→ March 17, 2023
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RRR.

RRR was a worldwide sensation last year, the biggest crossover in Tollywood history and now the third-highest grossing film to ever come from India. If you haven’t seen it, you probably know the Oscar-winning song “Naatu Naatu” from its viral dance sequence, which is certainly the highlight of the film. It’s a whole lot of movie, running three hours and bouncing across genres, including action, bromance, musical, and more, much of which doesn’t work, but at its heart it’s a revisionist revenge fantasy (like Django Unchained or Inglourious Basterds) that tries to have fun, and that’s when it works the best. (It’s streaming on Netflix.)

The core plot of RRR is pretty simple – an English colonial governor visits a Gondi village with his wife, and she takes a shine to a girl of about eight or nine, so she and her husband kidnap the kid, paying a few coins to the mother as compensation. Eventually, we meet Bheem (Tarak, also credited as NT Rama Rao Jr.), the tribe’s guardian, who swears to get the girl back, posing as a Muslim man in Delhi to try to infiltrate the governor’s house. Meanwhile, Raju (Ram Charan) is a soldier in the Raj’s employ who shows incredible courage and fighting skills, even against his own people, and is tasked with finding Bheem before he can pose a danger to the governor. Raju and Bheem meet without knowing the other’s identity and become best friends, but we know this can’t last and the two find themselves in conflict multiple times during the film before coming together near the conclusion. Everything else is ornamentation – this is a bromance driven by the kidnapping and rescue plot.

RRR is extremely entertaining, especially given its length (although it could have been a half hour shorter, if not more), but you have to accept it on its own terms. The action sequences are hilariously over the top, and these two men should be dead fifty times over by the time it ends – it’s like a Marvel movie in that way. Raju is impaled on a tree branch at one point, both men are stabbed more than once, both are bludgeoned, Bheem is severely flogged, and both go flying through the air high enough to break a few ribs at the last on impact. This is just how RRR rolls, and I laughed along with the absurdity of it. There’s even a bit of the horror-movie gambit where you are invited to enjoy a good kill here and there, usually when the victim is a colonial soldier or authority figure who’s been openly racist earlier in the film, and I have to admit a couple of those even worked for me. (When Edward finally gets what’s coming to him, it’s extremely well done – the reveal there is quite clever.)

That suspension of disbelief starts to crumble outside of the action sequences. I have no issue with the film’s depiction of almost every English person (save one) as a moronic asshole, given the Crown’s racist and repressive policies towards people who had existed without the white man’s help for millennia, but it does function as a plot convenience too often – it’s less fun to see your heroes outwit a group of simpering idiots than to see them defeat more worthy foes. There are smaller details that also seem unnecessary, such as when one of the heroes is held in solitary confinement and nearly starved, but somehow manages to exercise and become more muscular in the process. I understand the desire to turn these two into supermen, but this feels like an LCD Soundsystem album, where every song with a good hook goes on twice as long as it needs to.

There’s an extended flashback in the middle of the film that explains Raju’s character and arc at great length, a conceit that Amsterdam used and that tanked that film’s story. It’s more effective here, and far more necessary, but again goes on way too long, and the way the story jumps to the past, back to the present, and then a good while later returns to that flashback to finish the story is sloppy. That could have been much tighter while still providing the essential back story.

The two lead actors are pretty great, though – both can command the screen when they’re on it, both exude charisma, and the way they work together on screen whether their characters are friends are foes is the movie’s strongest asset. I’d watch a whole series of movies where these two solve crimes or take out petty English tyrants, especially with a well-choreographed dance number or two. Both men are already stars in India, and I can see why. There isn’t much room for anyone else, although it’s worth mentioning that the governor’s wife is played by Irish actress Alison Doody, who played the villainous Elsa Schneider in the third Indiana Jones film.

RRR won one Oscar this past week for “Naatu Naatu,” although the performance during the awards ceremony didn’t include any actual South Asian dancers, which seems like an unforced error for the Academy. India submitted another movie for the Best International Feature Film honor, The Last Film Show, a movie about how great the movies are, which meant RRR was ineligible for that award. I know many critics and fans felt that RRR deserved a Best Picture nomination, but I can’t get over that line. This is a fun movie, and an entertaining one, but I don’t think it passes that higher level of scrutiny – it’s sprawling and disorganized, often ridiculous, and engages in a lot of trickery to make the plot work. I still ranked it higher on my own list than than All Quiet on the Western Front, Elvis, or Triangle of Sadness, but I can name ten other films I would have put in the BP category over this.

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→ March 16, 2023
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Charlotte & Columbia eats.

Amelie’s French Bakery & Café is a Charlotte chain of … well, French bakeries and cafés, shockingly enough, and they’re really good across the board. My daughter was with me on the trip, and since we got there around 11 am, she had lunch for breakfast, going with the chicken/pesto/goat cheese sandwich, while I had an egg sandwich with bacon and mushrooms on a croissant. Mine was good, but my daughter talked about her sandwich for two straight days, saying she’d have eaten it again the next day with no hesitation. I can also recommend the chocolate éclair, the macarons (my daughter says the cotton candy and blueberry cheesecake were her favorites, while I’d suggest the café au lait and pistachio), and the key lime tart. I could do without Amelie’s kitschy décor, which reminded me way too much of the France pavilion at Epcot. This is what someone who’s never been to France might think France looks like. I’ve been to France. It’s a lot less tacky. But this is definitely French patisserie.

Milkbread is one of the buzziest new restaurants in the Queen City, but it was probably the most disappointing meal we had on the trip. We both got breakfast sandwiches on biscuits; hers was fried chicken while mine was sausage with a chilled “jammy” (barely hard-boiled) egg. None of this really worked because the biscuits fell completely apart when picked up, and in the case of my sandwich, the egg halves just kept sliding out – just slicing it would have at least solved that one issue. But I found the cold egg and hot sausage/biscuit combination offputting, and while my daughter’s sandwich was better, certainly, it needed something else besides just the chicken on it – maybe pickles, for example.

Inizio is a mini-chain of Neapolitan-style pizzerias around Charlotte where you order at a counter, making it a good option for a quick meal. They have a typical set of standard pizzas, but my daughter and I love pasta alla vodka, so we went with their monthly special, a pizza with vodka sauce, fresh mozzarella, and a drizzle of pistachio-basil pesto. It well exceeded my expectations for such a casual atmosphere – both the sauce and the pesto had big flavors, with the pink vodka sauce clearly cooked beforehand to remove some of the alcohol’s bite (I’ve had pizzas where they don’t do this, and so you get the unpleasant bitterness of the booze), while the dough was solid-average for a Neapolitan place, with good texture and some light charring but not the light airiness of the very best Neapolitan pizzas I’ve had. We split a Caesar salad which was forgettable, mostly because the dressing might as well have come from a bottle.

I met this baseball writer named Joe Pos-something who said he has a new book coming out in September for lunch at Banh Mi Brothers, right by the UNC-Charlotte campus. I am far from an expert on banh mi, and I say that in large part because I have liked just about every one of these Vietnamese sandwiches I’ve ever tried. This was a 50/55 for me, with the bread not exactly a true French bread but with a crust that crackled and shattered like it should, while the chicken and other toppings were all solid if maybe a little underseasoned. It’s a chain-restaurant wasteland out there by the university, so if you’re headed that way this is one of your best bets to do something local that’s also pretty light (at least compared to all the other options).

I tried two coffee places – Not Just Coffee and Undercurrent, both serving beans from local roaster nightswim, with the cup I tried at Undercurrent the slightly better of the two. That was a Wilder Lasso Gesha from Colombia, an anaerobic, double-washed bean grown at about 2000 feet above sea level. It had some black cherry and dark chocolate notes with a pleasant tartness that was less acidic than beans from East Africa. Not Just Coffee had a washed Finca La Planada from Costa Rica that had less pronounced flavor notes. Undercurrent had three pour-over options, while NJC only had batch brew available.

I had one meal in Columbia, South Carolina, as I drove in for the Gamecocks’ Saturday night game and then drove back to Charlotte that evening. I shouldn’t be that surprised to find interesting restaurants in big college towns, but I didn’t expect to find an authentic Korean restaurant that specializes in bibimbap right in downtown Columbia. 929 Kitchen & Bar serves Korean cuisine, including bibimbap, udon, japchae, and samgyupsal-gui (grilled pork belly), as well as Korean fried chicken in various forms. I had the bibimbap with tofu and a small selection of the fried chicken wings, opting for the non-spicy versions of both – I do like spicy foods, including kimchi, but I also understand my limits. That was probably my one mistake with the bibimbap, as I missed that heat, and the fact that the vegetables served on top were neither cooked nor pickled meant that the whole dish was bland, even with the soy-based sauce. They also serve the egg hard-boiled, rather than serving it raw and allowing the heat from the stone bowl ($1 extra) and the rice to cook it, which is a shame. The chicken wings were spectacular, though. If you do go, I recommend getting the spicy sauce with the bibimbap, or just ordering more of the fried chicken instead.

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→ March 12, 2023
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Top ten movies of 2022.

I’ve tried to publish some sort of ranking of films in each of the past few years, either on its own or folded into another post, usually tying it to the Oscars or to seeing some specific film that I thought I had to see to make the list more or less complete. This year, I still have too many acclaimed 2022 films left to see to keep putting this off – Living, EO, The Quiet Girl, Saint Omer, and Return to Seoul among them – so I’m just calling it today, and if I see something later that belongs in this top ten, I’ll add a note here at that point.

10. Nope. Jordan Peele’s third feature as writer-director wasn’t quite as good as his debut, Get Out, but also shows that he’s deft at more than just horror, and that his thematic range is much broader than that first film (or the second, Us, based on what I’ve read) implied. Two siblings run a ranch where they train horses for use in films, but a mysterious presence in the sky is spooking their horses and raining down metal objects without warning. As in Get Out, we learn in stages along with Daniel Kaluuya’s main character, with several surprises, a clever dose of humor, and this time some incredible special effects as well.

9. La Caja. Venezuela’s entry for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film is, unfortunately, only available on MUBI, which is how I saw it, but which also seems like it might bury its chances of finding any sort of audience. It follows a young boy who goes to Mexico to claim his father’s remains, only to spot a man he believes to be his father walking around in the same town where he supposedly died. It’s small, but powerful, addressing themes of immigration, economic inequality, and the exploitation of workers.

8. Tár. I was completely on this film’s wavelength until the last twenty minutes or so, when the main character, Cate Blanchett’s Lydia Tár, experiences her fall from grace, and it’s no longer clear if everything we see is real. She’s a world-famous conductor of classical music, an impossible celebrity in our era, and extremely used to getting whatever she wants, without consequences for her actions. The majority of the film is such a perfectly slow burn that it’s frustrating when the pace gets faster for the final portion, but what comes before is a remarkable work of writing and direction from Todd Field, as well as yet another masterful performance from Blanchett.

7. The Menu. “Rich people are terrible” was a big theme in movies this year, but unlike some of the others, The Menu gets the tone right with its extremely dark comedy that also skewers modern food culture and features an excellent ensemble cast led by Ralph Fiennes and Anya Taylor-Joy. A group of mostly unlikeable people head to a restaurant on an island for a prix fixe dinner that costs $1250 a person, only to find the celebrity chef’s behavior increasingly disturbing until something big happens that makes it clear this is no ordinary meal. It’s funny, and strange, and gives the viewers more to chew on than the diners get.

6. Broker. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 2018 film Shoplifters was one of my top 3 films of that year, and this movie, starring Parasite’s Song Kang-ho, has a lot in common with the earlier film, as both revolve around a group of people who form a makeshift family after they find the world has cast them aside. Broker focuses on two men who steal abandoned babies from a ‘baby box’ at their church to sell them on the black market to parents desperate to adopt, but this plan goes awry when one of the mothers comes back the next day, learning about their illicit business and demanding to come along with them as they try to find adoptive parents. It doesn’t quite pack the same punch as Shoplifters, but it’s still lovely in its own way, and the story gives it more of the edge of a thriller.

5. The Eternal Daughter. I wasn’t a huge fan of Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir, and didn’t see The Souvenir Part Two, but this sort-of sequel is a knockout, featuring Tilda Swinton … and Tilda Swinton, as she plays two characters, the main character from The Souvenir films (played by Honor Swinton-Byrne, Tilda’s daughter) and her mother (played by Swinton in the first two films). They travel to the mother’s childhood home, now a creepy bed and breakfast in north Wales, as the daughter tries to learn about her mother’s life to make a film about her and hold on to these memories before her mother is gone. I know Swinton can be a polarizing actress, but this is her at her absolute best.

4. Aftersun. Charlotte Wells’ feature debut about an 11-year-old girl taking a trip to Turkey with her father, who is divorced from her mother and not very present in his daughter’s life, packs a huge emotional punch by doing very little – the camera observes, as we are watching the daughter’s memories from some point later in her life, and we are left to decide what might really have happened. It’s a heartbreaking look at how hard it is for us to understand our parents, especially through the lens of childhood memories, and features two standout performances from Paul Mescal (nominated for Best Actor) and first-time actor Frankie Corio.

3. Decision to Leave. The most ridiculous snub of the year at this year’s Oscars was the omission of Decision to Leave from the Best International Feature Film category – it made the 15-film shortlist, and it was miles better than the two eventual nominees I’ve seen. Director Park Chan-wook’s first film since 2016’s The Handmaiden follows a depressed detective in Busan as he tries to determine whether the death of an immigration officer who fell from a mountain he climbed frequently was an accident or an almost-perfect murder at the hands of his wife. The detective becomes obsessed with the case and the young widow, which sets off a series of events that can only end badly for at least one of them. It’s a masterful plot that eschews easy answers, anchored by two strong lead performances by Park Hae-il as the detective and Tang Wei as the widow/murder suspect.

2. The Banshees of Inisherin. Colin Farrell’s Pádraic and Brendan Gleeson’s Colm are best friends and drinking buddies, but one day, Colm says he doesn’t want to drink with Pádraic any more … or even talk to him, which drives Pádraic, who doesn’t have much going on in his life and lives with his sister (Kerry Condon), to increasingly desperate measures to which Colm responds in turn. This latest film from Martin McDonagh reunites the stars of his In Bruges in a film that is by turns comic and tragic, standing as a parable for the Irish Civil War while also serving as a meditation on male friendship. All four of the film’s most prominent actors, including Barry Keoghan, deserved and earned Oscar nominations, and the dialogue in this film is spectacular.

1. Everything Everywhere All At Once. My favorite film of the year, which isn’t to say it’s the best film of the year except that I think it is. It’s a madcap trip through the many-worlds hypothesis that ends up a poignant and insightful story about parenthood, self-sacrifice, the hopes and dreams we have for our kids that we didn’t fulfill for ourselves, the immigrant experience, and more. It’s also funny, exciting, and laced with cultural references that were right in my wheelhouse. Ke Huy Quan deserves all of the praise and accolades he’s receiving, while Michelle Yeoh gets her best role at least since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I want to watch it again and again, but I also know it’ll never quite hit the same way as the first viewing, where all of that madness turned out to be something magical.

If you’re curious, 11 through 15 on my list right now are Glass Onion, The Wonder, The Fabelmans, After Yang, and Women Talking. My favorite animated film of 2022 was The Sea Beast, on Netflix, and my favorite documentary was probably The Janes, which made the Oscars shortlist but not the final five.

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→ March 12, 2023
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Oscars preview, 2023 edition.

Here we go, my annual Oscars preview with links to every movie I’ve reviewed on this site. Throw your predictions, disagreements, snubs, and more in the comments.

Best Picture

All Quiet on the Western Front
Avatar: The Way of Water
The Banshees of Inisherin
Elvis
Everything Everywhere All At Once
The Fabelmans
Tár
Top Gun: Maverick
Triangle of Sadness
Women Talking

What will win: Everything Everywhere All At Once

What should win: Everything Everywhere All At Once

What was snubbed: Decision to Leave, Aftersun, The Eternal Daughter

I know there’s a wide chasm between folks who think EEAAO should win, like I do, and those who think it will be at best a below-median Best Picture winner, but I’m comfortable with my take. Not only do I think the film works extremely well, but it’s also tried to do the most – it’s an extremely ambitious movie on multiple levels, and succeeds at all of them. There should be a level of difficulty adjustment when considering movies for this honor. My second choice would be The Banshees of Inisherin, while Elvis would be the biggest travesty, although I haven’t seen Avatar.

Best Actor

Austin Butler, Elvis
Colin Farrell, The Banshees of Inisherin
Brendan Fraser, The Whale
Paul Mescal, Aftersun
Bill Nighy, Living

Who will win: Fraser

Who should win: (pass)

Who was snubbed: Park Hae-il, Decision to Leave; Song Kang-ho, Broker

I haven’t seen The Whale or Living, since even people who praise Fraser’s performance don’t say kind things about the movie, and I’m not paying $20 to stream a bad film at home, even to hate-watch it. Mescal and Farrell were both incredible in their roles and weren’t doing an extended impersonation, like Butler did, but it seems like neither has any chance to win.

Best Actress

Ana de Armas, Blonde
Cate Blanchett, Tár
Andrea Riseborough, To Leslie
Michelle Williams, The Fabelmans
Michelle Yeoh, Everything Everywhere All At Once

Who will win: Yeoh

Who should win: Blanchett

Who I really want to win: Yeoh

Who was snubbed: Tilda Swinton, The Eternal Daughter

Best Actress is the strongest category this year, although the nominations don’t adequately reflect how good a year it was for actresses in leading roles. De Armas was not good in a terrible role within an even worse movie, and Williams, while a very skilled actress, gave an affected performance that barely qualified as leading. I could name a half-dozen better performances than de Armas’s, and did in my Blonde review. Of the contenders, Riseborough had no shot even without the controversy, and I’d give Blanchett a slight edge over Yeoh, but Yeoh is the sentimental favorite for many reasons and Blanchett already has one of these things.

Best Supporting Actor

Brendan Gleeson, The Banshees of Inisherin
Brian Tyree Henry, Causeway
Judd Hirsch, The Fabelmans
Barry Keoghan, The Banshees of Inisherin
Ke Huy Quan, Everything Everywhere All At Once

Who will win: Quan

Who should win: Quan

Who was snubbed: Gabriel Labelle, The Fabelmans

I think this is the lock of the night, and I’m good with it, although Gleeson did give something close to a second lead performance in Banshees. Quan is another sentimental favorite, since EEAAO marks his return to acting after a twenty-year absence, but he’s absolutely essential to that movie and his character has the most range of any of the four main ones. Hirsch has the weakest case, since he’s on screen for less than ten minutes, and this seems like a way to honor an older actor at the end of his life rather than an argument that this was one of the five best performances by an actor in a supporting role in 2022. He’s very good in that small role, though.

Best Supporting Actress

Angela Bassett, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Hong Chau, The Whale
Kerry Condon, The Banshees of Inisherin
Jamie Lee Curtis, Everything Everywhere All At Once
Stephanie Hsu, Everything Everywhere All At Once

Who will win: Bassett

Who should win: (pass)

Who was snubbed: Dolly de Leon, Triangle of Sadness

I’ve only seen Banshees and EEAAO, although I’ll get to Black Panther soon – I loved the first one, like most people, but that has made me disinclined to see the sequel, especially given its running time. (Seriously, enough with the three-hour movies. Hollywood needs a pitch clock.) I also haven’t seen The Whale, so I can’t say specifically that de Leon belonged over her, but de Leon was the only truly redeeming quality her film had. Chauwas great in the underrated The Menu, though.

Best Directing

Todd Field, Tár
Martin McDonagh, The Banshees of Inisherin
Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert, Everything Everywhere All At Once
Ruben Östlund, Triangle of Sadness
Steven Spielberg, The Fabelmans

Who will win: Spielberg

Who should win: No opinion

Who was snubbed: Park Chan-wook, Decision to Leave

This is my pick for the category where something wacky might happen. I could see any of these candidates winning, and while the betting lines have the Daniels as huge favorites, I’m not sure … is it not a serious enough movie? Is this the one place the voters honor Spielberg for making a movie about how great movies are? (They could do that with original screenplay, too.) Does that create a chance for one of the other three to sneak in? I don’t have a strong opinion on this award this year, despite seeing all five of the nominees; I would just say I don’t think Östlunddeserves it, because the movie itself isn’t very good, and the direction in the middle section is too weak.

Best Writing (Original Screenplay)

Todd Field, Tár
Martin McDonagh, The Banshees of Inisherin
Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert, Everything Everywhere All At Once
Ruben Östlund, Triangle of Sadness
Steven Spielberg, The Fabelmans

Who will win: The Daniels

Who should win: McDonagh

Who was snubbed: Jeong Seo-kyeong & Park Chan-wook, Decision to Leave; Charlotte Wells, Aftersun

I’ll point out that these are the same five nominees as the five for Directing, and none are women, again.

Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay)

Edward Berger, Lesley Paterson, and Ian Stokell, All Quiet on the Western Front
Kazuo Ishiguro, Living
Rian Johnson, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
Sarah Polley, Women Talking
A whole bunch of people, Top Gun: Maverick

Who will win: Ishiguro

Who should win: Polley*

I haven’t seen Living, so I qualify my opinion that Polley should win here with that caveat. Ishiguro is an actual Nobel Prize winner. I feel like that’s going to sway a lot of voters, even some who haven’t seen the movie. This would make him just the third person ever to win an Oscar and a Nobel Prize, along with Bob Dylan and George Bernard Shaw, both of whom won the same Nobel as Ishiguro (Literature). Maybe I’m way off base, but I try not to overestimate the Oscar electorate.

Best Animated Feature

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
Puss n Boots: The Last Wish
The Sea Beast
Turning Red

What will win: GDT’s Pinocchio

What should win: The Sea Beast

What was snubbed: My Father’s Dragon

I haven’t seen the latest Puss n Boots cash grab, and I doubt I will. Pinocchio looked amazing but the songs weren’t good and the story itself felt wooden (yes, pun intended). I watched The Sea Beast last night on a flight home and was pleasantly surprised by many aspects of the story, while the animation was excellent. My Father’s Dragon is the latest film from Cartoon Saloon (Wolfwalkers) and I can’t recommend it enough if you enjoy animation. I have Inu-Oh downloaded on my iPad right now to watch on a future flight, after it earned a Golden Globe nomination.

Other quick thoughts:

  • I’ve only seen three of the five Best Documentary Feature nominees, with Navalny my favorite, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed fascinating but also a little frustrating in its lack of focus, and Fire of Love a disappointment.
  • I’ve seen just two of the five Best International Feature Film nominees, de-prioritizing those once it became clear All Quiet on the Western Front was a complete lock, while my #3 film of the year, Decision to Leave, got the shaft. I also think All Quiet will win Best Cinematography and a bunch of other awards that are very important but that I don’t think I know enough to offer an opinion.
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→ March 11, 2023
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Women Talking.

Women Talking doesn’t lie – it is a film of women, almost exclusively, and they do a lot of talking, and since the vast majority of the film takes place in a single room, it has the feel of a stage play that’s been adapted for film. That’s not the case, as this is an adaptation of Miriam Toews’ 2018 novel of the same name, but it does mean it won’t be to everyone’s tastes. It is to mine, though, as I love a movie that’s packed with strong dialogue, although the film’s extreme realism starts to break down near the end once the talking is done and the time for action arrives. (It’s available to stream on Amazon Prime.)

The novel is based loosely on a true story: In the early 2000s, the women in a small, isolated, retrograde Mennonite community in Bolivia would wake up with bruises and blood that indicated they’d been sexually assaulted during the night. The community’s elders claimed that they were making it up, calling it a matter of “female imagination,” and then claimed it was the work of demons. Some of the victims eventually caught their rapists in the act; it turned out a group of men in the colony were using an animal anesthetic to sedate entire families so they could rape the women, with victims ranging in age from 3 to 65. Ten men were convicted of rape or associated crimes and served jail time, while one fled and, as far as I can tell, remains at large.

Women Talking starts with the premise of the attacks and has the women of the colony, many of whom are functionally illiterate and almost none of whom has knowledge of the world beyond the community, hold a vote on whether to do nothing, stay and fight, or leave. The vote results in a tie between the last two options, so a subgroup of the victims meets in one large room in a barn to decide for all of the women what to do. This discussion comes with time pressure, as the elders have told the women they have two days to forgive their rapists or face excommunication. The ensuing debate occupies the majority of the film’s running time.

The cast of Women Talking is an All-Star lineup. Two-time Emmy winner Claire Foy plays one of the women, Salome, who wants to stay and fight, advocating violence if necessary. Jessie Buckley, who has BAFTA and Oscar nominations to her credit, plays Mariche, whose anger comes out as sarcasm and derision directed at her fellow women, although as in most cases we learn that there’s a reason why she acts the way she does. Rooney Mara, herself an Oscar nominee, has probably the best performance I’ve seen from her as Ona, who has become pregnant by her rapist, and who is determined to carve an independent path for herself in a community that denies this to its women. Two-time Tony Award winner Judith Ivey plays one of the older victims in the room and delivers on of the most nuanced performances, as we first get the idea she might be a little daft, only to learn about her character’s depth and strength in layers. And Frances McDormand, the most decorated cast member of all, appears briefly in the film, although by the second time she appeared I’d forgotten her first scene completely.

Which all makes it a bit frustrating that the best individual performance in the movie comes from its lone male cast member, Ben Whishaw. He’s consistently great, but the way the script is written, his character, the milquetoast schoolteacher August, has the broadest range of emotions and actions, He’s hopelessly in love with Ona, who appears to return his affections to some degree but has refused to ever marry anyone. He’s in the room as the scribe, since he’s one of the few colony members who can read and write, but often finds himself asked for his opinions, which are then welcomed by some of the women and derided by others (Mariche in particular). It’s a numbers game – the women are all sharing the bulk of the great dialogue, while Whishaw is the sole male voice, and he’s half of the only real interaction between any two characters that doesn’t come from the stay/leave debate.

For most of its running time, Women Talking had me completely in its grasp, but the way the story resolves broke that spell. There’s a strong element of feminist fantasy here, almost from the start, but I could stay with it until the plot has to leave that one room. Either decision would have presented problems for the script, but this particular choice of resolution was improbable and also highly impractical, to the point where I couldn’t extend my suspension of disbelief enough to accept it. It takes a potentially great movie down to an above-average one, a 60/65 to a 55, although the power of much of the dialogue and some of the individual moments still stayed with me.

Women Talking took two Oscar nominations this year, one for Best Picture, which I think is fine given the other nominees; and one for Best Adapted Screenplay, which I know it probably won’t win but I think should get strong consideration because the script itself is so dense. This is all dialogue, and so much of the dialogue is great – although, again, this story puts vocabulary into the mouths of these characters that may not be realistic for women who’ve been denied education or worldly experience – that the film relies more on the quality of its script than most.

That’s nine of the ten Best Picture nominees for me; I can’t be bothered sitting in a theater for three and a half hours to watch the blue people, especially since I never saw the first Avatar. I haven’t changed my overall opinion that Everything Everywhere All At Once is the best movie of 2022, and the one I most want to see win the top honor. I’ll have more thoughts on the Oscars and my top movies of the year on Sunday.

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→ March 11, 2023
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Stick to baseball, 3/11/23.

Nothing new at the Athletic this week, although I should have 2-3 coming up this week as my travels continue. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday.

For Paste, I reviewed the game Gartenbau, which combines very simple rules with tight decisions that make it a real challenge to play it well.

On The Keith Law Show this week, I had my annual Oscars preview episode with Chris Crawford. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I was going to send another issue of my free email newsletter this week but got tied up with some other writing (board game stuff, actually), so it’s still on my to-do list.

And now, the links…

  • The rash of anti-trans bills across the south and Midwest are the work of a network of religious-right groups that operated in secret while pushing their bigoted agenda, according to emails between those groups and South Dakota state Rep. Fred Deutsch (R) obtained by Mother Jones.
  • My wife and I watched the Oscar-nominated animated short My Year of Dicks, which is very funny and sweet, which led us down the rabbit hole of its writer Pamela Ribon, including this hilarious 2011 post from her now-defunct blog about how she might have become a new urban legend.
  • From January 2022: Ashli Babbitt, who some right-wingers want you to believe was a martyr, had a history of violent behavior prior to her participation in the January 6th insurrection.
  • Utah legislators have voted to change the law that made it nearly impossible for victims of sexual assault by doctors to sue their attackers.
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→ March 9, 2023
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Klawchat 3/9/23.

Keith Law: To the chair in the room where I live and breathe. Klawchat.

Joe: Did you post an article about your scouting trip in Minnesota?  Maryland fan here hoping the first hand reports were not as bad as the box score.
Keith Law: No, I’ll file something after this weekend – I wanted to wrap both trips up into one post since this one probably wouldn’t be enough for its own.

Guest: Have you heard anything about how Thomas Saggese looks at Rangers minor league camp? Is he opening at AA Frisco this year?
Keith Law: Minor league games haven’t begun yet. I assume he’ll go to Frisco since he finished there after spending nearly all of the year in high A – he’s not going back down and I see no reason they’d jump him to AAA.

JT: Tennessee just allowed denying interracial couples marriage licenses.

How the hell does the GOP have a single voter? #%#*%$#*
Keith Law: Because there are a lot of people in this country who agree with their policies. Although I admit that Tennessee, with more than half of its population living in/near cities, should be far less reactionary than its legislature is.

JT: The Blue Jays have a certain MiLB hitter killing it in ST: is the best reaction from Jays fans that it’s cool his heights include this and then stay the course?
Keith Law: Spring training stats do not matter. They just don’t, and we do this every year, and they still don’t matter. Jays fans should just remember the year Gabe Gross led ST with 8 homers.

Scott: You have been evaluating prospects for quite awhile. Are you able to get the sense from young players who might become a future MLB coach or manager? If so, can you provide some examples?

I’m curious if those skills are able to be seen at such a young age.
Keith Law: No, that’s not what I’m looking for when I go to the ballpark to see a player.

Chris H: Thoughts on Ronny Mauricio?
Keith Law: You can see my report on him in my Mets top 20 and org report.

Snapper Bean: Any insight on why its taking the Phillies so long to announce what exactly is going on with Andrew Painter?
Keith Law: I mean, they don’t exactly owe us an answer immediately, right? Some of the hand-wringing I’ve seen online is a bit much. They might be getting a second opinion, or discussing options with the player. My only complaint is that they promised an update and didn’t deliver – just don’t promise the update.

Benito: Keith! Are you watching any of the WBC? Excited to see a fellow paisan like, uh, Matt Harvey, pitching for Italy?
Keith Law: I’m not – I like the WBC as a way to market the sport but the majority of the players involved aren’t prospects for me to cover, so I never watch much of it.

Edward: I heard chatter from the hosts on MLB Network Radio this morning saying the pitch timer should be eliminated after the eighth inning.

As someone who (I think) supports the timer, do you think turning it off in late innings makes any sense?
Keith Law: I do support the timer and I do not support turning it off in late innings. Players will adjust to it soon enough and then this won’t be an issue any more.

Ryan: Hi Keith. I know you’ve said spring stats hold little value but is/has there ever been a situation where your thoughts on a prospect’s MLB readiness what changed by how they performed in the spring?
Keith Law: Nope. Performance in ST does not matter. It has no predictive value.

Sean: Suffering Tiger fan here. Reports out of spring are that – despite not getting many hits, Torkelson is hitting the ball hard. Have you heard anything about that? We still believe in Tork? Thanks.
Keith Law: I still think Torkelson will be a solid big leaguer. Didn’t he hit the ball reasonably hard last year in the regular season?
Keith Law: He did, actually. So I don’t know what we would take from him doing the same thing against worse competition in games that don’t count. (I understand they probably count for him, as he’s trying to prove he deserves a spot on the roster.)

Iohn T.: How worried should the Yankees be about Rodon?
Keith Law: I don’t love hearing about pitchers with forearm strains, regardless of health history. But he’s also had so much arm trouble, including a TJ, that it seems like worse news than for a pitcher with a clean track record?

matt: Griff mcGarry seems to falling off the prospect radars a bit, what kind of factors are influencing that?
Keith Law: I don’t agree with that at all.

Brett: What do you think about Encarncion-Strand? Seems like he may actually have a shot at the OD roster with Votto still on the mend?
Keith Law: Power over hit with a lot of chase. I don’t think he’s ready to hit MLB pitching. He was #17 on my Reds top 20: https://klaw.me/3xdfXZz

Radar: How has working at The Athletic changed — if at all — since it was acquired by The New York Times?
Keith Law: For me, it hasn’t. I can’t speak for anyone else.

Brent: Any planned visits to central Indiana for Max Clark?
Keith Law: Yes but probably later this spring when he’s got some games under his belt. I’m hoping to see the big 3 HS bats – him, Jenkins, Nimmala – as well as McGonigle and Eldridge since they’re near me. Otherwise I’m focusing more on college guys since it’s a college-heavy draft.

Ryan: The Cardinals seem set on starting Lars Nootbaar every day this year. What was your projection of him as a prospect and do you think this was the right direction to take during the offseason?
Keith Law: I don’t think I ever wrote him up – he was a big swing change guy and he’s very different now from who he was in college or even pre-pandemic in the minors, when he had no power and you couldn’t project him as even an up-and-down guy.

Guest: Is a catcher’s game calling ability something to consider in evaluation, or not at all?
Keith Law: I think it is.
Keith Law: But I do rely on others to tell me when a catcher is good/not at that. There’s no way I could infer that from watching even several games, not without knowing who’s really calling pitches and game-planning behind the scenes.

Chase: I’m going to my 1st Spring training game in Scottsdale at the Diamondbacks park in a couple weeks. Any recommendations on the stadium, food, or another team/park I should try to visit?
Keith Law: Beautiful park. Probably my second favorite in AZ after the Giants’ place, but Salt River is also much bigger and easier to get into/out of. It’s close to Soi4, a Thai place at Via de Ventura/Scottsdale Rd that I’ve liked for a decade; and Andreoli Grocer, an Italian market and sandwich place. But you’re also a stone’s throw from Old Town Scottsdale which has easily a dozen or more strong food and drink options (plus a Cartel Coffee).

Holly: Early reports are that big Jackson Rutledge is impressing in Nats camp.  Is he a guy who could be a fast mover now?
Keith Law: If he’s healthy and he throws strikes and we see more of a third pitch, sure.

John: Can Andre Lipcious push for playing time with the tigers this year?
Keith Law: Sure, although there’s no ceiling there for me. Unless his swing has changed, he’s a low-power bat who doesn’t play anywhere he could be a regular. Fine to give him a shot and see what you have, though.

Matt: Will the Yankees listen to Judge about Volpe staying on the parent club, or are they gonna stick him in the minors for control?
Keith Law: I’m not a fan of letting players pick who else makes the roster. I do like Volpe a ton but I do not see how a month or two in AAA hurts him, while it could also let them give Peraza an extended look at SS.

Mike: Who do you see making the biggest impact between Jackson Rutledge, Jake Irvin, and cole henry over the next few seasons?
Keith Law: Irvin has the lowest ceiling of the three. All of them have substantial injury histories or questions. I think I’d take Henry but man I don’t feel good about any of them making a big impact because of health.

Chris: Just got back from a week and a half in Ariz for my first ever ST there. Saw 6 ballparks in 9 days.  Couldnt get into Pizzeria Bianco (line was way out the door at 11am open!) but did go to MBB and CRUjiente on my last day in Scottsdale, thanks for the recs!
Keith Law: You’re welcome! I’m looking forward to a trip out there at the end of the month, for scouting and for food.

Ryan: With Willson Contreras signed long term, Should the Cardinals look to trade Ivan Herrera, similar to how they traded Carson Kelly, or should they hold on to Herrera as insurance/backup?
Keith Law: I would look to trade him – he’s good enough to start for someone.

Mike: Think Caleb Kilian can turn it around and be a post-hype sleeper?
Keith Law: Can, yes. Will? I don’t feel great about it. He was a real mess in the second half last year.

Laci: Luis Garcia – top 50 SP this season?
Keith Law: I feel like the way they use him makes that unlikely – he is a good enough pitcher to be a top 50 SP but probably won’t pitch enough innings to get there by total value, if that makes sense. Maybe a top 50 SP on a per-inning bases, but not on a WAR basis.

Mike: Do you ever listen to podcasts like Rates and Barrels, effectively wild, or any other baseball podcasts?
Keith Law: I don’t, but it has nothing to do with the podcasts themselves – when I’m in the car, which is my only listening time, I either listen to new music or to non-baseball podcasts. The job eats up enough of my time that I’m rigid about carving out space for non-baseball time.

Ken from Entertainment 720: If the Yankees have a prospect that they  grade at 45 but the Twins grade him at 55 and the Twins have a prospect they grade at 45 but the Yanks think is a 55, why arent trades like this done?  It would theoretically improve each farm system
Keith Law: That happens sometimes, but I do think there’s the fear that you’re wrong about the 45 and he goes somewhere else and becomes a 60 while the guy you thought was a 55 comes over and becomes a 45 and suddenly you’re a 0.

Mike: Cj abrams got 6 lbs heavier… i know you mentioned he needs to bulk up, but i’m guessing thats not nearly enough?
Keith Law: He needs to get stronger, which sometimes means bulking up but can just be more strength in his hands/forearms. He joked about how hard it is for him to gain muscle, so the 6 lbs is a big deal for him whereas for, say, Aaron Judge, it’s a rounding error. The proof will be in the exit velos.

John: Do you watch Ted Lasso?
Keith Law: Yes, we watched S1 and S2. I like it, but I’m glad it’s ending after S3. I felt the premise started to wear thin by the end of the second season. I think this is the ceiling for a feel-good TV show.

Romorr: How did you feel about the Frazier signing for the Orioles, vs. say, a Vavra/Urias platoon? Add on some other 2B prospects being close, still not a fan.
Keith Law: Didn’t like it for the reasons you mentioned (esp prospects coming) and also because any money they spend should be on pitching at this point. Their lineup is not the issue.

Leith Kaw: Do you think J Walker should start the season in St Louis? Cardinals writers seem split on if the team will keep him down for more OF experience or start him in MLB to hopefully gain a draft pick if he finishes top 3
Keith Law: They have other OF options to sift through. I won’t criticize it if he makes the team – he has handled every promotion so far, no matter how aggressive – but I see a baseball reason to try other players first.

Karl: Should Bryce Miller start the season in AA? Does he have the opportunity to make it to Major Leagues this year or is 2024 the more likely scenario?
Keith Law: I think he makes the team this year at some point.

Mike: does isaac paredes have a good offensive profile to you?
Keith Law: So he is almost the complete opposite of the player I thought he’d be. I thought he’d make a lot of hard contact and hit for average with doubles power, but struggle to play any position at an even average level. Instead, he was a plus defender last year and made a ton of weak contact. So I think the answer to your question is no, but also I have no idea what to make of him at this point.

Mike: Do we have permission to believe in a Kelenic breakout?
Keith Law: Granted.

Edward: Do you ever miss being on TV regularly?

I’m sure the reflexive answer is “no,” but there are few better ways to build your brand.
Keith Law: It’s no and yes. There are things I miss, and things I don’t. But I also recognize people don’t watch those shows anywhere near as often as they used to. MLB Network has been kind enough to have me on a few times a year, and I always say yes if I can. I’d rather have the evenings either to go see players or spend time at home.

Bob Pollard: Should the Mets just give Baty the 3B job and see what happens? Do you think they will, or will they start him in AAA?
Keith Law: I would give him the job.

Lois: What are the biggest things that have changed about the way you evaluate players versus 5, 10, and/or 20 years ago?
Keith Law: Far more data today, of course, and widely available video.

Maddie: How legit is Addison Barger? Someone to watch if Merrifield or Biggio struggles?
Keith Law: When hasn’t Biggio struggled? Barger is already the better version of that player.

Mike: How do you feel about mackenize gore heading into 2023
Keith Law: If he’s healthy I’m still a big fan.

Erik: Any chance of a JJ Bleday breakout after moving to a new organization?
Keith Law: Needs a big swing change.

James: As a “new to football” fan was the Super Bowl a crushing loss for you, or just more of an “oh well”?
Keith Law: It was a crushing way to lose, but what a tremendous season for the Eagles. I can’t be too disappointed.

Carlock: Can Strider repeat with only two pitches?
Keith Law: Yes.

G: The Ricketts family’s republican donations / values have killed my Cubs fandom. Putting us cubs fans on the left in a really weird spot. Are most MLB owners this right leaning and just the Ricketts publicly are?
Keith Law: Yes. The Kendricks might be even more so. Randi Kendrick has donated millions to right-wing causes, including attacks on public education.

Jake: I know you aren’t a huge Mervis fan, but he has to be a better choice than Hosmer, right?
Keith Law: I would go Mancini > Mervis > Bryan LaHair> Gary Scott > Kevin Orie > Hosmer.

Chris: for Chase, I just got back from a week and a half in Ariz, i thought Cubs and Dodgers/Rangers stadiums were also nice (in addn to Dbacks), Angels in Tempe is kind of a dump and right on a busy highway
Keith Law: I can’t stand the Dodgers stadium. You’re right in the sun the whole game if you’re behind the plate. I wish they could put the thing on a turntable and spin it around.

JD: Seems like kids of MLBers have higher rates of making the Show and of being stars, compared to non-legacies. Is that just confirmation bias, or a real phenomenon?
Keith Law: The bias is in opportunities – if you’re the son of a big leaguer, you’re probably (not certainly) growing up in a higher-income household, and you will always get more attention from coaches, scouts, etc.

Paul: Is there a reason Langford isn’t universally considered a better hitting prospect than Crews outside of the famous name? They seem to have similar contact and walk rates and Langford clearly has more power. Am I missing something?
Keith Law: Langford’s also a better runner, but Crews plays CF now while Langford plays a corner. Crews is definitely more famous and has been a GUY since he was a HS junior. There’s a comfort level with the longer track record. I have had several scouts come back to me to say they’d take Langford over Crews, though.

Candler: Speaking of Luis Garcia, any indications that the Nats’ Garcia will take a leap forward this year? Still only 22 years old.
Keith Law: I don’t know of any reason to think so.

Juwan: Is Skenes a viable candidate to go top 3? Do you like his secondary offerings enough for that type of ascension assuming he stays healthy and continues performing well?
Keith Law: Yes, he’s on track to pass Dollander at this point.

James: If you were Rizzo, would you shy away from taking a Wyatt Langford second overall because of the prospect pool already accrued or would you leap at the opportunity to add another high end prospect in that area to give yourself a better chance of assembling your outfield of the future? Question’s really a resource allocation consideration.
Keith Law: Best player available.

Mike E: Thanks for sharing your anxieties on the airport in the newsletter. I also don’t have any fear in the actual flying part but the process of going through the airport can give me anxiety days in advance.
Keith Law: Thank you for reading. You can sign up for my free email newsletter here.

Brian: Is there a breakouts article forthcoming?
Keith Law: I have written one every year for as long as I can remember.

Matthew: Any hope for Forrest Whitley making the majors at this point?  Even as a reliever?
Keith Law: Yes.

Guest: FYI on the Tennessee marriage bill: it only allows people to refuse to “solemnize” a marriage; in other words, perform it. It does not allow county clerks to refuse to issue licenses, which is purely ministerial
Keith Law: There’s some disagreement over this.

Pat: Correction- The Tennessee HOUSE passed a bill that allows county clerks to ban interracial (& same-sex & interfaith) marriage. It still needs to pass the Senate & the Governor has to sign it.
Keith Law: Thank you. The Tennessee Senate is 81% Republicans, and the Governor is a Republican, so I think the odds are in the bill’s favor.

JD: Any guesses what will come out of the totally-not-about-Steve-Cohen baseball economics committee?
Keith Law: A bunch of complaining about players making too much money.

Jake: The Cubs are considering Madrigal at third. Can any team win with a lineup that doesn’t have one player projected to hit more than 25 HR’s and most under 15?
Keith Law: I suppose it’s possible, but you’d better prevent a lot of runs.

Danny: I’m going to Scottsdale for the first time next month- is Pizza Bianco easier to get into for lunch? Any other pizza reccos for Scottsdale/Phoenix?
Keith Law: Try the second location near the Biltmore. The crowds have been crazy at both spots, but especially the tiny original location, since the Netflix show about it aired.

Matt: Are velocities expected to come down with the pitch clock? Seems like it’s gonna be hard to tbeo
Keith Law: I think BA had a piece that the velocities didn’t come down in the minors last year with the pitch clock?

Kevin: Does Brandon Walter have a chance to be a mid rotation starter or is he destined to be a bullpen arm?
Keith Law: I think he’s most likely a reliever. Just watch some video of him to get some idea.

JR: As a Mets fan, which trade is going to end up “hurting” the most, Kelenic or PCA?
Keith Law: I feel like PCA at this point, although I refuse to give up on Kelenic.

Ben: What roasters are you buying from these days? You recommended Archetype a few years ago, and it’s become one of my favorites. Thanks!
Keith Law: I buy when I travel, mostly, Hoping to hit Foxtail when I go see the Rays’ kids next week and Cartel of course when in Phoenix. But I try to mix in some new places when I go to other cities.

Matt: Any idea what Sarah Huckabee is doing allowing 9 year olds to work? It sounds insane, even for the GOP.
Keith Law: Cheaper for employers than raising the minimum wage!

James: Is there an offseason for college pitchers? From the regular season to Summer league to Fall ball…. it seems like college pitchers have no break from throwing. I wonder if that has anything to do with these college injuries?
Keith Law: More college pitchers take the summer off every year to rest.
Keith Law: It’s hurt a lot of summer leagues’ caliber of competition but it’s better for the pitchers’ arm health.

Ike: Any reason to hold out hope on Nick Pratto? What do you see his role being in a year?
Keith Law: Yes, I still think he’s a potential starter, although he may need to do it somewhere else.

Matt: How concerned are you about Chase Dollander’s inability to find his slider this year? It looked like a legit plus plus pitch last year and now it’s just disappeared. Would an MLB team feel confident that they could help him get it back after they drafted him?
Keith Law: I get more concerned each week. Is it health? Hard to think of a comparable example of a guy going from a 70ish breaking pitch to a wildly inconsistent pitch that’s mostly a 45 without an injury.

Henry: If you’re Andrew Friedman do you stick with Miguel Vargas at SS, and hope to get someone before trade deadline? I feel awful for Gavin Lux.
Keith Law: Vargas at SS seems like a huuuuge stretch.

Jake: What do you expect to be the fastest pitcher eventually? When we were young, 100 mph seemed like a unicorn and now there are hundreds of people who can do that with of course varying results. Reminds me of the 4:00 mile but even that eventually plateaued.
Keith Law: I think the 104-105 range is the ceiling. I feel like there was some research on this maybe ten years ago that argued that 105ish was the absolute maximum given human anatomy. Maybe I’m remembering wrong?

JP: what do you expect from Brayan Bello this year?
Keith Law: League-average or better starter.

Isaac: Have you seen Jacob Misoroski live? The reports sound promising. Do you feel he can add a 3rd pitch and be a #2/3 type?
Keith Law: No, he’s only pitched in juco and then instructs last fall, before I got to AZ. Adding a third pitch is certainly possible but not a small thing.

JR: March Madness fan at all? Do you fill out a bracket (even if it’s just for a friendly competition with family/friends?)
Keith Law: No, basketball has always been my least favorite sport, and since I went to a college that rarely makes the tournament (and where athletics in general weren’t a huge part of campus life) I never got into it that way either.

GlennMo: I haven’t heard really any hype on Mikey Romero, which is odd in that market. Is he someone to be excited about possibly added some strength?
Keith Law: I like Romero as a potential solid regular at 2b or above-average one at SS.

SadinLa: Any hope for Jo Adell? Still looks enticing, but maybe I’m just fooling myself
Keith Law: I don’t know how you undo the damage done by the over-aggressive promotions. He didn’t belong in AAA and then he didn’t belong in the majors, offensively or defensively. He’s never recovered. When I talk about sending a player like Walker or Volpe or (pre-injury) Painter to AAA for a month rather than rushing him to the majors, this is what I’m talking about. You don’t want to derail a kid over what amounts to a few extra weeks of games in the big leagues. There’s very little downside to being conservative with a player who has little to no AAA experience or success.

Josh: Is Manzardo a guy you could see making a singnificant impact in the majors? Your write up was glowing, but seems like he may have been dinged for being relegated to 1st.
Keith Law: I think he’s the only true 1B on my top 100, no? That should tell you that I believe in his bat – I do ding those no-position guys quite a bit.

SadinLa: Does Will Benson get a fresh start in cincy? Watched him many times in A ball , he looked like a man among boys. Physical phenom back then
Keith Law: Gets a fresh start in a ballpark that rewards guys with power, even if the hit tool is lacking, but I think he’s got a long way to go with the bat still.

Trevor: This season may be the most I’ve looked forward to going to games and it’s all bc of the pitch clock
Keith Law: It removes so much dead time from the game that the experience of watching is just much better.

Isaac: Would you keep Harry Ford at catcher? Can he be a top 20 type prospect by years end?
Keith Law: I’d try to keep him at catcher until he either shows he can’t handle it or the bat turns out to be way more advanced than the glove (like Bryce Harper or Wil Myers) so moving him is the right developmental move.

foolsgold1971: Gavin Stons’s changeup is even better than advertised.  Am I overreacting?
Keith Law: It’s pretty good. Freaking Dodgers, man.

David: Have you read any books by JG Farrell?  I just finished Troubles and thoroughly enjoyed it.
Keith Law: No but I’ve sort of been working through the list of Booker Prize winners so I’ll likely read that and/or The Siege of Krishnapur.

Isaac: Evan Carter, crow-armstrong or Robert Hassel? Seem like similar players. A year ago it seemed like Hassell then a huge gap to the other 2, but I’m guessing that’s closed or reversed. Thanks as always!!!
Keith Law: Carter probably has the highest ceiling, PCA is the best prospect of the three because he has a high floor but also some ceiling.

AWC: Just when MLB inserts changes to make their games more watchable… They can’t reach an agreement with YouTube TV to carry MLB Network so their games are literally unwatchable. Make it make sense!
Keith Law: I feel like that might get worked out in time.

Not a cow: M.Bleis and de Paula have been getting a ton of helium. Are they elite talent type prospects?
Keith Law: Bleis was on my top 100 for that reason.

Ken: The guardians lack thump in their outfield. As much as we love watching Kwan and straw and etc, is valera an instant upgrade as soon as he’s ready? He seems to suffer from prospect fatigue, does he still have that impact upside?
Keith Law: Still has impact upside but definitely needs to improve some of his contact rates before he’s ready.
Keith Law: That’s all for this week. I’ll be traveling a lot this month so I don’t know when the next chat will be, but I will post a few scouting blogs as I see players, both amateur and pro, including one on Monday or Tuesday about some draft guys. Thanks as always for reading and for all of your questions!

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→ March 8, 2023
→ By

Broker.

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 2018 film Shoplifters was my #3 film of that year, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, depicting a cobbled-together family of thieves who come together because the world beyond hasn’t provided them with the structure they desire. It’s a simple story where nothing substantial happens, deriving its huge emotional power from small interactions and gradual revelations about the five core characters.

Kore-eda’s most recent film, Broker, is his first Korean-language movie, and stars Song Kang-ho of Parasite as one of two baby ‘brokers’ who sell abandoned babies, illegally, to couples looking to adopt. It shares a core theme with Shoplifters, as we see five people come together to form another would-be family, one even closer to the dynamic of a biological family, but does so with more plot and more suspense than Shoplifters, counteracting the familiarity of the earlier film. (You can rent Broker on Amazon, iTunes, etc.)

Song plays Ha Sang-Hyeon, owner of a laundry business who also volunteers at a church where there’s a baby box, a place where anyone can leave a baby they wish to give up for adoption. He and his friend Dong-soo (Gang Dong-won) steal some of these babies to sell them on the black market for a few thousand dollars, which they also justify to themselves as saving the babies from going to an orphanage. This all goes awry when one mother, Moon So-young (Lee Ji-eun, a K-pop singer who records as IU), comes back after abandoning her baby, and ends up accompanying the two men on their visits to would-be buyers. They’re pursued by two policewomen, Detectives Lee and Soo-jin, who have been trying to catch the baby brokers in the act of selling a child so they can arrest the two men, although it turns out that Soo-jin (Bae Doona) has additional motives for her ardor in this search.

The brilliance of both of these Kore-eda films lies in the telling, in the dialogue and the small moments and the way his characters reveal themselves through their interactions with each other and the world around them. All three of the main characters have elements in their histories that we learn as the film progresses that further explain their motivations, but more importantly just reveal more about who they are. The script is smarter than just connecting A to B, than saying that one character does something specific because some other thing happened in their past; it uses those past events to provide depth and definition to all three of the main characters, and even to a couple of the secondary characters as well.

Song earned the Best Actor award at Cannes in 2022 for his work in Broker, becoming the first Korean actor to win the honor there, continuing the rise in global acclaim that began with his work in Parasite, although he already had a few cases’ worth of honors in South Korea and elsewhere in Asia going back a quarter of a century. He’s the core of this transient family, and his understated performance in Broker gives the film the anchor that allows some of the other actors to go bigger with their individual characters. This is just Lee Ji-eun’s second major film role, and she’s a revelation – I doubt anyone would guess she was a singer by trade from watching her nuanced, affecting performance as a mother who has her reasons for wishing to give up her baby but is also determined to see him go to the right family. Just about every character here is damaged in some way, but none of the performances, even the side ones, are showy or loud.

I adored Shoplifters, and I think that colored my experience with Broker. Both revolve around makeshift families, and both understand that families can be what we make of them. Many people do not have the privilege of strong biological ties, of two parents or siblings or extended relations who are present in their lives, but both of these films explore the ways in which some people forge those relationships on their own – perhaps unwittingly, because we need that sort of connection in our lives. Broker is an excellent film, and is different enough from Shoplifters thanks to some of the suspense in the second half to stand on its own, but I also think I loved it a little less because it treads some ground familiar to me from the earlier film.

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→ March 7, 2023
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The Fortune Men.

I may have mentioned a few times that my in-laws are Welsh, as in born in Wales, so I’ve explored a bit of Welsh culture in the last few years while dabbling in the language as well. I discovered quite recently that Llenydiaeth Cymru (Literature Wales) has its own annual prizes under the Wales Book of the Year banner, and the most recent Rhys Davies Trust Fiction Award went to Nadifa Mohammed for her latest novel The Fortune Men. It’s based on the true story of Somalian immigrant Mahmood Mattan, the last man hanged in Cardiff, whose 1952 trial and execution for the murder of Lily Volpert were a tragic miscarriage of justice. His conviction was quashed 45 years later, followed by a payment to his family of over £700,000 and then a police apology in 2022, although by then his widow and three sons had all died.

Mohammed reimagines the time from just before the murder through the crime, arrest, and sham trial, where Mattan barely received a defense and, in the retelling, the police misconduct was appalling. There were no witnesses to the murder, and the only two people who were certain to have seen the assailant, the victim’s sister and niece, both said Mattan didn’t match their recollection. A Black man came to the door of Lily’s shop after hours, but as a moneylender as well as a seller of fabric and other odds and ends, she was accustomed to such visits. Her sister closed the door between the shop and the family’s dining room, but about twenty minutes later, someone knocked to say that her sister had been found dead, her throat slashed, and £100 taken from the safe. A combination of racism, police incompetence, and coincidence put Mattan at the center of the investigation, and once the authorities had settled on him as their man, very little could stop the wheels of justice from crushing him under their weight.

Mattan receives a fascinatingly open portrayal in this novel, as Mohammed does not canonize her subject, depicting him as a dissolute gambler and a bit of a layabout. He was a sailor who fled a suffocatingly predictable life in what was then British Somaliland, eventually taking to the seas, settling in Cardiff, and marrying Laura over her family’s objections, only to jump back on a ship almost immediately after their wedding. He’s largely out of work at the time of his arrest, only half-heartedly looking for jobs, spending what little he gets in public assistance at the horse tracks. He doesn’t pay the people who lend him money back, at least not promptly. He’s also prone to verbal outbursts that come back to bite him at the trial. Yet he’s also quite clearly innocent of the crime in question, and a loving if sometimes inattentive husband and father to three sons.

We see Mattan as a whole person, rather than just a victim of a racist society, or even just a man in the wrong place at the wrong time. He has a childlike faith that the truth will set him free in a literal sense, until it becomes clear that the British justice system is not interested in justice. Flashbacks to his childhood also lay bare the irony of a man leaving a predictable but relatively safe life in Somaliland only to move to the supposedly more enlightened colonizer country to face racism, poverty, and ultimately murder at the hands of the state.

The story, and the end, are already known, so Mohammed’s challenge is to make this story with a defined arc and conclusion interesting, which she does, while generating empathy in the reader for a relatively unsympathetic main character. Being condemned isn’t a character trait, so Mohammed fleshes out Mattan in a fascinating way to make him real and expand him beyond the common tragedy of an innocent man sent to his death. It’s a serious novel in multiple senses of the term, with a topic that seems contemporary despite the setting seventy years in the past.

Next up: Khadija Abdalla Bajaber’s The House of Rust, winner of the inaugural Ursula K. Le Guin Prize.

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→ March 5, 2023
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Minneapolis eats, 2023 edition.

I spent the weekend in Minneapolis at the Cambria College Classic to scout potential first-round picks Jacob Gonzalez (Mississippi), Matt Shaw (Maryland), Enrique Bradfield, Jr. (Vanderbilt), and Hunter Owen (Vanderbilt), along with the enigmatic right-hander George Klassen, who was bounced from Minnesota’s rotation after two starts where he averaged two walks per inning, but hit 99 in a relief appearance on Saturday night. Anyway, that’s a different post. This is a roundup of what I ate.

I met friends for dinner at Tullibee, a fine-dining restaurant in the Hewing Hotel right downtown, which was certainly the meal of the trip. We shared a few small plates and then I got one main, which was the only dish that wasn’t excellent. The caraway potato rolls come warm, with butter soft enough to drink (I don’t recommend this), although the presentation in a wooden box with a sliding glass lid is a bit silly. If I’m going to pay for bread, this is the quality I expect. The kale & date salad with almonds, celery, midnight moon (a Dutch goat cheese), and an orange vinaigrette was a solid take on the rather played-out kale salad, although I confess I still like kale salad quite a bit and find it very satisfying for something that’s extremely healthful. Midnight moon is one of my favorite cheeses, so that didn’t hurt. The wood-fired carrots with a scallion labneh beneath and a brown butter-sage finish were probably the best thing I tasted there, with that perfect taste of the fire to contrast with the sweet earthiness of the rainbow carrots. The one slight disappointment was the cassoulet, which I love because it contains duck confit, and if I see duck confit on a menu, I’m getting it. I don’t care what else is on the menu, just take it, I’m getting the duck confit please and thank you. Unfortunately, it was a little overcooked – since that’s cooked ahead of time (that’s what the confit process is, poaching the duck legs in duck fat for up to 24 hours at a very low temperature, so overcooking is more or less impossible), I assume they heated it too much or for too long to serve it. I also thought the sausage, which came whole, was too salty. I ordered their house Negroni, which replaces the Campari with the French herbal liqueur P31, so the drink is the color of mouthwash. It’s less sweet and less overtly bitter than a traditional Negroni, so while I wouldn’t say I like it better than the classic, it worked on its own merits.

My other dinner on the trip was at Billy Sushi, which is a very trendy restaurant that hides some very good quality fish under the veneer of what is basically tourist sushi – bizarre rolls with too many ingredients, wacky starters, and, in this case, way more Wagyu beef than any sushi restaurant should have on its menu. (They have at least two items that come with raw Wagyu that’s torched right before serving. It’s very showy.) The red snapper was probably the best of the six types of nigiri we tried, impeccably fresh and tasting of the ocean, while the bluefin tuna was about as soft as the butter in that bread dish at Tullibee. (I don’t typically order bluefin, since it’s being fished out of existence, but it came in the combination plate we ordered.) Of the non-nigiri food we tried, the shrimp po’ boI, which is actually just diced shrimp breaded, quickly fried, and tossed with masago, plum sauce, and a Thai chili aioli, was the best item, as the shrimp is just barely cooked, which is the opposite of what I associate with fried shrimp at just about any place you get it. The dish was perfectly spiced for me, with the occasional big hit of chili to remind you it’s there. The hot si-fu salad, which is cold but is supposed to be spicy, was perfectly fine but not spicy, and I’d rather try something else from the extensive menu – or just get more raw fish.

Vivír is an all-day bakery, market, and café attached to Centro in northeast Minneapolis, serving Mexican and Mexican-inspired dishes for all three meals. I got the chilaquiles verde, which is one of my favorite breakfast dishes to get anywhere, and their version comes with tortilla chips that have softened slightly from the spicy salsa verde, along with shredded chicken, radishes, queso fresco, and tangy crema. I would have gone lighter on the crema, which overpowered the other flavors in the dish, since the fat in it tends to mute the effects of chili peppers on the palate (which I assume is why it’s there). I’d love to go back and try several other things on the menu – they have duck carnitas tacos on the lunch menu, and as stated above, I can’t pass that up.

Farmers Kitchen and Bar was my lunch stop on Friday, walkable from U.S. Bank Stadium and next to where the Mill City Farmers Market is held on Saturday. Their fried walleye sandwich, called “The Shore Lunch,” was incredibly light for a fried anything, with the fish still flaky and moist. The sandwich comes with tomato, cucumbers, tartar sauce, and pickles on the side, while the menu said the roll was ciabatta but I think it was different the day I went, as I thought it was brioche or some similar enriched bread. It’s an all-day café that does breakfast and weekend brunch as well as a full coffee bar.

Speaking of coffee, I tried Spyhouse, one of the two main third-wave roasters in the Twin Cities, since I’d already been to Dogwood before. Spyhouse has seven cafés, one in Rochester and the others in Minneapolis or St. Paul, and I went to two of them – the one in the Emery Hotel downtown and the one in Northeast Minneapolis on Broadway. The first one is charmless because of the hotel, but the second has the vibe I want in a bustling coffee shop, with plenty of space to work and hang out. I tried their Gisheke drip coffee from Rwanda and the Finca Monteblanco from Colómbia, buying a bag of the latter to bring home; I liked both but the Gisheke was so hot when I got it that I missed out on some of the typical characteristics of Rwandan beans (they often taste of stone fruit, with light acidity that’s less than Ethiopian/Kenyan). The Finca Monteblanco is very smooth with some chocolate and caramel notes, enough so that I’ll run it through the espresso machine too at some point.

I did revisit two places I’d been to on previous trips. I first ate at Hell’s Kitchen in July of 2006 and have been back at least twice since then, and it’s still excellent, although when I went on Friday they were struggling with service despite very few customers. (I assume they’re short-staffed, like most places, but on this morning there seemed to be plenty of people on the floor.) I got what I always get, the regular waffle with coarse cornmeal mixed into the batter, and the maple pork/bison sausage, and while I concede it would be rather hard for any dish to hold up to memories from nine years earlier, the waffle came pretty close. Due to some confusion in the kitchen, I got to try the lemon-ricotta waffle as well, but I think I just don’t like that flavor combination – there was nothing wrong with it, and I know most people love lemon-ricotta breakfast dishes. I also went to do a little writing at Patisserie 46, about 15 minutes south of downtown, to work for a bit, and that place hasn’t changed a bit – it’s a real French patisserie and boulangerie, and since I was one of the very last customers as they closed, they gave me (and a few other lucky guests) a free baguette they would otherwise have had to toss.

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