→ February 26, 2023
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To Leslie.

Like most people, even like most film critics, I had never heard of To Leslie before the surprise nomination of Andrea Riseborough for Best Actress in this year’s Academy Awards in late January. The film had taken in just $27,000 at the U.S. box office and had just a handful of reviews on Rotten Tomatoes at the time; there are far more reviews now but they’re almost all new as critics have rushed to catch up. Despite the controversy over how Riseborough ended up getting the nomination, To Leslie is quite a good film, and deserves the much wider audience it’s received, with standout performances from Riseborough and from her co-star Marc Maron. (You can rent it on Amazon, iTunes, etc.)

To Leslie is supposedly based on a true story, although the real person who inspired it has never been named that I can find. Leslie (Riseborough) is a single mom in west Texas who wins $190,000 in a local lottery, but who spends it all, mostly on alcohol, abandoning her 13-year-old son, losing her friends, and ending up homeless. The film jumps forward to the point where she’s been kicked out of the motel where she was living and has to call her son, James (Owen Teague). He lets her stay with him if she quits drinking, but that goes as you’d expect, and her life continues to spiral downward until she ends up at another motel run by Sweeney (Maron), where she gets a job cleaning rooms that also includes a place to stay. The majority of the film comes after that point and watches her struggle to stay sober, find some sort of purpose, and deal with the notoriety she’s acquired through her windfall and how publicly she squandered it.

There are, of course, a lot of addiction/redemption stories out there, and To Leslie is very much of that ilk, but it does several things to distinguish itself from its peers. One is that it doesn’t lionize the addict. Leslie’s kind of a terrible person. She’s not just a fuck-up, to use the technical term, but really does not seem to grasp the effects of her actions on other people at all, most notably how her choices in life have affected her son. She’s not the addict with a heart of gold for whom you just can’t help but root; I was rooting for Leslie because I didn’t want to see things continue to get worse for her, or to see her cause more misery for anyone around her. There’s no sense of “oh, if only she could get better, she’d be this wonderful mother/friend/person.”

To Leslie also doesn’t provide much in the way of magical solutions to addiction. Sweeney certainly helps her, but in a more practical sense, rather than, say, dispensing words of wisdom or some pop philosophy. Royal (Andre Royo) also lives and works at the motel, and he knows Leslie from childhood, so he’s seen her act and is very disinclined to help her, even trying to convince Sweeney not to give her the job or a room. Nance (Allison Janney), who we only know at the start as a former friend of Leslie’s, is openly antagonizing her in public. There’s no panacea here and no too-perfect friend or family member to offer a cure. Instead, Leslie pretty much has to do this on her own.

Riseborough is on camera for virtually the entire movie, giving this role a level of difficulty that few of her peers could match for this year. It is, truly, a tremendous performance, on par with Cate Blanchett’s in Tár, which I had as the best performance by an actress I’d seen so far in this cycle (even though, sentimentally, I’m pulling for Michelle Yeoh). She’s completely lost in the role, so it’s hard to even remember that she’s English, let alone that she’s not actually Leslie. It’s a fine line to walk to keep this character interesting without making her too pathetic or making her detestable, and Riseborough manages to stay on it. (She’s also great in the musical adaptation of Matilda, which came out last year on Netflix.) Maron is also excellent, giving Sweeney some nuance and complexity without making him too nice, or too sappy, or too much of anything. He’s a regular guy, and while his interest in helping Leslie isn’t that well explained by his back story – it’s just not that plausible – their interactions come across as very real. None of the supporting actors have that much to do, with Janney slightly wasted in her one-note role, while Stephen Root, who plays her partner Dutch, suffers from a lack of screen time.

As for the controversy over the nomination … I get why the Academy has those rules in place, but this is a good outcome for Riseborough, for the movie, and for the awards themselves. Maybe it’s a reminder to everyone involved that there are always great performances that get overlooked because the movies are too small or commercially unsuccessful. I’d probably still vote for Blanchett, but I wouldn’t argue with anyone who thinks Riseborough is better.

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→ February 25, 2023
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Stick to baseball, 2/24/23.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I’ve had several new posts, including a ranking of the top 20 prospects for impact in the majors in 2023 and a draft blog post on the Globe Life College Baseball Showdown, which featured TCU (Brayden Taylor), Vanderbilt (Enrique Bradfield Jr.), and more. I chatted with three of our beat writers about prospects – Dan Connolly about the Orioles’ farm system, Jen McCaffrey about the Red Sox’ farm system, and Dave O’Brien about Atlanta’s farm system.

I’ve done a bunch of podcasts and other interviews in the last few weeks, including the East Village Times’ podcast (Padres), the Seattle Sports Union podcast, the Phillies Nation podcast, WTMJ Milwaukee’s Extra Innings podcast, the Locked on Dodgers podcast, and the Sox Machine podcast (White Sox).

Over at Paste, I reviewed the game Quacks & Co., the kids’ version of the great push-your-luck game The Quacks of Quedlinburg.

On the Keith Law Show this week, I spoke with Fangraphs’ lead prospect writer Eric Longenhagen as we compared some of our rankings on our top 100s (here’s his top 100) and discussed the top of this year’s draft class. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I sent out another issue of my free email newsletter on Friday, which marks my sixth so far this year, a better pace than I had in 2022, something I hope to keep up now that I’ll be writing something pretty much every week for the Athletic.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: The New York Times Magazine has a long feature on Ghibli Park, a sort-of theme park built around the works of animation legend Hayao Miyazaki.
  • A police officer in Pueblo County, Colorado, shot and killed an unarmed man in the car line outside a school because the man got into the wrong car by mistake. Video shows the officer gave no warning and neither he nor his partner gave the victim, 32-year-old Richard Ward, any assistance as he bled to death on the ground. The DA declined to charge the officers, saying they “justifiably feared for their lives.”
  • I grew up in Smithtown, New York, and from kindergarten through twelfth grade I attended public schools in that district, which is now further embarrassing itself by adding armed guards at its schools despite no actual evidence that these prevent mass shootings.
  • 25th Century Games has a Kickstarter up for three new tile-laying games: Agueda, Color Field, and Donut Shop. As of Friday morning it’s less than $2000 away from its funding goal.
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→ February 24, 2023
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Death is Hard Work.

Death is Hard Work is the most recent novel by Syrian novelist Khaled Khalifa to be translated into English, first published in Arabic in 2016 and appearing in translation three years later. It’s a play on William Faulkner’s classic tragicomic novel As I Lay Dying, this time set in Syria during the present civil war, as three siblings try to transport their father’s corpse to a specific graveyard where he’d asked to be buried, working as a commentary on the collapse of Syrian society as well as a window into the internecine squabbles of the family.

Abdel Latif el-Salim has died, not long after his beloved second wife, Navine, preceded him in death, and Abdel’s dying wish to his son Bolbol was that he be buried in a certain graveyard in his hometown of Anabiya, a long way from where he died somewhere in Damascus. Bolbol takes this request very seriously despite the obvious practical complications of transporting a corpse in a hot country that is bitterly divided by civil war, where passing between two checkpoints can be more complicated than crossing an international border. Bolbol then recruits his brother, the arrogant and short-tempered Hussein, and their sister, Fatima, to accompany him on what seems like a suicide mission to drive a van with their father’s corpse in back to Anabiya. The novel follows them through interactions with friends and acquaintances who try to help them, rebels and soldiers who usually try to hold them up, to a jail and a hospital and across roads that barely exist, before the trio finally reach their destination.

The absurdity of the novel comes primarily from the fact that their father was wanted by the brutal authoritarian regime that still controls Syria for some unknown offense, likely just thoughtcrimes, which causes problems almost every time they are stopped by any entity connected to the central government. At one point, the soldiers “arrest” the corpse, although fortunately for all concerned, it never progresses to a trial. There’s also the grotesque humor that comes from the decomposition of the body, the stench of which actually helps the siblings escape trouble on more than one occasion on their journey.

The quarreling among the siblings, and the back stories of all four of the main characters (including the father, whose life was full of joy and heartbreak), all give the novel its dramatic heft. There’s a contrast between the almost mundane lives they all lived prior to the start of the civil war in 2011-12 and the life-and-death struggle going on every day across Syria in the novel’s present day, as well as a parallel between the siblings arguing with each other and the split within Syrian society, pitting neighbor against neighbor in a conflict that has at least a half-dozen different groups fighting the government and sometimes each other. I have just superficial knowledge of the civil war, but it seemed clear that Khalifa was at least in part crafting a metaphor for the conflict and for his country, where siblings continue to argue long after the thing that ties them together – a nation, their father – is dead and decaying.

There’s another, less positive aspect to the connection between this work and Faulkner – the challenging prose. Khalefa’s writing is dense, without the long sentence structures of the bard of Yoknapatawpha County but a similar grounding in the details of every scene and every character. That creates a richer tapestry, with even secondary characters becoming more three-dimensional on the page, but also makes it a slower read for a novel just short of 200 pages.

Khalefa’s previous novel, No Knives in this City’s Kitchens, won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, given annually since 1996 to a novel written in Arabic that has not yet been translated into English, with such a translation part of the prize. I’d be curious if any of you have read that novel (or this one), since I liked Death is Hard Work enough to seek it out.

Next up: I’m currently reading the most recent Booker Prize winner, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka.

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→ February 23, 2023
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The Fabelmans.

Steven Spielberg has apparently been trying to make a semi-autobiographical film for over twenty years, but waited until his parents died before producing it. He finally did so with last year’s The Fabelmans, a thinly-veiled rendering of his childhood and teenage years with a particular eye on the relationship between his parents. I don’t think Spielberg is capable of making a bad movie, but he is capable of missteps within his movies, and the way he depicts his parents here through their surrogates detracts from the movie’s overall power. (It’s available to rent on Amazon, iTunes, etc.)

Mitzi (Michelle Williams) and Burt (Paul Dano) Fabelman are Jewish couple living in New Jersey, near Philadelphia, in 1952, when they take their son Sammy to see his first film, Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth. Sammy is entranced, especially by the movie’s train-crash scene, and this sparks what becomes a lifelong love of the movies. The young Sammy’s burgeoning interest in filmmaking is set against the drama of his parents’ failing marriage, his mother’s apparent connection to his father’s best friend and colleague Bennie (Seth Rogen), and his mother’s mental health issues. The story takes us through the family’s moves to Arizona and then California, while Sammy makes films, often involving his younger sisters, dates the most comically Christian girl you could imagine, and encounters antisemitic bullies at his WASPish high school.

By far the best parts of The Fabelmans are the movies within the movie. There’s incredible care taken to depict the results of these efforts by Sammy, but also how he combined the ingenuity he inherited from his engineer father with the artistic sensibilities of his pianist mother to create and improve the sort of illusions he loved so much in Greatest Show. These track with the actual film projects from Spielberg’s youth, short films up through the longer documentary-style movie he made of senior skip day at his high school. It’s a little behind-the-scences peek at old-school moviemaking, and often quite joyous.

Sammy’s parents are so strangely drawn, however, that the scenes that center on either or both of them all feel too sharp-edged, bordering on caricature. Burt, who is based on Spielberg’s highly successful inventor father Arnold, is a milquetoast who does basically nothing while his wife openly flirts with his best friend, and just generally seems oblivious to most of what’s going on in his own house. There are hints about his ambitions at work, but it’s oddly unbalanced, especially since Spielberg has said that his father was a major influence on his own career, something that is completely absent from the film. Dano plays Burt with a simpering affect that makes the character seem sad and pitiable, but not interesting or complex. Mitzi is depicted with somewhat greater depth, although there’s still something hollow about the writing (not the portrayal), as if this is Spielberg’s visualization of his mother rather than an attempt to write and depict her as a complete person. It’s more sympathetic than empathetic, and while I suppose it’s not my place to tell a writer how to portray his mother on film, it doesn’t read well to me as a viewer.


There are several supporting performances here that stand out, not least of them a brief turn from Judd Hirsch as Mitzi’s uncle, who appears unannounced, spends a few days with the family to sit shiva after Mitzi’s mother dies, and then leaves after imparting some essential wisdom to Sammy. It’s the standout performance of the film, reminiscent of Judi Dench’s Oscar-winning turn in Shakespeare in Love (“Have a care with my name, you’ll wear it out”), which parlayed about 13 minutes of screen time into an Academy Award. Hirsch might have even less time in The Fabelmans, but it’s by far the best performance of the movie. Rogen gives a very solid turn as Bennie, further underscoring his shift as a serious actor after his excellent work as the carpenter-cum-thief in Pam and Tommy. Gabriel LaBelle is excellent as the teenaged Sammy, even when he’s more observer than participant in the action; there are a couple of scenes with Sammy and Mitzi where Sammy is the more interesting character, and LaBelle pulls these off well. (Also, he kind of looks like a younger Barry Keoghan.) And there’s a cameo later in the film that I won’t spoil but that involves someone known better as a director than as an actor and who is clearly having a blast in a tiny role.

Spielberg’s best work usually revolves around Big Things. His most critically acclaimed films rely more on broad brush strokes in plot and character, while he’s had more difficulty when he’s trying to work small, whether it’s nuance in story and theme or characters who require more three-dimensional depictions. The Fabelmans falls into the second category. As a love letter of sorts to the movies, and a memoriam to his parents, it’s fine, but as an actual film, it’s lacking. The story is thin and the two main characters are just too two-dimensional.

The Fabelmans picked up seven Oscar nominations this year, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress for Williams, Best Supporting Actor for Hirsch, and Best Original Screenplay for Spielberg and Tony Kushner, the latter marking Spielberg’s first-ever Academy Award nomination for screenwriting. I won’t be surprised if it goes 0 for the awards this year; it’s not the favorite, nor should it be, in any of those five categories, at least. Hirsch might be the most deserving, but Ke Huy Quan is better and he’s the favorite. Williams gives a good-not-great performance, limited by the way the character is written, although the scene at the campsite is sublime. (I do want to know why she can’t move the top half of her face, though.) This is a movie about how great movies are, so I can’t rule it out even for Best Picture, but the odds are against it. Perhaps there’s a sop to Spielberg in the Screenplay category, but that could easily be the place the voters honor Tár, assuming Everything Everywhere All at Once remains the favorite to win the whole thing. I can’t see picking The Fabelmans anywhere it’s nominated, though. It’s a perfectly adequate film, but it’s not Spielberg’s best, and I think highlights what he does well because so much of this film is about things that he doesn’t.

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→ February 21, 2023
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Dallas eats, 2023 edition.

My trip to Dallas didn’t involve many meals worth discussing, since I was mostly at the ballpark in Arlington (and ate stadium food, something I very seldom do, for good reason). Most of my food journeys involved coffee, as it turned out, with two very good spots near my hotel in downtown Dallas.

Stupid Good Coffee actually lives up to its name, serving beans roasted by nearby third-wave roaster Oak Cliff Coffee, with the drip coffee I had on Friday their Honduras El Puente (according to what I could see, at least). They also do a lot of ridiculous, sugared-up drinks that mask the coffee itself, but they’re at least using the right beans to start with. It’s a small shop in a small shopping area inside an office building next to the Renaissance on Elm St., but with just one employee on Friday – I know it’s hard to find staff now – the service was slow.

Weekend is another tiny shop, this one tucked into the Joule boutique hotel, serving coffee from Counter Culture – in this case, another Honduran offering from El Puente, so quite likely beans from the same wholesale lots. Weekend does pour-overs, which is the better option as their drip coffee is actually brewed too hot, while they also have espresso drinks and some small food options, including some prefab breakfast tacos and real croissants. Every hotel needs a café like this one.

I had two meals of note on the trip. One was at Angela’s Café, an all-day diner in the Bluffview neighborhood that serves Mexican-American cuisine. I went there for breakfast with my alter ego, who just happened to order exactly the same thing I did – chorizo and eggs with hashbrowns. It’s a simple dish but one of my favorites, and not something I ever see on menus up where I live. Angela’s’ version was excellent, although I’m also willing to accept that the eggs in this are always cooked more than I like, and their hashbrowns were perfect other than that they needed more salt (but I almost always think that, don’t I?).

The other was a quick bite between games from Flying Fish, a local chain serving Cajun-influenced seafood dishes. Their shrimp po’ boy was … fine, nothing special. The shrimp definitely weren’t as fresh as they could have been, but I would have also consumed an entire bag of the hush puppies that came with it. I wouldn’t go out of my way to eat at a Flying Fish, but it’s certainly better than eating anything in that ballpark.

I did get what I thought was pretty solid Mexican-American food from a place called Fernando’s, close to Angela’s, as some friends ordered dinner from there before they all came with me to the Saturday night TCU-Arkansas blowout, but my friends said there’s much better Mexican-American food to be had in the area and this was just the closest option. Of course now I’m going to leave more time on the next trip to make sure we eat at one of these better places.

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→ February 16, 2023
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Explorers.

Phil Walker-Harding’s games are very consistently among my favorites for light to midweight games that you can play with the whole family. Gizmos, Sushi Go, Cacao, Silver & Gold, Super Mega Lucky Box, Imhotep and Imhotep: The Duel, Gingerbread House, Bärenpark … he’s got few peers in his space, and he’s had very few misses in his fifteen-year career as a designer. Explorers ($25 at amazon via that link) came out in the U.S. last spring – I saw it at Gen Con – and it’s another flip and write that I’d say is part of an unofficial trilogy of games along with Silver & Gold (polyominos) and Super Mega Lucky Box (numbers).

In Explorers, players will mark off squares on their maps based on the terrain shown on the tile flipped on each turn, trying to expand from the starting square to mark off specific squares that show rewards. There’s no benefit to marking off blank squares unless they’re adjacent to one of the villages on the map; otherwise, everything you do is in service of moving towards reward spaces.

The terrain tiles have two different terrains on them, with four total on your maps – water, desert, plains, and mountains. When a terrain tile is flipped, the active player picks one of the two terrains shown and then may mark off three squares on their map that match the chosen terrain. The squares must all be adjacent to existing X’s (marked spaces), but don’t have to be adjacent to each other. Then, other players may either mark two squares of that same terrain, or mark three squares of the other terrain. There are also a couple of terrain tiles that show split terrains – so water/mountain or plains/desert – but they work the same way.

In the basic game, you score points in four ways. If you cross off a key, you can then cross off any temple and score for it, with the points for each temple declining every time a player reaches it, from 12 for the first player to 6 for the last in a four-player game. After each of the four rounds, you score one point for each gem you’ve crossed off – so a gem you cross off in the first round will be worth four points by game-end. In each round, you can score 2, 5, or 10 points for your provisions crossed off in that round – an apple, a carrot, and a fish. You can only cross off one of each in a round. And you score points for how many squares you’ve crossed off adjacent to your four villages – 3, 5, 7, or 10 points for 1, 2, 3, or 4 squares.

There are other squares that give bonuses beyond points. If you cross off a horse, you may cross off any square on your map that’s adjacent to one you’ve already X’d, regardless of terrain. If you cross off a scroll, you circle one on your board. On a later turn, you may then mark that off to ignore the terrain tile and choose any terrain you like, even one on the tile, but now you can cross off four squares rather than two or three.

The game allows you to change the maps and scoring tiles every time out, but all players use the same map and tiles in any specific game. All four of the basic scoring tiles are reversible to an advanced side; for example, the advanced provisions scoring won’t let you cross off any in round one, then gives you points only for apples in round two, carrots in round three, and fish in round four. It also allows you to use up to three expert scoring tiles that function like public objectives in other games – scoring 10 points if you mark at least one square in every desert section, or scoring points for touching all four edges of the map, with the bonus declining each round until you get it.

The game is also easy to play solo, like most roll-and-write or flip-and-write games, although I’d say this is even easier than most: You just flip a terrain tile and choose the one closest to you as the active (3-square) terrain. After each round, you cross off the highest bonus for each temple you haven’t reached yet. That’s it.

If you like Silver & Gold and/or Super Mega Lucky Box, then you’ll probably like Explorers – they all have a common DNA, right down to the way you build the flip deck (here you shuffle all eight terrain tiles at the start of each round, remove one at random, and then flip the other seven). All three games have bonuses that you can achieve through the game, although this has less chaining than SMLB or games like the Clever series from Wolfgang Warsch. This game is very much on my wavelength for a fun filler, and it comes in a smaller box, although it’s quite heavy thanks to the thicker cardboard tiles and frames for your boards. I’d rank it bottom among those three games, but not by much, and I’d say it’s a tiny bit more complex to learn and play well than either of its predecessors. It’s certainly another hit from Walker-Harding, who’s maybe had one real miss among all of his games that I’ve played (Cloud City), and definitely worthy of a family game night.

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→ February 12, 2023
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Causeway.

Causeway is a solid little film, and I mean that in a very positive way. It reminded me a ton of Columbus, the 2017 debut feature from Kogonada (whose After Yang I still need to catch up with); and of Driveways, maybe a little bit because of the similar names. It’s not quite as good as either of those movies, as the script itself is thinner and less credible, but like those two films, it’s anchored by two outstanding performances by its leads. (It’s streaming on Apple TV.)

Jennifer Lawrence plays Lynsey, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan who suffered a traumatic brain injury when an IED hit her convoy, forcing her to come back to the U.S. for rehabilitation. She’s struggling with all aspects of the injury, including accepting that she can’t return to combat immediately once she’s regained most of her physical functions. After she has a panic attack in traffic and damages the car from her temp job cleaning pools, she befriends the owner of the garage where she takes it, James (Brian Tyree Henry), and the two form an unlikely, platonic friendship where the two talk through their problems and fears with each other in a way that Lynsey certainly can’t do with her family.

Like the two other films I mentioned above, Causeway is a talkie – if you don’t like movies that are about 90% dialogue, this probably isn’t for you. I am very much in the target demographic for that sort of film, because they often feel to me like well-written novels or novellas, and I’m perfectly happy to spend an hour and a half with two interesting characters even if there isn’t much action or romance. There’s no action here, and the closest thing to romance is a failure – which is good because it’s not the least bit credible when it does happen. It’s two people, each haunted by trauma, having honest and realistic conversations about themselves, revealing their feelings by degrees, holding things back as people do when dealing with guilt and shame.

Henry was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his work here, and he’s deserving. He’s been an actor to watch for years now, making huge impressions in Widows and If Beale Street Could Talk. I’m thrilled to see him get a leading role (regardless of the Supporting tag, he’s the co-lead here) and to get recognition for his film work after he’s received two Emmy nominations for his work on Atlanta. Lawrence is predictably strong here in a role that’s more understated than much of her previous work, including three of the four times she’s earned an Oscar nomination, which might have worked against her here. I did find it funny when the owner of the pool-cleaning company asks if her character is “home from college,” since Lawrence is 32, although she does look pretty young in the film because of how they dress the character.

The bar for a film like this to clear to be a truly great movie is pretty high – it’s like how a corner outfielder just has to hit that much more to be a potential star. I don’t think Causeway clears it. There are aspects of the relationship between James and Lynsey that aren’t entirely credible, and there’s a part of her back story that is never adequately explained given its prominence in her character’s current state. The film also favors Lynsey over James too much, rather than giving the two characters equal weight in the script and in the way they help each other, which unfortunately opens the film to criticism that James’ character is the “magical” Black man there to help the white lead. (I don’t think it applies, but I concede the possibility that I’m wrong.) Instead, Causeway is merely very good, a film of modest ambitions that largely achieves them, and that’s worth watching on its own merits and for what Henry and Lawrence bring.  

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→ February 11, 2023
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Stick to baseball, 2/11/23.

My top 100 prospects and team reports have been running for the last 12 days, finishing up today with the AL West team reports/top 20s. You can see the index of everything I’ve written here, which includes direct links to the reports for every team, the top 100, the farm system rankings, my chats on that site, and more.

My latest review for Paste actually went up last week, and even I missed it in all the hubbub. I reviewed the board game It’s a Wonderful Kingdom, the two-person variant of the popular game It’s a Wonderful World, but I have to say I think the original is a better game, even for two people. It’s a bit like 7 Wonders meets Century Spice Road, but with a little more to it than that might imply. You can buy It’s a Wonderful World here on amazon if you’re intrigued.

My free email newsletter has been almost-weekly this year, and I’ll send out the next iteration this weekend. I skipped my podcast this week because I was writing so much. I think it’ll be back next week. Maybe. Life is full of uncertainties.

And now, the links…

  • The Toronto Star looks at the fall of Jamie Salé into conspiracy theory and denialism. The 2002 Olympic gold medalist, previously best known as one of the two skaters originally cheated out of the gold by corrupt judges, has become a COVID and vaccine denialist – and, of course, now she’s trying to profit off these false views.
  • Intelligencer looks at the increasing “junkification” of Amazon, where legitimate products are getting harder to find as the company tries to muscle its way into more spaces. My outsider’s take: this is what happens when a company needs unbridled growth to prop up a stock price (or a billionaire owner’s wealth).
  • The BBC profiles the French author Colette, calling her “the most beloved French writer of all time,” although in the English-speaking world she’s probably best known for writing the novel Gigi that became a hit musical and film.
  • Is disdain for the less educated the “last acceptable prejudice,” as Michael Sandel writes in the New York Times? He also argues that it’s a problem for the Democrats, and a perception they need to shed.
  • Iowa Republicans introduced a bill that would expand child labor in the state, including jobs previously deemed too dangerous for kids like those in mining, logging, and animal slaughterhouses.
  • We’re seeing fewer big scientific breakthroughs, with the pace dropping steadily for over three-quarters of a century. Part of it is that breakthroughs are harder to come by as the low-hanging fruit is long picked, and part is that nations don’t invest in basic science research without promise of immediate financial returns the way they used to.
  • This blog post arguing that Dominion killed replayability in board games makes a great point – the need to constantly buy expansions to is a great business model for a very small number of games/publishers but not sustainable for the industry as a whole.
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→ February 10, 2023
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Triangle of Sadness.

Triangle of Sadness was a surprise nominee for Best Picture this year, also taking home nods for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. It’s the first film for writer/director Ruben Östlund since 2017’s The Square, and like that film, it’s a disjointed story that starts out with great ambitions and ends up succeeding most when it focuses on its simpler themes. (You can rent it on amazon, iTunes, etc.)

The triangle of the title refers to the film’s tripartite structure, which I would summarize as “fine, bad, good,” in that order. We start out by following two models, Yaya (Charlbi Dean, who died just before the film premiered) and Carl (Harris Dickinson), who are in a relationship but fight over seemingly trivial matters like who’s paying for the check in a restaurant – she makes far more money than he does, but gender roles dictate that he should pay. She’s also a social media influencer, which leads to an invitation for the two of them to go on a cruise on a luxury yacht, where they meet a bunch of fairly horrible rich people and mostly ignore the obsequious crew, who are themselves divided into the mostly white upstairs staff and the mostly nonwhite cleaning and cooking staff. The ship sinks, and a group of survivors wash up on an island where they have to find a way to survive, but it turns out only Abigail (Dolly De Leon), who barely appeared in the film’s first two parts, has any skills pertinent to staying alive.

The 2022 film and TV cycle was full of “rich people are terrible” themes, from White Lotus to Tár to The Menu, and Triangle of Sadness offers nothing new in this vein, which ultimately is the movie’s undoing. Yaya is vapid and a shallow stereotype of the Instagram model/influencer, right down to having Carl photograph her about to take a bite of a pasta dish that she won’t eat because she’s “gluten intolerant.” The rich people they meet on the boat barely need names, as they don’t even rise to the level of caricatures, with just one of them (Winston) serving some real function beyond being wealthy and horrible, and in that case it’s for a pretty good joke that has a strong payoff later in the segment. It’s only when we get to part three, on the island, that any characters get real development and show some depth, including Abigail, and the script finally makes good use of its ire towards the idle rich. It takes way too long to get to that point, however, and Östlund could have just made the whole movie out of that and given us a better end product.

That middle section, though, is a mess, figuratively and literally – I asked a friend if he’d seen the movie, and he hadn’t, but he asked if I meant the film where everyone throws up on a boat. There’s about ten minutes of people suffering from food poisoning, projectile vomiting around the dining room and in the halls, which is later followed by the ship’s waste disposal system backing up, just in case you weren’t already sufficiently grossed out. It’s a two-minute gag that goes on forever, exacerbated by a dreadful bit where the drunk captain (Woody Harrelson, mostly wasted here) engages in a superficial debate between capitalism and communism with a wealthy Russian oligarch who made his money in fertilizer (or, as he says, “shit”) over the ship’s PA system. It’s unfunny, and consists more of the two men, both thoroughly inebriated, spouting aphorisms from other writers, reminiscent of college students arguing over these subjects because they took one class on Marx and are now experts in the field.

The third section redeems the film to some extent, and ends with multiple points of ambiguity that work extremely well, although it just shows how much better Triangle of Sadness could have been. The Square was also full of interesting ideas, perhaps more so, but also ended with enough ambiguity to soften some of the too on-the-nose aspects of the satire within, right down to the question of whether we should feel any sympathy for the hapless yet arrogant and entitled main character. Here, Östlund’s targets are too easy, and because they’re all stranded on this island – how this is possible, or they could be stuck there for what seems like weeks, when most of these same people were still using their cell phones right when the ship sank – we have some sympathy for all of the characters, since we’re never hoping for any of them to die, or even really to suffer any further. (Not that any of that would be a good thing, either.) There’s a clear intent here to tell us that rich people are useless to society, and while I’m not exactly disagreeing with the point, the final third drifts away from it enough to undermine the first two sections, especially since it’s by far the funniest and best crafted of the film’s parts.

How this film ended up with a Best Picture nomination with a ten-minute scene of emesis and diarrhea is beyond me; I wonder if voters thought this made the film avant-garde. It’s not half as clever as it thinks it is, unfortunately, and other than De Leon, who earned a Golden Globe nomination for her performance, none of the actors has much to work with. Aftersun and Decision to Leave come to mind as two films that the Academy’s voters were at least aware of, having given the former’s Paul Mescal a Best Actor nod and putting the latter on the shortlist for Best International Feature Film, that were both worlds better than this mess. If the final third existed just as a short film, I’d probably extol its merits, and praise the way the ending is open to multiple interpretations, too. Instead it’s just a tantalizing glimpse at what this film might have been if anyone had reined Östlund in. However, I do look forward to his next film, The Trapezoid of Mild Irritation.

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→ February 7, 2023
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Music update, January 2023.

Sorry this is a bit late, but I’ve been writing a few thousand words a day for my regular job. January turned out to be a fertile month for new single and even album releases, more so than usual (I think), so I’ve got a little catching up to do. If you can’t see the widget below, you can access this month’s Spotify playlist here.

Young Fathers – Rice. Heavy Heavy just dropped on Friday, so I haven’t had a chance to dive into it yet, but the reviews are ebullient, and I’ve loved two of the three lead singles. I don’t even know how you can categorize their music, other than that it’s mad and often brilliant.

Belle and Sebastian – I Don’t Know What You See in Me. A Scottish bent to the playlist, at least at the start. Belle & Sebastian returned with their second album inside of a year with Late Developers, which is poppier than last year’s A Bit of Previous and more consistently upbeat. I also loved “So in the Moment” and nearly put that on the playlist instead.

Måneskin feat. Tom Morello – Gossip. I know Måneskin aren’t very admired by critics, but this track, with Morello on guitar, is an absolute banger and was stuck in my head for more than a week after I first heard it.

The Clockworks – Blood on the Mind. This Irish quartet signed with Alan McGee’s Creation Records, the label that signed Oasis back in the early 1990s, in 2019, releasing a bunch of singles and one EP since then but still no proper album. They’re often described in the British press as punk or post-punk but this tack isn’t as hard-edged as those genres, with the high energy of punk but a better groove in the bass and drums.

The Lottery Winners – Worry. These guys can’t miss, at least when it comes to crafting big pop hooks. Their second album, Anxiety Replacement Therapy, is due out on April 28th.

The Rills – Falling Apart. ThisLincolnshire band just missed my top 100 from last year with “Landslide,” but I’m going to guess this one will end up on my top 100 for 2023, as it has an even better hook and is the kind of English indie-rock that, for whatever reason, just speaks to me.

The Empty Page – Dry Ice. This post-punk duo from Manchester released their first album, Unfolding, back in 2016, but their follow-up has been delayed several times since then and is due out sometime this year. “Dry Ice” is the first single from it, released in November, with the next single due out March 3rd.

Etta Marcus – Smile for the Camera. Marcus is a 21-year-old singer/songwriter from London who gets compared to Lana del Rey and who I think would appeal to fans of Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus, except I’m not a fan of any of those three singers but I love this song from Marcus.

Arlo Parks – Weightless. Auto-include whenever Parks puts out a new single. There’s a slight shift here with an electronic element in the backing music here, the first single ahead of her sophomore album, My Soft Machine, due out May 26th.

Bree Runway w/Stormzy – Pick Your Poison. This came from Runway’s five-track December EP WOAH WHAT A BLUR!, mostly written by Stormzy, and it’s a very sweet and soulful ballad about heartbreak, a big departure from her usual sound.

Obey Robots – Porcupine. This song showed up on my Spotify Release Radar because it’s tagged as a collaboration with Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, but it’s actually a new project from Ned’s guitarist Gareth “Rat” Pring along with singer Laura Kidd. There’s a definite Ned’s vibe to the guitar work here, though.

White Reaper – Pink Slip. Another January album release, Asking for a Ride is the fourth full-length from these Kentucky garage-punk-pop stalwarts, although it’s just 29:21 long so isn’t that almost an EP? Anyway, I don’t think they’ve ever released a single I didn’t like.

Screaming Females – Brass Bell. Apparently I should know this group already, as Wikipedia tells me Spin named their singer/guitarist Melissa Paternoster the 77th greatest guitarist of all time back in 2012, which… seems aggressive? Anyway, not knowing them is on me, and this song has a great guitar hook and an earworm in the chorus.

shame – Six-Pack. shame’s third album, Food for Worms, comes out on February 24th, with this track and last year’s “Fingers of Steel,” this one in a more experimental vein with a frenetic energy that carries it through some of the discord in the guitars.

The New Pornographers – Really Really Light. This song is … fine. Not peak NP, not Twin Cinema or even Brill Bruisers, but it’s a perfectly cromulent New Pornographers song.

Black Honey – Up Against It. A Fistful of Peaches, Black Honey’s third album, is due out on March 17th, with this the fourth single ahead of its release (“Charlie Bronson,” “Out of My Mind,” “Heavy”), further indicating their shift to a darker sound than they started out with on the All My Pride EP and their self-titled debut album.

Rival Sons – Nobody Wants to Die. Have you seen that Chevy Silverado commercial with what sounds like a blatant Led Zeppelin ripoff for its music? I assumed it was Greta van Fleet, but it was actually a track from Rival Sons from about a decade ago. This is their newest track, and it’s in that same blues-rock vein but nowhere near as derivative.

Tribulation – Axis Mundi. Melodic death metal that’s actually just traditional heavy metal with death-metal vocals – this track, and really a lot of Tribulation’s music, derives far more from early British heavy metal and doom bands like Sabbath and Maiden than from death-metal forebears like Death or At the Gates.

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