrup, which isn’t hard to make but which I think has lost its luster because of fruity, blended nonsense that has appropriated the name. Hemingway liked them, and I don’t think he was sitting poolside with a giant glass of slushy mango juice and rum. Anyway, I don’t know why I ordered fish and chips when I was kind of feeling like getting something light, but it was the right choice – Bar Virgile’s version has just a light breading, and the cod could not have been more perfectly cooked, enough so that I ended up eating most of it with a fork because I couldn’t pick it up. I was having dinner with my friend from middle school, and after we went across the foyer to their cocktail bar, Annexe, where I had a drink called the Lazy Monk that was clearly their twist on a Last Word, using gin, génépy, Luxardo maraschino, lime, and a rosemary-thyme simple syrup. With green Chartreuse becoming hard to find, everyone’s looking for alternatives – Luxardo has one called Del Santo that gets good reviews from folks who use it in a Last Word – and this was a great twist, with the syrup bringing herbal notes to the front but not enough to throw off the drink and make it too sweet. It’s not a Last Word, which is one of my favorite cocktails ever, but it’s damn good. I got to Durham a little early after an aborted attempt to go to Blacksburg (the game was rained out about 90 minutes into my drive), and parked at Yonder Coffee, located inside The Daily, to have some tea and sit for a little bit. They have a credible selection of teas available, including hojicha, my favorite green tea – the leaves are roasted, so it’s less grassy than most green teas.

I tried Big Dom’s Bagel Shop, which is only open Wednesday through Sunday, and then only until they sell out. The everything bagel was covered with seeds and salt, and it had the right consistency in the center and enough chew to the crust. I ordered an egg sandwich, and the eggs came in one of those pre-cooked blocks of scrambled eggs, which, fine, I’m here for the bagels, but I feel like a good bagel deserves better than that.

One Blacksburg restaurant to mention – Café Mekong, a pan-Asian spot in a strip mall a little south of downtown. They clearly do a thriving take-out business, although their handful of tables were full the whole time I was there. The papaya salad was standard-issue, just average, but their Singapore noodles were a 55.

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→ April 11, 2025
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Nosferatu.

I came into Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu knowing relatively little of the lore behind the story; I’ve read Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but had never seen any adaptation of it, not even the 1922 silent film of which this is a remake. It’s about as spot-on a gothic horror film as I’ve seen … maybe ever, really, with sound effects that will curdle your soul and a strong-as-always performance from Nicholas Hoult as the tragic real estate agent Thomas Hutter. (You can stream it free on Peacock or rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

Eggers’s screenplay adheres closely to the 1922 story, which changed several substantial elements of the Stoker novel, altering some major plot events and making the story darker and more violent while removing much of the sexual subtext in favor of more physical horror. Hutter is a young, ambitious real estate agent whose wife, Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) has a psychic connection to the monster Nosferatu, who poses as the Romanian Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) and demands that Hutter visit him to sign the contract for Orlok to purchase an estate in Wisburg, where the Hutters live. Thomas has no idea of the grip the vampire has on his wife, other than that she has intensely realistic dreams and a history of sleepwalking and seizures, but he is terrified by Orlok and realizes that he’s some sort of undead or otherwise unnatural creature during his brief stay at the castle. Upon his return home, he finds that bubonic plague is spreading through Wisburg, along with a huge number of rats, but the occultist Prof. Von Franz (Willem Dafoe) sees that this is not a medical disease but a spiritual one and leads the effort to find Orlok and kill him once and for all to save Ellen and the surviving townspeople.

The story is somewhat beside the point in Nosferatu and even in Dracula, as neither even has a real protagonist; the main character is the vampire, and he’s off screen (or page) for large portions of both works. He is everpresent, often working through his acolyte Knock (Simon McBurney) or just spreading fear because we know he’s coming for Ellen and know of the destruction he’ll wreak when he arrives. It’s all atmosphere, amplified by the way Eggers always shows Orlok in shadow, or from the back, so that we very rarely see him clearly until his final scenes in the film, when we see just what a deformed monster he has become; we hear Orlok much more than we see him, with Skarsgård speaking in a slow, guttural, overenunciated accent that sounds like he’s moonlighting (pun intended) from his job as the lead singer for a melodic death metal band from Gothenburg.

Most of the best scenes in the film don’t involve Skarsgård at all, though; he’s scarier when we don’t know when he’s coming or what he’s up to. McBurney is just as horrific, because he is utterly insane; we know what the vampire is doing, but Knock is unpredictable and his violence is all the more shocking for it. (He’s the equivalent to Renfield from Stoker’s novel, but here Knock is Hutter’s boss and appears at first to be a mild-mannered real estate man, more like an accountant or a barrister than the asylum inmate that Renfield is when he first appears in the book.) Rose-Depp’s main function in the movie is to appear terrified, which she does well, as she’s the only character who understands all along what the true nature of the threat is. For most of the film nobody believes her, including her best friend Anna (Emma Corrin, underutilized here), except for Dr. Von Franz, the man everyone else thinks is a crank, further underscoring Ellen’s terror – she knows he’s coming, she knows she is inextricably bound to him, and everyone thinks she’s a hysterical woman.

Nosferatu sounds great, by which I mean it sounds absolutely awful, especially if you watch it with headphones. You may never want to eat again after hearing this movie. I would imagine sales of black pudding plummeted after this film hit theatres. Some of this is obvious – you wouldn’t expect any less from a scene where a vampire feeds on a victim – but even when Hutter is eating dinner at Orlok’s castle, every bite or sip feels like a menace. It’s a crime that this film, which was nominated for four Academy Awards, didn’t get anything for sound; three of the five nominees in that category went to musicals or films about music, which seems to exclude films that rely on other forms of sound, which Nosferatu did more than almost any other movie in 2024.

Hoult is excellent here, as he is in pretty much everything, although even his character isn’t that well-developed, and the acting as a whole is probably the one weak point of the film. Ellen is a damsel in distress who only develops any sort of agency at the very end of the film, so Rose-Depp doesn’t have a lot to do, and spends most of her time on screen looking terrorized (with reason) but not doing much else. Dafoe seems like an obvious choice for a mad scientist, but that works against him here – he is so obviously Willem Dafoe, and is the only actor who doesn’t really do a proper accent for his character, that he isn’t terribly convincing as a character whose main job is to convince everyone, us included, that he isn’t mad. It’s also not a film that depends on the performances to work its dark magic, as Eggers creates such a bleak, foreboding atmosphere, and then layers increasing degrees of shocking violence on top of it, that it works extremely well throughout without getting as much from its actors as it might have. I’ve got one more major 2024 release to see, but this is easily in my top 5 from last year.

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→ April 10, 2025
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Transcendent Kingdom.

I read Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel Homegoing a little over three years ago, because my daughter had been assigned it in her high school English class and said it was good but “grim.” I thought it was marvelous, and also grim, but beautifully crafted with a series of compelling characters through the time-shifting narrative.

Her second and still most recent novel, Transcendent Kingdom, has a far more conventional structure and is built around a single family of four, only two members of which, the daughter Gifty and her mother, are still around in the present day, although we don’t learn immediately where her brother Nana and father are or if they’re even still alive. Gifty is a graduate student in neuroscience at Stanford, while her mother, a Ghanaian immigrant, lives alone in Alabama; Gifty gets a call that her mother has taken to her bed in a severe bout of depression, so she brings her mother to California to take care of her. We learn that this isn’t her mother’s first such episode, and the recollection brings us the story of Gifty’s father, brother, and how Gifty turned away from the devout Christianity of her childhood and towards the science she hoped would explain everything that religion couldn’t answer.

This isn’t a huge spoiler, since it’s mentioned on the back of the book, but if you want to know nothing stop reading here … Nana died of a heroin overdose after a doctor gave him Oxycontin for an ankle injury Nana suffered playing basketball. Gifty wants to learn about the neuroscience of addiction, to understand why someone would be unable to stop when they know it’s hurting them, killing them, and hurting everyone who cares about them. She was about eight years younger than her brother, and watching him go from a lively, popular kid who seemed to be going places to a zonked-out addict, and a thief, and worse has shaped huge swaths of the last eighteen years of her life. It forced her to grow up and take more charge in the house than someone her age should have to do, it broke her faith in God (but not her mother’s), and it turned her inwards, especially when it came to talking to anyone outside of her family about her brother – or even that she had one.

As someone who grew up with religion, devout perhaps in my blind belief but not exactly in practice, but who is secular now, I found particular resonance in Gyasi’s descriptions of Gifty now, knowing something is gone and won’t return, but that there is no regaining it. Religion serves a purpose for many people, and often becomes a core part of one’s identity, but if you lose your faith, as Gifty does and as I did, you can’t simply go to the God store and buy a new one. Once you realize it’s not true, the spell is forever broken. That absence is real, and you may grieve for all that once was, from your belief in a benevolent God to the hope of an afterlife to the fact that so many adults told you these things were true when they’re not. (I recognize not everyone shares my nonbelief, of course.)

Beyond the question of religiosity, Transcendent Kingdom functions as a different sort of coming-of-age novel: The protagonist loses her innocence about the world, and then spends the next eighteen years following one narrow path that she believes will help her make sense of it. Her mother returning to the isolation of her bed and near-total silence bookends the period of Gifty’s quest for an answer to everything, from why Nana fell so quickly into addiction and death to why their mother is so prone to these severe depressive episodes. Faith couldn’t answer these questions, so why can’t science? This structure also allows Gyasi to retell parts of Gifty’s story that don’t involve Nana or their mother, including her time at a certain college in the Boston area and her tenuous relationships with people around her at Stanford. The novel puts Gifty together piece by piece in front of us, jumping back and forth in time to show how she got to this point of a sort of crisis of unfaith.

It’s hard to avoid judging Transcendent Kingdom by the standard of its predecessor, which was a completely different sort of book and wowed with its structure and scope. This is a small novel about a big character, and it doesn’t cast the same sort of spell that Homegoing did. It’s just different, but still has Gyasi’s easy, thoughtful voice, and shows her developing a single character to a much greater extent than she could possibly have done in Homegoing’s staccato stories.

Next up: About to finish Naomi Novik’s Uprooted.

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→ April 9, 2025
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Nashville and Knoxville eats, 2025 edition.

The last two weekends saw me head to two different spots in Tennessee, so here’s my food roundup, starting with Nashville…

Rozé Pony is an all-day restaurant, café, and bar maybe ten minutes southwest of downtown Nashville, and it was packed with day-drinkers when I was there, including one very large party there for some sort of celebration. I had just come from Florida, where eating reasonably healthy food is a challenge, so I ordered a fish sandwich with a side salad. The sandwich was called, unfortunately, the sloppy salmon. (They can’t stop you from ordering a glass of water.) It was tremendous, with salsa negra, a lemon mayo (aioli, whatever), and charred or roasted peppers. It was pretty sloppy to eat, but I inhaled the thing, and the leaves in the salad looked and tasted extremely fresh.

Maiz de la Vida is a food truck turned high-end Mexican restaurant in the South Gulch neighborhood; what I had was very good, but I really wish 1) I’d ordered differently and 2) I could have tried some of their cocktails, but I never drink before games, obviously. I tried the chips with three salsas at my server’s recommendation, and two of the three salsas were excellent, especially the salsa norteña with habaneros; the chips were house-made, but some were too thick or just otherwise greasy and not that pleasant to eat. The duck breast in mole was outstanding, perfectly cooked, with a rich, smoky, just faintly spicy mole negro, served on a very small bed of diced sweet potatoes with a dry cracker made from egg whites and sesame seeds. On its own, it is delicious, but the dish needs something else besides the meat – I expected more vegetables/starch on the side of it, and had no idea that’s all I was getting, or I would have ordered something else. It’s not how I prefer to eat, and because of my metabolic disorder it’s not great for me to eat a meal that’s very high in protein relative to everything else, so it’s a me problem, not a Maiz problem. I’ll go back, after a game, and I’ll order a bunch of different things.

Little Hats pitches itself as an Italian market & deli, and they do have the dry goods you’d expect, but the sandwich I got was all wrong. They have a prosciutto, fresh mozzarella, tomato, and basil sandwich, a combo I usually can’t resist, as it’s basically a caprese salad on bread with a slice or two of prosciutto crudo, which adds salt and fat to the equation. Little Hats’ version treats the prosciutto like it’s deli ham, stacking it over a half-inch thick, so it overpowers everything else on the sandwich, and it’s also really tough. Prosciutto crudo, which is cured for months and never cooked, is sliced extremely thinly because the extensive dehydration from the curing makes it tough to chew if it’s thicker. I couldn’t even finish this, which seemed criminal.

I resisted the urge to go to Barista Parlor as I usually do, meeting a colleague at Steadfast Coffee instead; it’s a local roastery that appears to be mostly wholesale business (at least based on their site), and unusual for a third-wave (or -adjacent) shop in that they offered free refills on drip coffee. Unfortunately, I didn’t write down what blend they used that day, but it was pretty balanced, medium-bodied trending towards the lighter end, without any really distinctive notes.

Attaboy is a second outpost of the speakeasy-ish cocktail bar of the same name in Manhattan, founded by Sam Ross, creator of the paper plane and penicillin cocktails; and Michael McIlroy, creator of the greenpoint cocktail. You have to knock on the door and someone will take you in if there’s room, although there’s no secret password required. The bar has no menu; your bartender will ask what sort of spirits or drinks you like and will make or create something for you. I had two different bartenders and tried two different drinks. The first was a rum-based drink with an amaro that was like Averna, but not actually Averna, and the drink ended up a little too sweet for me. The second was a riff on the last word, one of my absolute favorite cocktails, called a Wordsmith, made with rum rather than gin, and in this case using an aperitivo called Doladira that has rhubarb in place of the green Chartreuse. I’d drink that every day until my liver gave out.

The following weekend found me in Knoxville, where I got to walk around downtown for the first time even though I’d been there twice before. It’s a great and booming downtown core, with quite a few restaurants, a ton of coffee shops (I counted six within a two-block area, I think), and bars.

Kaizen was on Eater’s list of the dozen best restaurants in Knoxville, but it was really disappointing. The menu is great, and I ordered three items since I hadn’t had lunch while traveling, but the best of the three was actually the salad: arugula, beets, carrots, a soft-boiled egg, with a sesame-ginger dressing. I tried one of their steamed buns ($3.50 a pop), with fried chicken, but it was really chewy, and the kimchi smeared on it didn’t add any flavor at all. The duck leg fried rice seemed so promising, with duck confit deep-fried till crispy, an over-medium egg, and the rice, but the rice was DOA with the cause of death drowning by soy sauce, and they fried the duck for too long so it started to dry out. Great concept, poor execution.

Stir is an all-day restaurant, at least on the weekends, and their brunch came recommended by multiple people. I’m definitely less adventurous first thing in the morning, but also, seeing Waffle Houses everywhere made me just want a waffle, and not one from a Waffle House (or, worse, a hotel lobby one). Stir’s are good, clearly just made, pretty tender, although it’s odd that it came with the syrup already on it. I got the version with eggs and potatoes, rather than the version with fried chicken, and the over-medium eggs were spot on. The potatoes were nicely crisped but could have used more salt.

For coffee, I hit up Awaken, which is also downtown, around the corner from Kaizen and Stir. They use coffee from Quills in Louisville, a good roaster albeit not my favorite up there (that’s Sunergos). Cute space, solid espresso, credit to the barista for asking if I liked more foam in my macchiato (it was just right).

I stopped at The Vault, a cocktail bar downstairs from the restaurant Vida, where I’d eaten last year, and ordered a Last Word … and that was enough for one night, as it was larger than I expected and a second might have knocked me out. Their house versions of classics all contain too many extra ingredients, though; you don’t have to modify the Negroni or the Manhattan with three more spirits, they’re classics for a reason. It’s a cool space and I was disappointed it wasn’t busier on a Saturday night, when you’d think more people would be out and might appreciate a higher-end place to drink.

I also returned to A Dopo Sourdough Pizza, since I loved it last year; I changed it up a little, going with their “rucchetta” pizza, with arugula and Parmiggiano-Reggiano on a margherita, and added prosciutto crudo. Believe it or not, there was way too much Parmiggiano on it to the point that I scooped some off with my fork because I couldn’t taste anything else. It may be the king of all cheeses, but it’s also basically a salt-fat-umami bomb, and I could barely make out the other flavors. It’s such an odd thing to do because that’s such an expensive ingredient, too. The dough was outstanding, though. I skipped the gelato this year, as I’ve kind of been off desserts while traveling now.

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→ April 8, 2025
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The Brutalist.

Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is a vast, sweeping character study rich with detail and allegory, powered by a tremendous (and Oscar-winning) performance by Adrien Brody as the title character, memorable and meticulous scenery, and one of the strongest scores of the year. It’s also far too often a slog, running three and a half hours, with too much inconsistency in the pacing and the level of specificity from scene to scene. (You can rent it now on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

Brody plays László Tóth, a Bauhaus-trained architect in Hungary before World War II who is sent to the concentration camp in Buchenwald by the Nazis, while his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and his niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) are sent to Dachau. Tóth survives the camp and immigrates the United States, where he works in his cousin Attila’s furniture store, although Attila’s Catholic wife clearly doesn’t approve. Attila lands a major renovation project for Harry Van Buren (Joe Alwyn) as a surprise for his father, the wealthy Carnegie-esque Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce), putting Tóth in charge. Tóth’s designs transform the library space, but Van Buren is enraged that his son made these plans without him, firing the contractors and refusing to pay. Attila kicks László out, which leads to him working as a manual laborer and living in a charity workhouse, while his previous use of morphine has devolved into a heroin addiction. Tóth’s design for the library ends up earning so much praise that Van Buren tracks him down and hires him for a major new project … and that’s all before the intermission, before Erszébet and Zsófia make it to the United States, before the stresses of the project and the exacting (and conflicting) standards of the two men begin to clash.

The Brutalist is a biopic of a fictional character, much like 2022’s Tár, that feels so specific that it’s easy to forget that Lázsló Tóth never existed. Brody is as good as ever – and I’d argue he’s always good, even in small roles like in Grand Budapest Hotel or Midnight in Paris – as the complex, tortured genius, who has some of the expected art-over-commerce philosophy, but also carries the weight of the trauma of his time in Buchenwald, his long separation from his wife, and his flight to a culture that is deeply foreign to him and that faces him with both its xenophobia and its antisemitism. Even in some of the film’s least believable scenes, his portrayal never wavers in the least, and he carries huge portions of the overlong script by himself.

The padding in The Brutalist is all around the edges, rather than entire scenes that needed to go (although the first scene of the Tóths in bed after their reunion probably could have been left on the cutting room floor). There’s a brief shot of László and some workers carrying a model of the community center he’s building for Van Buren up a flight of stairs into the mansion, probably lasting ten or fifteen seconds; the scene adds nothing, and there are tiny moments like that throughout the film that add up to make the film feel too long. Corbet, who directed and co-wrote the film, has a pace-of-play problem. It’s like he hired James Murphy as his editor.

Jones is somewhat lost here in a bad haircut and overdone accent, although the real problem is that her character barely exists outside of László’s orbit until her very last scene, when she acquires a force and gravity we haven’t seen before, underscored by the character’s infirmity and Jones’s own petite stature. (She’s nearly a foot shorter than Brody.) The movie isn’t about her, of course, but her absence is a huge shadow cast over the first half of the film, with László grieving the possibility of her death and then finding out she’s alive but can’t emigrate legally to join him, making the incomplete development of her character in the second half more obvious.

That’s generally a problem with the plot as a whole: the first half is itself a whole movie, and the second half isn’t. It’s the shell of a movie, but tries to pack in too much while giving it a similar level of detail, and that makes for irregular pacing and some portions that were just outright boring. There are also two sexual assault scenes, one entirely implied, one on-screen but shot from a distance, and neither is handled well – the first one is just dropped entirely, and the second has absolutely nothing to foreshadow it, making it seem like either a clumsy attempt at metaphor or just a very cheap plot contrivance to set up the denouement. After thinking about it what broader points Corbet and his co-writer Mona Fastvold might have been trying to make, I’m leaning towards the metaphor argument: A huge theme in The Brutalist is how inhospitable Tóth finds the United States, a country that, then and now, has held great hostility towards people from just about any other country, and has a very long and shameful history of antisemitism that still exists today. The assault is an act of degradation and dehumanization, emphasized by his assailant’s taunts during the attack. I don’t think the scene fits in the least in the film, but that’s the best I’ve been able to make sense of it.

The Brutalist is a proper epic, an ambitious film that tries to do more than almost any film I’ve seen in the last few years; the closest parallel I could think of was 2018’s Never Look Away, another long film covering a huge portion of an artist’s life, although even that one doesn’t try to tackle the giant themes Corbet and Fastvold cover here. Brody’s performance is remarkable – and I didn’t even mention how great some of his suits are, which would be useful information for me if I weren’t half his size – and the film looks like it should have cost as much as a Marvel movie. I’m holding it to a higher standard primarily because it’s over 200 minutes long, and if you’re going to ask that of your audience, you need to earn their attention repeatedly. I’m not entirely sure The Brutalist does that; even so, it’s a film to laud in the hopes it inspires more big swings just like it.

The Brutalist earned ten nominations at this year’s Oscars and won three, for Brody as Best Actor, for Lol Crawley for Best Cinematography, and for Daniel Blumberg for Best Original Score, deserving of all three of them. (I’ll note that 1) Tim Grierson pointed out to me that Blumberg was briefly the lead singer & guitarist for a British band called Yuck, and 2) the strongest competitors for those last two awards weren’t nominated, Nickel Boys for Cinematography and Challengers for Original Score.) Pearce is strong as Van Buren and certainly has enough to do that he was worthy of a nomination for Best Supporting Actor, but Jones’s character isn’t that well-written and her performance within it is one of the film’s weak points; I would have much preferred to see her Best Supporting Actress nomination go to Julianne Moore for The Room Next Door. I have The Brutalist in my top ten for the year, with probably just one more worthy film to go (I’m Still Here), but I wouldn’t have picked it over Anora for Best Picture.

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