→ November 29, 2018
→ By

Holding On: The Troubled Life of Billy Kerr.

Holding On: The Troubled Life of Billy Kerr has the best theme – well, the most interesting theme, at least – of any board game I’ve seen this year. It’s a cooperative title where players work together to try to keep the titular patient alive while listening to his deathbed ramblings and trying to assemble his story from the memories you gain. The story aspect is just plain impressive – it’s a serious concept that could go really wrong in the guise of a game, but the writing is solid and does a good job of bringing the sense of partial memories to life. The game around it, however, doesn’t live up to the premise.

The game lets two to four players (although there’s no reason this couldn’t be a solo game) work together as ‘nurses’ in the ward where Billy Kerr is housed, and comes with ten scenarios that are each played over the course of a round of days, represented by the Patient deck of cards. On each round, players draw three Patient cards representing the morning, afternoon, and night shifts, and will choose to give medical care or palliative care for each. If they choose medical care, they expend Care tokens, which are the game’s main resource and not easy to come by, to either stop Billy’s condition from deteriorating, or, if he’s stable, improve his condition. (His condition is marked by a track, with his starting spot at 28; if he reaches 0, you lose.) If they choose palliative care, they may gain care tokens or acquire random partial memory cards, which come in five timelines.

On some cards, players may then expend one care token to Inquire, essentially asking Billy more about any specific timeline to try to get a clear memory. They then draw cards randomly from the clear memory card deck until they get one matching the chosen timeline; if that drawn card matches a partial memory card they’ve already drawn and placed on the table, they keep that clear memory card. Scenario objectives may require players to finish with a certain number of clear memories before the day ends (exhausting the Patient deck) or Billy dies, or to find ten specific clear memories, or to keep Billy’s spirits up with positive memories rather than negative ones.

Each patient card requires one to three staffers, which can be player tokens or neutral assistants, so in some rounds there will be more required staffers than available pawns. Players start the base game with two single-use “on-call” assistants, but otherwise have to ask nurses to pull double shifts, which gives them “stress,” little cardboard rings that go around the player pawns. If a player gets three stress, they must go ‘on leave’ and skip the next round, thus further straining the players’ resources. Thus the game becomes an ongoing resource optimization problem: When to spend care tokens to get more cards, when to choose to let Billy’s health meter slip to gain more tokens or partial memories, whether to choose tokens or partial memories while providing palliative care, and when to send a player or assistant on leave before it’s mandatory.

The main problem with the game is the way players acquire clues and how they can satisfy objectives. There’s too much randomness involved in the process of converting partial memories into clear ones – if you draw a clear memory card before you have the associated partial memory card, you can’t keep it, and the partial memory cards you get are completely random. When going to the clear memory deck via Inquiry or another method, you can choose the timeline from which you’ll draw cards – the idea is you’re prompting Billy with questions about that set of memories – but whether you get one that matches a memory you already have is entirely random.

Holding On board and pieces

The rest of the game is very well designed because it’s tightly balanced: this is a hard game to win, as it should be. You have to choose well throughout a game, or just get incredibly lucky with patient cards, to even have a chance to meet any objective, which is a requirement for any cooperative game to work. The decisions around when to use care tokens and when to forego the chance to gain memories so you can acquire more tokens are reminiscent of the cure-versus-treat decisions at the heart of Pandemic, and the patient deck always seems to be just the right length to make you go down to the wire. I just wish the storyline were better tied into the mechanics in a way that gave players more control over those random clear memory card draws. The only way around that now is to burn more care tokens and keep drawing cards, but you’ll need those tokens if you don’t want to kill the patient on your watch. It’s such a great theme and clever, novel concept that I still think this game deserves a wider audience, but if you get it, consider some house rules to avoid the frustration of losses due entirely to randomness.

Filed Under: Uncategorized
→ November 28, 2018
→ By

Green Book.

Green Book might have been a great movie in different hands. Based on the true story of a friendship between African-American pianist Don Shirley and the Bronx-born driver Anthony “Tony Lip” Vallelonga, the movie makes some dubious choices on perspective and sharpens almost every character to such a fine point that the result feels as nuanced as an after-school special. The National Board of Review just named Green Book its best film of 2018, which is entirely fitting for a body that gave the same honor to The Post last year: They favor popular, well-acted films that talk down to the audience with positive, timely messages and avoid answering or even addressing the toughest questions around their topics.

There’s a long prologue centered on Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen), a bouncer at the Copa Cabana, showing his boisterous family, pugnacious style at work, and gluttonous appetite, all of which is just character development of a sort before the meat of the movie begins. Shirley (Mahershala Ali, likely to get an Oscar nomination) is looking for a driver and, although he doesn’t use the term, bodyguard to take him on a tour of the Midwest and then American south, which, in 1962, was still highly segregated and thus dangerous for African-Americans traveling there. Tony and the men in his family are all typically racist of the Italian-Americans of the time – the word mulignan, a disgusting Italian-American racial slur, comes up often in the film – but, of course, Tony and Shirley grow to understand each other, becoming friends, even teaming up on a duet of “Ebony and Ivory” in the closing scene. (I may be remembering that last part wrong.)

The film is directed by Peter Farrelly, known for directing gross-out comedies with his brother, and you can see his hand all over the finished product – not in a good way. The film is slapsticky at times and grabs far too many cheap laughs around things like Tony spitting out food he doesn’t like or other peccadillos of personal hygiene. But the biggest mistake is that the script, co-written by Tony’s son, Nick, tells us a story about racism from the perspective of white people. This is not a story about race in America. There’s virtually nothing here about what it’s like to travel while black (a phrase Tony uses in the film), or simply to be black in a white man’s world, or, in Shirley’s case, to be a black man trying to succeed in a career that requires him to, in a sense, suppress his blackness. Beyond the true story of the friendship these two men developed, one that lasted fifty years beyond the time depicted here until their deaths in 2013, this is a movie about a white guy realizing what racism means at a tangible level. When Shirley says he wants Tony to drive him into the Deep South, Tony says there’s going to be trouble, but is still shocked when he sees the visceral effects of the casual racism that characterized the everyday South. (Which is not to say that racism is gone today; it’s merely hiding behind nice furniture.)

The film also plays fast and loose with too many details of the story and history, starting with condensing what was a real-life tour of nearly 18 months into a two-month whirlwind tour that ended on Christmas Eve, punctuating the film with a feel-good resolution that never happened. Shirley’s surviving relatives, including a brother mentioned in the film and a niece, say the depiction of him as estranged from his family and the black community is false, as is the idea that he had never even had fried chicken, which makes for a brief running gag in the film. There are also minor details that get in the way of the core story, such as Tony discussing Aretha as a household name in 1962 (she was only 20 and had yet to become any kind of star) to try to show Don as out of touch with popular culture.

The way the film depicts Italian-Americans is about half right – and the half it gets right is probably the important part. Italian-Americans, at least those in New York, were tight-knit, family-oriented, insular, and definitely racist and even xenophobic, not just due to outright racism – cultural prejudice in Italy was more north versus south, rather than based on skin color – but because of typical othering, the way one class that faces prejudice might find another group on which they can look down. Mortensen and the actors who portray his family members all boast an embellished bada-bing Brooklyn Italian accent, even though they’re supposed to be from the Bronx. Some of the older characters in the film speak Sicilian – I heard travagliari, the Sicilian word for work, rather than the Italian lavorare – but Mortensen speaks standard Italian with a very clean accent when he switches languages. Linda Cardellini plays Tony’s wife, Dolores, but has nothing to do except look pretty, and her accent is even more exaggerated than Mortensen’s. We do fold our pizza to eat it, because we’re not savages, just not the way Tony does in the film.

Ali’s a lock for a Best Supporting Actor nomination, and might win the award for the second time (the first was for Moonlight). He’s wonderful, because he always is, and I think he does his best to soften the depiction of Shirley as an overly fastidious, isolated person, so that the character comes across more as a person of color trying to navigate a very narrow path through a white world. Mortensen really loses himself well in Tony Lip, but without the subtlety of Ali’s performance; he might still get a nomination now that the furor over him using the n-word in a discussion about the film seems to have died down. Had the film done better at the box office, perhaps it would be a lock for a Best Picture nomination, and it still might get one, but there are going to be at least ten more worthy movies out there in what looks like a crowded year.

Finally, I didn’t like the film, but I don’t want to mislead anyone into thinking this is a terrible film. It’s a bad film compared to what I usually watch, but I don’t watch many really awful films. I skim off the top, because I’m not a professional critic and see only what I want – typically films critics have loved or that are nominated for something major. It had a CinemaScore of A+ last time I looked, and it is absolutely a crowd-pleaser sort of film, and smarter than most films that try to hit those emotional notes. I personally found it sentimental, predictable, and even schlocky at times, and I was bothered by aspects of the film that I think won’t bother most people. Your mileage – and the film has a lot of mileage in it – may vary.

If you want another perspective, Monique Judge reviewed the film for The Root, and within her review there’s a letter from Harry Belafonte praising the film, urging audiences to go see it. He feels it’s accurate to the time and place, since he performed himself across the country in that period, and that “there are many perspectives from which to tell the same story and all can be true.”

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ November 26, 2018
→ By

Arkham Horror.

Fantasy Flight Games just released the third edition of its popular Arkham Horror cooperative game this fall to positive reviews, the first new version of the game since the 2005 edition, with somewhat streamlined rules and four scenarios to play in the base game. I had no experience with the previous versions – the original is from 1987, but Fantasy Flight’s 2005 version is considered a major improvement – but played this version a few times and found it easy to get into once you get past the daunting setup. It’s a co-operative game you can also play in solo mode, and follows the typical format of Lovecraft-themed games where you can die or go insane, but that’s not the losing condition in this edition. The balance here is solid and the format allows you to throw up a lot of defenses to try to give yourselves time to solve the mystery, but if you don’t do so in time, allowing too many horror tokens to pile up, you can still lose the entire game.

Arkham Horror is a Cthulhu game, so you’re going to play investigators trying to find and eliminate Lovecraftian monsters before they kill you or drive you insane, but in this game you can just replace a dead or insane investigator with a new one, losing any extra cards or bonuses you’d accumulated. The board has a different setup for each scenario, with five neighborhood tiles, each comprising three districts, and streets connecting them. Scenario cards tell you where to generate new monsters, place clue tokens, or potentially roll for benefits as you move your investigators around the board. Each scenario has you trying to rack up enough clue tokens to trigger the next phase, eventually winning the game by completing some final task – often beating a more difficult monster spawned after you’ve hit the final clue threshold.

The clues themselves are just tokens, not actual clues; you’re not solving a puzzle or mystery here, but accumulating those tokens while you also try to add cards to boost your investigators. Each investigator has a unique profile of health and sanity points, and gets a specific number of dice for each of the game’s five types of tests, which are measured by dice rolls; you roll that number of dice, and if you get at least one 5 or 6 among all your rolls, it’s considered a success. Investigators can add cards that give them items, spells, and even allies who add more benefits and can absorb some types of damage to spare your main character.

Game turns are simple, although you’ll take so many turns that an entire game will probably run two hours or more. You get two actions, including moving your investigator, attacking an enemy, warding off horror tokens (if too many accumulate, bad shit happens), starting an Encounter in your space to draw a neighborhood card, fleeing from a monster, and so on. You’ll spend most of the game moving to new spaces to either defeat a monster or try to draw a clue, since each game phase is triggered by gathering some set number of clues that lets you flip a scenario card to see the next step, or occasionally to go clear out some horror tokens from a space before they cause negative effects specific to that scenario.

Arkham Horror

Setup takes a while, primarily because each of the base-game scenarios has a unique board, tokens, and monsters, the last of which must be separated out from the complete set and shuffled into a game-specific monster deck. Once you’re rolling (pun intended), though, the game can move along as quickly as the players want to play it; game length is then a function of the storyline and the number of things you have to achieve or collect to get to the next stage. Turns themselves don’t take that long, and combat can be resolved with a couple of dice rolls. (One of the best benefits you can get in the game, from items or allies or spells, is the ability to reroll one or more dice.) If there’s a downside to Arkham Horror beyond its length, it’s that the clues aren’t anything more than green discs – you’re not actually putting together a story or solving any sort of mystery, just collecting good things and avoiding bad things. There is narrative text throughout each scenario, both on neighborhood cards and on the scenario cards that dictate the flow and rules of that specific session, but it’s all window dressing – you don’t need to know or follow any of that story to play the game.

I haven’t played the previous editions of Arkham Horror or the related game Eldritch Horror, but from what I’ve read, this third edition of AH borrows much of the mechanics of Eldritch Horror, and has streamlined this game’s design to reduce some of the randomness – investigator characters start with specific items/spells, the ‘mythos’ tokens at the end of each player turn are a bit easier to predict and plan around – while also giving players four scenarios out of the box instead of one. Those all sound like upgrades to me, at least.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ November 24, 2018
→ By

Stick to baseball, 11/24/18.

My one ESPN+ post this week covered the James Paxton trade, which included one of my favorite pitching prospects in the minors, lefty Justus Sheffield. I didn’t hold a chat this week due to the holiday.

You don’t have to sign up for my free email newsletter, but you’re missing out on lots of words.

And now, the links…

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
→ November 23, 2018
→ By

Terra Incognita.

I’m a huge Connie Willis fan, and have been since I first encountered To Say Nothing of The Dog a few years ago, enough so that I chose that book for my guest appearance on the Hugos There podcast a couple of months back. I’ve read all of her Hugo-winning novels (four books for three awards) and two more of her novels, but hadn’t tried any of her short(er) fiction until I stumbled on Terra Incognita, a collection of three of her novellas, in the Strand back in August. The collection includes “Remake,” which was sold as a standalone novel when it was published and sits on the blurry line between short novel and novella, as well as “D.A.” and “Uncharted Territory.” Two of them are great, and the third feels like filler.

“Remake” is the star of the show, so to speak, and features some of the imagination and prescience found in much great science fiction back to Jules Verne. Willis envisions a world where studios no longer make movies; they use computer algorithms to digitally update old movies, inserting different actors into others’ roles, and then fighting over the legal rights to every actor’s likeness on celluloid. They can change plots and endings, all automagically, and even go back and erase all traces of alcohol or tobacco to satisfy the Temperance League. Into this world comes a young woman who just wants to dance in the pictures, and who captures the attention of a programmer responsible for those digital edits, including the aforementioned temperance nonsense. He tries to talk her out of it, saying she won’t even find a dance teacher let alone movie roles, but then something strange happens and he’s convinced he’s found her likeness in the background of some classic films. Did she find another way in? Was it time travel?

That story was worth the price of the book, even though it’s a bit more ridiculous than even Willis’ lighter fare (Crosstalk and Bellwether), as the central mystery of the story is so clever and there’s no way you won’t start rooting for the girl to make it. The half-hearted romantic tension between those two is sort of a red herring, and there’s some frippery involving the third character, Hedda (also spelled Heada), that takes us away from the main story, but the central plot is strong and I loved dancing along with Willis through the golden age of musicals. She got the CGI part of her future right, but she shouldn’t have bet against musicals coming back into vogue – everything comes back into fashion eventually.

“D.A.” is the shortest of the three entries in this volume, and felt to me like a taunt directed against Ender’s Game, which is much beloved and very male-centric, even though author Orson Scott Card tries to walk back the toxic masculinity with the short story that is tacked on to the novel’s end. (The story came before the novel, but that’s a discussion for another day.) A young woman in cadet school finds herself drafted for duty on the space station … but she didn’t even apply for the spot. She’s brought to the base against her wishes, albeit not quite against her will, and spends all her available time trying to find out what went wrong in the selection process, with the help of an earthside friend with some convenient hacking skills. I could see the vague outlines of the ending coming, but I still enjoyed the journey.

“Uncharted Territory” was the one story that never clicked with me, although there’s one comic element that is funny in a very Connie Willis sort of way. Three humans and one non-human are charting the terrain on an unpopulated planet that likely holds some substantial mineral resources, and must deal with harsh conditions while also coping with the interpersonal relations of that sort of mission … including some strange attractions among them. The characters just don’t gel here at all; Willis rarely has trouble giving her characters unique profiles and three-dimensional personas even in just a handful of pages, but these characters, human and otherwise, just don’t come together. The one non-human’s habit is a good running gag, and there’s a little comic material in the fact that the two species can’t seem to distinguish biological sex in the other species, just not enough of that to salvage the story.

Next up: Still Graham Swift’s novel Last Orders, winner of the Man Booker Prize.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ November 22, 2018
→ By

Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont.

I had no idea there was a British author named Elizabeth Taylor, apparently of some repute in the UK, until I saw the name pop up on the Guardian‘s list of the top 100 novels ever written about ten years ago, and even then knew little about her beyond the Wikipedia entry. I imagine her chagrin at having a world-famous actress (and one who provoked many tabloid headlines) share her name, although perhaps it also pulled some readers toward her books when browsing store shelves. Regardless, she did make that top 100 with her wry comic novel Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, a sweet but unsentimental look at a widow’s move into a long-term hotel that attracted a number of retirees, forming the early equivalent of today’s over-55 communities, and the odd friendship she strikes up with a local writer. (It was adapted into a movie in 2005, but I’ve never seen it and hadn’t heard of it till now.)

Taylor rather deftly creates two parallel narratives around her protagonist and then spins them together to evoke comedy from the intersection. Mrs. Palfrey moves into the Claremont at the beginning of the novel and meets the cast of eccentrics – the busybodies, the would-be lothario, the lonesome, the creep – who populate it. Since the residents are all on the older side, that group will change over the course of the novel, naturally, and the tenor of life in the building (especially in the dining room, the center of most activity) will also shift slightly with each alteration in its makeup. One day, while walking to pick up a library book for another resident, Mrs. Palfrey slips and falls outside the home of Ludo Myers, a would-be writer who spends his days at Harrod’s trying to work on a novel, and who runs out to help her. The two strike up an immediate friendship, as Mrs. Palfrey just appreciates the young Ludo’s kindness while he sees in her a potential muse for his fiction, that drifts into comic territory when she introduces him to her new neighbors at the Claremont as her grandson, Desmond, who really exists but has yet to bother to visit her. (I’m sure you can guess what happens later in the book.)

Mrs. Palfrey was the last of Taylor’s novels published during her lifetime, written when she was into her 50s, and perhaps a look forward at life in old age for a generation that was living longer and more likely to have many years after their children were grown. (She was married and had one child, but unfortunately Taylor died just four years after this book was published at age 63.) One common theme among the denizens of the Claremont is that they’ve largely been forgotten by people in their lives from outside of the Claremont: Adult children don’t show up often, if at all, nor are there many visits or even phone calls from the outside world. And when someone departs from the facility for what we might now call assisted living, the residents seem eager to forget her.

The intersection of her relationship with Ludo, which is somewhat maternal but with the awkwardness of a flirtation, and the way she tries to keep up appearances at the Claremont is the essence of the book’s humor – of course Desmond will show up, and hilarity will ensue. But Ludo also sees Mrs. Palfrey and her mates at the hotel as fodder for the novel he’s been long stymied in writing, a fact of which she’s ignorant, so the question arises for the reader if his affection for her is real or merely functional. The other residents of the Claremont are all stock characters skillfully deployed by Taylor for purposes of humor or pathos, both of a distinctly British variety – there’s little to make you laugh out loud, but much of the book is just witty, and it nicely balances out the obviously grim tone the book takes when one of its elderly characters dies.

This was Taylor’s most critically-acclaimed work, making the Man Booker Prize shortlist in its year, and appeared twice on top 100 lists in the Guardian – the one I use, and another that only included novels published in English (assembled by the same writer, twelve years apart). It’s a brisk, entertaining read, probably worth a more serious meditation on its thoughts on growing old and growing apart from the people who were close to us … but some topics are, perhaps, best left alone when one is in the throes of a good chuckle.

Next up: I’m many reviews behind at the moment, but I’m currently reading Graham Swift’s novel Last Orders.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ November 21, 2018
→ By

Indian Summer app.

Game designer Uwe Rosenberg has managed to make a reputation for himself with two very distinct genres of board games – very complex, low-randomness games of worker placement and resource collection, often with rulebooks running twenty pages long; and light puzzle games that ask you to fill out your personal board with Tetris-like pieces while achieving certain side goals. I’m not a huge fan of the former, other than his original Agricola, but I like the latter quite a bit, including the first one, the two-player Patchwork. He’s followed that up with the “puzzle trilogy” of Cottage Garden, Indian Summer, and this year’s Spring Meadow. The first two now have app versions – I presume the third is in development – and, since I have the physical version of Cottage Garden, I decided to start with the app version of Indian Summer (android • iOS), and report that it’s pretty good across the board.

The basic move in Indian Summer is to place one of five tiles in your personal queue on to your 8×9 board, which is divided into six segments. The tiles can cover three, four, or five spaces at once, and every tile has a single ‘hole’ in it that allows anything printed on the board to peek through after you’ve placed the tile. When you place tiles to cover an entire segment (12 spaces), you then gain any treasures that appear through the holes in those tiles – berries, nuts, mushrooms, and feathers, each of which grants you some special ability. When one player fills out his/her entire board, that becomes the final round, after which players will get one more chance to play their nuts (#phrasing) before the scoring. You get one point for every space covered, up to 72, and then one bonus point for every nut you have left over.

The treasures are the key to the game, of course. Playing a feather lets you place an additional tile on the same turn. Playing a mushroom lets you place the first tiles in the queues of any two opponents. Playing a nut lets you place a squirrel tile, covering a single space, anywhere on the board. Playing a berry lets you refill your queue from the main supply before the automatic refill that occurs when your queue is empty. You can also trade up that chain at a 2:1 ratio, such as two berries for one nut, or down at a 1:1 ratio, such as one feather for one mushroom.

If you create certain three- or four-hole patterns with the tiles you place, you can place a bonus animal tile that matches that pattern and then score the treasures a second time. Since every board has just one feather on it, this is the obvious way to score a second feather – place tiles in a way that the feather is visible and part of a pattern matching an animal tile. There are even four animal tiles that come with a treasure of their own, one of each type, of course.

The app has run extremely well for me so far and provided sufficient challenge with the AI players to keep me playing. The tutorial could be better – it’s goofy, but didn’t make all the rules clear, especially not with the animal tiles – but I figured out the rules with some trial and error as well as one check in the online rulebook. The colors are fantastic, and using the app to move and rotate or flip pieces is intuitive. You can also easily click to see opponents’ boards, but the app is smart enough to give you a tiny thumbnail so you can see at a glance how close each opponent is to covering all 72 spaces.

The AI skill levels seem to vary by the amount of time the app gives itself to decide on its next move; the hard AI players can easily take ten seconds to decide on a move, which is weird but actually reassuring in a way, as (I assume) the AI player is running through a huge list of potential moves before settling on one. I can beat the hard AI players about half the time, but the main challenge is finishing the board first because the AI players clearly favor that goal, with adding animal tiles their second criterion. It’s easy to get the shaft because an AI player filled out its board and triggered end-game, especially if you were the first player to go, since then you don’t get to place any other pieces beyond the one-space squirrels. I’ve noticed more than one instance where an AI player could have ended the game (I think) but chose not to do so, which seemed suboptimal when it happened – not for me, though, as I appreciated the extra turn.

The app has a great undo function that rolls everything back to the start of your turn, which is great for trying different scenarios out to see what has the best outcome. It seems to follow strict and not entirely necessary rules about using those optional actions; for example, if you’ve played a berry to add tiles to your track, you can’t then decide to play a feather to place two tiles on this turn, which doesn’t make much sense to me. That also means you can’t place a tile, play a berry, then place another tile.

I think I still prefer Patchwork as a game for its simplicity and the pure two-player experience – Indian Summer plays two to four – but this is very solid, and it’s a bit simpler than Cottage Garden too. My lone complaint with the game, rather than the app, is that the scoring is so tight that it does feel like the winner is often determined by the randomness of the draws, both what board you get and what tiles appear when. Since you can’t win if you don’t fill out your board, it’s a bit of a race as well. I’ll keep playing this one but I don’t think it’ll replace Patchwork for me any time soon. It does mean I need to pick up Cottage Garden’s app, though.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ November 20, 2018
→ By

Widows.

Steve McQueen’s new film Widows, his first since his Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave in 2013, is an adaptation of a 1980s British TV series of the same name, a series McQueen says he wanted to adapt for some time. He’s maintained much of the framework of the series’ six-episode first season, which spawned a second season (Widows 2: Electric Boogaloo) and later a sequel series, but added some new elements and rewritten the resolution completely. It’s a dense, layered, frenetic heist film that packs a ton of backstory into the first two-thirds of the film – too much, really – before a tremendous finish worthy of the genre.

Harry Rawlings (Liam Neeson) is the leader of a four-man crew that we see trying to escape from a robbery at the start of the film, only to have them die in a police shootout and explosion, which leaves their four wives as the widows of the film’s title. Veronica Rawlings (Viola Davis, who’s going to get an Oscar nomination for this) finds out that Harry stole from would-be city alderman Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry), who wants his $2 million back and gives her a month to find it any way she can. Harry left behind a notebook with details on his next job, with a potential $5 million prize, so Veronica decides to contact the other widows – whom she’s never met – to assemble a crew and pull off the heist themselves so she can pay off Jamal and set the widows up financially.

The effort by the widows to become a team and pull off this heist is the main plot in the film, but there’s so much more layered on top of it that many scenes end too quickly, so the tension doesn’t always build enough and we don’t always get enough exposition on the characters. Jamal is running against Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrell), who’s trying to win the seat long held by his father (Robert Duvall as a pretty obvious Trump surrogate), but it turns out that Jack has a connection to Harry, and also ends up with other connections to the widows. Alice (Elizabeth Debicki), another of the widows, was abused by her husband and by her mother (Jacki Weaver, underutilized here), and ends up trying to be a high-end escort to make ends meet, but really comes into her own by working with these other women and taking care of herself for the first time. The third widow in the crew, Melinda (Michelle Rodriguez), is the least interesting character by far, with the most cursory backstory, a role that certainly does the actress playing it no favors and ultimately ends up overshadowed by the other members of the group, including the woman they bring on as the driver, Belle (Cynthia Erivo).

There is a lot of extra material in this movie, which feels at least like McQueen might have tried to pack in all the backstories from the TV series into one two-hour film. There’s a strand around Veronica’s son, deceased before the movie begins, that has no relevance to anything else in the movie and feels like it’s been tacked on to make a political point (a valid one, but not germane to this film). The political campaign is overstuffed for a subplot, and includes its own threads that never get resolved – the black preacher whose support is with the white candidate gives us a dynamic sermon and then seems to serve no other purpose in the film. Jamal’s story is vague – possibly by design – and his arc has no real ending. The salon is where we first meet Belle, but nothing else about the salon is interesting; it reappears later in another scene that tries to make a political point, this one less effective than the one about Veronica’s son. Even Frumpy Carrie Coon is just a prop here, which is a waste of a terrific (and beautiful) actress.
The real strength of Widows isn’t its story, but its cast, which looks like someone drafted a fantasy team of actors in a league with only four players. Davis is excellent, as she always is, although I think her character doesn’t become three-dimensional enough until the film is well underway. Erivo doesn’t even arrive until halfway through but she is an immediate force, with an epic scene when Belle first meets Veronica. Debicki – who towers over the other women, even though her character starts as a shrinking violet with no strength to defend herself – has the strongest arc of the women in the crew and delivers an outstanding performance to make that character growth credible, discovering that she’s capable of doing more than she imagined while also learning to stand up for herself. (Her character’s scenes as an escort, with a very short-looking and oddly coiffed Lukas “The Pin” Haas, give the film its best side quest.) Daniel Kaluuya plays Jamal’s brother and is utterly terrifying as a sociopathic killer. Farrell’s role could easily have been a caricature of a crooked Chicago political scion, but he turns on the Farrell charm – not to mention a passable Chicago accent – and gives the character some emotional depth and enough different faces to avoid that trap.

There’s a pervasive sense in Widows that McQueen is telling the story of women pushed into bad situations by the men they trusted, then finding their own power and agency in the wake of the botched heist, only to have even more men threaten them, push them around, or just ignore them. We can see Alice develop that sense of confidence and empowerment explicitly, like when she asks Melinda for the building plans and manages to figure out where the target is (with one convenient little coincidence). Belle hustles to make money to support her daughter, but is held back by a lack of economic opportunity or a reliable support structure. Veronica had the strongest career prior to their husbands’ deaths, but is also pushed into unexplored territory, the extent of which isn’t clear until the final scene of the film.

Where McQueen goes astray is in piling so much other thematic material on top of this. There’s a statement about politics, how so many of the people who want to represent us offer both good and bad sides, that issues are frequently not as clearcut as we’d like … and then there’s Tom Mulligan speaking like President Trump about minorities and immigrants. There’s a subplot about white police shooting unarmed black citizens that has nothing to do with the rest of the story – and much of the content here that touches on issues of race just doesn’t work, even as it sits alongside discussions of gender that do. Economic inequality pops up. All of these are themes worth covering, but the total puts a weight on Widows that no two-hour film that is also busy telling a ripping heist story could support.

There is far too much good in Widows for all of these quibbles to bring the film down too far; it’s still a lot of fun and very sharp, never talking down to the audience except for the police brutality thread, and with some details in the heist sequence itself that aren’t properly resolved. There’s a ton to unpack from this movie, and five performances that are at least worthy of consideration for awards – Davis seems like a lock for a Best Actress nomination, while Debicki, Erivo, Kaluuya, and Farrell are each outstanding in supporting roles. If you can hang with all the prologue and the terse editing, the payoff here is enormous.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ November 19, 2018
→ By

Burning.

Burning, Korea’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, is based loosely on a 1992 short story by Haruki Murakami called “Barn Burning.” It takes that very brief framework and builds a dreamlike, post-noir feature film, running nearly two and a half hours, that entraps viewers in its layered mysteries early and then increases the tension like a vice as it approaches its shocking resolution. (The Murakami story appears in The Elephant Vanishes, and is also in the online archives of the New Yorker.)

Lee Jong-su* is an unemployed, would-be writer who bumps into an old classmate, Shin Hae-mi, whom he doesn’t recognize because she’s had plastic surgery. She spots him, and makes it clear that she has some interest in him, eventually bringing him back to her tiny apartment and sleeping with him. She also asks him to feed and clean up after her cat while she takes a two-week trip to Africa, which he agrees to do even though it’s a long drive from his father’s farm in the country. When Jong-su goes to pick Hae-mi up on her return, she’s with a new guy, Ben, who is rich, condescending, and possibly her boyfriend. Jong-su seems resigned to the loss of Hae-mi to Ben, but those two keep inviting him out with them, stringing him along, until one day Ben confesses to Jong-su that he has a hobby of burning greenhouses, burning one every two months or so because it’s the ‘right pace’ for him. Later that night, Jong-su makes a cutting remark to Hae-mi, after which she vanishes, leaving Jong-su to try to figure out what’s going on. From there, the story turns darker as Jong-su follows – or stalks – Ben in search of the girl.

* Korean names are written with the family name first; I’ve held to that convention in this review.

At one point in the film, Ben says to Hae-mi, “it’s a metaphor,” after which she asks what a metaphor is, and Ben says Jong-su should answer, since he’s a writer. This entire film is a metaphor wrapped around a set of smaller metaphors. There’s a strong subtext of the pervasive nature of class distinctions in Korean society, and how the upper class may view the lower classes as not just inferior but expendable. Ben represents the idle, entitled rich, while Jong-su and Hae-mi both come from the lower classes. Jong-su lives on a farm while his father is in jail for assaulting a government official, and has very little spare cash; his estranged mother reappears at one point, complaining of how rich Koreans treat her in her menial job and saying how she needs money, which Jong-su promises to provide despite lacking means. Hae-mi, we learn, is broke, with outstanding debts she can’t pay, working just occasionally as a model/dancer outside shops that hire girls like her to try to drum up business. Ben drives a Porsche, lives in a gorgeous apartment, thinks nothing of spending money on food or drink, and appears to have little regard for people he views as beneath him, as do the friends of his who appear in the film – totally ignoring Jong-su while he’s at their parties while treating Hae-mi and Ben’s next girlfriend as if they’re some sort of entertainment, not actual people.

Throughout the film are smaller metaphors, not least of them the actual burning and references to it. There are cigarettes everywhere (and the occasional joint), fires in the background of shots, the burning color of the sun at sunset, and hints of the world burning around our characters with Donald Trump appearing on a TV lying about immigration and with North Korean propaganda audible outside Jong-su’s house. Birds make several appearances; there’s a postcard drawing of a bird in Hae-mi’s apartment, but it’s gone after she vanishes. Hae-mi tells a story about a well that might also have been a metaphor, but discussing its implications would reveal too much.

The main criticism of Murakami’s writing has long been that he doesn’t write compelling women, and the woman in “Barn Burning” is nothing but a prop, so the screenwriters here had a blank canvas … and didn’t do a ton with it. Hae-mi, played by Jeon Jong-seo in her first film role (where she really reminds me of Lily James), is a Boolean character – she has two modes, the flirtatious and perhaps overly sexual coquette as well as the stark depressive who seems to lack a will to live. All her edges are extremely sharp, while Jong-su in particular is drawn with far more nuance to just about every aspect of his character. Jeon does what she can with a character that verges on the ridiculous, at times appearing more like the object of male fantasy than like a fully realized woman, but the writing limits what she can do.

The two male leads deliver outstanding performances. Yoo Ah-in plays Jong-su as a sort of slack-jawed stoner – seriously, his mouth is constantly open – whose expressions and slow reactions would imply that he’s not very bright, but there’s more intelligence beneath the surface here, and Yoo gives him some emotional depth that I wasn’t expecting given how the film first introduces the character. Stephen Yeun is totally magnetic as Ben, smarmy and confident and charismatic, the character Jong-su wants to dislike but can’t quite come around to doing so because Yeun gives him that extra layer of amiability on top of what appears to be a rather unpleasant core.

The original story has Jong-su’s character comparing Ben’s to Jay Gatsby, a line that also appears in the film, while William Faulkner comes up twice during the movie as well. (I had a book with me to read while I waited for the film to start, and in a pure coincidence, it was Faulkner’s The Unvanquished.) The Faulkner connection is fascinating as his writing was frequently opaque, full of symbol and metaphor, and covered themes like racial prejudice and the moral decay that can accompany rising financial status. Ben’s skin is substantially lighter than those of the other main characters, as are his friends’, and the question of his morality and motivations, and even how he acquired such wealth, hangs over the last half of the film.

Murakami’s story doesn’t make the ending clear, but the film makes it much more evident what’s happening with these characters – at least, I think it does, although director Lee Chang-dong ensures that we never get explicit proof that our suspicions are correct. There’s sufficient misdirection here to keep viewers thinking about this film for days afterwards, as I have been. It’s well-written, extremely well-acted, features some stunning and memorable shots, and is just tortuous enough to keep you off balance right through the final scene. It’s one of the best films I’ve seen so far this year.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ November 18, 2018
→ By

The Wife.

The Wife, based on novel of the same name by Meg Wolitzer, has received early acclaim primarily for the performance of Glenn Close as the wife of the movie’s title. She delivers a solid performance, as you might expect, but the movie is dreck, the cinematic equivalent of painting by numbers, with moments so big and predictable that I actually walked to the back of the theater at one point to message a friend about how bad the movie was.

Close plays Joan Castleman, the wife of author Joseph Castleman (Jonathan Pryce) who, as the film opens, wins the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993; the story takes us with Joan and Joe to Stockholm for the ceremony while giving us flashbacks to when they met and through the development of his career and their marriage. Joan was a student in Joe’s writing class at Smith, with Close’s daughter Annie Starke playing young Joan and Harry Lloyd hamming it up as young Joe, and they start an affair even though Joe is married and the two are teacher and student. Their romantic relationship also involves a professional partnership, as Joan is a gifted writer in her own right, but subverts her talents because she believes there is no market for a female novelist, while she can help Joe turn his writing into something that can succeed critically and commercially. Back in Stockholm, Nate (Christian Slater) is hounding the family so he can write a biography of Joe, while their adult son David (Max Irons) is there to sulk, smoke pot, and yell at his father. Of course, the tensions build over the course of the film to a melodramatic climax where we learn the truth about Joe’s work while Joan makes some major decisions about the rest of her life.

The hackneyed story runs through a series of coincidences, clichés, and outright groaners that destroy any suspension of disbelief because you can’t possibly accept anything this stupid as remotely realistic. Joe’s about to kiss the stunning young photographer who’s been assigned by his publisher to take pictures of him in Stockholm when the alarm Joan set on his watch to remind him to take his heart medication happens to go off at that precise moment. The winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics is supposed to be there for comic relief but is just an unfunny caricature of the overbearing, bragging parent, and of course we later find out that his kids are messed up. Nate is an even worse caricature of a mercenary writer, unctuous enough to soak the audience in grease, even dressed to depress with a cheap leather jacket and jeans while everyone else is attired for the occasion. David is the brooding young author and his fractured relationship with his father is overwrought and undersold. The scene with the walnut in the hotel room is insultingly trite. And if you can’t see the ending coming with all the clues the film positively throws at you from the beginning, the little plastic castle must be a surprise to you every time.

Close’s performance in The Wife has garnered substantial praise and she’s considered very likely to earn a Best Actress nomination, both for her performance and because the subject matter is clearly Oscar bait. Close is … fine. She gives a good performance in a role that is just not all that interesting – Joan’s character is just not that remarkable and the confines of the script do not give Close all that much room to stretch out. Joan says she doesn’t want to be seen as the long-suffering wife, but that’s just what she is, and we’ve seen this character a thousand times before. Close does what she can, but there’s no new thing under this sun.

Pryce is a scene-chewer by nature, although he deserves credit for how spot-on his Brooklyn Jewish accent is; he gives Joe a little charisma so you can see how women might still be interested in him despite his gruff manner and bombast. Irons scowls his way through the film, although the script gives him little else to do, and Elizabeth McGovern, whose bizarre diction was a constant distraction on Downton Abbey, tries to deliver some sort of weird 1950s dame voice to match an overblown speech that alters the course of Joan’s life.

The groupthink around this film just flabbergasts me – this is a badly written story with two competent performances at its heart, neither of which can elevate this movie beyond the level of dreadful. Even the few laughs are forced and the jokes frequently obvious. If Close gets a nomination over Rosamund Pike (for A Private War) or Melissa McCarthy (for Can You Ever Forgive Me?), it might be more a career achievement honor than a reflection of their respective performances.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,