→ February 7, 2022
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Music update, January 2022.

Prospect season pushed this back about a week, but my monthly playlists are back, and this one is longer than usual because I have some tracks from late December as well. You can see the playlist here if you can’t see the widget below.

As for my use of Spotify, I’m leaning towards switching to another service, but in the middle of prospect-writing season, I didn’t have time to figure out the logistics of moving all of my playlists and information over – let alone deciding which service to use. I don’t think their responses so far have been adequate at all; putting a disclaimer before a podcast where the guest spends 2-3 hours spewing misinformation does nothing to stop the misinformation from spreading. That’s even before I get into more recent revelations of a Joe Rogan using the n-word dozens of times. I’ll get through the prospect reports and reevaluate where I put my money and where I ask you to listen to my playlists.

Gang of Youths – in the wake of your leave. I can’t wait for this Australian group’s third album, Angel in Realtime, which drops on February 25th. The title track was a top ten song of last year for me, and this one isn’t too far behind. There’s a lot of peak (1980s, not “Beautiful Day”) U2 in their music.

Khruangbin feat. Leon Bridges – B-Side. The collaboration that brought us last year’s EP Texas Sun returns with another EP this month called Texas Moon. This song is fantastic, but the second single from the EP, “Chocolate Hills,” was surprisingly boring.

Large Plants – The Death of Pliny. Large Plants is the new side project from Jack Sharp of Wolf People (not to be confused with Wolf Parade, Wolfmother, Wolfgang Press, or Wolf). This track is very late ’60s blues-psychedelia with some lovely guitarwork as a highlight.

Waxahatchee – Tomorrow. Katie Crutchfield did the soundtrack for the Apple TV+ adaptation of the graphic novel series El Deafo. This song feels very much like someone asked her to write the most upbeat song she could, and it’s great.

Camp Cope – Running with the Hurricane. I heard this song before knowing anything about the band, and was surprised to hear something so Americana-sounding from an Australian band. If you like Waxahatchee, I think this song might be up your alley.

Sprints – Little Fix. This Irish punk-garage quartet have churned out a series of hooky singles that don’t skimp on the noise elements, always with something a bit clever in the lyrics as well.

Frank Turner – A Wave Across a Bay. Turner’s tribute to Frightened Rabbit singer Scott Hutchison, who killed himself in 2018, has a beautiful build in the chorus and Turner’s knack for turning clever phrases even in grief.

Spoon – Wild. Spoon’s first album in five years, Lucifer on the Sofa, drops this Friday, and the two singles I’ve heard so far show Britt Daniel in peak form, with a harder edge to the music behind him, something I can certainly support. The piano riff behind the chorus sounds incredibly familiar to me though.

White Lies – Am I Really Going to Die. It’s not as morbid as it sounds – it’s quite upbeat, in fact, and after hearing the two singles they’ve released, I’m wondering if As I Try Not to Fall Apart (due out February 18th) is going to be this British new wave band’s best album yet.

Shungudzo – It’s a good day (to fight the system). A tip from my grad school classmate Jim led me to I’m not a mother, but I have children, the 2021 debut album from Zimbabwean-American (and former Real World cast member) Shungudzo. The album itself combines multiple genres, from folk to hip-hop, with biting social commentary, and would have made my top albums of the year list if I’d heard it in time.

FKA Twigs feat. Jorja Smith and Unknown T – jealousy. So FKA Twigs released a mixtape in January called [CAPRISONGS] featuring a cornucopia of high-octane guests, but if you’ve followed my music lists at all, you had to know I’d choose the song with Jorja Smith to highlight. The drumbeat behind this track is intense, with sudden stops and starts that keep you off balance for the duration of the song.

Lucius – Next to Normal. I’ve liked quite a few Lucius songs over the decade since their first proper album came out in 2013, but I did not expect this track, which sounds like it could have come from Prince’s back catalog. Their third (or fourth, depending on whether you count their self-released record from 2009) album, Second Nature, comes out on April 8th.

The Mysterines – Dangerous. I’ve been looking forward to this British hard rock quartet’s debut album for about two years now, although this track isn’t the best representation of the high-octane grunge I’ve come to love from them. That LP, titled Reeling, is out March 11th.

Kid Kapichi feat. Bob Vylan – New England. Two artists who appeared on my top 100 songs of 2021 teamed up on this new single, taking aim at voter apathy in the UK with music that would have fit right in on Kid Kapichi’s This Time Next Year.

Crows – Slowly Separate. Crows’ Silver Tongues was one of my favorite albums of 2019, and this is the first new music from the British punk-rock band since then. They’re signed to IDLES’ Balley Records label, but I find their music more accessible and interesting than their bosses’ throwback punk style, more akin to Kid Kapichi or Fontaines D.C.

Yard Act – Pour Another. The Overload, the debut album from this British post-punk band, did not disappoint, from the title track to “Payday” to “The Incident” to this bouncy, dissonant tune. I keep coming back to the Gang of Four comparisons because they fit so well. Maybe these guys should cover “Natural’s Not In It?”

The Smile – You Will Never Work in Television Again. The Smile are Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, and Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner. There’s supposed to be an album coming, but for now we have two singles that sound a fair bit like Radiohead’s first album, and I’m here for anything where Radiohead members return to their rock roots.

Peter Doherty & Frédéric Lo – You Can’t Keep It From Me Forever. Yep, that’s Pete Doherty of the Libertines, working with the French musician Lo, with an album from the two of them due out on March 18th. Doherty also hinted at new Libertines material perhaps coming within the year, which would be even more exciting, but this track has a lot of that same vibe, almost like an older twist on the Libertines’ sound.

Hatchie – Quicksand. Hatchie’s dream-pop sound always reminds me of the Cranberries’ first two albums before that band went sideways; don’t be fooled by the slow start here, as the chorus has the big hook Hatchie delivers on all her better tracks.

Griff & Sigrid – Head on Fire. Griff doesn’t miss – that’s three incredible pop tracks from her in a year, this one featuring the popular Norwegian singer Sigrid.

Tempers – Nightwalking. Gothic electronica from a NYC duo who’ll release their third album, New Meaning, in April.

Steve Vai – Zeus in Chains. Vai’s Passion and Warfare came out the summer after I graduated from high school, and I couldn’t get enough of it. That particular style of instrumental guitar music hit a creative and popular zenith at that time, ending some time in 1992-93 with the rise of grunge (I’d call Joe Satriani’s “Summer Song” the last big hit of this movement), and Vai’s next album, Sex & Religion, didn’t have the same kind of melodic highs, and I fell off the train. Then this song popped up on my Release Radar, and it’s pretty good – maybe not quite at the level of “I Would Love To” or “The Animal,” but with a solid hook and some peak Vai shredding.

Zeal & Ardor – Church Burns. This project of Swiss-American musician Manuel Gagneux will put out a new, self-titled album this month, and if this song is any indication, his efforts to integrate gospel sounds with extreme metal – he says “black” metal but I assume that’s a play on words – are reaching their fruition.

King Buffalo – Shadows. This track is ten minutes long, just to warn you, but if you like psychedelic metal with a good bit of stoner to it, King Buffalo’s Acheron should be right up your alley.

Anxious – Let Me. This Connecticut hardcore punk band veers into extreme metal territory, with less of the melodic sensibility of last year’s “In April.”

Destruction – Diabolical. These icons of ’80s thrash – Wikipedia calls them part of the “Big Four” of German thrash, which, sure – actually sound pretty good for a bunch of guys pushing 60, and I give them credit for sticking to their sound. Thrash’s moment came and went as its adherents either went more commercial (looking at you, Metallica) or more extreme, but I’ll forever think of it as the perfect blend of speed and technical playing, without the excesses of most death metal bands.

Deserted Fear – Reborn Paradise. German melodic death metal that borders on thrash, just with growled lyrics. The machine gun-like guitar riff behind the verse stood out for me even with the ridiculous vocals.

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→ January 26, 2022
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This is Your Mind on Plants.

Michael Pollan made a name for himself, or perhaps a bigger name, for his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which came off like such an attack on our modern diets that he wrote a brief companion book called In Defense of Food. In defense of Pollan, however, his writing goes well beyond those two books or that subject; he can be a gifted writer on many matters of food and food science, and is not the scold that Omnivore’s Dilemma might lead you to believe that he is. Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation is a history of food and food science, and an explanation of how we used fire and heat to change the way we ate, in turn changing the trajectory of our species. His most recent book, a collection of two previously published essays plus a third, is called This is Your Mind on Plants, and covers three psychoactive compounds or chemicals produced by the plant world: opium, caffeine, and mescaline.

By far, my favorite part of this book was the portion on caffeine, which was originally released as an Audible original and excerpted by The Guardian as part of its longread series a few months ago. Pollan was a caffeine addict, like the overwhelming majority of Americans, and as part of his research into the chemical’s effects on our brains and our lives, chose to give it up completely before gradually reintroducing it into his life. He spoke to Dr. Matthew Walker, author of How We Sleep, who is a scold, at least on this topic, and among other things claims that caffeine’s half-life is around 6 hours, so a quarter of the caffeine you consumed in a cup of joe at 9 am is still in your system at 9 pm. (Estimates of its actual half-life vary, but it may be closer to 5 hours, which would push up that latter time to 7 pm.) Caffeine in the afternoon, which we often consume to combat our bodies’ evolved tendency towards biphasic sleep, is especially harmful; the iced coffee you have at 2 pm would still leave more than a quarter of its caffeine in your system at 11 pm, a typical bedtime for adults who have kids or at least have to work in the morning.

Most people understand on some level that caffeine can harm your sleep quantity and quality, but Pollan also points out how much we depend on caffeine each day for simple alertness, to feel like we think clearly, to clear the fog of sleep – or, of course, the fog of caffeine withdrawal. There is even research showing that caffeine can help certain types of recall and improve our reaction times in certain physical tasks, although viewers of Good Eats know that caffeine may make you work faster, but it doesn’t make you work smarter. Pollan gives a breezy history of caffeine and its two major delivery systems (tea and coffee), including descriptions of their ties to colonialism, exploitation of native peoples, and slavery, before bringing us back to the narrative of his caffeine withdrawal and reintroduction.

The opium essay appeared in slightly redacted form in Harper’s in the late 1990s, and is less about what the drugs derived from opium do than Pollan’s own misadventures in growing poppies in his own garden, only to discover that he may be violating federal law by doing so. Opium is a latex taken from the seed capsules of the Papaver somniferum plant, although Pollan claims that there are other poppies that can produce some of the same compounds, just in smaller quantities. The drugs we associate with poppies are opiates, alkaloids found within the latex, including morphine and codeine; or derivative products, such as heroin (made through acetylation of morphine) or oxycodone (synthesized from thebaine in the latex). You can consume the raw latex, which is supposed to be unspeakably bitter, and will cause nervous system depression. Pollan didn’t end up doing that, although he certainly thought about it, and wrote about thinking about it, and expunged a few pages until releasing the full article here. He describes the conversations from the time around what it was safe to write, while his editor at the time, John R. MacArthur, has disputed Pollan’s version of events. Anyway, Pollan drank some opium tea, and said it tasted awful but felt nice.

Then there’s mescaline, which, of these three drugs, has the unusual characteristic of offering very little downside to the user. Its use is highly restricted, because Drugs Are Bad! even though there’s a small body of evidence that mescaline, derived from a cactus that grows in the American southwest, and psilocybin, produced by several hundred species of fungi mostly in the Psilocybe genus, may help people with severe depression or anxiety. The majority of Pollan’s essay here revolves around mescaline’s somewhat recent history of use in religious ceremonies among certain indigenous American tribes, the ridiculous laws around its use, and environmental and cultural concerns around it. He eventually tries some as well, and has what sounds like a very pleasant experience of heightened awareness with mild hallucinations, not something that might fit the stereotype of a trip. I have never tried either of these psychotropics, and Pollan’s narrative made me slightly more curious about them.

Pollan the anti-scold is an insightful, conversational writer who is unafraid to educate his readers but never loses sight of the need to entertain at the same time. There might be a bit too much of him in the opium section – the idea of DEA agents bashing down his door because he had two poppies in his garden might come across as paranoid – but despite his first-person writing in the remaining two sections, he takes care not to let his persona take over. His thoughtfulness in describing the mescaline ceremony he witnesses, for example, does him credit; he’s just trying to get high, so to speak, not to appropriate anyone’s culture. It’s a short book, compiling some pieces you may have read before, but an enjoyable diversion, and one more tiny brick in the wall for drug decriminalization.

Next up: Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai, because Mike Schur told me to read it.

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→ January 25, 2022
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Spencer.

Director Pablo Larraín has a specific vision when it comes to biographical films: He takes a very small, pivotal period in his subject’s life and shows it in minute detail, sometimes moving events from outside the window into it for dramatic purposes. He did this to good effect in Jackie, fueled by an outstanding performance from Natalie Portman; and to mixed effect in Neruda, which lacked focus and glossed over some of Pablo Neruda’s significant character flaws. Larraín’s vision frames Spencer, his portrait of Princess of Wales Diana Spencer, but even Kristen Stewart’s award-worthy performance as the title character can’t salvage this overblown mess of a film. (It’s available to rent on Amazon and Google Play.)

The time window in Spencer is three days around Christmas in 1991, when the Royal Family made its annual pilgrimage to Sandrington, near where Diana grew up. At this point, her marriage to Prince Charles was already in shambles, fully aware he was having an affair with Camilla Parker-Bowles, and she felt (with reason) attacked and scorned by multiple other members of the royal family. She had bulimia at this time, and is shown frequently running to the bathroom after and even during meals, and appears more comfortable speaking with the staff than with those of her social class. By all accounts, she dreaded these family sojourns, but was powerless to object to them.

Spencer also dealt with bulimia for about a decade, which included the time period of this film, and food is both a substantial theme and major framing device. This could have been a major point in a different script, but here, it’s lazy, and because the script has Diana behaving erratically – undressing with the curtains open, wandering the fields at night, talking to birds/ghosts/inanimate objects, breaking into her abandoned childhood home (which was not, in fact, abandoned at the time) – it comes across as just more evidence that Diana was crazy, rather than suffering from mental illness. Diana says in the film that she feels like she’s in a “cage,” with very little control over just about any aspect of her life, and the script seems to equate her eating disorder, which can be about exerting control over something, with her demand that she be allowed to select her own dresses. It comes across as unserious, accentuated by claustrophobic camera work that has Stewart crashing down hallways, drunk on despair.

Stewart is doing a fair impersonation of Diana, particularly in facial expressions (sometimes too much so), but by the time the story gets to Sandringham and she has to interact with other characters, she’s far more effective, and in many cases seems like she’s the only thing reining in this Woman on the Verge script. If she weren’t credible, and actually a bit restrained, the movie would have gone completely off the rails within a half an hour, because nobody else in the movie gets more than a smattering of lines or screen time. Sally Hawkins plays a fictional character, Maggie, the royal dresser to Diana, wearing a bad wig, with the movie’s dumbest twist, a complete waste of a very talented actor. I would guess the second-most lines belongs to Sean Harris as Royal Chef Darren McGrady, who would later become Diana’s personal chef, although the film also makes their relationship improbably casual. (The real-life Chef Darren weighed in on his Youtube channel on what’s real in Spencer and what’s not.)

The hair and makeup on Stewart are remarkable, helping make the transformation more credible – it’s easier to forget the actor behind the role here than in, say, King Richard. Jonny Greenwood’s score is way over the top, however – there’s too much of it, and it’s too loud, as if this is supposed to be a psychological horror movie rather than a biopic. It’s at its worst in the first half hour of the movie and then tapers off to sort of a dull roar, a rare miss for the Radiohead guitarist.

As if Spencer isn’t enough of a tortured watch with its melodramatic fabrications, the entire concluding sequence is such obvious arrant nonsense that it takes you right out of any suspension of disbelief you might have had going. None of this happened, because none of it could have happened. It’s all bollocks. I would be happy to see Stewart get a Best Actress nomination for this, but I couldn’t recommend this movie for any other reason.

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→ January 24, 2022
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Klara and the Sun.

Kazuo Ishiguro is one of the greatest novelists currently writing in English, a deserving winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and the Booker Prize (for The Remains of the Day), and author of two of the hundred best novels I’ve ever read (Remains and Never Let Me Go). His latest novel, Klara and the Sun, made the longlist for the Booker, finds him revisiting themes from several of his earlier works in another light science fiction milieu, in a work that is beautifully written but often seems too remote from its real subjects.

Klara is an Artificial Friend, an android that parents buy to serve as companions for their children, since school is now held remotely. Many children are also ‘lifted’ in what appears to be genetic engineering, but it’s a devil’s bargain – children must be lifted to have a chance of going to a suitable school, but there’s some risk of negative side effects, even death, from the procedure. Klara finds herself chosen to be the companion of Josie, a child who’s been lifted but is suffering significant illnesses because of it, and it’s implied that the lifting is part of why her parents are divorced. Artificial Friends get their power from the sun, so Klara comes to believe that the Sun is a god, or the God, and that this omnipotent being will be able to cure Josie – if Klara does something in return.

Because Klara narrates the book, we only get a superficial take on everything that happens, and details you might expect are not forthcoming (do not forthcome?). I’m just assuming ‘lifting’ means genetic engineering of some sort, for example. It arises that someone else in the world of these people has died, and we are left to infer the cause. There are great novels narrated by children or childlike characters – To Kill a Mockingbird is the most obvious example – but they amp up the level of difficulty for author and reader alike. Klara’s commentary is robotic, by design I assume, and it is the first way in which Ishiguro holds us at a distance from the text.

Klara and the Sun might be the loneliest novel I’ve ever read. The mere idea of Artificial Friends seems conjured out of a cloud of loneliness, and every character in this novel comes across as almost desperate in their lack of connection with others. There are few interactions here that don’t involve Klara, who is, to be clear, not an actual person. Josie’s parents are alienated from her as well as from each other, and their nearest neighbors, who live a mile or so away, are further separated from them because Rick, who is Josie’s age, was not ‘lifted.’ This near-future, which also includes replacement of even highly educated workers by robots or automation, seems neither that distant from ours nor that improbable, but it sounds apocalyptic in its isolation.

Klara’s relationship with the Sun feels like a parody of religious faith, or at least of a child’s concept thereof; Klara assumes that anything she doesn’t understand must be the Sun’s doing, and that the Sun can change anything if Klara simply believes enough – or makes an appropriate sacrifice. She also has a child’s conception of the world, seeing one small construction belching out smoke and assuming it is the only source of pollution on the planet. Klara convinces several other people to help her in her odd quest to appease the Sun and save Josie, but, without spoiling the ending, I’ll say that the outcome leaves Klara with next to nothing in the end.

Ishiguro’s prose never fails to amaze; even in The Unconsoled, by far my least favorite of his novels even though its ambition is evident, he still writes beautifully, evoking rich images of time and place. It’s jarring in Klara and the Sun to see such classic, almost poetic prose used for a story that is relentless in its reserve. Klara had to be the narrator, and yet her childlike view of the world, including a limited emotional vocabulary, means that the novel lacks the emotional punch of Ishiguro’s other works – even Never Let Me Go, which had a similarly dystopian setup and story, but had a huge emotional payoff. Klara has the same distinctive voice and meticulous setup as I’ve come to expect from Ishiguro, but the whole is less than the sum of the parts.

Next up: I’ve just finished Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book, which lived up to its billing.

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→ January 22, 2022
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Stick to baseball, 1/22/22.

I’m still grinding away on the top 100, with more than half of the player capsules written so far. It’ll run on January 31st, followed later that week by the column of guys who just missed. The team-by-team reports will run the week after. I have a podcast episode ready to roll that should be up any day now.

My latest review at Paste covers The Rocketeer: Fate of the Future, a two-player game from Funko based on the cult classic Disney film, which is itself about to get a reboot.

And now, the links…

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→ January 20, 2022
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Quo Vadis, Aida?

Quo Vadis, Aida? falls into the weird in-between category created by AMPAS’s alteration to the rules for Oscar eligibility last year: It wasn’t officially released in the United States until 2021, but was nominated for the Best International Film in the 2020 cycle because it was released before the end of February (and was submitted by Bosnia and Herzegovina). Available to stream on Hulu, with perhaps the most incongruous commercial breaks in film history, the film is an unstinting look at the genocide of Bosnian Muslims, mostly men, during the Srebrenica massacre of 1995.

Aida is a translator for the UN’s peacekeeping force at the UNPROFOR base in Srebrenica, as well as a schoolteacher and mother of two teenaged boys. The film all takes place over a matter of hours as Serbian forces take over the town and residents flee, with several thousand entering the base but thousands more gathering outside to try to gain entry. Serbian Gen. Ratko Mladic, now a convicted war criminal known as the “Butcher of Bosnia,” offers safe passage out of Srebrenica to any Bosnian Muslims who wish it, but Aida is one of the few who suspects that the offer of safety is fake. She pleads with the Dutch peacekeepers to keep her family safe on the base, even as those same forces find themselves impotent in the face of Serbian arms, with the promised air support from NATO never materializing.

If you’re familiar with the Srebrenica massacre, you may have some idea how this is all going to turn out. Serb forces slaughtered more than 8000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys, raped thousands of women and girls, and tortured more civilians. They threw the victims’ corpses in mass graves. Much of the massacre took place just outside of the base – the buses that were supposed to take the men to safety simply drove beyond the ‘safe’ area and emptied their passengers so Serb soldiers could murder them. Many of these war crimes were caught on film; some perpetrators were later charged by the Hague, including Mladic, although saying they were brought to justice implies justice is even possible in a case like this. The current mayor of Srebrenica and current Prime Minister of the Republika Srpska, one of the two divisions of the current government of Bosnia and Herzegovina, both deny that the massacre and genocide even occurred.

Aida, played by Aida Selmanagi? – her husband plays Mladi? – is perfect as a woman who sees disaster impending and feels powerless to stop it, but will try anything to save her family. The tension on her face provides the film with all of the intensity of a thriller, even though there is no actual violence until near the very end of the story. Her desperation increases by degrees, as with the frog in the pot of slowly boiling water, so that she may not fully realize how hopeless her situation is until well past the point that hope was gone. Aida survives, but there is no redemption in the ending here; if anything, the script underlines to the endless horror of those who do survive a genocide, and then are faced with daily reminders of what they’ve lost, of those who lost less (or even gained), and of those who did nothing while these crimes took place.

I don’t watch horror movies that rely on violence to create fear in the viewer, because I simply can’t adjust my mind to a worldview that finds entertainment in human suffering. Quo Vadis, Aida? is a horror movie of a different sort. You know this has to end badly for Aida and her family, somehow, because you know the world sat on its hands and watched as the Serbs murdered 8000-plus men simply because they were Muslims, as over 60,000 Bosniaks were killed in the war. You feel horror for Aida, and shame at the impotence of the peacekeepers and at the willful blindness of the west, rather than cheap fear from body horror or, worse, the lurid entertainment that some people feel from rooting for a killer. Quo Vadis, Aida? is a great film, shouting an important piece of history from the hilltops, but it’s anti-entertainment by design. You want to avert your eyes, but if you do, you’re complicit in the crime.

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→ January 16, 2022
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Stick to baseball, 1/16/22.

Still working on the prospect rankings – I started the actual writing this week, after several weeks of prep – which will run starting January 31st at the Athletic. I appreciate your patience. My podcast and my Paste reviews will return this week.

And now, the links…

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→ January 14, 2022
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Mass.

Mass marks the directorial and writing debut of actor Fran Kranz, an actor who hasn’t done anything so far that might have indicated he was capable of this. Mass feels in so many ways like a stage play, with just four characters in one room constituting the vast majority of the film, and it pulls off a discussion of a difficult subject in an engrossing and credible way. (You can rent it on amazon or iTunes.)

Mass takes place at an Episcopalian church, almost entirely in a meeting room, where two couples, played by Jason Isaacs, Martha Plimpton, Reed Birney, and Ann Dowd, will meet some unknown period of time after a school shooting where a son of one couple killed the son of the other couple, and other classmates, before killing himself. The parents whose son committed the murders are no longer together, and have taken different paths – mom is wracked with guilt, and wants compassion, or at least more of a kinship with the grieving couple, while dad is still trying to absolve himself somehow and is bottling up his grief. Meanwhile, the parents of the victim are still deep in their grief, and can barely contain their rage when the conversation first turns to the killings. The meeting is unmoderated, but has been arranged by a counselor who seems to have worked with both couples; the four are simply left to their own devices. (I’m not saying which couple is which by design; it’s better to avoid knowing until the dialogue reveals it.)

The dialogue is raw and doesn’t flinch from its subject, including, at one point, a detailed description of the sequence of the murders. The parents share how they found out about the massacre not long after they were sharing photos of their kids, which appears to have been their pre-arranged conversation starter. The script shines when it centers their shared grief, how both couples lost sons that day, and how this isn’t some sort of Grief Olympics between them. Kranz doesn’t try to explain the inexplicable, other than to have the shooter’s father run through the litany of possible explanations – which follows an abortive discussion of gun laws in America. The victim’s parents ask the questions you’d expect, including why the killer’s parents didn’t do something to stop this, but Kranz doesn’t give any easy answers. The end of that conversation in the meeting room might be the only time the script loses its intensity, because the quartet reaches that point abruptly given what came before. It’s relentless without ever becoming lurid or otherwise pandering to retain your attention. It’s a story about one small bit of the aftermath of a school shooting, and Kranz never loses sight of that.

Mass has received a slew of honors from local critics’ circles and independent film groups, including taking the Robert Altman Award from the Independent Spirit Awards, won in recent years by Moonlight, Spotlight, One Night in Miami…, and Marriage Story. Dowd and Isaacs have each won a supporting actor award, although I’m not sure what makes either of them ‘supporting’ in this film. All four are great, but Dowd stands out – the script gives her the most to do, and she’s incredibly affecting both in her grief and her need to be understood by the other parents. The idea that Being the Ricardos might get a Best Original Screenplay nomination over this is … well, especially aggravating because the nomination would ensure more people know that Mass exists. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, because it’s very talky, because it so resembles a play adapted to the screen, because it’s so unsparing of its topic. It is a tough watch, but it achieves everything Kranz could have wanted from his script.

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→ January 13, 2022
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Being the Ricardos.

Aaron Sorkin just can’t help himself: After directing The Trial of the Chicago Seven into an occasionally entertaining but bloated, self-important mess, he’s done it again with Being the Ricardos, and here the offense might actually be worse. This is a funny script about very funny people, one that touches on a couple of important topics, and Sorkin directs the audience right out of the film multiple times. (It’s free for Amazon Prime members.)

The film covers one week during the heyday of I Love Lucy, when a blind gossip item tagged Lucille Ball as a Communist, another tabloid story said that Desi Arnaz was unfaithful to Ball, and Lucille reveals that she’s pregnant, which was a huge complication for the highly censored, misogynistic medium of television in 1953. Those events all did take place, but in reality, they happened in separate weeks, and Sorkin condensed them all for (melo)dramatic purposes, which is small potatoes compared to other choices he made here. The conflation of three crises lends itself well to Sorkin’s trademark rapid-fire dialogue – yes, we get walk-and-talks – and despite its lack of adherence to the truth, it probably improves the film on the whole.

Far and away the biggest problem with Being the Ricardos is Sorkin himself. He frames the movie with what are supposed to be interview clips with the show’s three main writers in something like the present day, although those three people have all been dead for at least ten years now. The interviews add nothing, and I mean nothing, to this movie, and at times are actively insulting, such as the scene near the very end of the movie when none of the three can remember Desi Arnaz’s catchphrase. I wanted to throw something at the TV. Sorkin makes his presence felt in plenty of other ways, not least in the many scenes that tell us just how incredibly important the work of television is, what a difficult art form it is, and uses that to tell us what a genius Lucille Ball was – except the whole thing rings very fake. A fair amount of the movie is devoted to Ball obsessing over the blocking in one scene, and I’d be shocked if any of that was true, including the bizarre 2 a.m. meeting she calls to go over it again.

The script does have a lot of humor in it – zingers, banter, sarcasm, you name it, and the actors bring the energy required to keep up with a script like this. Nicole Kidman won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama, a surprising result to those who follow this stuff, but she’s better here than Renée Zellweger in Judy or Rami Malek in Bohemian Rhapsody, both of whom won Oscars for what amounted to very strong impersonations. Kidman gets the voice right, but the script doesn’t have her engage in much physical mimicry, focusing instead on the very wide range of emotions Ball would have felt if all of these things had happened in the span of a week. Kidman’s performance is superb, giving Ball depth and complexity; if you don’t think she’s worthy, it’s a comment on the film, not on her performance. Javier Bardem, as Desi, is right behind her, although in his case getting the accent right was critical and I could see an argument that his performance is more of an imitation than hers was. Tony Hale also deserves some mention for a quiet but essential performance as showrunner and head writer Jess Oppenheimer, and J.K. Simmons is very funny as William Frawley, playing him as a drunken asshole with occasional moments of clarity. I’m fine with Kidman getting a nomination, as seems likely, but if this gets a Best Original Screenplay nod over, say, Mass, I might throw something else, too.

Ball was not an actual card-carrying Communist, of course, and the controversy blew over quickly in reality; Sorkin sorkins it up with a very Hollywood ending that he fabricated, perhaps to match the incredible real-life resolution to the issue of CBS refusing to let Lucille be pregnant on the show. (The telegram in the movie is real.) Sorkin overdraws his dramatic license many times, but he does bring it all together for a strong finish, with Ball and Arnaz talking in her dressing room just before they go on stage … except the movie keeps going after that, and the second ending Sorkin gives us is worse. The film starts badly and ends badly, and even though much of what comes in between is funny and emotional, someone needed to tell Sorkin to trim all this fat and just let the two main characters carry the story.

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→ January 13, 2022
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Snow.

John Banville won the Booker Prize for his novel The Sea and was shortlisted for the noirish The Book of Evidence, but he also writes mysteries featuring a pathologist named Quirke under the pen name Benjamin Black. He published a new mystery in 2021, titled Snow, under his own name, with references to Quirke but a new lead in detective St. John Strafford, whose first name is pronounced “Sinjin” and last name is mispronounced by everyone he meets. Banville can’t help but write beautifully, and he has crafted a narrative that zips right along, in a setup that could easily have come from an Agatha Christie novel … but my god, the ending is so predictable you could probably guess it from this setup: In the prologue, a priest is murdered, stabbed in the neck and then castrated. If a possible motive for someone to kill a priest in this way came to your mind, you probably got it right.

I’m a fan of classic English mysteries, especially those of Christie – I’m a Poirot guy, but I’ll read anything she wrote, and have read more books by her than by any other author. There´s something about the simple setup and intricate plotting that will always appeal to me; it’s similar to my taste in board games, where most of my favorites have simple rules that lead to complex strategies. There’s an elegance to it that I appreciate.

Banville follows the template to a tee, other than, perhaps, the detail of the gelding of the priest’s corpse. But is he subverting the genre, or playing it straight and just adding too little to the form to make it interesting? Banville’s prose evokes the setting, the place, and the cultural conflicts that lie beneath the surface of the story, including the Catholic/Protestant split in 1950s Ireland. The Osborne family, owners of the house where the priest died and where he was often a visitor, are Protestants, as is Strafford, which the Osbornes seem to think should make them allies, especially against the power of a Church that will eventually show up to lean on Strafford to let the truth lie. Yet the motive for the murder is mundane, and figuring out who did it won’t be difficult.

The novel also suffers from Strafford’s blandness: he’s neither likeable nor unlikeable, lacking the conceited air of Poirot or the wit of Archie Goodwin or the debonair of Lord Peter Wimsey. Strafford enters the book early enough to establish some sort of defining qualities for himself, even an eccentricity or two, but beyond his name and the running gag that everyone loses the ‘r’ in his surname when he introduces himself, there’s nothing.

Banville does seem to be making a bigger point here with this story, about Ireland, the Church, the aftereffects of trauma, and doing that in a murder mystery feels a bit off. I doubt Banville wanted to trivialize his subject, but that’s how it comes off in the end, especially with the last-minute twist to the resolution (which is also reasonably easy to see coming). There’s a follow-up novel coming this year called April in Spain that unites Strafford with Quirke, to be published under Banville’s own name rather than the pseudonym, and perhaps that will answer some of these questions. As much as I enjoyed reading Snow while I was in the middle of it, the ending revealed it to be just empty calories.

Next up: I’m reading Mike Schur’s upcoming book How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question, which, so far, is just as good as you’d expect.

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