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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Parallel Mothers.
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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:
- The top 100 prospects
- The prospects who just missed the top 100
- The ranking of all 30 farm systems
- The org top 20s:
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…
- Longreads first: There is no evidence that wearing masks in school harms children’s mental health or educational development. None. I’ll repeat: There is no fucking evidence, people. Every one of those anti-mask grifters you see on Twitter hawking their $80 a year substack is full of shit.
- In 2003, a woman in Australia was convicted of smothering all four of her babies to death. Several researchers believe she is innocent, and that a mutant gene was the real cause of the tragedy.
- MIT Technology Review has a very long piece on the scientist at the center of the lab-leak conspiracy theory.
- The scourge of private equity is now causing rapid inflation in housing prices, with PE firms buying up apartment buildings, hiking rents, and skimping on or even forgoing basic services to tenants.
- WIRED looks at how personal finance apps are making phone scams even easier.
- The Harvard Gazette ran an excerpt from Kevin Birmingham’s 2014 book on Ulysses’ long and tortuous road to publication. I reviewed The Most Dangerous Book back in 2016.
- MEL gives us the subterfuge behind the surprise pop hit “Tubthumping,” and how the anarcho-communist band Chumbawamba used its success for their own ends.
- Are you getting cardboard shipping boxes from U-Line? Not only does the family that owns U-Line fund the far-right site The Federalist, they’ve given millions to other right-wing extremists, including some of January 6th terrorists. If you use U-Line in your business, find another vendor. If you get a package in a U-Line box, contact the shipper and ask them to use someone else for their boxes.
- Space elevators are a staple of hard science fiction novels and stories, but if one breaks, it’s a massive and potentially fatal disaster. The plot of Green Mars includes the sabotage of a space elevator, and while I don’t care for the novel, Kim Stanley Robinson does a reasonable job of getting the science right on what happens when the broken cable hits the ground.
- REI sent this union-busting email to all of its employees, then published a podcast full of dubious rationalizations for its anti-union efforts.
- The Washington Post profiled the woman who led the first successful effort to unionize a Starbucks store.
- COVID-19 becoming “endemic” doesn’t mean it’s becoming harmless.
- In fact, there’s evidence that the claims that the omicron variant is less severe than prior ones are due to greater population immunity, not to any reduced ability of the virus to cause serious illness. Also, there’s a subvariant of concern, too, although once again, vaccination confers substantial benefits.
- COVID denialists on the right seem to think the virus is actually a person – at least in the language they use to minimize it.
- Right-wing pundits, including Jordan Peterson, were up in arms because a Boston hospital denied a heart transplant to a man who refused the COVID-19 vaccines – but such rules are routine to increase the likelihood of the patient’s survival.
- Anti-vaccine loon Christiane Northrup has become a major donor to Maine Republican candidates, including former Governor Paul LePage.
- Two Long Island nurses have been charged with selling fake vaccine cards and entering the false information into vaccination databases, taking home $1.5 million in the process. But what happens to the people who bought them?
- An inevitable consequence of all of this anti-vaccine misinformation is that now measles vaccination rates are falling in the UK.
- Meanwhile, Republicans in 14 states are pushing bills that would block medical boards from censuring doctors who spread misinformation; in Tennessee, the Know-Nothings in the state legislature even pressured the medical board into removing language from its website discouraging such doctors.
- Speaking of foundations of misinformation, Fox News was happy to talk to an anti-vax state trooper … until he died of COVID-19.
- A New Jersey police officer was driving drunk when he struck a pedestrian … and then put the body in his car and drove home with it. He didn’t call 911. He now faces a dozen felony charges.
- The story about the Los Angeles train robbery a few weeks ago, which made news across the country and even in Europe, is really about how Union Pacific laid off 4/5 of its security force – and how the mainstream media increasingly just buys whatever corporations are selling.
- This is horrifying: San Francisco police used DNA from a woman’s rape kit to identify her as a suspect in another crime. And we wonder why women don’t come forward to report their assaults. I’ve already reached out to two state Senators in Delaware, and to the Attorney General, to see what can be done to make sure this does not occur here.
- Over 650 Philly cops who claim they’re too sick or injured to work are fine holding down other jobs.
- A tax cheat and father of a child murderer has bankrolled a right-wing streaming network that has given Steve Bannon a platform again. It’s available through most major streaming platforms, too.
- A tremendous piece of local journalism led to the resignation of the police chief of Brookside, Alabama, who had set up a racket that scammed drivers out of over $500,000 a year in fines and forfeitures – often when they were no closer to the town than the local interstate.
- A Republican state senator in Texas has sworn in a declaration that the state’s Republicans violated federal voting rights laws in a recent redistricting.
- Minneapolis police insisted on a no-knock warrant in a predawn raid – raid, a word that should be reserved for war, or perhaps when there’s a lost ark involved – on an apartment in the city. They ended up murdering an innocent civilian sleeping in that apartment.
- Spokane district attorney Larry Haskell is under fire, again, for his wife’s long history of racist and white nationalist comments online. It’s more disturbing that voters keep electing him.
- Families in West Virginia are suing a school that held a Christian revival on campus during school hours, with some teachers forcing students to attend. This isn’t the first such incident in this school district.
- I liked Encanto, and assume it’s going to win the Oscar for best animated film, but I noticed the script glossed over the weird power dynamic between the Madrigals and the townsfolk. Jim Vorel wrote about that very topic for Paste.
- Hannah Keyser has a great piece at Yahoo! Sports asking why people get so mad over Hall of Fame voting. The abuse was worse than ever this year.
- Ohio’s extreme gerrymandering leads to more extreme laws from legislators who don’t have to worry about re-election, even though the laws are often opposed by a majority of Ohio voters.
- The mayor of Ridgeland, Mississippi, a suburb of Jackson, decided to order the city’s libraries to remove all LGBTQ+ materials before he’d release their funding. The city’s leaders are denying this is what’s happening, but a local nonprofit group has raised all of the missing funds from donations.
- This feels like old news now, but McMinn County, Tennessee, banned Maus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, from its school curricula because there are naked mice in it.
- Who’s behind all the book-banning movements? Major conservative dark-money donors, of course.
- And they’re also pushing educational gag orders across the country, with over 120 such bills introduced in the last 13 months.
- Like the one in Florida, supported by the death-loving governor there, that wants to force LGBTQ+ kids back in the closet. (DeSantis can’t even bring himself to condemn a neo-Nazi rally in Orlando.)
- Or the laws targeting the chimera of critical race theory in schools, which threatens teachers’ livelihoods and even their freedom.
- LZ Granderson writes about the extreme illogic of Michelle Tafoya leaving the media to campaign against racism education, when she herself lives in a town that has become majority white thanks to racial covenants in housing contracts.
- The British government recently moved to make something called “virginity repair” surgery illegal. I didn’t know this was a thing, but it is clearly founded in some seriously deranged religious beliefs.
- Matt Walsh, espouser of misogynistic and homophobic views under the guise of Christianity, tried to trick a bunch of trans people into participating in a documentary attacking trans rights.
- This is from before the Oscar nominations were announced, but the LA Times‘ Justin Chang implored the Academy to nominate Drive My Car for Best Picture – which they did.
- Craig Calcaterra continues to expose New Albany, Ohio, school board member Philip Derrow as a science-denying history-ignorant turnip.
- Is a building at Florida State University causing cancer in the people who work there? Cancer clusters are often matters of chance, but in this case, there’s evidence of actual carcinogens in the air ducts, and the school has closed the building to investigate.
- Missouri’s Attorney General Eric Schmitt courted snitches among parents opposed to mask mandates, setting off a series of pointless, expensive battles that probably did way more to harm kids than wearing a mask ever could.
- Instagram is doing nothing to suspend or block accounts promoting hate speech.
- I don’t often agree with Jennifer Rubin’s editorials in the Washington Post, but I think her take here is correct: The only way Democrats can hope to fight Republican voter-suppression efforts is to change the venue to local elections and referenda, taking the message directly to voters – and even that may not be enough.
- I can’t love this tweet enough.
- Board game news: I saw a prototype of Earth, a tableau- and engine-building game from Inside Up Games, at PAX Unplugged, and from what I saw it looks right up my alley. It’s on Kickstarter now.
- So is Trekking Through History, the third Trekking game (following Trekking the National Parks and Trekking the World) from Underdog Games.
- And so is Rolling Heights, the new roll-and-write game from the designer of Mystic Vale.
- Tiwanaku, the game previously known as Pachamama, will relaunch on Kickstarter on March 9th.
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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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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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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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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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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…
- Before the longreads: Richard Uihlein has been a major dark-money contributor to the GOP and various right-wing endeavors (including anti-LGBT rights groups) for years, but a new report found that he helped fund groups trying to overturn the 2020 election. His company, U-Line, is one of the major sellers of shipping boxes in the country. If you run a company where you use cardboard boxes, please consider using another manufacturer. If you get a package and the box was made by U-Line, contact the shipper and ask them to consider using another manufacturer. Here’s another call for a boycott of U-Line.
- Longreads: Brookside, Alabama, has created a machine for hitting travelers with bogus traffic violations and generating fines for it, according to this outstanding investigative piece from John Archibald on AL.com.
- Clarence Thomas’s wife, Ginni, is a right-wing activist with what appears to be undue influence at the Supreme Court, according to this report from the great Jane Mayer (author of Dark Money). Judge Thomas has not recused himself from cases in which his wife his involved.
- Texas Monthly looks at the stalled investigation of an abusive gymnastics coach in Texas, and how it parallels a dysfunctional process across the gymnastics community.
- The Washington Post has the story of an alleged thief who lived with a wealthy woman for the last few years of her life and then started selling off her art and jewelry when she died – and may have stolen from many other people as well.
- Joss Whedon gave a long interview to New York that I don’t think went the way he planned it. Tim Grierson broke it down for MEL.
- A Vanderbilt student who was raped by another student there writes about how the university declined to expel her rapist, despite a finding that he had committed the most serious violation in the student code.
- Input looks at Instagram “petfluencer” account owners who clone their pets. Just because you can does not mean you should.
- I didn’t know Cincinnati had an unused subway tunnel network for a train system that was never built.
- Maybe Cincinnati would have a subway if they hadn’t pissed away $920 million to pay for the Bengals’ stadium in the last twenty years – with more costs to come.
- The University of Michigan fired its President after learning he may have had an affair with a subordinate, about two years after they first moved to fire their provost for his own sexual misconduct allegations.
- Senate Republicans’ move to block the John Lewis Act puts more than just voting rights in grave peril.
- DirecTV announced, finally, they will drop the misinformation-spreading OANN later this year. Do you have Verizon FiOS? CenturyLink? Prism? AT&T U-Verse? Call them and ask them to do the same.
- The seven Chicago-based AV Club employees who were told to move to Los Angeles, only to find their jobs had already been listed online for new hires, have all chosen to take their CBA-protected severance.
- The COVID-19 vaccines are safer than aspirin or acetominaphen.
- Arkansas is so in the thrall of anti-science forces that they gave ivermectin to prisoners who caught COVID-19, despite a lack of any evidence that the deworming paste is effective against the virus. Some of those prisoners are now suing the state.
- Florida Republicans may pass a bill that would prohibit schools from teaching anything about the racism of white people that would make white students feel “discomfort.”
- Many major media outlets have been reporting on a “rise” in thefts that isn’t actually happening. Stories about cargo thefts against Union Pacific have omitted the fact that UP laid off most of its security employees during the pandemic.
- Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni – who has been in power since 1986, and once spent foreign aid to buy himself a private jet – has imprisoned and tortured a writer for insulting him and his son in a tweet.
- Paste profiled Yard Act, one of my favorite new rock bands of the last two years, a Gang of Four-influenced post-punk act with lyrics that are spoken as often as they’re sung.
- Board game news: The Kickstarter for Skate Summer, a route-building and set collection game from Pandasaurus, opened up this week.
- Keymaster Games, publisher of Parks and Trails, opened pre-orders for Caper: Europe, an upcoming two-player heist-themed game.
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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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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…
- Longreads first: This New York Times story by Maggie Jones on the realities of sex after age 70 is one of the best pieces of longform journalism I’ve ever read. It is quite long, but it’s thorough, clear, and highly empathetic, all while discussing a topic that remains largely taboo even as other areas of human sexuality have become more acceptable in mainstream media.
- Guitar World interviewed Mastodon’s guitarists about their writing and playing styles, including the writing of their massive new album Hushed and Grim.
- Have we forgotten how to read critically? I’d counter: Did we ever know?
- From last March: Smithsonian goes long on the history of Neapolitan pizza, the world’s “first” fast food. (Maybe.)
- Philadelphia magazine has updated its list of the metro area’s top 50 restaurants for the first time since the start of the pandemic, but without ranking them this time. The new list has two of our favorites right here in Wilmington, Bardea and Le Cavalier, and some wonderful places in Philly, including High Street (in its new location!), Stina, Suraya, and Friday Saturday Sunday.
- A study widely shared by anti-vaxxers has been revised to reflect new data showing vaccine boosters are more effective against the Omicron variant than previously believed. I’m sure the anti-vaxxers will correct themselves as soon as possible, without anyone else pointing this out to them.
- That said, Omicron is still putting incredible pressure on our overtaxed hospital system, in large part due to the number of people who have refused to get vaccinated.
- Here’s a study showing that COVID-19 vaccines nearly eliminated hospitalization and life support requirements for teenagers who were infected with the virus. No vaccinated teens in the study group died of COVID-19, compared to seven deaths in unvaccinated teens. Here’s the Washington Post article on the study.
- CORBEVAX, the open-source COVID-19 vaccine that represents our best chance so far to vaccinate the developing world, has received more funding from the company that makes Tito’s Vodka than from the U.S. government. Wealthy countries are busy buying Pfizer and Moderna vaccines while failing to fund a vaccine that would reduce the odds of new variants emerging in less wealthy nations.
- A Canadian
herojudge ruled that an unvaccinated father may not see his kids until he gets vaccinated. Imagine being so caught up in anti-vax conspiracy theories that you would rather refuse to see your own kids than get a safe, effective shot. - Maine’s medical licensing board has temporarily suspended the license of a doctor who spread anti-vaccine and other COVID-19 misinformation. She has also prescribed hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, two drugs that are ineffective against COVID-19, by falsely claiming her patients had other illnesses.
- There was a huge brouhaha over on the forums for Tabletop Simulator after it came out that a moderator was banning users just for saying the words “gay” and “trans.” Kotaku has the whole breakdown, including the culture wars in TS’s Steam reviews now.
- The L.A. Times has more on the battle between G/O Media and the Writers Guild, with the union arguing that the AV Club’s private equity owners have treated the site’s Chicago-based employees unfairly.
- Baltimore’s top prosecutor, Marilyn Mosby (D), has been indicted on charges of perjury related to a series of financial transactions where she claimed hardship so she could buy multiple properties in Florida.
- Michigan’s Attorney General has referred her investigation of GOP electors who signed a document that falsely claimed Trump had won the state’s electoral votes to federal prosecutors. The electors may have committed forgery of a public record and election law forgery, each of which would lead to jail times.
- Also in Michigan, a woman filed a criminal complaint accusing former state House Speaker Lee Chatfield (R) of sexually assaulting her when she was a teenager. Chatfield is the woman’s brother-in-law, and he claims they had an “affair” that began after she turned 18. It’s very Clemens-esque.
- A Chicago alderman and community organizers are urging the feds to investigate how Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D) may have misused federal COVID-19 relief funds.
- Two LA cops ignored a robbery in progress to try to ‘catch’ a Pokemon Go creature. They were fired, sued to get their jobs back, and lost their appeal.
- Amazon employees in Bessemer, Alabama, will get a second chance to vote on unionizing after the company was found to have engaged in unfair anti-labor practices during the first election.
- Also in Alabama, an especially loony anti-vaxxer who was recently arrested for refusing to wear a mask in a Whole Foods is now saying drinking your own urine cures COVID-19 (it doesn’t).
- This story on bokit, a fried-dough sandwich native to Guadeloupe, will make you want to visit the Caribbean island and French overseas department.
- Invasive species from around the world are threatening Antarctica’s ecosystems by hitching rides on the increasing number of ships that visit the continent.
- Board game news: There’s a video trailer for a new board game based on the hit series The Queen’s Gambit, a show about an existing board game called … chess.
- All we have so far is this tweet, but the publisher of the great two-player game Riftforce has announced their second title, a deck management game for up to 8 players called Underdogs, as well as an upcoming expansion to Riftforce.