→ December 19, 2018
→ By

Top 18 albums of 2018.

It was a year of huge disappointments, with albums from CHVRCHES and Arctic Monkeys that fell far short of their previous highs – or even their previous lows. Even Judas Priest returned with an album of one good song and a bunch of tracks that just made them sound old. HAERTS finally made it back, but their second album was just solid, nowhere close to the revelation of their debut. St. Lucia’s return was sort of in between his tremendous, unabashedly poppy first album and the inexplicable follow-up. A number of highly acclaimed albums (Mitski comes to mind) did absolutely nothing for me – and let’s not even talk about how the 1975 have suddenly become critical darlings.

In the midst of the wreckage there were a few albums I enjoyed, although I have to admit my little gimmick of pushing the list’s length to the last two digits of the year is getting harder as I go. Some other albums I did like, just not enough for the list, include the Black Panther soundtrack, Alkaline Trio’s Is This Thing Cursed?, Interpol’s Marauder, Khruangbin’s Con Todo El Mundo, Cœur de Pirate’s en cas de tempête, ce jardin sera fermé, Thrice’s Palms, Hinds’ I Don’t Run, Van William’s Countries, and Iceage’s Beyondless.

Previous years’ album rankings: 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013.

18. Pinkshinyultrablast – Miserable Miracles. Formerly a shoegaze band, this St. Petersburg (Russia, not the one with the baseball tomb) trio made a hard left into spacey, electronica-heavy dream pop on their third album, which didn’t have a standout track for me (maybe the lead single, “Dance AM”) but works better as a cohesive listen across its nine tracks and 37 minutes.

17. Jorja Smith – Lost & Found. Shortlisted for this year’s Mercury Prize – which went to Wolf Alice’s sophomore album, a record I found very disappointing – Smith’s debut record blends her soulful voice with classic R&B sounds and contemporary electronic elements. Her vocal style reminds me of part Alicia Keys, part Erykah Badu, with her English accent seeping through at times. The album works well as a whole, rather than for individual singles, but I’d recommend the title track, “Teenage Fantasy,” and “The One.”

16. Courtney Barnett – Tell Me How You Really Feel. The Australian singer/songwriter’s sophomore album was less hook-filled than her debut, but her lyrics remain a highlight throughout, and her laconic delivery remains unique even in a music world where every other singer is trying to carve out her own distinct style. Highlights include “Charity,” “City Looks Pretty,” and “Nameless, Faceless.”

15. Django Django – Marble Skies. A bit of a return to form for the lads who were shortlisted for the Mercury Prize in 2012 after their debut album had a global hit with “Default,” here featuring a handful of radio-worthy singles, including the title track, “Tic Tac Toe” (released in 2017), “Surface to Air,” and “In Your Beat.” Their style of electronica doesn’t always crank up the BPM, often tending to minimal arrangements and layered vocals; the closing track, “Fountains,” has a simple vocal line, a drum machine, and maybe someone’s little Casio keyboard, but still manages to craft a compelling melody and enough depth to the sound so it doesn’t sound like your teenaged neighbor’s demo tape.

14. Belle & Sebastian – How to Solve Our Human Problems (Parts 1-3). Originally released as three EPs before the band packaged them together as one fifteen-song album, this Belle & Sebastian record is truly all over the place in style, format, even feel, a retrenching after the poppy Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance but still boasting some big hooks on songs like “The Girl Doesn’t Get It,” “Show Me the Sun,” “The Same Star,” “We Were Beautiful,” and the throwback closer “Best Friend.” Some tracks here just don’t work (“Cornflakes” comes to mind), but the positives outweigh the negatives.

13. Toundra – Vortex. This progressive instrumental metal band from Madrid released their fifth album this year, the first that didn’t have a Roman numeral as its title. Other metal albums I liked in 2018: Tribulation’s Down Below, Riverside’s Wasteland, Horrendous’s Idol, High on Fire’s Electric Messiah, and the fascinating Stranger Fruit from Zeal & Ardor, who blend Negro spirituals with blackened death metal.

12. Lauren Ruth Ward – Well, Hell. The last album on this list I heard this year, even though it came out back in May, Ward’s debut record showcases her smoky voice as she goes from slithering on the opener “Staff Only” to sultry on “Make Love to Myself” to snarling on the LP’s best track, “Blue Collar Sex Kitten.” She’s an openly queer singer who sings a lot about being openly queer, about coming to terms with her sexuality and being comfortable in her own skin. It’s a record deserving of a lot more attention than it’s received, especially given the (deserving) critical acclaim for Courtney Barnett, who produces similarly thoughtful lyrics and slides between indie-rock genres.

11. CLOVES – One Big Nothing. Kaity Dunstan finally dropped her full-length debut, three years after “Frail Love,” which appears on this record, made my year-end top 10. Her voice is stunning, even with some of her quirky intonations, although I think she’s best suited to minimalist songs that bring her vocals to the front, regardless of tempo. This includes a re-recorded version of “Frail Love” as well as “Bringing the House Down” and “Don’t You Wait.”

10. Artificial Pleasure – The Bitter End. They made my top 100 last year with “Wound Up Tight,” an upbeat dance/rock number that appears here after the slamming opener “I Need Something More” and takes us into the frenetic “All I Got,” a trio of high-energy songs that sound like someone rebooted The Human League and shot them full of coke. They dial the energy down on a few tracks, as in “On a Saturday Night” – for these guys, the drop in tempo makes it sound like a dirge – but most of this record gets the right blend of darkwave and danceable rhythms. The six-minute track “People Get Everywhere” even veers into a little classic funk for a perfect change of pace in the middle of the album.

9. Snail Mail – Lush. Lindsey Jordan recorded this when she was just 18, and it’s been all over best-of lists; Pitchfork and Paste both placed it fifth on their year-end lists, and it appeared on rankings by the Guardian, AV Club, and NPR. Her vocals might be an acquired taste, but her music feels surprisingly timeless for someone so young – something you’d hear on college radio in virtually any decade, varying just by the quality of production, although women singing and playing this kind of indie-rock is a more modern phenomenon. “Pristine” is the breakout single, although “Heat Wave” and “Golden Dream” are also strong.

8. Sunflower Bean – Twentytwo in Blue. Well, when one of your band members is a dead ringer for a young Bob Dylan, I guess you lean into it and title your sophomore album as an homage to “Tangled Up in Blue.” Their second record is tighter than their first, with better songwriting and a little more swagger on tracks like “Burn It,” “Crisis Fest,” and “Human For,” and more purpose to slower tracks like “Twentytwo” and closer “Oh No, Bye Bye,” which sounds like a lost track by the Church.

7. Soft Science – Maps. Soft Science’s third album was the first I’d heard of their music, ten short songs with one-word titles, adding up to all of 33 minutes that run the gamut of alternative music styles, from the smashing opener “Undone,” which redoes My Bloody Valentine for 2018 with audible vocals, to mid-90s Lush-like Britpop on “Breaking,” to ethereal post-new wave on “Diverging,” on to the country-tinged closer “Slip.” There isn’t a bad track in the mix, which is a rare thing in our era of two good songs and 45 minutes of filler; if anything, I find myself wishing the record were longer whenever I finish it.

6. Jungle – For Ever. Jungle first appeared on my 2014 year-end top 100 with “Busy Earnin’,” their debut single, but the rest of the album fell a little flat to me, lacking enough bangers to balance out the slower tempo neo-soul stylings of the remainder of the record. Their second album strikes that balance much more effectively, with plenty of upbeat, ’70s R&B/dance numbers like “Heavy, California,” “Happy Man,” “Smile,” and “Beat 54 (All Good Now)” along with slower jams like “Cherry” and the orchestral “House in LA.”

5. Wombats – Beautiful People Will Ruin Your Life. The fourth full-length from the wry post-Britpoppers was a bit short on hit singles, but the extended version, which included two bonus tracks I loved (“Bee-Sting” and “Oceans”), ended up with a solid half-dozen above-average songs, which is rare for me to find. The album also includes 2017’s “Turn” and “Lemon to a Knife Fight” as well as this year’s “Cheetah Tongue,” but there are a few absolute duds on here, which was definitely not true for their previous album, Glitterbug.

4. Turbowolf – The Free Life. Hard rock with occasional electronic elements from a Bristol quartet that seem delightfully anachronistic in their willingness to just rock out – similar in feel to The Darkness but not in sound. This album, their third, features “Domino,” “Cheap Magic,” and “No No No,” but most of the songs just flat-out rock.

3. Black Honey – Black Honey. The Brighton indie-pop quartet’s debut album was several years in the making, but the deluxe edition, which has 21 tracks now includes all the singles I’ve recommended over the last four years – “Midnight,” “Bad Friends,” “I Only Hurt the Ones I Love,” “Hello Today,” “Crowded City,” “Somebody Better,” and “All My Pride.”

2. TVAM – Psychic Data. Electronica, mostly instrumental, almost entirely weird … except every once in a while Joe Oxley, who records as TVAM, slips in an utterly memorable hook, as on my favorite track from the record, “These Are Not Your Memories,” or on the searing “Porsche Majeure,” or the massive six-minute closer “Total Immersion,” which feels like a huge hit in 1986 in an alternate universe where new wave spawned another generation of rock musicians.

1. Young Fathers – Cocoa Sugar. The winners of the 2014 Mercury Prize returned with their best album yet, a genre-busting album with hip-hop elements that rest on a lo-fi foundation of neo-soul, dub, and experimental music. Pigeonholing these guys as a rap act does them and the genre a disservice, and since their debut album, Dead, they’ve moved even further into experimental territory, often dispensing with traditional song structures while playing with textures and sounds. Some songs have little to no rap content; some mix noises you might associate with late ’80s industrial music into lo-fi electronic jams. “Toy” was a modest breakout single thanks to a clever video, while “Fee Fi” isn’t far behind thanks to the menacing tone of the repeated piano riff. Sometimes my album of the year is comfortable, something I just enjoy start to finish because it’s full of strong melodies or reminds me of a particular style of music from when I was younger. Cocoa Sugar is the opposite: It’s great because it makes me so uncomfortable, diverging constantly from what I expect and from the confines of conventional popular music with which I grew up.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ December 18, 2018
→ By

Shoplifters.

Shoplifters, Japan’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and a nominee for the same award at the Golden Globes, is a little film with an enormous heart that spends almost all of its two hours on the verge of shattering, asking huge questions about the meaning of family without providing any easy answers. It won the top prize at Cannes, the Palme d’Or, this past May, and is out in U.S. art theaters now.

The family at the heart of the film includes Osamu Shibata and young Shota Shibata, who work as a team of shoplifters to cope with their poverty, as Osamu says that items in a store belong to nobody until someone purchases them. Coming home from one such escapade, they spot a very young girl, four or five, named Yuri, playing outside in the cold, alone, with scars on her arms that point to child abuse. They take her in, and her arrival in the household – which includes Osamu’s wife, Nobuyo; her young sister, Aki; and Hatsue*, whom they all call “Grandma” – changes the dynamic within their tiny apartment, at first causing strife (such as Shota’s jealousy) but eventually bringing some of them closer to each other and causing them to act much more like a family, culminating in a big day out to the beach for Yuri’s first time seeing the ocean. Over the course of the film, director/writer Kore-eda Hirokazu gradually reveals the actual relationships among these different characters, who form a family by choice rather than by blood, opening up questions of what it means to be a family and how much we need those relationships to thrive. Of course, this situation can’t last, and when a shoplifting trip goes off the rails, the family is caught, and no one escapes unscathed from the aftermath.

* The actress who played Grandma, Kiki Kirin, passed away in September at the age of 75, after the film’s release in Japan.

Although Shoplifters never stops moving – there’s barely any silence in the film, as the characters are always talking, even if it’s about the most mundane matters – almost everything that happens in the script is there to highlight some facet of the family’s dynamic, and how these people, all misfits of some sort, have come together to fill in the voids in their lives left by the absence of a proper family. Nobuyo and Hatsue have a running conversation throughout the film about whether family is better when you choose it, rather than when it’s chosen for you; Nobuyo thinks the bond is stronger when it’s one you chose. Even though Shota, who, as you might have guessed, isn’t actually Osamu and Nobuyo’s son, and Yuri were kidnapped, they were also both taken from situations where their families neglected or abused them, and taken into a household where they were provided with love and affection – which doesn’t excuse the kidnapping, certainly not in the eyes of the authorities, but again raises the question of what happens to us when our biological families don’t give us what we need.

None of the adult characters has clean hands in this story, and Kore-eda takes pains to avoid lionizing them for their poverty or absolving them of their sins for their kindness towards Shota and Yuri. Aki’s parents think she’s studying abroad (maybe), but she’s actually working in a peep show parlor, where she may be falling in love with a customer. Grandma milks her late husband’s family for regular gifts, but complains about their parsimony. Nobuyo and Osamu have a bigger secret that isn’t revealed till the tail end of the film, as well as the true story of how and where they found Shota. Kore-eda has given his characters good intentions, but each shows an entirely human failure of execution, while the various authorities, from a shady landlord to the investigators who eventually find the family, all seem able to execute while suffering from an absence of heart.

You’ll want a happy ending for these characters by the end of Shoplifters, especially for the two kids, but it just wouldn’t be realistic, and doing so would undermine the points Kore-eda is trying to make with his melancholy story. Characters who don’t fit in anywhere, who live on the margins of society and take the family they can build because the world hasn’t given them another one, aren’t going to get that kind of resolution.

Sakura Ando is especially affecting as Nobuyo, whose history we see in glimpses that hint at past tragedies, and who ultimately sacrifices more than anyone else to try to make things right for Shota. Both kids are played by first-time actors – Kairi J? (Jo), who plays Shota, looks like he’s going to lead a J-pop boy band at some point, while tiny Miyu Sasaki, playing Yuri, has a knack for heart-melting facial expressions, especially amazing for someone who was just five or six when this was filmed.

Embed from Getty Images

J?, Sasaki, and Mayu Matsuoka (Aki)

Shoplifters even beat out Burning at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards for best film, and both should be nominated for Oscars in the Best Foreign Language Film category, although that one seems like it’s Roma‘s to lose. It’s such a lovely, heartbreaking film, with such universal themes, that it’s worth seeking out near you while it’s still playing in independent theaters.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ December 17, 2018
→ By

Roma.

Alfonso Cuarón’s passion project Roma, his first film as director in five years and just his eighth feature film since his debut in 1991, has already become the most-lauded movie of 2018, and it’s easily one of the best I’ve seen this year. It looks different from anything else I’ve watched, it sounds incredible, and the script finds a seemingly impossible equilibrium between the tension of its story and the lyrical quality of both the setting and the way Cuarón layers the scenes with moving cameras.

Based on Cuarón’s childhood, growing up in the Colonia Roma neighborhood in Mexico City, Roma shows us this story through the eyes of the family’s maid, Cleo, played by first-time actress and preschool teacher Yalitza Aparicio. Cleo, a woman of Mixteco ancestry who speaks that language to other servants but Spanish to the family, and another servant Adela seem to handle everything for the family, as the father is emotionally absent when there and then physically leaves the film not that long after it begins, while the mother seems incapable of handling even basic domestic chores – or just unwilling to do so. Cleo cooks, cleans, puts the kids to bed, wakes them up, dresses them for school, takes them there, picks them up, and more, while the mother, Sofia, watches and occasionally criticizes, when she’s not dealing with an obviously breaking marriage to Antonio.

Cleo’s story eventually takes center stage when she becomes pregnant by Fermin, a young, feckless man, obsessed with martial arts, who naturally leaves her the moment he finds out she’s expecting. Along the way, we see the resolution of the issue with Sofia and Antonio’s marriage, the 1971 Corpus Christi massacre of antigovernment protesters by a PRI-backed paramilitary group, the tensions between landowners and tenants outside of Mexico City, and the divides of race and class that separate Cleo and Adela from the children they care for every day. Almost everything that happens in the movie is serious, even heavy, from a marriage imploding to an unplanned pregnancy to political unrest to, eventually, a threat to some of the main characters, yet the film is often silly or sweetly funny, especially when it comes to Sofia’s attempts to drive the family’s oversized car or Fermin’s naked display of toxic masculinity.

If Roma had been a major American studio release with a big budget and dialogue in English, the posters could easily have used the tagline “Cancel All Men.” Every male character in this film is some sort of terrible, with Antonio and Fermin competing for the title of worst. Cleo is the heart of the movie and the only character to get full development; the kids are more like props, and Sofia is often shown in shadow because we see her through Cleo’s eyes. The necessity for Sofia, Cleo, and Sofia’s mother to carry on in Antonio’s absence in a culture that clearly doesn’t respect women the way it respects men is never made explicit but is a clear undercurrent throughout the story. Cuarón populates the film with lesser male characters as well – the chauvinist doctor who doesn’t think Sofia’s (female) obstetrician is up to the task, the random creep who decides Sofia needs ‘cheering up,’ even the comic Professor Zovek (played by the Mexican wrestler known as Latin Lover), whose outfit should have left more to the imagination.

As compelling as the plot can be at times – the protests, the delivery, the beach scene near the conclusion – Roma is an even better technical achievement. Shot in black and white, filmed by Cuarón himself after his regular cinematographer couldn’t commit to the full three and a half months for the project, Roma plays out like a fugue for the eyes, with cameras often moving laterally at a different pace from the characters they’re following, with characters in the backdrop moving at yet another pace. (If I see this again, I’d like to just try to watch what’s happening in the background, as there was never enough time to focus on that and the main characters, but I always knew there was more to see if I shifted my gaze.) The quality and pervasive sense given by the sound is just as remarkable; even watching at home, without any high-end equipment, I felt immersed by the sound of the waves in that beach scene, so much so that I was mildly relieved I hadn’t seen it in the theater because it might have been overwhelming. Cuarón seems to have made this film to put viewers into a specific atmosphere of time and place, using these visual and auditory techniques to do so, and it works, well enough to make up for the lack of strong characters beyond Cleo or the non-traditional nature of the plot, which has several smaller, interlocking arcs rather than a single narrative that takes us from start to finish.

Roma has already won top honors from film critics’ groups in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York (three different such bodies), San Francisco, Toronto, and Washington, although it was ineligible for the Golden Globe category for Best Motion Picture – Drama. (The Golden Globes can be a fun telecast, but their movie awards and nominees the last two years have been awful.) It seems like Roma is a dead lock in two categories at the Oscars, for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Cinematography, and should earn nominations in Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Sound Editing at the very least. I’d love to see Aparicio get a Best Actress nomination, but that seems like an unrealistic hope given her much more famous competition; I’d certainly give her the nod over Glenn Close (The Wife) or Melissa McCarthy (Can You Ever Forgive Me?), both of whom are currently in the top five on GoldDerby.com’s Oscar odds. I still have a few contenders left to see, but this and Burning are the two best films I’ve seen so far in 2018.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ December 15, 2018
→ By

Stick to baseball, 12/15/18.

This week’s MLB winter meetings weren’t great, but I did write up a few moves: Cleveland’s trades for Carlos Santana & Jake Bauers, the signings of Joe Kelly and Jeurys Familia, the Lance Lynn signing & Tanner Roark trade, the Rays’ signing of Charlie Morton, and the Phillies’ signing of Andrew McCutchen.

On the board game front, I wrote up every game I tried at PAX Unplugged for Paste, and reviewed the Terraforming Mars app (on Steam) for Ars Technica.

I resumed my free email newsletter this week, after a longer break than I wanted due to those same stupid meetings and stupid prospect calls getting in the stupid way, but you should join the over 5000 current subscribers for even more of my words.

And now, the links…

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,
→ December 14, 2018
→ By

Las Vegas eats, 2018 edition.

Three days and four nights in Las Vegas did at least mean a few interesting meals in a city that is known for overpriced celebrity chef-backed restaurants on the Strip but that has a vibrant food culture once you leave the gaudy façade and head a few miles in any direction.

The best meal I had all week was at The Black Sheep, a Vietnamese-influenced spot in a strip mall (of course) in Rhodes Ranch in southwest Vegas. There was no way I wasn’t ordering the cocktail called Mr. Brownstone – once I saw it on the drink menu, it wouldn’t leave me alone – which comes with an ice cube made of brown sugar, ginger, and mint. The server heats the top of it with a kitchen torch, and then pours the bourbon into the divot the flame created. I would just counsel you to drink it fast, because I didn’t and then the drink became overly sweet at the very end.

Their duck confit was similarly calling me from the menu and was superb. It comes with Israeli couscous, cooked a little past al dente, with a mild yellow curry sauce, onions, and shaved Chinese broccoli. There was also a single flower on the dish which I realized at some point was no longer on the dish because everything tasted so good I ate the flower without realizing it. For dessert, they had two options, a chocolate tres leches cake that is always on the menu and a seasonal persimmon bread pudding; I took the former and regret nothing. The chocolate cake is served with a chocolate ‘nest’ on top, a disk of lacey dark chocolate, as well as Vietnamese coffee mousse, cocoa nibs, and a Tahitian vanilla crème anglaise. It took an award-winning effort of willpower to stop myself from finishing the entire cake.

Settebello is a VPN-certified pizzeria with two Nevada locations, one in Henderson and one in Red Rock, plus three in California and one in Salt Lake City. They import many of their key ingredients from Italy, including the flour in the dough and real prosciutto di Parma; the crust is soft with visible char on the outside, although I expected a slightly airier feel to the edges. I tried their namesake Settebello pizza, a margherita base with sausage roasted in their wood oven, pancetta, mushrooms, and pine nuts. I don’t think it needs both meats, but the sausage had a good smoky note from the oven and the pine nuts provide some crunch to contrast with the soft center of the dough.

Flock and Fowl is a fried chicken joint with a handful of not-fried-chicken items on the menu, but really, if you’re going here, it’s to eat fried chicken and drink their ‘flocktails.’ I kept it simple with the two-piece (drumstick and thigh) plate with rice, slaw, and pickles; the chicken was outstanding, perfectly crispy on the outside but tender on the inside, on the salty side but cooked so well that I was fine with the sodium hit. The spicy sambal sauce it’s served with has a nice, complex flavor if you can handle the heat, which is significant. The rice was served ‘plain’ but had a natural buttery taste to it; the slaw, on the other hand, had zero flavor at all and needed some kind of acidity. We also ordered the “boneless wings” (I know, not a thing) with a salt and Sichuan pepper (which isn’t really pepper, but does taste very much like it) crust; their flavor was perfect, not spicy but just a bit hot, while the meat on the interior was a little overcooked. I drank a Lychee’s Knees cocktail, with gin, lychee, and lemon, fruitier than I normally go for in drinks but the interplay of the lychee’s sweetness and the herbal notes in the gin worked well.

On the breakfast side, I didn’t do quite as well; all three places I tried were just okay. The Peppermill was probably the best of the three, even though its atmosphere leaves everything to be desired. Just get something with hash browns in it – that was the best thing I ate there – but skip the hot blueberry or apple muffins, which are overloaded with sugar. CraftKitchen in Henderson has an incredible menu and a well-known area chef behind it, but the crab cake benedict I got was surprisingly light on flavor; the egg was perfectly poached but the crab cake was mostly bread crumbs, and there was too much moisture in the dish for the bread to handle. PublicUs is a hipster coffee shop – no, Jakie Wohl wasn’t there – with a full menu of egg dishes and avocado toast. The sourdough waffle was quite good, definitely a unique combination of flavor and texture, but the Portuguese sausage I got on the side was lukewarm.

For coffee, Mothership in Henderson is your best bet, with house-roasted single origins available on drip or as pour-over; I got their current option from Rwanda and the roast was perfect so some of the stone fruit flavors came through in the cup. I also had coffee at PublicUs twice; their “macchiato” is not a traditional one, even though I asked the woman who took my order that specific question, so what I got had way more milk than I like, and the pour-over I got the second time came in a mug that was cold so the coffee cooled off too quickly … and the drink was $8, which might be a fair price in a decade after climate change has crushed the global coffee crop but is ridiculous right now for a bean (from Costa Rica) that isn’t that special.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ December 13, 2018
→ By

The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan won the Man Booker Prize in 2014 for his World War II novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a graphic description of life for POWs forced by the Japanese army to build the Burma Railway in 1943. Through the eyes of its flawed hero, Dorrigo Evans, the novel exposes the brutal conditions for soldiers and civilian slave workers, with estimated deaths over 100,000, as well as the impact of that imprisonment and a failed affair on Evans’ life for decades beyond the war.

Evans is a student rather than a soldier, a man in love with literature and poetry going back to the ancient Greeks, a doctor conscripted to fight in the war and eventually made a colonel, a position that carries over to leadership over the other captives as they’re forced to work on the railway even as malnutrition and disease overtake them. Evans is a paragon of virtue in the literal and metaphorical jungle, sacrificing his own well-being to try to keep as many of his men alive as he can, negotiating without leverage to try to get sick men time off the line so they might recover, setting up a makeshift hospital and even performing amputations and surgeries that increase patients’ odds of survival just to something above zero. Flanagan creates a whole cast of eccentrics around Evans to put a veneer of comedy above both the inherent tragedy that many of these men will die there and none will leave unharmed as well as the unstinting descriptions of the physical degradation of life in the labor camp. (Flanagan gives a lot of detail on how the men’s bodies betray them due to dysentery and other parasites, so if you can’t deal with substantial prose about emesis or defecation, this book may not be for you.)

Wrapped around that narrative is a secondary thread about Evans’ romantic life – his quick but futile attachment to Ella, whom he marries but to whom he is serially unfaithful for decades, and his one affair, during the war, with Amy, the young wife of Evans’ uncle Keith. Amy is very much his one who got away, but after the war their affair does not resume, and he returns to Ella and a life of emotional isolation and meandering. Evans struggles to balance that internal void against his rising profile as a national hero, a man who fought to protect his men from the worst their Japanese tormentors could dish out and who himself survived to be celebrated, even as he feels worse about himself and can’t find any meaning in all of their suffering.

The two subplots don’t tie together particularly well even at the end of the book, however, leaving a disjointed feeling even after the final pages. Keith lies to Amy, telling her that Dorrigo died in captivity, and then after the war, Evans learns from Ella that Amy and his uncle died in a gas explosion at their hotel, so there’s no happy ending or even a continuation of this great, passionate affair between them, and the story barely resurfaces in the remainder of the book. Instead, after the war, we get more of the story from the perspective of two of the captors who also served as main characters in the jungle – a sadistic Japanese officer and a Korean guard who especially enjoyed beating the captives. The former manages to escape punishment and, given a chance, repents, to some extent, and tries to create a new life where he can redeem himself. The latter is caught and tried, finding himself blamed and punished for the atrocities that were ordered by men above him in the hierarchy who often weren’t tried or received lighter sentences. The theme here, reminiscent of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, seems to be that things don’t always come right in the end, and that any idea of justice for the victims or survivors was misguided, so it fell to each individual to make his own meaning out of meaninglessness.

That choice by Flanagan detracts from the center of the novel, which focused on life in the slave camp from the perspectives of Evans and the Japanese officer, by the way it splinters the reader’s focus and fails to adequately tie the Amy subplot into anything else other than the connection through Dorrigo. The storycraft within each plot thread is very well-executed, and the prose, while often difficult to stomach, is erudite and evocative, so that each individual chapter or section works on its own. The finished product lacked some of the unity that a great novel like this, that covers an enormous historical event by casting a wide net, needs to have to truly hit its ceiling.

Next up: Still reading Marlon James’ Booker winner A Brief History of Seven Killings.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ December 12, 2018
→ By

Last Orders.

Graham Swift won the Man Booker Prize in 1996 for his novel Last Orders, a book influenced by William Faulkner’s seriocomic classic As I Lay Dying* but rather more somber and fleshed-out in its telling of four men traveling to scatter the ashes of one of their friends. It’s a very quick-moving read where Swift gave each character, including the dead man’s widow and some of the wives and daughters of the men narrating the book, nuance and depth in a short period of time, but falls short on the ultimate question of what Swift is trying to express in the work.

* Whether it was more than just influenced by Faulkner’s novel is a matter of some debate. I don’t recall As I Lay Dying with enough detail to offer an opinion here.

Jack Dodds is the dead man at the heart of the story, a butcher, married to Amy, with a biological daughter June and adopted son Vince, and his death of stomach cancer sets off the events of the novel, including his last wish to have his ashes scattered into the sea at Margate. Amy doesn’t wish to do this, so his friends Ray, Lenny, and Vic join Vince on a road trip to the coast, a journey narrated in parts by the four men, with other chapters telling portions of their history from the viewpoints of Amy and Vince’s wife Mandy. The present-day narrative unveils cracks in the relationships between the four men and between some of them and Jack from before he died, as well as emotional visits with him in the hospital after it was clear he wasn’t going to recover, while other chapters, including those narrated by Amy, unfurl Jack’s complicated home life and relationships with family members. Amy’s pregnancy was unplanned, and June was born with some severe developmental disability that has confined her to an institution; Jack refused to even visit her, while Amy dutifully visited weekly, and that started a crack between them from which the marriage could never recover.

Where Faulkner’s take on a caravan moving the coffin of the family’s dead grandmother bordered on farce, Swift uses Jack’s death to explore the different relationships between these characters, especially how Jack’s life choices – going back to his decision to become a butcher – affected those around him, permanently damaging any chance of a functional marriage to Amy. Mandy appears in the history as a runaway teen whom Jack decides to take in as an employee and boarder, a strange and perhaps inappropriate decision that also looks like an attempt to replace the ‘normal’ daughter he never had, only to have his adopted son end up marrying the girl who was a sort of surrogate daughter. Amy had an affair that Jack probably didn’t know about, with one of his friends, and her own story – that of a wife who felt emotionally abandoned because her husband washed his hands of his own daughter – is the most emotionally engaging part of the novel, including the question of whether she would rekindle the affair now that Jack has died. I haven’t seen the film adaptation, but it appears from what I read on my Internet that Amy’s character, played by Helen Mirren, gets a more significant arc in the script.

What misses the mark in Swift’s telling is the boys-being-boys aspect of the road trip. He accurately depicts the modern masculine idea of restraining one’s emotions, of swallowing your grief until you choke on it, but there are scenes here where the men are just acting like children – the juvenile fight, the bizarre behavior in a bar somewhere on the road – that don’t get at any ultimate point. This is a larger story set on the framework of a road novel, but a road novel has to have a metaphorical destination as well as a physical one, and Last Orders skimps on the former.

Next up: I’ll be reading Marlon James’ Booker winner A Brief History of Seven Killings for a while.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ December 11, 2018
→ By

Mirai.

Mirai, a Japanese animated film that isn’t from Hiyao Miyazaki but is very much in the tradition of his films and those of his Studio Ghibli, snagged the fifth Golden Globe nomination for Best Animated Feature, along with the four obvious nominees this year (including Isle of Dogs). Directed by Mamoru Hosoda, Mirai tells the story of a young Japanese family from the perspective of the son, Kun, who seems to be about four years old, and how his life changes when his baby sister Mirai arrives, upending Kun’s world, especially as his father decides to work from home and take care of the kids.

The plot itself is very simple and sweet: Kun is fascinated at first by the baby, but quickly realizes she isn’t going to be a playmate (at least not yet), and that her presence means he’s getting less time and attention from his parents, so he starts to say she’s boring and he hates her and the usual stuff. The family lives in a curiously-shaped house that has a small enclosed yard, and when Kun goes there in the middle of one of his tantrums or otherwise storms off, he has these … experiences, never specifically identified as dreams or even explained as real or imagined, but where the family dog is a tall young man with shaggy hair, or Mirai appears as a teenager and asks Kun for help with something. (The name Mirai means “future,” so there’s some wordplay involved here that doesn’t quite translate; the Japanese title is Mirai no Mirai, meaning “Mirai from the future.”)

Mirai is whimsical the way most Miyazaki and similar Japanese animated films are, with some genuinely funny sequences like when Kun, teenaged Mirai, and the human version of the dog are trying to creep into the house to put something away and then must creep up on Kun’s father to retrieve a little bamboo piece stuck to his pants. It’s entirely a visual gag, one of several strong ones that dot the film. And the handful of landscape shots are stunning, whether out in a field or forest or, at one point, on a rainy city street, as well as shots of trains and within Kun & Mirai’s family “tree” that evoked a sense of motion like you’re speeding through a tunnel or on a roller coaster. If we don’t quite have a cat bus or parents turning into hogs, we do still get the blending of reality and fantasy that characterize the genre and allow Hosoda to tell us Kun’s story from the child’s perspective without it becoming a tired mess.

The story drifts along through Kun’s various fits over trivial stuff either directly around Mirai or around how his parents are different now that he has a sibling, until he has the worst tantrum of all because he wants to wear his yellow pants (they’re in the dryer) on a family trip. This leads to Kun running away, or at least imagining it, the longest of these dream sequences and by far the darkest – probably not appropriate for young kids, even though everything before that would be fine for little ones. This is also what separates Mirai from so many other cute but ultimately forgettable animated films; Hosoda doesn’t pull up short, showing viewers a graphic depiction of what it’s like to be a child who’s lost and terrified, calling back an image we saw at the start of the film in one of Kun’s board books.

Writing as a parent who still remembers how difficult the first few months were after my daughter was born, when her mom was still recovering from a difficult delivery and neither of us was getting enough quality sleep, I thought the whole air of this story felt very authentic. I have memories of sitting at the kitchen table, trying to write or even think through my fatigue, while also trying to do my part around the house (cooking and some cleaning) and feeling like doing little more than going back to sleep. I can’t imagine how much harder it is when you have an infant and another little one around.

The English dub has voice-overs from John Cho and Rebecca Hall as Kun’s parents and Daniel Dae Kim in a smaller role as Kun’s great-grandfather – a war hero who built motorcycles, just generally an all-around badass – who appears in one of Kun’s escapades, all of whom are excellent if perhaps a little too easy to recognize (especially Cho, who is so damn good in everything he does). GKids is doing a limited theatrical release, showing the movie exactly once in my local multiplex over the weekend, so if you get the chance to see it near you on the big screen, it’s worth seeking out.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ December 10, 2018
→ By

The Favourite.

I can’t think of another 2018 film I’ve been looking forward to more than The Favourite , which pairs three actors I really like – Olivia Colman (whom I loved in Broadchurch), Rachel Weisz (very good in this year’s Disobedience), and Emma Stone (I mean … duh) – with Yorgos Lanthimos, the director of 2016’s The Lobster, a film that included Weisz and Colman as well. It’s a dark comedy, that sends up stolid films about the political backstabbing at the English court, and shifts much of the power to the women, with nearly all of the men playing secondary roles in every bit of the story. It’s brutally funny, often surprisingly crude, and yet somehow just a beat or two off the mark even with the three women all at the tops of their games.

Colman plays Queen Anne, a slightly dimwitted monarch who eats too much and suffers from gout, and who is friends with/controlled by Lady Marlborough (Weisz), the wife of the head of the British Army (Mark Gatiss), who rules the court with an iron fist, often by running roughshod over the Queen. Enter Abigail (Stone), a cousin of Lady Marlborough’s who has lost her title thanks to a profligate father and begs for a job in the castle, landing as a scullery maid before she manages to attract the Queen’s attention by concocting an herbal remedy for the Queen’s gout. This elevates Abigail into a higher orbit, and sets off a rivalry between her and her cousin for position and status – Abigail trying to secure some, Lady Marlborough trying not to lose what she has. The Queen, meanwhile, isn’t quite as oblivious to their machinations as she seems, and rather enjoys the competition for her affections as well as the novelty of having another person around to fawn over her.

The studio has positioned Colman as the lead actress for award season – she won Best Actress from the LA Film Critics’ Association on Sunday, and earned a Golden Globe nomination for the same in the comedy/musical category – but I side with the Gotham Independent Film Awards’ approach, where they gave a Special Jury Prize to all three women as an ensemble. Nobody is the lead here, and all three deliver Hall of Fame-caliber performances. Colman had the hardest job of the three, playing a woman whose body is gradually betraying her (she’s helping, of course, with her libertine eating habits) and who is prone to emotional outbursts and outright juvenile behavior to get what she wants. Weisz, who’s always good but can often translate on screen as inadvertently cold, has found the perfect role for her mien, as Lady Marlborough is some kind of wicked, possibly a sociopath, definitely lacking empathy, and permanently looking out for herself. Her severity in appearance and speech, the former amplified by how she’s costumed and made up, makes Lady Marlborough an easy antagonist for viewers to loathe while the plucky young Abigail makes her first moves – even though, of course, Abigail is far from the ingenue she pretends to be.

Stone already had the Oscar win for La La Land, but this is her first leading role in this sort of film, and she’s more than up to the task, including affecting a convincing upper-class English accent – which should have marked her from the start to others in the castle that she might be of the manor born despite her circumstances. Abigail will smile and flatter as she’s sharpening the knife to slit someone’s throat (metaphorically … there is blood, but not that sort), and plays the victim beautifully to her advantage, with Stone running through a panoply of faces to Abigail’s world, scheming behind closed doors and displaying a quiet cunning that the film reveals as her standing and confidence grow. I did not expect less from Stone than from the others, but I also walked away more impressed with what she delivered given that she hasn’t made films of this caliber before. Abigail is a Moll Flanders for our time and Stone has outdone even the work that won her an Academy Award.

The script as a whole is a lowbrow black comedy in the most highbrow of settings. Aside from a few servants who get a line in here or there, the film takes place entirely Upstairs, and almost no dialogue comes from anyone but the Queen, her retinue, and the MPs leading each party. That makes the crass humor and heavy use of gutter language – the c-word flies through this movie like a hornet harassing its victim – amusing at first, simply for the contrast, although the script leans too much on that; by the time there’s a joke about semen on someone’s hand near the end of the film, the novelty of this bathroom humor in fancy dress has long worn off. The humor works far better in the extremely witty repartée between characters, especially when Lady Marlborough and Abigail go at each other directly or through a third party, and with some outrageous visual humor, notably the dance scene with Weisz that gets a glimpse in the trailer but builds its humor perfectly with each escalation until its abrupt end. There’s still humor to come later in the film, but that is the movie’s zenith.

The Lobster, written by Lanthimos, ended on a question – whether a character would do something dramatic for the woman he might love. The Favourite ends in ambiguous fashion, as it’s unclear whether the ‘victor’ in the competition between the two women has won a Pyrrhic victory, but the story loses steam as it approaches the finish line. One problem is that there’s a moment with Abigail that shows her capable of far greater cruelty than the story gave us reason to believe; her venality to that point came entirely in pursuit of gains for herself. Another, greater problem is that as the film approached its resolution, it became less clear what the story is really trying to tell us: Is there a point to this beyond the sheer entertainment of two women trying to one-up each other, or of three great actresses putting on the performances of their lives for two hours? That’s probably enough, but I left the theater thinking that I wasn’t sure what the capital-p Point was, and even 24 hours later I still don’t know.

That said, I’m calling at least five major Oscar nominations for The Favourite: Picture, Actress, Supporting Actress (two), and Screenplay. Director seems a bit less likely than those; the Golden Globes didn’t nominate Lanthimos, but did nominate Peter Farrelly for his hamhanded, sentimental direction of Green Book. I’d also expect nods for Costume and Set Design; although we always tend to notice the women’s dresses in costume dramas, the men’s here are actually far more interesting to look at because so many of them are utterly ridiculous. (There’s a sort of running gag about wigs that I rather enjoyed.) I’d be very curious to hear what experts think of the cinematography, as Lanthimos employs some very strange shots, including fish-eye looks at rooms and off-balance pan shots, which I found offputting but could easily be effective to more experienced eyes. That’s probably seven to ten nominations in the end, and that kind of bulk probably puts it up near A Star Is Born for the top prize.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ December 8, 2018
→ By

Stick to baseball, 12/8/18.

I had five pieces for ESPN+ subscribers this week, on the Robinson Cano trade, the Paul Goldschmidt trade, Washington signing Pat Corbin, the Yan Gomes trade, and the Jean Segura trade. I did not hold a chat this week due to other demands on my time.

I have updated my annual posts of recommendations of cookbooks and gifts for the cooks in your life. My top board games of the year columns for Paste and Vulture should both go up next week; I’ll post my year-end music rankings here the week of the 17th.

And now, the links…

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,