→ April 2, 2023
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Stick to baseball, 4/1/23.

Since the last roundup, I’ve written three new posts for subscribers to the Athletic – my annual predictions post, my first dispatch from spring training (mostly Cactus League), my annual breakout player picks, and a draft blog post on three potential first-rounders from Wake Forest and Miami.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the cooperative game Paint the Roses, which has simple rules but poses a difficult deductive challenge for players, working best with three or more.

I appeared on the streaming Scripps News Network to talk about why major-league salaries keep rising while minor leaguers’ haven’t, although this was recorded and aired before the recent CBA announcement.

My podcast will return now that my spring training travel is over, with David Grann lined up as my next guest. I did send out a new edition of my free email newsletter about two weeks ago.

And now, the links…

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→ March 29, 2023
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Winston-Salem and Wilmington eats.

Mission Pizzeria Napoletana near downtown Winston-Salem isn’t just a pizzeria, but a full trattoria with house-made pastas and other incredible dishes made from scratch in the tiny cooking space behind their counter. My daughter was along for the ride on this trip, which meant I got to try a few extra items. We ordered the arancini starter, a special for that day that might have been the best version of this dish (balls of risotto rolled in bread crumbs and quickly deep-fried) I’ve ever had; the pizza with smoked mozzarella & tomato sauce; the rigatoni with tomato and cream; and the dessert special, zeppole, the Italian version of beignets. The pizza was outstanding – I’m pretty sure they use Bianco tomatoes, and the dough was perfectly light and airy around the edges with a thick outer crust and thin (but not wet) center. The pasta was truly al dente and the sweetness of the tomatoes shined through; I’ve come around over the course of my life on so-called ‘pink’ sauces, as just a small amount of cream is enough to bring out the sweetness of good tomatoes. The zeppole came in a paper bag filled with powdered sugar, which brought back memories of going to Italian festivals as a kid on Long Island, although the zeppole I ate at those festivals were never this soft or moist in the center. I can’t recommend this place highly enough.

Bobby Boy Bakeshop is a French boulangerie and patisserie that had a line out the door when we stopped there while driving around the Wake Forest campus’ west side. They offer some very impressive old-world breads, including $3 baguettes, and a real coffee and tea program. We just had some sweet treats – my daughter loved the coconut cake, which was very intensely flavored and actually not overly sweet – so I can’t vouch for the savory items, although they do offer a rotating sandwich of the day on their own bread.

Krankie’s is a popular breakfast spot that also roasts its own coffee beans, offering a Tanzanian peaberry the day I was there (you can’t buy it on their site) that had the slightly sweet berry notes typical of that country. My daughter and I each got breakfast sandwiches on biscuits and once again she defeated me, getting the special with chicken, pesto, and tomato, while I got the Yeti with eggs, house-made sausage, and tater tots right on the sandwich, drizzled with maple syrup. The sausage was the disappointing part, actually, as it was way overcooked, and the biscuit itself wasn’t as good as what I can make at home, but the coffee was very good if brewed a little too hot. It looks like those two places are the best options for craft coffee in Winston-Salem.

Chill Nitro is right downtown and offers ice cream made to order with the help of liquid nitrogen, offering an incredibly smooth product because the nitrogen freezes the ice cream base so quickly that the ice crystals remain very small. They also offer the option to add a shot of alcohol to your ice cream for $6, although I passed on that; alcohol also inhibits freezing but I didn’t think it would be necessary and I wasn’t interested in drinking right before the drive back to Charlotte. I had the peanut butter ice cream with peanut butter cups and a peanut butter drizzle, and it was indeed intensely peanutty with an outstanding texture.

I also went to (other) Wilmington to see Walker Jenkins last week and had one meal there, eating dinner at Savorez, a Latin American/Southern fusion place in a cute space with funky décor. (I wanted to try Seabird, but they’re closed on Tuesdays.) I went with the shrimp and grits, served with a chorizo gravy, goat cheese polenta, black beans, oven-dried tomatoes, and pea shoots. The idea of the dish was better than the execution, as the polenta itself wasn’t very hot and the chorizo gravy – which would have been great on biscuits – overpowered the flavors of just about everything else on the plate. The shrimp were actually quite good on their own, which meant deconstructing the dish was the best option.

I rolled into town earlier than I expected, so I stopped in Bespoke Coffee to sit for an hour or so, which is a very cool café/bar with a wide range of tea options (I don’t drink coffee that late in the day unless I have a migraine). I can’t say much about the booze or coffee offerings but I absolutely loved the space and would definitely end up working there often if I lived in downtown Wilmington. Well, that Wilmington, not mine.

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→ March 24, 2023
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The Rabbit Hutch.

Tess Gunty won the National Book Award in 2022 for her debut novel The Rabbit Hutch, the title of which refers to a low-income housing complex in a declining Rust Belt town called Vacca Vale that is home to a broad cast of peculiar characters. It’s a compelling read and the prose is lovely, although the stories of the various characters don’t tie together that well, giving the book the feel of a series of nested short stories rather than a single, coherent work.

The most prominent characters in The Rabbit Hutch are the four young adults who have just recently left the town’s foster-care system, including 18-year-old Blandine Watkins, the star of the show in more ways than one. She’s beautiful and eccentric, unknowable in many ways, bewitching at least one of her three male roommates (Malik), delving into all sorts of mysticism and woo while redefining who she is as she enters adulthood. Those three roommates are all just a little further into their majority, none of them doing very well at adulting, which is why, we’re led to believe, they so easily fall into a bizarre pattern of ritual violence against animals. Gunty also gives us an extended flashback to a former student at the local high school, Tiffany, who becomes the subject of the school’s 42-year-old music teacher’s advances and eventually his victim as well; and a long digression about Elsie, who was once the child star of a TV sitcom called Meet the Neighbors that’s beloved by one of the Hutch’s residents, and whose son, it turns out, hated her guts and is completely out of his mind. He doesn’t even live in Vacca Vale, and the thickness of the thread that brings him there by the end of the novel could be measured in nanometers.

It’s a disjointed novel, but Gunty has a real knack for crafting characters and describing her settings so that the reader observes from both the bird’s-eye view and from up close, putting you right there in the action through her use of both detail and metaphor. She refers to a dowdy 40-year-old woman named Joan who moderates the forums on an obituaries web site as having “the posture of a question mark (and) a stock face,” which only underscores the woman’s insignificance in the town and to some degree in her own life. She speaks of an older man failing on dating apps as hating women “an anger unique to those who have committed themselves to a losing argument.” Even when the plot was all over the place – and it was, a lot, especially when Gunty jerks us out of Vacca Vale to follow Elsie and her idiot son – the prose carried it through.

The novel opens with a passage where Blandine “exits her body,” which is going to lead readers to assume she’s been killed and they’ll have to wait the whole book to find out how and why. I’m going to spoil this right now, because it’s a dumb gimmick: She is alive at the end of the book. There’s more to it than this, but I can’t tell you how irritated I was even when I figured out before the midpoint that this was a scam – and it’s just not necessary. The progression of the story around these characters, and the way Gunty brings together the various subplots, is more than enough to sustain the narrative greed here. The strong implication that Blandine is dead, boosted by some other hints throughout the novel, only to reveal at the end that she’s not is cheap and unworthy of the rest of the book.

The Rabbit Hutch follows in the Richard Russo tradition of profiling dying industrial towns through their residents, here with less humor but with far better-written women than Russo ever provided. It also reminded me of J. K. Rowling’s poorly-received novel The Casual Vacancy, her first novel for adults and one that received a lot of criticism because it wasn’t Harry Potter. That book was set in a fictional town in southwest England that also seemed a bit down on its luck and followed a very broad, and in that case more diverse, cast of residents in the wake of the death of a parish councillor, working in themes of income inequality, racial injustice, drug policy, and more. I liked that book more than critics did as a whole, and think it’s a fair comparison here, with a more ambitious plot but inferior prose to Gunty’s.

I can’t speak to the National Book Award for last year, as I haven’t read any of the five other finalists, but The Rabbit Hutch feels much more to me like a promising rookie season that points to superstar potential than a “best of the year” sort of work. I enjoyed it, I loved the prose, I thought some of the subplots worked but as many didn’t, and there was too much manipulation of the reader’s interest for a novel this serious. I hope and expect that her next work will play more to her strengths, and dispense with the stunt writing.

Next up: Percival Everett’s The Trees.

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→ March 21, 2023
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Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

Black Panther was a tremendous action movie, a smart film with an incredible cast, an interesting concept and solid story, and brought some great action sequences that helped the film survive a story that didn’t quite hold together in its final third. The loss of its star and the actor who played the title character, Chadwick Boseman, meant that the long-awaited sequel Black Panther: Wakanda Forever was hemmed in by real-world events and would have to start its story with something acknowledging Boseman’s death.

That’s part of why Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is so long, running over two and a half hours, but for a script that was forced on some level to hit certain points, it’s smart, empathetic, and more interesting start to finish than its predecessor. It’s the action that lets this film down, not the story, as there’s something almost perfunctory about the battle sequences, both large and small. And the film doesn’t need a lot of that fighting anyway – it’s smarter and more thoughtful than a film that just resolves everything by having characters throw each other off buildings or boats.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever opens with T’Challa dying off screen as Shuri (Letitia Wright) moves frantically to try to find a cure, only to have their mother Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) arrive to inform her daughter of T’Challa’s death. This leads to a brief but solemn sequence to open the film as we see the community mourn and get glimpses of the Wakandan funeral rites, which are interspersed with scenes from the outside world, where other nations are demanding access to vibranium, with one country going so far as to stage a raid on Wakanda to try to steal some. An incident aboard a mining ship that was searching for an underwater source of vibranium in the south Atlantic exposes the existence of a suboceanic culture, Talokan, that also has access to the powerful metal. A young scientist named Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) – whom Marvel Comics fan know as Ironheart – designed the ship’s vibranium detector, putting her life in danger and setting up a conflict between Wakanda and Talokan over her fate and their relations with the rest of the world.

The reveal of Talokan and a sort of diplomatic mission to the underwater kingdom allows screenwriters Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole to engage in more of the world-building that was so mesmerizing in the first Black Panther film. There’s an extended flashback that explains the origins of Talokan and how their king Namor (Tenoch Huerta Mejía) has been in power for centuries, tying them back to a Mesoamerican tribe that was threatened by white slavers and the smallpox viruses they brought to the region. Namor is the only Talokanil character we get to know, unfortunately, although the stage is set for more such characters to appear in a future movie.

There’s also further development of the Wakandan culture on screen through the death of T’Challa and a further character death partway through the film, as well as more exploration of some of the core characters from the initial movie, notably Shuri and Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o). Nakia has left Wakanda and her post in California where she was about to work at the end of the first film, a decision that the film explains in pieces right through the end credits. There’s a little more exploration of Okoye (Danai Gurira) and M’Baku (Winston Duke), but I would have loved to see more with both of those characters, as well as the new Dora Milaje fighter Aneka (Emmy winner Michaela Coel of I May Destroy You). Instead of getting more time with them, we get a couple of pointless bits with Everett Ross (Martin Freeman) and his boss/ex-wife Val de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss), which are throwaway scenes that don’t advance the plot and are painfully unfunny.

Indeed, there’s a lot of humor in this film, and it often feels organic as different pairs of characters are thrown together – nearly always women, by the way, because this is very, very much a film about the women of Wakanda. Serious conversations turn light with a bit of unexpected banter, and the actresses deliver it seamlessly in ways that also make the relationships between them more credible.

Eventually, two things have to happen in this movie beyond the acknowledgement and grieving that open the story. One is that we need someone else to become the new Black Panther, and the other is that that character and Namor have to fight, probably within a larger battle between Wakanda and Talokan. The former worked for me – I thought it was one of the two obvious choices, and I thought the way the script handled it was smart and insightful, especially when that character takes the herb and travels to the ancestral plane. There’s a shorter story arc there that brings that character through to the film’s (first) conclusion that is effective if a little facile and sets us up well for at least one more movie in this series. The second part, the huge battle that mostly wraps up the film, had the problem I have with most Marvel movies I’ve seen – the fighting is mostly ridiculous, because one or more characters are all but invincible, people on the screen are doing all sorts of absurd things, and people are thrown great distances into hard objects without anything worse happening than getting the wind knocked out of them. It’s good that the ultimate solution in this movie isn’t just one character beating the hell out of another, but there’s a lot of that between A and B that didn’t help the plot and that just wasn’t as exciting as the action stuff from the first movie.

As for Angela Bassett and her Oscar nomination, I think she was clearly better than Jamie Lee Curtis, who won the award for Everything Everywhere All At Once, but I would have voted for Kerry Condon (The Banshees of Inisherin) or Stephanie Hsu instead of Bassett, who isn’t in the movie all that much and whose character is not that complex here. She is regal, but it’s a bit of the Judi Dench thing – is it enough to just be the queen, even if you’re not on screen and don’t have a lot of work to do to build out the character? (Yes, I know Dench won, but that will be a controversial win forever.) The most award-worthy performance in this film, for me, was Wright’s, as she has way more to do to develop and fill out her character, who went from a fun sidekick in the first movie to the closest thing this film has to a lead. This film leans on her almost as much as the first leaned on Boseman.

Is Black Panther: Wakanda Forever better than the original Black Panther? Yes … and no. It’s less fun and ebullient. It misses Boseman in many ways. The action sequences don’t work that well and there’s too much CGI in them. But there’s also a better story here, some really interesting and worthwhile character development, and more meaning in its story and conclusion. It almost demands a third movie in the franchise, beyond the Ironheart TV series that’s coming soon (with Thorne in the title role), that goes further with the women who now lead Wakanda in almost every way. It may not be what everyone involved intended for the franchise when it first starter, but Black Panther: Wakanda Forever has the series in a good place.

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→ March 18, 2023
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Stick to baseball, 3/18/23.

I’m running around Florida this week and will have a draft blog post up Sunday or Monday, but for now you’ll have to just make do with my ramblings here. It’s been a fairly unproductive week on the minor-league scouting side, but better for draft scouting, which I’ll write up before Monday.

In the meantime, the links:

  • An online influencer who pushed ivermectin to his followers FAFO’d – he took a daily dose of the antiparasitic, which causes severe heart damage if taken for too long or in large doses, and died of a massively enlarged heart. Now his followers are worried about their own health. Maybe they should have listened to doctors and scientists instead of one fucking moron with an internet connection?
  • Meanwhile, some parents of autistic kids are torturing their children by giving them ivermectin despite its horrible side effects. Where are all the people who claim their main goal is protecting kids when they campaign against drag shows and LGBT+ themed books?
  • Comedian Russell Brand’s turn towards conspiracy theories and anti-science views is a harbinger of a grim future where those with huge digital platforms misinform their large, often younger audiences.
  • Trump has once again called on his supporters to riot if he’s indicted, which I think is probably an attempt to deter state prosecutors from doing so. Let’s hope the relevant authorities are prepared this time around.
  • He’s also targeting Wall Street firms that use ESG (environmental & social goals) as part of their investment or other strategies, and while everyone agrees this is performative on his part, there’s a stunning lack of rejoinders from his targets.
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→ 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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