→ January 22, 2023
→ By

Stick to baseball, 1/21/23.

No new content for subscribers to the Athletic as I’ve continued writing capsules for the top 100 prospects ranking, which will run on January 30th. Please stand by.

My podcast did return this week, with guest Seth Reiss, who co-wrote the screenplay for the film The Menu. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I’m planning to send out another issue of my free email newsletter on Sunday, now that I’m back on track with the prospect stuff. I was fairly stressed about it as recently a few days ago, but I’ve caught up enough that I can finish everything with a reasonable daily output of words.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: A 17-year-old woman in Texas wanted an abortion. A judge decided she wasn’t “mature” enough to make that choice. ProPublica looks at the ramifications of that decision.
  • The San Francisco Chronicle has the heartbreaking story of a mother’s attempts to help her daughter, a 35-year-old opioid addict living on the San Francisco streets, touching on the city’s lack of services for addicts and for homeless people. There’s a sad baseball connection: The daughter’s boyfriend, Abdul Cole, was a Marlins minor leaguer for three years, but died last April.
  • The School Board of Madison County, Virginia, voted to ban 21 books from its libraries, including The Handmaid’s Tale and four books by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, because Christian groups complained.
  • Meanwhile, two Christian activists in Crawford County, Arkansas, are trying to remove the library director and defund the system over the display of LGBTQ+ books, calling it an “alternative lifestyle.” Sexual orientation is not a lifestyle, or a choice. Gender identity is not a lifestyle, or a choice. Religion is a lifestyle, and a choice.
  • Iowa Republicans are trying to defund public schools by allowing parents to use vouchers for private schools, including religious schools, which would seem to violate the principle of separation of church and state. You can send your kids to a parochial school, but only without my tax dollars.
  • A couple of Eagles players recorded a Christmas album for charity, hoping to raise about $30,000. It raised $250,000 and will help fund two toy drives and a summer camp for Philly kids with serious behavioral problems. (We have a copy.)
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→ January 17, 2023
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Elder Race.

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Elder Race made the shortlist for this year’s inaugural Ursula K. Le Guin Prize, which first brought him to my attention even though he’d written twenty-odd novels before this and won a few awards along the way. It’s a quick read with a clever conceit at its heart: what if the person who’s supposed to be a great wizard is, in fact, just a human who possesses sufficiently advanced technology that it appears to be magic?

The ’wizard’ Nygroth Elder is, in fact, Nyr Illim Tevitch, an anthropologist left in stasis to keep an eye on this colonized planet while the remainder of his crew has long since left to return to Earth – which may or may not still be a going concern. Lynesse Fourth Daughter, a princess so junior you might call her a spare to the spare, believes there’s an existential threat to her people, so she treks to Nyr’s tower to try to enlist his help to fight what she calls a demon, which her own mother thinks is a fabrication to try to gain attention or glory. Nyr reluctantly agrees to help, even though his directive is to observe but not interfere, even if refraining might cause harm to the people he’s watching, and they set off on a quest to find and defeat the threat. Along the way, the culture clash between the two emerges through their languages, as Nyr can’t even explain what a scientist is, and the translation engine he uses makes everything sound to Lynesse like some sort of magic.

Elder Race is a quest novel – or novella, which is how the Hugo Awards characterized it, giving it a nomination in that category in 2022 – but one with a metatextual component as well that, in some ways, is the more interesting of the two. Tchaikovsky tells the story by alternating narration between Lynesse and Nyr, thus presenting both sides of most of their conversations, which operates as a commentary on fantasy literature and works that try to blend fantasy and science, as well as a more humanist look at the challenges of communicating across cultures. The fact that Lynesse’s language lacks so many words that Nyr takes for granted and finds himself unable to express even through translation recalled Samuel Delany’s classic novella Babel-17, which takes the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – that the structure of a language influences how its speakers view the world – and turns it into an entire story, where a language is a weapon that alters speakers’ minds. Here language is less insidious, but stands as a concrete example of the difficulty of communicating across all of the boundaries that separate people, not just language but culture, history, religion, and more. Language is the visible manifestation of what amounts to a religious difference between Lynesse’s people and Nyr; what her family and subjects believe is magic is just technology they’ve lost in the centuries since humans colonized this planet.

Nyr is the more interesting and developed character of the two, in part because Lynesse is, by design, depicted as naïve – she’s young, but also not very worldly even within the confines of this civilization, and her faith in Nyr based on a historical anecdote is almost charming in its innocence. Nyr, meanwhile, has to grapple with both his role as potential savior, or as a failed savior, to Lynesse’s people, while also facing the fact that he might be severed permanently from his own civilization, condemned to a lonely existence where he enters long periods of suspended animation and can’t forge enduring relationships with anyone. He encounters crippling depression and covers it up with the help of embedded tech that takes the old trope about men compartmentalizing their emotions and turns it into software; he can just push it aside and deal with it later.

Tchaikovsky – who spells his name Czajkowski outside of his writing, as he’s of Polish descent rather than Russian – packs a lot into the 200 pages of Elder Race, without skimping on the quest part of the story, which is the real narrative that drives the book forward. You could probably just read this as a straight-up quest without giving the larger themes a second thought and still enjoy it. I found those themes gave this novel more heft and staying power in my mind after I finished. It’s to Czajkowski’s credit that he managed this in such a brief novel that revolves almost entirely around just two core characters.

Next up: I’m many books behind in my writeups, but I’m currently reading Brian Clegg’s Gravitational Waves: How Einstein’s Spacetime Ripples Reveal the Secrets of the Universe.

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→ January 16, 2023
→ By

Argentina, 1985.

Argentina, 1985 was the surprise winner of this year’s Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, beating out Decision to Leave and RRR, perhaps because of the power of its story. It’s a tight, well-acted film, a great antidote if your palate was still seared by last year’s bombastic The Trial of the Chicago 7, but in the end it also has a limited ceiling – this is a courtroom drama, and no matter how important the subject is, that genre constrains any film, show, or book. (It’s streaming free on Amazon Prime.)

Argentina, 1985 is based on the real-life case in a civilian court where Argentina’s democratically elected government tried several leaders of the military dictatorship that collapsed in 1983 after the country’s humiliating defeat in the Falkland Islands War. That dictatorship ruled for seven years and murdered thousands of its own citizens as part of the Dirty War against supposed leftists, with the total number of people the government ‘disappeared’ estimated between 9,000 and 30,000. In 1985, the government’s truth and reconciliation commission wanted to bring some of the leaders of the dictatorship to justice, in a case that became known as the Trial of the Juntas. The military tribunal kicked the case over to civil court, which meant that the state had to find lawyers willing to try a case that would likely see their families threatened and perhaps their careers ended if they failed. It fell to prosecutor Julio César Strassera (Ricardo Darín) to assemble a team of lawyers, with the aid of the young and inexperienced attorney Luis Moreno Ocampo (Peter Lanzani), capable of winning the case, which they did by finding survivors of the regime’s campaign of imprisonment and torture who were willing to risk their lives by coming forward and testifying against the junta’s leaders.

As courtroom dramas go, Argentina, 1985 hits the right notes without resorting to excessive sentimentality or big gotcha moments. This isn’t a police procedural where a surprise witness or a clever objection turns the case on its head, or some event outside the courtroom derails the case; it follows a clear, mostly linear narrative, where Strassera and Ocampo assemble a misfit group of extremely young attorneys who have very little baggage related to the case and are willing to work long hours trying to track victims down and then convince them to talk. It’s a rousing story given how they put that team together, and how, if there were such a thing, the oddsmakers would have given them a snowball’s chance of winning based on their resumés. We don’t get to know any of the lawyers in any depth, seeing a little of Strassera’s home life and tension with his bosses, and the other participants in the trial are ciphers – which is fine for a courtroom drama, again, but limits how far the film can go. Nobody needs to humanize a murderous dictator, but it’s also a less interesting film when the people on trial are irredeemable monsters.

The power of Argentina, 1985 comes more in the testimonies themselves than anything about the characters or even the overall narrative, since the convictions are part of history and would certainly be known to anyone watching the film in its native country. And these are the survivors, with no one there to speak for the dead and disappeared, a common problem for such reconciliation attempts in the wake of dictatorships and genocides. The stories are horrible enough to carry the heart of the film, and give it weight that I would imagine helped it with the Golden Globe and a slew of other honors so far in the 2022 awards cycle, as well as making the 15-film shortlist for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Film. I couldn’t vote for this over Decision to Leave, though, which also made the Oscars shortlist and seems very likely to earn a nomination for the award. Argentina, 1985 is about as well-made as a film can be, with solid lead performances and a tight script that even injects some levity into a difficult story. It just can’t be a truly great film within the confines of its genre and subject.

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→ January 14, 2023
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Stick to baseball, 1/14/23.

My latest piece for subscribers to the Athletic went up last Saturday, a breakdown of the Phillies’ trade for Gregory Soto, a deal I quite like for Detroit. My podcast will return this upcoming week, and the top 100 prospects ranking is scheduled to run on January 30th.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the roll-and-write game Riverside, which just missed my top ten games of 2022 list (it was the final cut).

I’ve sent out two editions of my free email newsletter in two weeks (!), so you should definitely sign up now.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: The Financial Times has a fascinating story on four women who work as spies in Britain’s SIS, looking at their actual jobs and lives (as much as possible) and the agency’s history of discrimination, often to its own detriment.
  • The Philly Inquirer looks at the successes and struggles of Mastbaum High School, a vocational/technical school in Kensington, a neighborhood often called ground zero of the city’s opioid epidemic. One unavoidable conclusion: the school is wildly underfunded given its role in the community.
  • You may have seen a claim about more athletes dying from cardiac arrest since the COVID-19 vaccines were introduced than died from the same in the preceding twenty or so years. It’s bullshit, and comes from a source-less site called goodsciencing that is probably backed by the CEO of conservative site NewsBlaze.
  • A fake tweet claiming a Florida doctor had made absurd pro-vaccine statements was amplified by a host of alt-right accounts, and Twitter refused to take it down, leading to a wave of harassment against her. VICE also covered the story, focusing on Joe Rogan amplifying the tweet.
  • Yet another fake AirBnB listing scam, this time in Philly, with renters showing up to find that the house was listed without the owners’ knowledge.
  • Right-wingers have been organizing for several years to take over school boards so they could push their theological, homophobic, transphobic, and even white supremacist agendas into public schools. The Philly Inquirer has a story about some progressives who are belatedly fighting back.
  • Smithtown, New York, the retrograde part of Long Island where I was born, decided to remove all Pride displays from its libraries back in June. This isn’t shocking if you’ve been there, as it’s as provincial a suburb as you’ll find. People there don’t get off the Island enough to realize there’s a whole big world out there.
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→ January 11, 2023
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Fleishman is in Trouble.

Fleishman is in Trouble, streaming now on Hulu, is an adaptation of the 2019 novel of that name, starring Jesse Eisenberg as the title character and Claire Danes as his ex-wife. It’s bad. In fact, it’s bad in a lot of different ways, but none more so than the fact that it doesn’t even seem to understand who the most interesting character in the series is.

Dr. Toby Fleishman (Eisenberg) is a successful hepatologist at a New York City hospital who is somewhat recently divorced from talent agent Rachel (Danes) when, after a weekend when he has their two kids, she fails to come pick them up at her assigned time – and the next day, she’s not only still AWOL, she’s unreachable. This becomes the catalyst to explore the history of their now-defunct marriage, Toby’s experiences as a single guy, and his friendships with Libby (Lizzie Caplan) and Seth (Adam Brody), whom he’s known since they all spent a semester in Israel during college.

Libby is the narrator, and the stand-in for the author, and we also get a fair amount of her story as well. She’s married to a safe, boring lawyer (Josh Radnor), with whom she has two kids and shares a nice house in the Jersey suburbs. She was working as a writer, but quit about two years before the events of the show to become a stay-at-home mom. With Toby getting a divorce and living it up as a single guy, while she finds the other stay-at-home moms to be incapable of having a modestly intellectual conversation, she falls into an existential crisis of her own.

The way the series unfurls, we get mostly Toby’s perspective for the first six episodes. Rachel is derisive towards him, even in front of friends; consumed by her work; and diffident towards her kids. In his telling, she’s all of the problems, and he comes to believe she was also unfaithful to him with a mutual friend. Only some of this is accurate, although when we get more of her side of the story, the result is we realize he’s also kind of an ass. Blame may not be shared equally, but neither of these two is free from it. By the time the final episode began, I hated them both, with Eisenberg more or less doing the Mark Zuckerberg character from The Social Network and Danes hitting one very loud note over and over.

Toby, it turns out, is high on his own supply, probably exacerbated by the success he’s having on dating apps. (Jesse Eisenberg is listed at 5’7”. He would not be doing that well on the apps in real life.) He and Rachel have differing memories of pivotal events in their marriage, including a traumatic scene around the birth of their daughter, and when Rachel develops post-partum depression with psychotic elements, Toby, a medical doctor, recommends … a support group. Not a psychiatrist, or anyone who could prescribe something. It’s hard to fathom, but it also may be a sign he really doesn’t take his wife seriously at all. She, meanwhile, is a very thinly drawn stereotype, the embodiment of the myth that you can’t be a successful working woman and a good mother together, which is especially odd in a series that depicts the alternative, stay-at-home moms, as vapid robots who walk around with an unearned sense of superiority and refer to a certain style of interior decoration as “mid-cench.”

Which brings us back to Libby, who should have been the star of the series (and, I presume, the book). Caplan gives the one truly good performance of anyone here, and it’s partly to her credit and partly because Libby is the only three-dimensional character. The winter of her discontent should have been enough to carry the movie, without the pointless mystery of Rachel’s disappearance (which gets an answer, but in a very unsatisfactory way). Libby is 41, with two kids who are approaching the point where they don’t need her like they did probably two or three years prior, and no longer has an active career. It’s the age and the point in life where feelings of regret over past choices you can’t unmake and the closing of future possibilities just due to age and circumstance are common. It’s a midlife crisis. It shouldn’t bother you, but it does. And Libby is aware of this, on some level – she knows her life is, if not great, solidly okay, and privileged, and even that she has unusual agency to make things better for herself. She even has the agency to choose to leave it through divorce, if she wants. The series isn’t interested enough in going deeper with her character, instead spending time with some of the worst sex scenes you will ever see as we follow Toby’s adventures in dating. There are some good parts of the Libby story, with one episode that’s primarily dedicated to her, but for every bit that’s telling (the freezer) there’s one that’s absurd (the pancakes).

The cinematography in Fleishman is a disaster too; the series relies way too much on a spinning camera gimmick that wasn’t just overused, but was nauseating, and that added nothing whatsoever to the story. It becomes the series’ crutch any time it needs to speed up time, or try to show a character’s confusion, rather than just doing so via dialogue or narration. I’ve seen action and sci-fi films/shows that were less reliant on camera movements, and can’t remember feeling like I had to turn away multiple times to avoid getting disoriented myself. This is supposed to be a realistic story, and all this gimmick does is detract from that.

The ultimate failure of Fleishman, though, comes down to where it rests its eye. The story puts us in a tiny niche of society – a very narrow subset of upper-class Manhattanites, where almost everyone around Toby and Rachel is a social climber obsessed with status and money, getting their kids into the Right Schools and using the right decorators and so on. (I was glad to see Ashley Austin Morris, who played Francine on the Electric Company reboot, appear as a side character; she doesn’t have a lot to do, but she does it well.) The script substitutes character quirks, like having Toby on some sort of weird keto or paleo diet for his entire adult life, for real depth, to the point where we don’t get to know any of the principals, let alone empathize with them beyond Libby. Caplan gives by far the best performance of anyone in the series, which makes it even more galling that the story doesn’t center her character outside of one episode, and even at that it’s never quite explained why Libby puts up with Toby when he’s consistently horrible to her. Libby is in Turmoil would have been a much better series, and then she could have just introduced Toby and Seth as her jerk friends.

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→ January 10, 2023
→ By

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is the full-length feature based on the series of short films from 2010 that featured the title character, a one-inch tall shell with an eye in its aperture and, yes, shoes on, voiced by Jenny Slate. It utilizes stop-motion animation to bring the dimunitive, wide-eyed shell to life as it shows us around the world he has created in an AirBnB, where he lives with his grandmother (voiced by Isabella Rossellini) after most of their family vanished when a previous tenant moved out. It’s charming, and slight, and for most of its 80-odd minutes it feels like a short that’s been overstretched, but the whole thing is salvaged by a tremendous finale. (You can rent it on Amazon, iTunes, etc.)

Marcel and his grandmother have jury-rigged a bunch of devices from household objects to help themselves adapt to their living space, most notably rolling around the apartment in a tennis ball, and to allow them more easily move between their indoor and outdoor environments. The gimmick in this film is that a guest at this AirBnB has decided to film his conversations with Marcel and post them online, where they find a cult following (as the real clips did), which leads to interest from the favorite show of Marcel and his grandmother, 60 Minutes. Their favorite host, Lesley Stahl, ends up visiting the apartment to interview Marcel and explain his quest to try to find the rest of his family, which, of course, leads to the big finish.

There’s not a whole lot more to Marcel the Shell with Shoes On; either you get on this film’s wavelength, and you enjoy the dialogue between the interviewer and the shell, or you don’t. The film is more witty and cute than laugh-out-loud funny, although the line about “everything comes out in the wash” did get a big laugh from me. Some of Marcel’s soliloquies veer awfully close to “inspirational poster in a waiting room” territory, and those were the ones where I found myself tuning out – that’s great in a short film or sketch but wears very thin over an hour-plus. With only the three characters for the vast majority of the movie’s running time, there’s a sameness that sets in until Lesley Stahl shows up to save the day.

From the point the filming of the show-within-the-movie starts, the movie’s tempo picks up, and suddenly it’s not entirely about Marcel’s witticisms and observations. Cute has a half-life, and it turns out it’s pretty short. When Marcel reunites with his family, the whole tone changes as well, and it’s surprisingly emotional as well, while also showing off a higher level of animation quality. That final twenty minutes or so takes this movie from below the ‘recommend’ line to just above it.

Marcel earned one of the five nominations for Best Animated Feature Film at this year’s Golden Globes, although I’m going to guess it has no chance to beat both Turning Red (which was mid) and Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (which I haven’t seen yet). I’ve only seen one other potential Oscar contender, another stop-motion film, Wendell & Wild, which was more entertaining throughout than this one but had a less inventive story. You can see Wendell & Wild, which was co-written by Jordan Peele, on Netflix; it has some important themes about race, gentrification, and the weight of history, but I thought the main character’s narrative was too familiar. Also, they kill the parents in the first scene, which I thought was trademarked by Disney. I’m hoping whatever wins the awards is still out there among films I haven’t seen yet.

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→ January 9, 2023
→ By

Tár.

Tár is writer/director Todd Field’s first film since 2006’s Little Children, and only his second since his debut feature In the Bedroom, which was nominated for Best Picture in 2001. And for about two hours, Tár feels like the best film of 2022, anchored by an incredible lead performance by Cate Blanchett as the title character, until it sputters out with a jarring increase in the tempo and increasingly unrealistic resolution to the main narrative event in the story.

Lydia Tár is the world-famous conductor of the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, arriving there after stops in New York, London, and so on. As the film opens, she’s sitting for an interview with Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker, in front of a live audience, in part to promote her new memoir Tár on Tár. Once the Q&A is over, we follow Tár to a class she’s teaching at Julliard and to her work in Berlin, where she’s preparing for a live performance of Mahler’s 5th Symphony that will be recorded for release. She’s extremely reliant on her assistant Francesca, who looks jealous of any contact Lydia has with any young woman, and there are mentions of a former student in her fellowship program who may be having personal problems and could be stalking Lydia. It’s clear that there are demons in Lydia’s closet, and that she hasn’t and still doesn’t treat the people around or below her well, including the patron Eliot Kaplan (Mark Strong in the world’s worst hairpiece), which at some point has to come crashing down around her. She’s also a rare woman leading a major symphony orchestra – there’s just one in the U.S. right now, Nathalie Stutzmann in Atlanta – and is also queer, married to a woman (played by Nina Hoss), bringing intersectionality into play even as she’s going to face the wrath of cancel culture later in the story.

For the first two-thirds of the film, Tár casts an incredible spell with its taut, intelligent dialogue and sense of tension simmering below the surface. Blanchett is at her absolute zenith here, with such precise intonation and micro-gestures that it’s hard to believe this isn’t her actual self, bouncing between English and German while standing in front of the orchestra, expressing this meticulous level of control over herself and those around her. She is Lydia Tár, even though Lydia Tár is herself a creation, which means that when the chickens come home to roost, as they must in any such story, the character comes apart at the seams so quickly and so melodramatically in the final third.

The film moves at such a perfect pace for the first two-thirds that it feels like Field either didn’t know how best to depict Tár’s fall from grace or that he might have wanted to make the film three and half hours long. We see Lydia’s imperious nature at home and work through scenes that leave the subtext, and sometimes the entire meaning, ambiguous, so that the picture of her character emerges gradually but the specifics – such as what happened with the former student, and whether she’s a victim or aggressor or both – remain uncertain. She’s clearly balancing on the knife’s edge mentally and professionally, so when the denouement comes, it’s cataclysmic, but the film shifts from second gear to sixth (is that a thing?) after that, and the script’s extreme commitment to realism evaporates. (I actually might put the start of its deterioration slightly when Lydia goes into what is supposed to be an apartment building in a less affluent part of town, only to find herself in a maze of hallways straight out of Piranesi.)

Tár does ask you to suspend some disbelief before that, but I could agree to those terms without too much trouble. The mere idea of a celebrity conductor of classical music in 2021 is kind of absurd; we only have a few classical musicians who might be near Tár’s presumed level of fame. Other aspects of the character are more plausible, such as her apparent lack of any friends or meaningful relationships beyond work and the one she has with her daughter Petra, the last of which also leads to a pivotal scene where we see just how far Lydia will go to protect her child. She even blows off her own mother on one of her trips to New York, which also foreshadows a scene later in the film, and is oddly dismissive to Kaplan (modeled after the financier and amateur conductor Miles Kaplan) even though he’s critical to her career and the foundation that runs her fellowship program.

One theory around the conclusion of Tár is that at least some of it is happening in her head, and the further I’ve gotten from watching it, the more I lean towards this interpretation. Either this is true, in which case I am more sympathetic towards the film as a whole, or it’s not, in which case I think the film fails to stick its landing. I think we’re watching her breakdown in accelerated time, some of which might be happening, but some of which is unreal – a dream, a hallucination, perhaps just a series of anxious thoughts from someone who has already been showing signs that she was seeing or hearing things.

Blanchett does give the best performance I’ve seen by an actress this year – probably the best performance by any actor – even though my sentimental pick for the Oscar will be Michelle Yeoh, who is great in Everything Everywhere All at Once. And even with the concerns I have about Tár’s script, and to some extent Field’s direction, it’s probably going to deserve and get nominations for Best Picture, Director, and Original Screenplay, because the first two hours or so are just that good, and even the tumble it takes at the end can’t completely undo what comes before. It’s not among my top five for the year so far, though.

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→ January 7, 2023
→ By

The Menu.

The Menu is a dark comedy/horror/social satire with an incredible cast and an impressive commitment to the details around its premise. It takes a hard turn about a third of the way through the movie that starts to make the audacious twist clear, and stays true to its theme almost to the end, where the movie sticks its first landing but fails to do so on the second, ultimate conclusion, which might be the difference between this film being just very good and being my favorite of the year. It’s streaming on HBO Max and is available for rent on amazon, iTunes, etc.

The film opens as we see a handful of obnoxious rich people boarding a boat for a highly exclusive restaurant, The Hawthorn, which is on a private island and helmed by a famous chef, Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes), with a prix-fixe menu that costs $1250 a person. Our primary perspective is through the ardent foodie Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) and his date, Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy), who we quickly learn was not the woman he was originally taking to this dinner. Other guests include the has-been actor George (John Leguizamo), an insufferable food critic who helped make Slowik’s career but is clearly now a skeptic (Janet McTeer), a trio of tech bros, and an older couple (Reed Birney and Judith Light) who we later learn are regulars. Margot recognizes the husband right away and isn’t happy to see him, nor he her. The diner-toursts are met at the dock by Elsa (Hong Chau), a humorless automaton, who gives them a brief tour of some of the grounds around the hotel before their seating. The meal begins with the sort of food you’d expect at a restaurant like this, with foams and gels and molecular gastronomy and deconstructions, with Slowik introducing each course with a soliloquy, only to have those become darker each time around. By the fourth course, things have taken a turn for the macabre, and it’s clear that this is no ordinary night at the Hawthorn. (There’s a great deleted scene that gives a little more backstory and that I think would have even further immersed the viewers in the food criticism aspect of the film, although I understand why it might have been cut.)

There is a lot going on here, and most of it works extremely well, starting with the film’s disdain for modern foodie culture – not food culture, mind you, but foodie culture, the worship of chefs, the conspicuous consumption, and the snobbery towards those who don’t speak the vernacular or share in the adulation. There’s a clear demarcation here between those two ideas; the substantive parts of Slowik’s monologues involve a real appreciation for food, for where it comes from, for living creatures that died for our plates, for the environment and the ecologies we spoil so we can eat whatever we want, whenever we want it. Chef Dominique Crenn, of Atelier Crenn, recreated several of her restaurant’s dishes for the film, and the plates we do see look incredible – and realistic, at least for a restaurant of this caliber. It’s food designed for the diner to appreciate the food, both the ingredients and the skill required to prepare them. That is separate from the diners, who are largely here for what you might call the “wrong” reasons, such as for the ability to say they ate there, even if they don’t remember or appreciate what they ate.

Margot turns out to be significant in the plot, as she’s the unexpected guest – the one person who wasn’t on the original manifest, and her mere presence seems to throw Slowik and some of the staff off their games, where they are otherwise robotic in their cultlike devotion to the chef and his commands. The contrast between their reactions to her and their reactions to everyone else is one of the early markers that something is very wrong at the Hawthorn, although I don’t think it remotely telegraphs what’s to come. (I will spoil one thing here, because it bothered me that it might be the twist: There’s no cannibalism involved. That’s such an overdone gag at this point that I was going to be seriously pissed off if that was the answer. It’s not.)

After a series of shocking events that drive the story deeper into the abyss, we get a double-barreled ending, one of which works extremely well, the other of which seems overcooked. The Menu requires some suspension of disbelief; it is the triple-distilled version of reality, which is a hallmark of great satire. The script is sending up both sides of the blade here, both the chef and the patrons, and does so effectively for most of the film, working with slight exaggerations that push the characters just to the wrong side of the line of plausibility. It earns that modest suspension of disbelief with dishes that look and sound completely accurate to the setting, with customers who viewers will easily recognize as archetypes, with a chef who conforms to the stereotype of the kitchen tyrant who abuses his staff in the name of great food. The first ending taps into a deeper understanding of two of the characters, and how one of them got to this point. The second ending feels more like bombast, and while it’s visually inventive (and funny), it pushed too far over that line of plausibility for me.

Fiennes and Taylor-Joy both landed Golden Globe nominations for their performances as the leads in a musical/comedy, which seems about right – Colin Farrell should win over Fiennes, Michelle Yeoh or Emma Thompson should win over Taylor-Joy, but both of these performances were strong and integral to the film. It’s a relief to see Taylor-Joy get a decent role and deliver within it after the fiasco of her performance in Amsterdam, and it might be her best film work since the very underrated Thoroughbreds (although I haven’t seen the 2020 version of Emma). Fiennes’s performance feels like the Spock-with-a-goatee version of his director character from Hail, Caesar!, a particular style he’s practically trademarked but that this time he twists just enough to make it incredibly sinister – not purely evil, like You-know-who, but menacing, so you feel like something awful is coming but can’t quite put your finger on why until the awful somethings start. He plays Slowik as the black comedy version of Daniel Day-Lewis’s fashion designer in Phantom Thread. I was a little disappointed to see The Menu didn’t get a screenplay nomination at the Globes, but they only give out one screenplay honor, while the Oscars do two and thus have twice the number of nominations available, so I hold out a little hope on that front. Right now this is in my top 5 from 2022, although we still have a lot of big films to watch (notably Aftersun and The Fabelmans), and the fact that I can’t stop thinking about it is probably the highest compliment I can give The Menu. It’s imperfect, but still has so much good stuff in it that it’s worth accepting its flaws.

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→ January 5, 2023
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Glass Onion.

I loved Knives Out, even acknowledging some of its weak points, because the core mystery was done so incredibly well – including plenty of misdirection – and the dialogue sparkled with all kinds of humor, not least from the detective Benoit Blanc. Writer-director Rian Johnson signed a deal with Netflix to produce several sequels, the first of which, Glass Onion, appeared on the site right before Christmas. Glass Onion gets the humor stuff right, arguably even more than the original, and adds a second character who outshines Blanc, but the mystery is inferior to its predecessor and there’s nowhere near the effort to mislead the viewer that a strong mystery film or novel should have.

Glass Onion does give us Blanc (Daniel Craig), this time on a Greek island owned by billionaire tech bro Elon Musk Miles Bron (Edward Norton), who is hosting a weekend murder-mystery party for five of his friends. Blanc received an invitation, but Bron didn’t send him one, so the latter is confused but also pleased to have someone so famous at his gathering. The other guests include Andi Brand (Janelle Monáe), who co-founded Alpha with Bron but was forced out in an ugly legal battle; Connecticut Governor Claire DeBella (Kathryn Hahn), who’s running for Senate on Bron’s dime; Lionel Toussaint (Leslie Odom, Jr.), Alpha’s chief scientist; Duke Cody (Dave Bautista), a Twitch streamer and men’s rights activist; and Birdie Jay (Kate Hudson), a model, fashion designer, and total dingbat. Birdie’s assistant and Duke’s girlfriend are also along for the ride. It’s very And There Were None, along with any of several Poirot novels where he’s invited to a gathering and ends up solving a murder (like Cards on the Table), so of course someone here ends up dead and Blanc has to solve the case.

Glass Onion is stuffed with humor of many kinds, including the ongoing satire of Bron, who is insufferably pretentious but also prone to malapropisms and rather transparently full of himself. He’s also in love with his gadgets and consumes conspicuously. On the other end of the humor spectrum, Hudson is hilarious as a fatuous and truly not very bright sendup of a type, one not unconnected to Hudson herself, since she’s the founder of Fabletics and Birdie started an athleisure line of her own. The film takes place around May of 2020, and we meet Birdie as she’s holding a giant, maskless party, while her assistant Peg refuses to give her back her phone because Birdie tweeted a slur (or more than one). I actually enjoyed the lower-brow humor, not least how dimwitted Birdie can be, than the satire, which was a more hit than miss but still a bit inconsistent.

The mystery, however, doesn’t live up to that of the first film, where suspicion was spread across a wide array of characters, and the script kept trying to redirect your attention to different suspects. Here, there’s one most likely culprit, and the film doesn’t spend much time trying to make you think it’s anyone else. I didn’t want that person to be the killer, because it was the least inspired choice of all. You might know who it is just from that description, which is unfortunate, but I think speaks to the way the ending here disappointed me.

It’s still a rollicking time, though, almost never letting up on the humor, and it’s buoyed by a great performance from Monáe, one of the best of her career. Monáe has always showed talent but she hasn’t had many opportunities to act in strong films since Moonlight. Her role here is far more challenging than it might first appear, as that character has unexpected layers to it, and she’s up to the task, whether it’s delivering dry humor, mockery, or faux-intellectualism, or acting the spy or even a little bit of the action hero. She even outshines Craig, who’s in fine form as Blanc but has far less to do this time around than he did in Knives Out, at least in exploring or growing the character. He has one scene right when all the guests sit down to dinner and Bron explains the rules for the murder mystery (the game, not the real one) where he goes full Blanc in the best way, and I hope in future films we get more of that. Glass Onion is like one of those Christie novels where Poirot doesn’t even show up until the second half of the film – you’re still entertained, but you want more of the character you really paid to see.

Then there’s the bombastic ending, which ties a few things together, including the necessary fulfillment of Chekhov’s gun, but goes on quite some time after the killer is revealed. Knives Out ended so perfectly, tying up every loose end while gently mocking itself and the conventions of the genre, that the shift to a very Hollywood-style resolution was surprising – it’s hard to imagine Poirot or Miss Marple or even Tommy and Tuppence in that situation, which was more befitting of the Continental Op, if even that. What leads up to the slam-bang finish is pretty clever, and the immediate aftermath is a satisfying comeuppance as well. I don’t mind fireworks per se, but I guess I wanted this film to adhere to its genre’s style more like the first one did.

That’s a lot of words about what was wrong with a movie that I ultimately liked, but you can’t talk about Glass Onion without comparing it to Knives Out. Where the first film might have been a little too by-the-book when it comes to the genre, Glass Onion got away from it more than I’d like. I’m here for all the Benoit Blanc films, but I hope the next one has more of him and a stronger mystery, with all of the same kind of humor.

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→ January 4, 2023
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Farha.

Farha was the Jordanian submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, and it’s the first full-length film for Palestinian director Darin Sallam, who had been trying to make the movie for nearly a decade. Based on a story passed down for over 70 years about a 14-year-old Palestinian girl’s harrowing experience during the Nakba in 1948, it works with a very simple plot and strong lead performance, but is also hemmed in by the director’s commitment to the original narrative. It’s currently streaming on Netflix.

Farha is the girl’s name, and as the film opens in mid-May, 1948, we see her playing with friends in their village in Palestine as the families there prepare for the arranged marriage of one of their daughters. Farha begs her father to send her to secondary school instead of marrying her off, and he eventually agrees, but while the paper is still in her hand, gunfire erupts as the British Mandate ends and Israeli troops threaten the village. Farha’s father tries to send her away with a neighbor who is driving his own family to safety, but Farha jumps out of the car and returns to her father’s side, so he puts her in a storeroom, locking the door and telling her he’ll return for her as soon as it’s safe. She ends up trapped in the room for several days, witnessing some of the horrors of the war through the keyhole, including an atrocity committed by Israeli soldiers.

Farha is both a coming-of-age story and an anti-war film, one that has upset Israeli authorities because it shows Israeli Defense Forces soldiers, one of whom wears a yarmulke, committing acts of senseless, gratuitous violence (albeit off-screen – we hear it, Farha sees it). The story takes place during the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” which refers to the displacement of 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from what had been British Palestine and would later become independent Israel. The displacement had already begun, with a civil war starting after the announcement of a plan to partition the territory between Jews and Arabs six months earlier. Israel declared independence on May 14th, shortly before the British Mandate was to end, and within days, four Arab nations invaded to try to abolish the Jewish state. Farha doesn’t give a specific date, but it’s at least well into the Nakba given that some neighbors try to get Farha’s father to come fight the Israelis with them.

This movie is tense, as Sallam films nearly all of it from within the storeroom; we only hear what Farha hears and see some of what she sees. Any noise from outside is a threat, and when those IDF troops arrive, every second could be the end. This would be a terrible experience for anyone, but for a 14-year-old girl who was just hoping to continue her education, it’s a horrific way to come of age. Sallam shows the viewer without telling – there’s no narration and after the first fifteen minutes there’s very little dialogue. Once the door closes and locks, life happens to Farha, and she is powerless to stop any of it.

Sallam’s choice to keep the viewer in that room works by centering Farha’s emotions, primarily fear, thus keeping the conflict personal rather than allowing it to spill over into something bigger and more showy (e.g., adding more on-screen violence, turning into a polemic against Israel or Great Britain). The viewer experiences everything through Farha, including her terror and her helplessness. Farha’s plight stands in as a synecdoche for that of Palestinians as a whole – they were, in a sense, trapped in their homeland, with Israel fighting on one side and taking much of their land, while the Arab nations fought Israel sort of on the Palestinians’ behalf, while the people themselves did fight but were by far the weakest force of the three, while more than half of the Palestinian Arab population was displaced by the war.

Farha is a little long for its content; there’s barely enough here for its 92 minutes, with arguably too much time showing Farha alone in the storeroom, although, again, Sallam is sticking to a specific oral history. It could have been 10 minutes shorter and perhaps been even more powerful, though. First-time actor Karam Taher is excellent as Farha, as she must be for this film to work, and I imagine we’ll see much more of her given the reception this film received in Toronto and positive reviews elsewhere. It didn’t make the shortlist of fifteen titles for the Academy Award, which I fear will relegate it to afterthought status, but at the very least, if you have Netflix, it’s worth seeking out.

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