→ March 11, 2025
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A Song for a New Day.

Sarah Pinsker’s A Song for a New Day depicts a United States in the near future where people are compelled to stay at home and avoid any kind of public gatherings in the wake of a series of terrorist attacks and a pandemic that killed some unknown part of the population. She published it in 2019. It won the Nebula Award for Best Novel on June 1st, 2020. I am going to say I think this one might have included a little bias – this is a perfectly cromulent novel, but I don’t think it’s really up to the historical standard here, even though that wasn’t a great year for sci-fi/fantasy novels.

A Song for a New Day follows two main characters, both queer women, through plot lines that intersect, split, and intersect again, with one of the two jumping forward in time. Luce Cannon (say it out loud) is a singer/songwriter whose band happened to play the last concert before the world shut down; Pinsker tells her chapters in first person, and begins her story with that final show before moving forward to the future time when live music is essentially banned. Rosemary Laws (no relation) is a young naïf who lives with her parents and works for the everything-store SuperWally (subtle) in customer support, dealing with users through a sort of virtual reality that works through wired hoodies. Through a small coincidence, she ends up getting a job with StageHoloLive, a company with a monopoly on recorded music and that streams ‘live’ shows to the SuperWally user base, again through virtual reality. Rosemary becomes a recruiter, going out into the real world in search of underground music venues to find new bands for StageHoloLive to scoop up, which eventually puts her in the crowd at one of Luce’s shows. Rosemary is, naturally, a true believer that these conglomerates are benevolent and that their services really help people, while Luce and her counterculture friends and acquaintances have other ideas – or, they just have ideas, and they help Rosemary come up with some, too.

The best parts of A Song for a New Day don’t revolve that much around the characters, neither of whom is that special or memorable, or even that tangible off the page – it’s the music, as Pinsker must be a dedicated fan of music, especially live music, to be able to evoke the sense of watching a great band in person just through her descriptions. Some of the music she describes is a little too far-fetched, as we’re talking maybe fifteen years in the future, not two hundred, but the descriptions of just being there, hearing it, feeling it in your bones, recognizing a song but also hearing it in a new way because it’s live, are the real standout here. There’s some fun and intrigue in the narrative around Rosemary’s attempts to find these illicit shows and scenes; it dovetailed nicely with my watch of A Complete Unknown, where Bob Dylan and some of his peers get their starts in little coffeehouses and other underground (albeit legal) venues in New York.

Pinsker also takes aim at Big Tech dominating more of our lives, a philosophical view I happen to share, but she lays it on so thick that it loses some of its bite. The company names, like many of the character names, are too obvious, and there’s the usual blame-the-consumer part going on – I can never blame people who simply choose the cheapest option, regardless of the hidden costs, or people who say yes to same-day delivery of something for no extra fee. That’s rational economic behavior. It’s also not in our natures to consider the externalities of anything we do; you have to learn those behaviors, like separating your recycling from your trash to keep it out of a landfill or breaking down those cardboard boxes so you’re not making more work for someone else. The blame should fall on the complicit governments that allowed these companies to get so much control over our lives and our economy – and now our Administration – but not on the consumers.

Even from my spoiler-free description, you can probably guess most of where the plot of A Song for a New Day ends up. There were virtually no surprises in the story or the development of Rosemary’s character – I don’t think Luce’s develops at all, except maybe for one sentence near the end of the book that hints at something further – so while it’s pleasant, it’s not as compelling as it could have been. The novel functions much better as a paean to the power and beauty of live music than anything else, and maybe that’s good enough for most readers. I just wonder if it would have won the Nebula if it hadn’t had a pandemic baked into the back story.

Next up: I just finished Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown and started Ursula Le Guin’s Nebula-winning YA novel Powers.

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→ March 10, 2025
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The Substance.

The Substance has a great concept for a sci-fi/horror film, and an even better theme. Writer/director Coralie Fargeat depicts Hollywood’s obsession with women’s looks and youth, and the patriarchy’s obsession with the same through an aging actress and fitness-show star who learns about a cheat code to become a 20-year-old version of herself again – but only every other week. It is such a shame that Fargeat had no idea what to do with the story once she got the setup in place; the second half of this movie is a literal and figurative mess, so much so that it’s appalling that this profoundly stupid movie got Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay nominations. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc., or watch it free on Mubi.)

Demi Moore plays the idiotically-named Elizabeth Sparkle, a Jane Fonda-ish figure who was once a huge star and now hosts a daily aerobics show, because I guess this movie is set in 1985 (although it never specifies when it’s set). On the day she turns 50, the show’s producer Harvey (as in Weinstein, because this film is just that subtle) fires her because she’s too old. (Harvey is played by Dennis Quaid, who hams it up as the role demands.) Elizabeth is so upset as she’s driving home that she gets into a car accident and ends up in the hospital, where somehow she doesn’t have any broken bones or internal bleeding or anything of the sort, but a creepy young nurse with ridiculously smooth skin slips her a flash drive that tips her off to a fountain-of-youth scheme called The Substance. She jumps through all kinds of hoops to get a hold of it – the film’s best sequences, really – and eventually tries it out: A second, younger version of herself (Margaret Qualley) emerges, literally, and takes over the lead spot on Elizabeth’s show. The hitch is that each week, Elizabeth and this new her, who takes the name Sue, must switch places: one goes into a sort of coma, and the other gets to run around and be alive and such. But when one of the two decides to take a little more than the allotted time, the center cannot hold and things fall apart – including the plot.

The whole setup is pretty brilliant, like something from a modern Philip K. Dick fable. (PKD did write at least once about “anti-gerasone,” a serum that reversed the effects of aging.) The attention to detail in the way the whole scheme works, right down to the packaging of the various parts of the Substance, would seem to presage a really thoughtful, smart conclusion, regardless of whether it works out for Elizabeth. There’s a wide range of points this story could have made about how society as a whole and the media industry in specific treats women as disposable assets with early expiration dates. It applies to women on screen in films and on TV, even news and sports anchors, but also applies to general societal attitudes towards women, even in what is supposed to be a more equitable and enlightened era. (Or was, I suppose.) Men who are Elizabeth’s age see her as old, then fawn over and leer at Sue, including, of course, Harvey.

Instead, we get a thoughtless, gross, and sloppy conclusion to all of that early promise. There’s an inexplicable rivalry between the two halves – which I interpreted as a commentary on women who step on or attack other women rather than standing together against the patriarchy – that leads each of them to try to sabotage the other during their waking weeks. And when one starts stealing time from the other, things go very awry, and it becomes clear that Fargeat never figured out the end of the story. The big concluding scene is a bloody mess, either way you want to interpret that phrase, and is also absolute nonsense: The hyperrealism that fills every part of the film outside of the use of the Substance is gone, and we’re no longer making or even pondering a point. We’re just covered in blood. There’s no further exploration of the entrenched misogyny across our society, or our obsession with youth and beauty. There’s no biting, satirical conclusion that takes down the Harveys of the world – or even the just normal, just innocent men who are probably contributing to the environment in all manner of little ways (and I’m not exempting myself here, either). Fargeat wrote herself into a corner, and instead of writing herself out of it, she just went for gore. I

Moore’s performance in The Substance earned her a Golden Globe Award and a SAG Award, as well as a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress; I don’t think this was a close contest between her and Mikey Madison, who won the Oscar for her performance in Anora. Moore is very good, but there’s some sentiment in the plaudits; she’s not even in the movie as much as a typical lead performer. There’s some daring to the performance, certainly, and she also has to act out some pretty gross scenes that couldn’t have been easy. Qualley didn’t get anywhere near the same attention, but she’s excellent and essential to the movie – she has to play a sort of scheming ingenue, and in any of her scenes at the studio, especially anything with Harvey, she nails the look and demeanor of someone who knows how to manipulate the hell out of the idiot man in front of her. She’s not better than Moore in the film, but she could have gotten some supporting actress support.

This just isn’t a good movie by any definition I would use. It’s very smart and entertaining for about half its length, and then it falls apart. It’s not smart, or interesting, or even entertaining in the second half, beyond the tension because we’re watching Elizabeth-Sue heading for some kind of terrible crash. I’m almost offended that it got a screenplay nomination, because the writing is the whole problem here. The performances are good, the effects and makeup are fine, but the writing is just lazy. A big violent finish is the easiest and least thoughtful way to end a story. This story, and the women it’s ostensibly supporting, deserved better.

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→ March 9, 2025
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Stick to baseball, 3/8/25.

I had two columns this week for subscribers to The Athletic – a ranking of the top 30 prospects for this year’s draft, and a scouting notebook on Oregon State, Auburn, and high school shortstop Kayson Cunningham.

I’m on the run, so let’s get to the links…

  • Musk’s goons disbanded the technology office known as 18F, which existed to develop projects designed to improve government efficiency. Some of the former employees have set up a site to explain and defend their work.
  • The Texas A&M Board of Regents voted to ban all drag shows at the entire campus network, a pretty clear First Amendment violation. FIRE has sued to block the ban.
  • Our genius President referred to Lesotho as a country “nobody has ever heard of,” so the BBC published a story with nine facts about the tiny African country, which is entirely surrounded by South Africa.
  • Phoenix Children’s Hospital – where my daughter received care multiple times in the two-plus years we lived out there – has put a halt to gender-affirming care in obeisance to Trump’s (probably unconstitutional) executive orders. Absolute cowardice.
  • Louisiana’s Department of Health is ending its mass vaccination programs and banning promotion of seasonal vaccines like the one against the flu. That measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico has already killed at least three people with over 200 confirmed cases, by the way.
  • People who voted for Trump are now losing their government jobs. I really find it hard to muster any sympathy for these folks; if they claim they didn’t know what they were voting for, they weren’t paying enough attention before they went to the booth.

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→ March 7, 2025
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Music update, February 2025.

I always think February is going to be a lighter month for music, but that makes no sense since it will always have four Fridays, same as most months, and it’s not like December when labels do try to avoid releasing new albums. This month was pretty packed, and I’m sure I missed stuff – I’m behind on some of the full-lengths released in the last four weeks for sure – but here’s what I’ve got. As always you can see the playlist here if you can’t access the widget below.

Blondshell – Two Times. I was lighter on Blondshell’s highly acclaimed self-titled debut album when it came out in 2023, but this song, from her upcoming LP If You Asked for a Picture, is by far the best thing she’s ever done, with revealing storytelling with off-kilter harmonies over a mesmerizing guitar line.

Waxahatchee – Mud. I actually drove right by the actual town of Waxahachie on my last scouting trip to Texas, while I was listening to this song (and playlist), an extra track from the Tigers Blood sessions.

Sharon van Etten – I Can’t Imagine (Why You Feel This Way). I’ve never quite gotten the critical acclaim for van Etten, who often sings like she’s stoned, but she does have a great voice when she lets it rip, and I’ve sense a stylistic shift over her last two or three albums to include more rock and other genres and away from the minimalist arrangements of her earlier work.

Heartworms – Just to Ask a Dance. Heartworms, aka Jojo Orme, released her debut album Glutton for Punishment last month to some pretty glowing reviews. It’s a frenetic, energetic mix of gothic new wave, dance, and industrial elements, with plenty of guitars, calling back to the several points of the 1980s (there’s some early NIN in here) while managing to also sound modern and inventive.

Matt Berry w/Eric D. Johnson – Why on Fire? I didn’t know the British actor Matt Berry, who appeared on The IT Crowd and What We Do in the Shadows and voiced a character in The Wild Robot, was actually a musician first, with his first album coming out in 1995. His newest LP, Heard Noises, has gotten a ton of praise, but I actually just like this one song; the rest of it is very nostalgic, almost a throwback to the ‘60s, and not the part I particularly enjoy.

Sports Team – Bang Bang Bang. This is the best of the three singles Sports Team have released so far from their upcoming third album, Boys These Days, due out May 25th. I loved this art-rock/post-punk band’s last record, Gulp!, which had great guitar-driven hooks and witty lyrics throughout, but the previous two singles they put out didn’t have the same energy this one does.

Sam Fender – Little Bit Closer. I confess I have to listen to Fender’s whole album People Watching, but this and the title track are both outstanding roots-rock tracks from a freaking British guy who just turned 30.

Fontaines D.C. – It’s Amazing to Be Young. A one-off single from the lads to commemorate one of the members becoming a father for the first time. Between this and “Favourite,” I might almost say they’d gone pop.

The Murder Capital – Death of a Giant. This Irish rock band just released their third album, Blindness, on February 21st, featuring this track and “Can’t Pretend to Know.” I wrote in October that they’re somewhere between punk and post-punk, but this song is almost math-rock (I don’t love the term, but it fits), and definitely goes beyond their punk-ish roots.

Adwaith – Gofyn. I’ve included a few more Welsh acts in the last five years because my wife is of Welsh descent, but this band actually popped up on an American-based playlist I follow on Spotify. They sing in Welsh, and use a sort of spare, post-punk style that sounds very DIY. They just released their third album, Solas.

swim school – Heaven. I’ve seen this Scottish band described as indie-pop, grunge, and shoegaze, all of which sort of fits. I’m into their sound, whatever it is, and I bet they kick ass live. This track is very shoegazey; it’s their first new music since their “mixtape” Seeing It Now came out last April.

Preoccupations – Focus. Preoccupations does one of the best revivals of mid-80s post-punk, right down to the guitar tones, so I’m pretty much going to include any track they release on here … but come on, that guitar riff at the start is “Uncertain Smile,” right?

The Horrors – Ariel. The Horrors’ follow-up to their magnum opus, 2017’s V, comes out on the 21st. Night Life seems like it’s going to turn hard into the psychedelic and shoegaze parts of their sound, based on the three singles so far.

Friendship – Free Association. These guys are from Philly and have put out four albums already, so I’m a little abashed that this is the first song of theirs I’ve ever heard. I love the music, the pulsing percussion lines and the haunting piano and string lines, but I do wish the singer would just … sing. He’s kind of warble-talking, and it detracts from the song.

The Tubs – Chain Reaction. Probably my least favorite single of the three released so far from this offshoot of the defunct band Joanna Gruesome. Their jangle-pop sound is right up my alley, although the earlier two singles had better hooks. They released their second album, Cotton Crown, today.

Tropical Fuck Storm – Goon Show. I suppose with a name like that, you kind of have to not give a fuck about anything, right? This song is weird and witty and at some points barely seems like a song. “It’s raining cats and dogma” is a great line, though. They’re promising a new album but have offered no details, so this is just a one-off single from the Melbourne supergroup.

Brooke Combe – Butterfly. Combe’s full-length debut, Dancing at the Edge of the World, came out on January 31st, featuring this smooth ‘70s-infused R&B/pop number along with the superb “This Town.”

Self Esteem – Focus is Power. I hadn’t heard of Self Esteem, the nom de chanson of Rebecca Taylor, who was half of Slow Club, before this song, but it seems like the kind of pop banger that could easily take off with its gospel-backed chorus and its trite, vague lyrics about self-worth and being powerful. I still like the melody, though.

Little Simz feat. Obongjayar & Moonchild Sanelly – Flood. Simbi’s back, with her next album Lotus coming out on May 9th. That’ll be her first full-length since 2022’s No Thank You, although she’s put out music in the interim via EPs and mixtapes. This track features more of her frequent collaborator Obongjayar (“Point and Kill”) than it does of Simz herself, which might be a negative if it weren’t for the tremendous beat behind all of their vocals. How is she only 31? I feel like she’s been recording for fifteen years now.

WOOZE – 4 Lovely Children. WOOZE’s self-titled debut album came seven years after their first release, and it hits the mark – the songs are ridiculous, bouncy, snarky, and just all-around fun.

Bartees Strange – 17. Strange just dropped his third album, Horror, and based on the four songs I’ve heard so far he’s expanding his sonic palate substantially, although I also understand the criticism of Jack Antonoff’s production style, which tends to mute Strange’s guitar work.

Anxious – Never Said. I don’t think these guys are an emo band, but that’s how I see them labeled in the music press; they’re somewhere between hard rock and hardcore, and even with some screamed vocals it’s pretty damn good. Their second album, Bambi, came out on February 21st, and it’s in my queue.

Doves – A Drop in the Ocean. I didn’t love the new album, Constellations for the Lonely, anywhere near as much as I’d hoped after hearing the killer first single “Renegade.” It’s just uneven, in both songwriting and production, and the third single “Saint Teresa” was just a mess. Singer Jimi Goodwin doesn’t always sound fully invested in the songs, which is disappointing as his voice is my favorite of the various band members’.

Momma – Bottle Blonde. This is more like it after their last single was heavily derivative of Veruca Salt’s “Seether,” more in that lo-fi indie-pop vein that characterized their best track to date, “Speeding 72.”

Andy Bell – apple green ufo. That’s the Andy Bell of Ride, not the one of Erasure; Bell just released a solo album Pinball Wanderer that is a spaced-out psychedelic trip, nothing like his music with Ride or Hurricane #1 or Oasis, and even includes a mellow cover of “I’m in Love with a German Film Star.”

Verbian – Fruta caída do mar. I get emails from a lot of music publicists, too many to even open most of them – it’s not like this is my job – but something got me to open this one, and even though it’s not the sort of experimental metal that email led me to expect, it is novel, with the percussion especially standing out here for the way it gives the song different textures throughout.

Mekons – War Economy. I didn’t realize the Mekons were still going, but they’ve been quite prolific, at least up until the pandemic, after which they didn’t put out any new music for five years, until last month’s Horror. I also don’t know their music very well, or even their history, given how often I confuse them with the Melvins, two bands with nothing at all in common.

Raven – Can’t Take Away the Fire. I can’t believe these guys are still going; Raven started in 1974, became one of the leaders of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, never breaking through commercially beyond that core audience, and they’ve never had more than a brief hiatus in their fifty years. More notable is that the band still has its two original members, the Gallagher brothers – no, not them – with John Gallagher still handling vocals and hitting the high notes at age 66.

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→ March 6, 2025
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Nickel Boys.

Nickel Boys, adapted from Colson Whitehead’s outstanding, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys,  is a daring experiment that tells the stories of its two protagonists in first-person perspective, giving the viewer the unsettling feeling of being in the abuse-ridden Nickel “Academy” for Boys. It’s easily one of the best films of 2024, earning just two Oscar nominations (Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay), although the script’s fidelity to the novel ended up blunting some of the suspense of the film for me.  (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc., or watch it free on that MGM+ thing nobody has.)

Nickel Boys starts by following Elwood (Ethan Herisse), a bookish young Black man in Florida in 1962 who ends up arrested as an accomplice to a theft he didn’t commit and is sent to a segregated reform school, based on the real-life Florida School for Boys, which was only closed in 2009 after decades of reports of abuse, rape, and murder of the children imprisoned there. Elwood becomes an easy target for some of the bigger, tougher boys there until a longer-term inmate, Turner (Brandon Wilson), comes to his aid, and the two become friends. When the pair see all of the corruption and violence going on behind the scenes, they hatch a plot to try to get the abusive school leader removed from power. Scenes from 1988 are interspersed through the film, showing Elwood, now an adult living in New York City, running his own moving business, eventually running into a former classmate from the institution and hearing how many others have died or fallen into substance abuse since they were “graduated.” We also see Elwood’s grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) in the beginning of the movie before Elwood’s arrest, in her attempts to visit him and use a lawyer to get him released, and in some of Elwood’s flashbacks to his life before Nickel.

This is the first full-length feature from director and co-screenwriter RaMell Ross, who directed the Oscar-nominated short Hale County This Morning, This Evening in 2018, making it even more impressive that he  chose to film it in first-person perspective, and to do so from the viewpoint of two different characters. There are several scenes we see twice, which naturally changes the way we interpret the events we’re watching, and even in scenes we see once the shift in perspective can be disorienting – deliberately so, mimicking the sense that the student-inmates must have had in an environment where punishment, including getting “disappeared,” could be arbitrary and capricious. The intense focus on only what Elwood or Turner could see means that the audience’s understanding of how brutal and corrupt the school leadership was is entirely defined by the boys’ understanding of the same. We might suspect it more than they do, of course, but the evidence comes to us through their eyes, so that their disbelief – especially that people in positions of authority could so blatantly ignore the rules and act unfairly – is more palpable.

That this film missed out on the Best Cinematography category is the great snub and mystery of this year’s Oscars; I understand the movie wasn’t that widely seen, but it got a Best Picture nomination, so enough people saw and appreciated it for it to land one of those spots even over some films that (I think) were seen as more likely to make the cut. The cinematography in this movie is everything; it is the defining feature of the film, and it elevates a story that was already fantastic to another level, making this one of the very best movies of the year. The two leads give excellent performances, but I can see the argument that both are too understated to become awards fodder, not when they were competing against impersonations and dancing lawyers and the like.

Nickel Boys is ultimately an experience, or a movie to be experienced, something that I seldom saw in this movie cycle; Anora, which won Best Picture and a slew of other honors, is one of the others, and I’d say the underrated A Real Pain is as well. All three movies draw you into their stories in the early moments and never break the spell until the final scene or two. I was at a slight disadvantage here, because I read the novel and remembered the twist, so the gut-punch moment that comes late in the film didn’t land the same way with me. That’s not a criticism of the film, but a comment on the particular experience I had in watching it. However, Ross made an editorial choice at the very end, after the resolution of the main narrative, showing some real-life images and footage that, unfortunately, did break the spell for me before we hit the credits. It was the only misstep for me in what was otherwise a superb film and tremendous directorial debut, one that I hope is a harbinger of more great work to come.

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→ March 4, 2025
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Arlington & San Antonio eats.

Just some smaller eats of note this time, with two spots I particularly wanted to mention. The first was a very unassuming Lebanese restaurant called Beirut Grill that’s about ten minutes from Globe Life Field. That might be the best baba ghanouj I have ever had, and if not, it’s very close. It was smoky, garlicky, and incredibly bright, and I almost could have made a meal of that alone, as I think the appetizer portion was one entire eggplant and came with five or six large, warm pitas. I did, however, order an actual main course, the tawook sandwich with shish tawook (marinated, grilled chunks of chicken breast) with tomatoes, parsley, and toum (garlic sauce) wrapped in a thin bread that I think was markook, since it was thinner than a pita or laffa. The chicken was still juicy and had the brightness of the lemon juice in the marinade, and the toum … well, it’s mostly garlic, so I’m a fan, but that’s the sort of thing you’ll probably love or hate. Those two items plus a sparking water came to about $19 before tip. I’ve been thinking about the baba ghanouj for three days now.

I was in San Antonio for part of the day on Saturday and found a food hall in the city called Make Ready, where I ate at Four Brothers, a Venezuelan food stand that sells arepas – two for $12.99, to be precise, so I got one with chicken and one vegan one with black beans, both with sliced avocado, maduros (sweet plantains), garlic sauce, onions, and more. The chicken one was so stuffed it fell apart before I could finish it, but that was the winner of the two, just because the chicken itself had so much flavor, smoky and salty and a tiny bit spicy. The vegan arepa was perfectly fine, but it missed the extra flavors from the sauce on the chicken itself. I’m trying to eat less meat in general, but on both my trips to Texas in the last three weeks, I’ve had narrow windows to eat, and usually that means chicken is involved somehow. I also got the yucca fries, but I’d give those a miss; they definitely needed more salt, but also they just weren’t necessary given the size of the two arepas.

I revisited Smoke ‘n Ash, the Ethiopian/Texas BBQ fusion spot in south Arlington that earned a writeup in the New York Times two years ago, and ended up ordering almost the same thing I did last July, with some small modifications. I will say having had the chicken and the ribs both with and without the Ethiopian awaze seasoning, I’d pay the upcharge to add it every time. Without is good; with is divine. I tried the ye’abasha gomen, listed on the menu as vegan collard greens to distinguish them from the “beefy collard greens,” which I believe contain beef. I’ve never had collards like these and I honestly don’t know how I feel about them; they’re very gingery, with garlic, cardamom, and coriander, so they also come across as very earthy in flavor. The collards themselves were extremely well cooked, tender but not mushy, and the whole thing had plenty of salt; it’s also just possible that it didn’t meld well with the other flavors on the plate. I still love this place and wish there were more things for me to try.

I’ll also vouch again for Nehemiah Coffee, a local coffee shop maybe 7-8 minutes from Globe Life up on Lamar. They’re open till 10 pm and serve some food and some beer and wine later in the day; their coffee is the best I’ve had in the area, and I really love their simple breakfast sandwich because of the chipotle aioli they put on it. It’s also a very appealing space in which to sit and work or read or just relax, because it’s open and gets a lot of natural light through the windows. That’s become my morning stop every time I’m in Arlington now.

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→ March 3, 2025
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A Complete Unknown.

A Complete Unknown looked for all the world like another hagiographic biopic of a musician who deserved better, but, much to my surprise at least, it’s a solid and at least somewhat balanced portrayal of a short window of Bob Dylan’s life. It’s well-paced, gets the right songs in the right places, and brings two outstanding supporting performances. It’s just unfortunate the guy playing Dylan is so tied up in an impersonation that the portrayal says nothing remotely insightful about the main character. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.; I received a review code from the studio’s publicity department.)

The story begins with Dylan’s (Timothée Chalamet) arrival in New York City, upon which he tracks down one of his idols, Woody Guthrie, by that point in hospital as Huntington’s Disease had affected his ability to control his muscles. Sitting by Guthrie’s bedside is Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), who invites Dylan to come stay with him and his wife Toshi (Eriko Hatsune, in the film’s most thankless role), where Pete quickly realizes that “Bobby” has some talent. We follow Dylan through little shows in New York City coffee houses and in slightly larger spaces where Seeger gets him on the billing – which is where he meets Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) – and onwards and upwards until Dylan gets to play the Newport Folk Festival. His first two appearances there were huge successes, but when he returned as the headliner in 1965, at the point where he was incorporating more rock sounds and was about to release Highway 61, he found himself in conflict with the festival’s organizers and many fans while also at a major inflection point in his career.

A Complete Unknown dispenses with the music biopic trope of some sort of adversity – usually drugs or alcohol – for the subject to overcome before the triumphant conclusion, likely because Dylan simply hasn’t had anything like that. The dips in his career were far less dramatic; the biggest one is probably his flirtation with Christianity, leading to a trio of albums that are generally considered his weakest, and all of that is more than a decade after the time period of this film. Instead, the script just lets the natural vicissitudes of the life of a rising musician define the narrative arc, such as his on-again, off-again affairs with Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning, playing a fictionalized version of Suze Rotolo) and with Baez, along with his conflicts with music industry suits and the Festival organizers. The slope of the curve is always positive, but there’s enough variation here to keep the story interesting – and the music doesn’t hurt.

That said, there’s a clear choice here to portray Bob Dylan as some sort of pop star, and it doesn’t exactly work with the source material. This is Bob Dylan, not just any songwriter or singer or musician. He won a Nobel Prize. He’s been covered by over 600 artists, running the gamut from Jimi Hendrix to Adele to Ministry to Bryan Ferry to XTC to the Ramons to Guns ‘N Roses to Van Morrison (with Them). He’s one of the most influential songwriters in the history of recorded music, but there’s very little to indicate that in A Complete Unknown. The portrayal here, which has fans recognizing him everywhere and hounding him in the streets, doesn’t even seem to line up with his commercial results in the film’s time period; his first album to reach the Billboard top ten came out in 1965, near the very end of the narrow window the movie covers. Maybe he had screaming groupies following him around, maybe he couldn’t go out in public to see his friend’s band play, but that doesn’t seem to jibe with the facts or Dylan’s persona.

I’m writing this just an hour or two after the Oscars ended, and although I haven’t seen The Brutalist to comment on whether Adrien Brody was deserving, I’m not upset that Chalamet didn’t win. He’s doing an extended impersonation, and in his case, it feels like Timothée Chalamet impersonating Bob Dylan impersonating Timothée Chalamet. The scene in the elevator when he meets Bobby Neuwirth for the first time is cringeworthy, as Chalamet is trying so hard to mimic Dylan’s voice and mannerisms that it comes off as bad parody; Richard Belzer never sank to such depths. Edward Norton and Monica Barbaro are both marvelous in their supporting roles, however, and while neither had much of a chance, especially not Norton, they really help A Complete Unknown keep its momentum and its general atmosphere, Norton – as charming as I’ve ever seen him – in the first half, Barbaro in the second. There’s also a brief cameo by James Austin Johnson as an emcee, which is a brilliant nod to Johnson’s impersonations of Dylan on Saturday Night Live.

The film also completely ignores Toshi Seeger, even though she was a significant figure in several of the events the movie depicts. She helped set up the original Newport Folk Festival; she produced and directed the TV series starring her husband on which Dylan appears in the movie; she later won an Emmy for a documentary about Pete’s career. Yet A Complete Unknown barely gives her any lines, and in most scenes she’s busy frowning or scowling, with a near-constant expression on her face like someone has placed a rotten onion just below her chin. The film has one nonwhite character of any significance at all, and she gets whitewashed out of the story. There are a lot of details here that are made up or combined into single events, typical artistic license in this kind of film, but the erasure of Toshi Seeger is almost unforgivable. (The New York Times’ obituary for her has more details on her life and legacy.)

The screenplay for A Complete Unknown, adapted from Elijah Wald’s book Dylan Goes Electric!,does veer enough from the clichés of the genre to maintain enough narrative greed to power through two-plus hours without a big dramatic twist to overcome my two pretty significant reservations about the film. Chalamet plays well and sings passably, even when imitating such an oft-imitated voice, and the performances around him hold him up in the moments when he descends too far into impersonation. I recommend it with the caveat that it could have been so much more, especially in terms of delving into Dylan’s character, perhaps in the hands of a different screenwriter and lead actor.

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→ March 1, 2025
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Stick to baseball, 3/1/25.

Two new posts this week at the Athletic, one looking at the top 25 prospects just for potential 2025 impact, and another draft scouting notebook from my trip to San Diego, looking at Tyler Bremner, Gavin Fien, and Nick Dumesnil.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the game Harvest, a big update to a smaller-box game of the same name from the defunct publisher Tasty Minstrel Games. I’m a huge fan of the new version.

I keep pushing back another issue of my free email newsletter because I’ve been writing so much other stuff, but it’ll come … soon. No promises, though.

And now, the links…

  • And they’ve already begun the process of banning trans people from obtaining visas to enter the United States. The absolute war on this tiny, highly vulnerable population should make everyone nauseous. It is just evil.
  • I’m embarrassed to say I did not know that many counties charge prison inmates “lodging fees” or “room and board” or some other bullshit – even if the convictions were later overturned. Pennsylvania’s Dauphin County has not only ended this practice, but forgiven over $65 million in such debts “owed” by past prisoners.
  • An unvaccinated child died from measles in Texas, the first death in the ongoing measles outbreak there that resulted from high vaccine-denialism rates there. The measles vaccine, part of the MMR shot, is extremely effective in preventing illness, and even if you survive a measles infection you can die years later from an incurable, degenerative neurological condition called SSPE.
  • That Mississippi town (Clarksdale) that sued a local paper to force them to remove an editorial they didn’t like backed down under public pressure, withdrawing their lawsuit.
  • The current Supreme Court is very friendly to states that want to kill prisoners, but they issued a surprising ruling in one recent case of an Oklahoma man who wasn’t even accused of killing anyone and where the prosecutors withheld critical evidence.

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→ February 28, 2025
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All We Imagine as Light.

All That We Imagine As Light might be better known for the controversy over its exclusion from the Oscar nomination than for the film itself; India’s film board, which has a history of dubious choices in this regard, declined to submit it as the country’s entry for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, instead submitting a comedy called Laapataa (Lost) Ladies. That film did not make the Academy’s shortlist, further enraging supporters of All That We Imagine As Light, and leading to some recriminatory comments from the Indian film board, including some cheap shots at this film and its director, Payal Kapadia. Much of this is the result of the Academy’s one-film-per-country rule, of course, but after India also passed over RRR two years ago, the criticism of their selection process seems to have some merit. (You can rent All We Imagine As Light on iTunes, amazon, etc.)

The shame is that Kapadia’s feature-length debut is a lovely film, following two women from Mumbai out to the country, where they go to help a local woman who has been evicted from the flat where she has lived for over 20 years because she has no papers to prove her residency and developers are throwing her out. Prabha is a nurse whose husband via an arranged marriage now lives and works in Germany and hasn’t called her for over a year, while her roommate, the younger Anu, has a clandestine affair with a young Muslim man, Shiaz, which neither Anu’s Hindu family nor Shiaz’s would approve. Prabha’s colleague Manoj, a doctor at the hospital, is clearly interested in her, but she demurs because she’s married.

This is a leisurely film, one that sprinkles in some bits of daily life without fully explaining them or connecting them to the main story. Prabha receives a gift in the mail without a name attached, and while we might infer where it’s from, it simply doesn’t come up again. Once the two women follow their neighbor to the rural village where she’s returning, however, there is at least some tension, as Shiaz follows Anu to continue their rendezvous, and Prabha discovers what’s really going on behind her back.

The film has the coveted 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with 145 reviews, and it feels like a movie that critics should love. It has a simple story with a small set of characters and goes deep on the two main ones, allowing them to develop over the course of its two hours in a very natural fashion, with absolutely nothing extraordinary or unbelievable in the plot to break its spell. Yet beneath this ease is a precision in movement, direction, scene, even music, with songs by the late Ethiopian nun Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, whose estate granted Kapadia the rights to use her songs. It has the feeling of a model ship assembled in a bottle: It is such a small thing, yet the labor and patience required to put it together are evident if you just look for it.

That said, I’m probably a lot lower on All We Imagine as Light than most professional critics – I recognize the skill and the care taken to make it, but it is quite slow, and my unquiet mind was wandering a bit in the middle third or so. (Also, just watching it made me feel hot. I don’t know when exactly in the year it was filmed, but everyone looks very uncomfortable. I would not survive long in India, clearly.) I wanted to connect more with the two characters, but the film is demanding a little more of the audience than I could give. I recognize this is my issue, not the movie’s. It’s easy for me to say “this could have been 20 minutes shorter,” but when I offer that criticism, I usually have specific content I think the director or editor should have cut. Nothing here feels extraneous, though. Its pace is the natural result of its story, and it took just shy of two hours to tell it. Your mileage may vary.

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→ February 27, 2025
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Memoir of a Snail.

Memoir of a Snail is almost too much of a bad thing: Its protagonist, Grace, suffers tragedy after tragedy in her life, confirming her fears about the world to the point that she’s left entirely alone as the film begins and she starts telling her life story. It is so beautifully told, however, that it holds itself together just long enough to get to the finish line, where it all comes together in an ending that brings hope with just a touch of sentiment. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

Nominated for this year’s Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, Memoir of a Snail is the second full-length film from writer/director Adam Elliot, who apparently has a reputation for these sort of bleak stories. It follows Grace Pudel (voiced by Sarah Snook), who we see as an adult at the beginning, watching her closest friend, Pinky (Jacki Weaver), die of the most old age. Grace then steps outside to the garden, where she releases one of her pet snails, Sylvia, and then begins to tell the sad story of her sad life, from her birth with a cleft lip, for which other kids make fun of her for years, to when she and her twin brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) became orphans – their mother died giving birth to them – and then their miserable lives in separate foster families. Gilbert ends up with an evangelical Christian family near Perth, where he’s forced to work on the family orchard and to speak in tongues while praying, while Grace ends up with a pair of nudist hippies who eventually just abandon her. Her life gets worse and worse, other than her friendship with the eccentric Pinky, who buried two husbands in tragicomic circumstances, but has a devil-may-care approach to life and is determined to have a good time.

Pinky’s death is, naturally, the spur that Grace needs to leave the house and go live her life for the first time, although how we get there is part of the magic of the film. There’s probably one tragedy too many – one of them definitely had me shout “enough!” at the screen – but there is so much exploration of Grace’s feelings that she ends up one of the best-developed characters in any film this year, live-action or animated. It also means that when she gets a happier ending, the film has earned it, even the one slightly implausible bit (which you will probably see coming) that makes her happiest of all of her new fortunes.

Elliotuses stop-motion animation in his films, with a style that naturally calls to mind Tim Burton’s work in the genre, with elements of Charles Addams and Edward Gorey in his characters’ appearances. They’re cute in a grotesque sort of way, especially Grace with her ridiculous snail-hat (it has two ping-pong balls on wires or pipe cleaners, painted as eyes) and Gilbert with his Harry Potter-ish hair. They’re weird, and that makes it easy to see why they’d be bullied and ostracized, and why they’d feel alone and scared of the greater world. It’s also easy to empathize with them, and root for them in their Dickensian circumstances, because he depicts them as real enough to keep them from becoming pathetic. Snook’s voice performance is also fantastic, so much so that she won Best Lead Actress at this year’s AACTA Awards, the Australian equivalent to the Oscars, with Weaver winning for Best Supporting Actress, both over actors who appeared in live-action films.

Best Animated Feature is the only category in this year’s Oscars where I’ve seen all of the nominees, and that’ll probably still be true on Sunday night. I expect Flow to win, as it won the Golden Globe and won the Best Animated Feature – Independent award at the Annies (the most significant awards for animated productions), but this isn’t even a close call; Flow is fine, but has no dialogue and very little story, just some beautiful animation work and a bunch of animals who turn out to secretly be civil engineers. It would be my second choice, with The Wild Robot third, Inside Out 2 second, and the very disappointing Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl last, because it just wasn’t funny at all.

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