→ March 1, 2022
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The Eyes of Tammy Faye.

Jessica Chastain won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Actress in a Film this past weekend for her portrayal of the title character in The Eyes of Tammy Faye, yet another in the ongoing series of crappy biopics churned out by Hollywood as Oscar bait. It’s especially unfortunate here, as Tammy Faye Bakker was a far more interesting person than this movie even considers, and wastes a solid performance by Chastain that’s more than the garden-variety impersonations that usually win these categories. (It’s streaming free on HBO Max.)

If you know of Tammy Faye Bakker already, it’s because she was the wife of televangelist Jim Bakker for most of her life; they met in college and she appeared on air with him for over two decades, helping him build a following and then an entire network, while also becoming a bit of a punch line herself for her excessive makeup and the way it would run when she’d cry. Their empire imploded when two scandals hit – Jim had been siphoning off donors’ money, and some of it went to pay off an employee, Jessica Hahn, who accused Bakker of raping her. The Bakkers divorced while he was behind bars, and Tammy Faye later married a business associate of theirs who himself later went to prison for bankruptcy fraud – she could sure pick ’em! – and died in 2007 of colon cancer.

That’s her story, at least the most public part of it, and that’s the story that The Eyes of Tammy Faye tells, when it bothers to tell a story at all. (Don’t even get me started on how much is made up in this film – pun intended.) This is a biopic, but not a biography. It’s not interested in telling us about Tammy Faye Bakker, the person. It’s a recitation of things that happened to her. She had an unhappy childhood. She married young. She helped Jim Bakker build his business with her puppets and her high, sing-songy voice. Her marriage crumbled, then fell apart. We get a few glimpses of her character, such as the various times she refuses to be the subservient wife when Bakker’s colleagues Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell are around – Jerry Jr. isn’t depicted, as he was busy with the pool cleaner – but those are scant, because a script this perfunctory has to play the hits. (Vincent D’Onofrio is unrecognizable as Falwell, although you might pick up his voice behind the clipped speech.)

The script does show the most important anecdote from Tammy Faye’s public life, at least: her on-air, live interview with Steve Pieters, a gay pastor who was diagnosed with HIV in 1982. (He’s still alive and gave a wonderful interview with Religion & Politics about the experience and the new film.) It was a compassionate, non-judgmental conversation, one that was consistent with Tammy Faye’s view of Christianity, showing love and compassion for everyone without judgment, but not Falwell’s and Robertson’s. Even today, it’s hard to imagine an evangelical TV show airing such a segment. In 1985, though, it was revolutionary – and Tammy Faye remained a supporter of the LGBTQ+ community for the rest of her life, even serving as the grand marshal of a pride parade at one point. This illustrates a lot more about the person she was than a series of vignettes, like the nonsense one about how they first ended up on television after their car was stolen (never happened), shows us.

Instead, The Eyes of Tammy Faye paints by numbers – this happened, and this happened, and then this happened, and then she took a bunch of pills, and then it all fell apart. (As far as I can tell, she never appeared intoxicated or stoned on air, either.) It is a series of unfortunate events, with no attempts to connect any of them, or give the audience any understanding of the people behind them other than painting Jim in broad strokes – which may be all he deserves, as both a philanderer and a fraud – and Tammy in only slightly less broad ones.

Chastain and Andrew Garfield expend so much energy trying to sound like the Bakkers that their work feels more like mimicry than acting – which is probably unfair to them both, but more to Chastain, who also has a lot more to do than Garfield does. Garfield’s Bakker is wooden, ambitious, single-minded, and if his faith was real at some point, it loses out to his desire for money and power. That transition occurs off screen, although you could argue its impact on Tammy Faye deserved more explanation. Chastain’s performance is more central, given that she’s the protagonist of the film, yet her imitation of Tammy Faye’s voice and mannerisms, as well as hair and makeup that make it hard to recognize the actress beneath, is hard to separate from the performance. She’s probably better than Nicole Kidman’s in Being the Ricardos, but there is no way on earth I’d vote for her over Penelope Cruz in Parallel Mothers or Olivia Colman in The Lost Daughter, and I think Alana Haim was better in Licorice Pizza as well. The Eyes of Tammy Faye also got a nomination for Best Makeup and Hairstyling; I’ve only seen one other nominee, Dune, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see this one win. It’s just not a very good movie, despite, or perhaps because of, all the emphasis on making it look right.

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→ February 26, 2022
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Stick to baseball, 2/26/22.

No new content directly from me this week for subscribers to the Athletic, but if I can shake this cold I have right now – the first time I’ve been sick since we all started masking just under two years ago – I’ll have a draft piece this upcoming week. I have done Q&As with our beat writers who cover the Orioles, Dbacks, Pirates, Red Sox, Twins, and Royals, and subscribers can also see all parts of my prospects ranking package here.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Matthew Murphy, lead singer and songwriter of the Wombats, talking about their latest album Fix Yourself, Not the World; his unusual lyrics; and mental health. Listen via The Athletic or subscribe on iTunes, Amazon, that other site, or wherever you get your podcasts. My free email newsletter returned last week as well, catching those of you who subscribe up on various things from my life from the last month as well as links to all the things I have written since the start of 2022.

And now, the links…

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→ February 25, 2022
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Hive.

Hive became the first film in the history of the Sundance film festival to win all three of its main awards (Grand Jury, Directing, and Audience Prizes), and became Kosovo’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Film, making the shortlist of fifteen films but not the final five (in a very competitive year). The movie is a worthy successor to the 2021 nominee, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Quo Vadis, Aida?, continuing the region’s Both movies revolve around stories of the Serbian-led genocides of the 1990s, but while the Bosnian film stays almost entirely within the events of the Srebrenica massacre, Hive deals with the aftermath of the genocide in Kosovo, following one woman whose husband disappeared during the killings in Krusha e Madhe, now called the “Village of War Widows,” and tries to find a way to support her family.

Based on the true story of Fahrije Hoti, Hive follows its main character as she has the idea to work with other (presumed) widows in their village to start a business selling ajvar, the local red pepper-based relish, similar to Bosnian pinjur (which, briefly, was available at Trader Joes!). As the film opens, Fahrije is seen working with a local charity that is offering to teach women to drive so that they can find work, although many of the women object to the fact that the teacher will be male. In a state that is 96% Muslim, being alone with a man in a car would be unacceptable, and these traditional gender restrictions are one of the film’s major themes, as the massacre of the town’s men means many of the women have no source of income.

Fahrije lives with her father-in-law, who uses a wheelchair and refuses to give up hope that his son is alive or to make allowances for the need for his daughter-in-law to earn a living; and her two children, one of whom is a teenager who is sensitive to the way the town perceives her mother. She keeps bees and tries to sell the honey in town, but it’s too meager an income to support their needs. When Fahrije tries to start the business, she finds a willing buyer at the local supermarket, who is willing to give them shelf space and supports their efforts – I kept waiting for the twist there, but there wasn’t one – yet faces needless opposition from the men in her town, from having her car window smashed to someone coming into their makeshift warehouse and destroying inventory. The man from whom she buys the main ingredient for the ajvar, red peppers, keeps pestering her to go out with him. And she’s trying to find out if her husband’s remains are among those found near the town’s river, an effort that requires DNA from her father-in-law but which he refuses to provide.

Hive offers a simple narrative, taking the viewer from that initial meeting with the women’s organization through the idea and to execution, without spending too much time on any one part of the story – especially not the conception of the ajvar cooperative, which could have been dreadful if they’d tried to extend the scene. One of the great strengths of the script is how much is left unsaid; the characters talk tersely, which keeps the story moving and also infuses it with a sense of rage and frustration simmering below the surface. Yllka Gashi plays Fahrije, and her taut, anguished performance is essential; even when her efforts succeed, there’s always a sense that it’s transient, or that no matter what happens, she’ll continue to be haunted by the uncertainty of her husband’s fate. (The movie’s ending is not entirely factual, at least on that last front.) Its strength lies in its simplicity, but at the same time, it also limits the film’s ceiling – as does the general adherence to a true story. It doesn’t have the serial gut punches of Quo Vadis, Aida?, instead telling a story about the survivors, one that juxtaposes the horrors of the Serbians’ atrocities in the former Yugoslavia with a single anecdote of hope. It has the feel of a good, low-budget indie movie – which is not to detract from first-time writer/director Blerta Basholli’s efforts here. If anything, I’d like to see what she can do next, perhaps with more resources, even to continue shining a light on what happened in her native Kosovo.

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→ February 23, 2022
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Nightmare Alley.

Nightmare Alley took home a Best Picture nomination despite tepid reviews for a movie that ended up in that echelon, with unfavorable comparisons to the 1947 black-and-white version that director Guillermo del Toro chose to update. For fans of noir cinema, however, this is a fantastic melding of that genre’s conventions with del Toro’s visual style and meticulous placement, one that I found incredibly entertaining up until the rather predictable, on-the-nose ending.

Adapted from a 1946 novel of the same name, Nightmare Alley follows the path of a con man named Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), who we see burning down a house with a body in it, without any explanation given, and then who walks off a bus and into a carnival, where he ends up with a job. On his first night there, he sees the carnival geek, whose role is to bite the heads off live chickens and drink their blood as entertainment for the carnival’s patrons. Stanton learns the art of cold-reading from other carnival workers, and falls for one of the other carnies, Molly (Rooney Mara). The two take off together and form a mentalist act for a dinner theatre show in Buffalo, where they encounter Dr. Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett) and her wealthy client, the latter of whom believes Stanton can communicate with his dead son. Stanton hatches a plan to con that client and other wealthy men in the city by using information from Dr. Ritter, offering to split the money with her, but it goes awry when another client, Ezra Grindle (Richard Jenkins), wants more than Stanton can provide.

The film looks incredible, as you’d expect from del Toro, although this time around he has no supernatural elements to work with – the monsters are inside the characters themselves, so to speak. The city of Buffalo has never looked so vibrant and glamorous, and even the carnival has a grim beauty under the lights, when the show is on. The film is set in 1939, with a depression on and war beckoning, but you’d never know it except when the characters mention the war in passing, with opulence everywhere once we get to the big city – especially Dr. Ritter’s office, with walls that appear gold-plated and a recording apparatus that looks like it came from the science fiction stories of that era.

Del Toro also coaxes some great performances from a loaded cast, not least of which are those of Cooper and Blanchett. Cooper earned more Oscar buzz for the two minutes he’s on screen in Licorice Pizza, but there’s far more to this character and Cooper plays it so effortlessly that perhaps we’re starting to take him for granted. Blanchett is marvelously inscrutable as the good doctor, with unclear motives and fungible ethics; her actual interest in Stanton is obscured until their final scene together. David Strathairn and Toni Collette do their usual, understated thing as the pair who pretend to be psychics at the carnival, while Willem Dafoe leans into his creepier side as the carnival’s operator, although he unnerves less through malice than through his lack of empathy for anyone else. There’s a great cameo from Mary Steenburgen in a one-note role as well. Mara, unfortunately, is as flat and toneless as ever, making it hard to see what Carlisle sees in her, and almost as hard to sympathize with her when he leaves her in the lurch.

This film looked like it was going to end in one of two ways, and del Toro chose the one that’s telegraphed early on in the film, which is true to the novel’s ending but feels so overdone – foreshadowing is great, but the amount of time this script spends telling you where it’s going to end up gives the ending the aftertaste of an artificial sweetener. It contrasts with the film’s refusal to be explicit with background details, including Carlisle’s and Ritter’s pasts, and what drives each of them to do what they do. There’s a recurring symbol of the corpse of a baby that Dafoe’s character keeps in his trailer, but it’s never fleshed out in any way, with a lot of speculation (this one is pretty good, with a small spoiler involved) but nothing concrete, and it felt more like del Toro being del Toro, rather than something that added to the finished product.

I enjoyed Nightmare Alley for its noir vibe and some of the very strong performances, but I can’t believe this is one of the top ten movies of the year – it’s more style than substance and it failed to stick the landing. It’s not as good as Parallel Mothers or The Lost Daughter, neither of which took a Best Picture nomination, just to pick two that I’ve already seen. It took a Best Cinematography nomination as well, but of the four nominees I’ve seen, I’d rank it fourth for that category. It’s also nominated for Best Costume Design and Best Production Design, however, and seems worthy of both honors.

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→ February 22, 2022
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Parallel Mothers.

Pedro Almodóvar earned his first Oscar nomination in 1988, as Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown made the final five for that year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film (now Best International Film). He won the same award eleven years later, for Todo Sobre Mi Madre, my introduction to his work, and was most recently nominated for the strong, introspective Pain and Glory, which earned a Best Actor nomination for Antonio Banderas two years ago.

Almodóvar’s most recent work, the outstanding Parallel Mothers, finds the director similarly pensive, but this time he’s looking outward, with a two-layered story about truth and reconciliation in Almodóvar’s native Spain, a country that is still grappling with the legacy of a dictatorship that ended nearly a half-century ago. Parallel Mothers starts with a story about a mass grave from the Spanish Civil War, then pivots abruptly into the two mothers of the title, both of whom give birth in the same hospital but find themselves intertwined by the events that come afterwards, before we return to the story of the grave in a sweeping conclusion. The middle story itself packs an emotional wallop, but it is also a grand metaphor for the challenges Spain – or really any country – faces in confronting the truth of its past.

Penelope Cruz, who got the film’s one Academy Award nomination this year (for Best Actress), plays the photographer Janis Martinez, who happens to be taking pictures of a forensic anthropologist named Arturo. The fascists killed her great-grandfather in the 1930s, forcing him first to dig the mass grave in which he’d be buried, and then tore him from his family a night later. Janis asks Arturo if he could help exhume and identify the bodies, with help from the government’s truth commission. They also sleep together, from which Janis gets pregnant, a development she welcomes, as she’s 40 and has always wanted children. She shares a room at the hospital with the teenaged Ana, who is unhappy at her condition, and they become friends for the moment, although they lose touch once they resume their lives outside the hospital. When they reconnect, Janis learns that Ana’s baby died of SIDS, and she asks Ana to move in and be her au pair, but she has an ulterior motive as well.

The Janis/Ana story itself contains multitudes; both characters are complex, with detailed backstories, reasons why they are who they are, yet no connection to each other beyond the coincidence of their simultaneous arrivals at the hospital. Janis knows a truth that she can’t bear to share with anyone, including Ana and Arturo, but without the truth – and even a chance for reconciliation – nobody can move forward with their lives. When that truth comes out, it sets off a bomb in their lives, threatening everything Janis has wanted, but that’s followed by a period of forgiveness and understanding that wouldn’t be possible without the truth, no matter how brutal. Only after that can we return to the story of the mass grave, as Arturo takes a team to the village where Janis’ great-grandfather died, and where her family still lives, and begins the process of searching for and disinterring the remains.

There’s enough metaphor and symbolism here to fill someone’s senior thesis. The parallels between the Janis/Ana story and Spain’s own uncomfortable grappling with the impacts of the Civil War and the fascist Franco’s tyrannical, forty-year reign give Parallel Mothers its narrative framework, but Almódovar has populated the film with smaller details that give depth to the story of the two women while also sharpening the connection between the nested stories. As for symbolism, there’s food everywhere here, such as when Janis teaches Ana to make a tortilla Española, a classic Spanish dish of thinly sliced potatoes poached in olive oil and finished with eggs to bind it. It’s a national dish (a big deal in a country with divers regional cuisines), and its history goes back at least 200 years; passing this knowledge from one generation to the next, as Janis does to Ana, may stand in for the idea of passing along all knowledge, presaging a later scene where the two argue in Janis’s kitchen, and the older women lectures Ana over her ignorance of her country’s history. (I don’t know if there’s any symbolism to this part, but I certainly noticed the gigantic wheel of Manchego sitting on Janis’s counter, under class, and you are fooling yourself if you think I’m not trying to figure out how to get my wife to sign off on that in our house.) The color red appears everywhere in the film, from Janis’s handbag to her phone case to various decorative objects in her home, which is an Almodóvar trademark; here it could stand in for the blood spilled in Spain’s 20th century, unmentioned and yet pervasive even if no one wishes to discuss it. There are substantial hairstyle changes, little language quirks, so many choices in the script that seem deliberate given what Almodóvar was trying to do with the concentric narratives.

This is one of my favorite films of 2021, although I wouldn’t put it at the very top. The film’s finale is moving, although it comes upon the viewer rather quickly; the script probably could have gone longer, both to resolve the Janis/Ana storyline and provide more time in the rural village where the exhumation takes place. There’s also a smaller twist in the relationship between the two women that seemed to come from nowhere, almost as a convenience, and it doesn’t contribute meaningfully enough to the plot for me to buy into it. Cruz is so good in this, with Milena Smit also superb as Ana, that combined with the literary, layered script, I still found myself lost in its depths long after I left the theater.

I’m not sure why Spain selected The Good Boss, which stars Javier Bardem (Cruz’s husband), over this as its submission to the Academy Awards this year, although the one-film-per-country thing has already outlived any usefulness it may have had, but the one nomination it got, for Cruz, is well deserved – she’s certainly better than Nicole Kidman, who may win. (Cruz also became just the fifth woman nominated twice for Best Actress for films in languages other than English, and the first to do so for two Spanish-language roles.) I have read, but have no way to verify, that the Spanish film group that chooses its submissions dislikes Almodóvar, having passed over his Volver and Bad Education, but the joke is on them, as The Good Boss made the shortlist but not the final five nominees for Best International Film.

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→ February 19, 2022
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Stick to baseball, 2/19/22.

My prospects ranking package is now all posted for subscribers to the Athletic. Here’s the complete rundown of everything that ran:

BaltimoreHoustonChicago Cubs
BostonLA AngelsCincinnati
NY YankeesOaklandMilwaukee
Tampa BaySeattlePittsburgh
TorontoTexasSt. Louis
Chicago White SoxAtlantaArizona
ClevelandMiamiColorado
DetroitNY MetsLA Dodgers
Kansas CityPhiladelphiaSan Diego
MinnesotaWashingtonSan Francisco

I also did two Q&As over at the Athletic, one the day the farm rankings went up and one the day the top 100 went up.

Since my last stick to baseball post, I’ve reviewed several board games over at Paste as well, including Nidavellir, one of my favorite games from 2021; Equinox, a new version of Reiner Knizia’s game Colossal Arena; The Rocketeer: Fate of the Future, a two-player game based on the 1991 cult classic; and Wilson & Shep, a cute bluffing game for players as young as five.

I’ve done a bunch of podcasts and radio things related to the top 100, including the Seattle Sports Union; the Update with Adam Copeland (talking Giants prospects); Press Box Online (Orioles); Sox Machine (White Sox); and Karraker & Smallmon (Cardinals).

My own podcast returned in late January, with three episodes since my last roundup: Michael Schur, author of How to Be Perfect and creator of the show The Good Place; the post-punk band Geese, an episode where I answered a bunch of reader questions on the top 100 too; and union labor lawyer Eugene Freedman, who gave his thoughts on the MLB lockout. You can subscribe via iTunes, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

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→ February 17, 2022
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Dune.

Dune could have gone wrong so many ways, but the biggest risk in converting Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classic to the big screen was always the plot. The novel’s setting is iconic, from the desert planet to the sandworms, yet the complexity of the story around the Christ-like Paul Atreides stood out as the greater challenge, the one aspect of the book that couldn’t be addressed with CG. Denis Villeneuve’s Dune does a remarkable job of distilling the first half of the book into a single, accessible story that simplifies the plot without overdoing it, while also providing the look and feel that have helped make the novel an enduring classic of its genre.

(Disclaimers: I love the original Dune novel, so much that I read all five of Herbert’s increasingly terrible sequels, but have still never seen the David Lynch film adaptation from 1984.)

Dune follows the familiar template of the ‘chosen one,’ a story arc that stretches back to the Bible and continues now in YA fiction, most notably the Harry Potter series. The messiah here is Paul Atreides, the teenaged son of the Duke Leto Atreides, who rules the planet Caladan, and his concubine Lady Jessica, a member of the cultish spiritual order the Bene Gesserit. Paul exhibits unusual mental abilities from an early age that indicate that he may be the savior foretold by the Bene Gesserit’s prophecy. The story opens when the Emperor orders the Duke to take stewardship of the desert planet Arrakis, the only source of the drug known as spice or mélange, which also happens to be an essential element in interstellar travel. The present rules of Arrakis, House Harkonnen, are not especially keen to lose their powers, leading to armed conflict that puts Paul on the run and in charge of his own destiny.

Villeneuve’s decision with his co-screenwriters to split the book into two films, hoping the first would fare well enough that the studio would greenlight the second, paid off twice – it did do well enough that we will get a sequel, and I would argue that it only did that well because it didn’t try to cram a densely plotted 500-page novel into a 150 minute movie. There’s so much room to breathe here that Timothée Chalamet gets far more screen time to give a little depth to Paul’s character, while Rebecca Ferguson, as Lady Jessica, may be an even bigger beneficiary, as some of that character’s most important scenes would almost certainly have been cut in a single-film adaptation. Paul’s character comes alive more in the second half of the book, once he’s on the run with the Fremen people, which leaves a modest void in a first-half movie for another central character to fill, and Ferguson does so with the film’s best performance.

The cast of Dune is incredible on paper, although the result is more “I can’t believe they got Charlotte Rampling!” than “I can’t believe how great Charlotte Rampling is!” Oscar Isaac is here. So is Javier Bardem. Stephen McKinley Henderson, who you know by sight even if you don’t know him by name. And there is some value in having these very famous people, any of whom can command a scene by themselves, in smaller roles. They don’t get quite enough to do – not even as much as Jason Momoa does in a memorable turn as Duncan Idaho.

The film does look amazing, though. Villeneuve is no amateur at worldbuilding on the screen, and this is the Arrakis of the page, whether in wide shots or close-ups, feeling vast and foreboding and terrifyingly dry. You’ll find yourself craving water watching this film. Many of the special effects are impressive, especially those showing the various flying vehicles on the surface of the planet, but there’s just as much wonder in the sword fights or the scenes showing troops massed in formation when the Atreides arrive on Arrakis to take control.

Dune ended up with ten Oscar nominations this year, including Best Picture, Best Cinematography, and Best Adapted Screenplay, but not Best Director, which surprised me given how much Villeneuve had to put together here even taking the script (which he co-wrote) as a given. I’m not surprised at the lack of acting nominations, given how many people and named characters in the film, and how little depth most of them get even in a film that’s a solid two and a half hours. Ferguson might have had an argument for a supporting nod, but that’s probably it. My guess is Dune wins a bunch of technical awards – ones it may very well deserve – without taking Best Picture or Adapted Screenplay. Of the four BP nominees I’ve seen so far, though, I think it’s my favorite.

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→ 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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