→ December 30, 2017
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Haroun and the Sea of Stories.

I’d only read one Salman Rushdie novel prior to this month, tackling Midnight’s Children back in 2010; I found it a somewhat difficult read, but brimming with imagination, big themes, and incredible prose and wordplay. What I didn’t know until very recently was that he wrote a children’s novel called Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which appeared on the Guardian‘s list of the 100 greatest novels ever written. It’s quite wonderful, featuring more of the wordplay and creativity that marked Midnight’s Children, reminding me in many ways of The Phantom Tollbooth, one of the best children’s novels I’ve ever read (twice, in fact, once on my own and again to my daughter), and the works of Roald Dahl.

Haroun Khalifa is the young son of Rashid, a storyteller who suddenly loses his gift of narration when his wife leaves him, leaving the two of them without any means of support and Rashid without his identity. When Rashid fails to deliver at a speaking engagement, he and Haroun are whisked off to the Valley of K for his next assignment, speaking for the politician Snooty Buttoo – there are a lot of Butts in this book – only for Haroun to discover that his father has lost his ability to weave stories because Iff the Water Genie is trying to sever Rashid’s imagination. This leads Haroun to learn about the Sea of Stories, the plot by the evil Khattam-Shud to poison it and block its source, and the impending war between the Kingdoms of Chup and Gup that will determine the fate of the Sea.

Rushdie makes Haroun the hero of his own story in the tradition of children in literature who have to do something to save one or both of their parents. Haroun faces difficult choices and shows courage in the face of great odds, standing up to the various otherworldly creatures trying to steal his father’s gift or kill Haroun’s new friends from Gup or sew the lips of the Princess Batcheat shut. (He gets no help from the vacuous Prince Bolo, the antithesis of the typical prince-hero character, generally saying and doing the wrong thing or just showing no awareness of what’s happening around him.)

The text itself is replete with puns, references to Hindustani words or Indian historical figures, and even pop culture references. Iff and the Butts work for the Walrus, who employs technicians named the Eggheads, a reference I trust I don’t have to explain. Butt the Hoopoe certainly sounds like a nod to the British glam-rockers Mott the Hoople. Many names allude to characters in the stories of One Thousand and One Nights, including Haroun al-Rashid, a real-life Caliph of Baghdad who appears in many of those tales. General Kitab’s name means “book” in Arabic and Hindustani, and his army comprises numerous Pages. And the fish with multiple mouths, or maws, are referred to as Plentimaws … and there are Plentimaw fish in the Sea. (The book also has a brief appendix where Rushdie explains many of the character and place names.)

It’s also hard to avoid the likelihood that Rushdie wrote this as a reaction to the fatwa issued against him by Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran after the publication of Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses and the general controversy over a portion of the book that some Muslims deemed blasphemous. In the wake of its release, at least ten countries banned the book in some form, including his native India, while many U.S. bookstores declined to sell it. There were also multiple bombings of bookstores and newspapers in the U.S. and in the United Kingdom related to the book’s sale, while the Archbishop of Canterbury called for an expansion of England’s Blasphemy Act to cover offenses against Islam. (That law was repealed entirely in 2008.) Haroun may be just a children’s novel, but it’s probably also a parable about censorship and the threat to the marketplace of ideas, showing how a society might suffer in a world without stories.

Haroun is better for slightly older kids, because the vocabulary would likely be too demanding for children below fifth grade or so, although the story itself would mostly be appropriate – Haroun’s mother runs off with another man near the beginning, but eventually returns without any real comment – and easy for any child to follow. I could see younger kids being disturbed by the threats to sew the Princess’ mouth shut, although Rushdie softens that possibility by having other characters complain about how awful her singing voice is. It’s a book for younger readers, though, so Haroun saves the day, no mouths are sewn shut, and Rashid eventually regains his talent for weaving stories. The beauty of this book is the journey, the literal one Haroun takes to this other world – I haven’t even mentioned the earth’s second moon, Kahani, which you might not have noticed because it moves by a Process Too Complicated to Explain – and the one on which Rushdie takes the reader, with puns and gags flying so fast that you might miss them on your first read. It’s a delight and a testament to Rushdie’s boundless imagination.

Next up: I’m many books behind in my reviews, but right now I’m reading Kat Kinsman’s memoir Hi, Anxiety: Life with a Bad Case of Nerves.

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→ December 29, 2017
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Lotus.

The new board game app for Lotus (itunes) • android), a 2016 title from designers Mandy & Jordan Goddard, comes from the same studio that brought us the wonderful Lanterns app last year, and the game has a very similar look and feel from the graphics to the animations to the sound. The game itself is quite simple and should lend itself well to the app format, but there are a couple of problems with the implementation that keep me from recommending it yet.

On each turn, a player has two actions, which can include placing one or two petals from his/her hand to a single flower, trading in cards for others from the player’s own deck, or adding a ‘guardian’ with his/her symbol to a flower already underway. Each petal card has a specific color and shows one or two icons of your own symbol; when a flower is finished, there’s a bonus for the player who had the most symbols on the flower, whether from petal cards or guardians. When your turn ends, you can refill your hand from your deck or take ‘wild’ flower cards from the table, which have a specific color but no player symbols, and thus are useful for finishing a flower but not for gaining control of it.

When a flower is finished, there are two bonuses handed out. The player who finishes a flower gets one point per petal on the flower, from three (purple) to seven (pink). The player who had the most tokens on the flower, whether from petals or from guardians, gets a second bonus, which can be five points regardless of flower type, or can give the player one of three special abilities for the remainder of the game: a hand size limit of 5 instead of 4, the ability to play three or more petals to one flower in a single action, or adding a guardian with double the influence. The first two are extremely valuable if you get them early, but I’ve had minimal success with the bigger guardian and prefer to skip it for the five points.

Lotus app screenshot

Lotus largely devolves into a game of chicken, where you’re trying to force other players to play petals so that you can finish off one or more flowers on your turn, especially the higher-valued pink or white flowers. There’s always the five-point bonus you get when you have the most petals/guardians on a flower someone else finishes, but even that is subject to change if an opponent plays wisely. If you finish the most flowers, you’ll probably win, even if you weren’t working too hard on maintaining control via your symbols – you’ll get a few along the way regardless. So often players, even the AI players, will trade cards to burn off an action in the hopes that someone else will place cards that make it easier to finish a flower next time. It’s a bit of a drag, and also boosts the luck factor because you need to get the right cards at the optimal time.

The app is gorgeous and runs smoothly, but I have two real issues with it, one of which is that the AI players are not very good, even on the ‘hard’ setting. I had never played this game before I downloaded the app, but can easily beat the hard AI when playing one or two opponents, and usually win or come in second with three. The AI players just don’t utilize the added abilities well enough to compete with a decent human player. The other issue is the lack of an undo function. You have two actions on your turn, and thus should be able to undo the first one before you’ve taken your second one. This is a simple enough function for the programmers to include and I think it’s a necessary one for a board game app that isn’t real-time or involves revealing information with each action. So while the game itself is pretty and pleasant to play, I think both of this issues need to be addressed before I can recommend it.

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→ December 24, 2017
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The Shape of Water.

The Shape of Water is hands-down the best love story between a woman and a fish-man that you will ever see – and, I would hope, the only one. But despite a trailer that makes it look like a Cold War thriller and a romance at the heart of the plot, Guillermo del Toro’s masterful new film is also a profound meditation on the essential loneliness of mankind.

Eliza Esposito (Sally Hawkins) is a mute but hearing cleaning lady working at a secret military facility and laboratory in Baltimore in the late 1950s, along with Zelda (Octavia Spencer), who rarely stops talking but also serves as an interpreter for Eliza’s sign language. One day, the women learn that the lab is now home to “the Asset,” a humanoid sea creature, capable of breathing both in and out of the water, kept in chains and tortured by the security agent Strickland (Michael Shannon). Eliza, fascinated by the creature, begins to eat her lunch in the lab where it’s held, and forges a relationship with the Asset through gestures and shared hard-boiled eggs. Strickland has convinced his military superiors to vivisect the Asset, then kill it, while the scientist Hofstatter (Michael Stuhlbarg) sees that it is intelligent and capable of communication, arguing that it should be kept alive and studied humanely. Eliza, already hoping to rescue the Asset from Strickland’s cruel treatment, learns of the plan and hatches an escape plan with the help of her painter neighbor (Richard Jenkins).

The trailer for The Shape of Water emphasizes the chase for the Asset once Eliza has sprung it from captivity, but that takes up, at most, the last 15 minutes of the film; about 3/4 of its running time is dedicated to the budding relationship between her and the fish, first friendship and then romance. The film requires you to suspend your disbelief in many ways, but the emotional connection between the two characters is convincing: Eliza is entirely alone in the world, abandoned as a baby and raised in an orphanage, with only her neighbor and Zelda as any kind of friends at all; the Asset may be the only creature of his type, and is certainly alone now that he’s been stolen from his home in South America.

But it’s not merely those two who are alone in this film, even if they exist at the script’s emotional core. Her painter neighbor is a closeted gay man in an era when coming out was not a viable option; he’s lost his job due to his drinking, lives alone with several cats, and says to Eliza at one point that he’d starve if she didn’t show up to encourage him to eat. (He also knows sign language.) Zelda is married to a useless husband, complaining daily to Eliza how he doesn’t appreciate or help her.

And then there’s Strickland, the most problematic character in the movie. Shannon’s performance is excellent, as you’d expect, but Strickland is as one-dimensional a villain as you’ll find. He sees the Asset as an abomination, not an intelligent creature, citing Scripture as it suits his beliefs. He’s racist, sexist, and elitist. He develops a spontaneous sexual obsession with Eliza (because she’s mute) and harasses her, while also treating his wife as a prop and his children as if they were barely there. And there’s no attempt to explain his selfish, misanthropic behavior – he is just what he is. This is not a good man making a difficult decision for God and country, or a complex individual faced with a black swan dilemma; he’s a horrible person in every way, which makes him as dull as the serial killer in a horror movie.

The remainder of the film, however, is superb, not least in how del Toro asks you to suspend that disbelief and then runs with the license you’ve given him. There is much that would be ridiculous if you thought about it, but the fabulist script builds the world so quickly and convincingly that very little of what comes after seems out of place. (I had one quibble: why was Hofstatter the only scientist around the Asset? You’d think there’d be a mob of biologists, anthropologists, and so on trying to study it.) The score mixes sounds you might find in French romance films with some more art-house tracks, and even has a fantasy musical number near the end that, again, asks you to just roll with it.

Hawkins should be nominated for all of the awards for Best Actress, and while the competition is stiff this year (Frances McDormand for Three Billboards is also worthy, and you know Meryl Streep will get her annual nod), she might be my pick to win right now. Her role requires her to express everything through expression and gesture, and the character herself grows from this mousy, childlike woman counting out her life in hard-boiled eggs (and other morning routines) to a woman capable of plotting a heist and risking her life for her lover. She’s utterly convincing at both stages of her character’s development. It’s a tour de force performance, with the higher level of difficulty that voters often tend to favor.

Jenkins and Spencer have both earned Golden Globe nominations for their Supporting roles, and Shannon would also be worthy of a nod, although his character’s stock nature might hurt him. This also seems like a lock to earn nods for Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, and Score, at the very least, and if the fish counts, for Costume Design too. I still have three (or more) major Best Picture contenders left to see, but of the 25 films I’ve seen so far this year, The Shape of Water would only be behind The Florida Project on my own rankins.

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→ December 22, 2017
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Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges has become something of a cult film since its 2008 release, earning critical acclaim and a few awards but faring modestly at the box office at the time, instead growing in popularity and stature in the intervening nine years. He’s now back in the critical spotlight for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, another dark comedy, but where In Bruges felt like a farce, or even a slapstick sendup of crime films, Three Billboards weaves its comedy into a far more serious tapestry of grief, violence, and trauma, succeeding in fits and starts but deriving too much of its humor from easy targets.

Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand) decides to rent three disused billboards on a seldom-used road near her house to draw attention to the unsolved rape and murder of her daughter, Angela, seven months previously. The billboards name Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) and ask him why there have been no arrests, and by naming the chief Mildred sets off the volatile, dimwitted police officer Jason Dixon (Sam Rockwell), who still lives with his crone mother and decides to avenge his boss – who is something of a father figure to him – first by petty methods and eventually by violent ones. (Dixon has also previously been in trouble for abusing a black suspect in custody, although he’s still on the force.) Willoughby, meanwhile, is dying of pancreatic cancer, which makes him a sympathetic figure in the town and further turns many of them against Mildred for putting up the billboards.

The plot twists substantially from there, although there isn’t much more to say without spoiling the rest of the film; it is fair, however, to say that the rape and murder of Angela Hayes becomes less relevant to the story as it progresses, so that when it returns to the surface near the conclusion of the film, it appears as much for the maturation of one character as it does for the plot itself. The script meanders as if written by Richard Linklater’s evil counterpart from a mirror universe, highlighting the various eccentric and generally miserable residents of Ebbing, including Mildred’s abusive ex-husband (John Hawkes), his 19-year-old dingbat girlfriend Penelope (Samara Weaving), their depressed and grieving son Robbie (Lucas Hedges), and James (Peter Dinklage), a little person with an evident crush on Mildred. They’re just about all a mess in one way or another, understandably so in many cases, but the billboards set off an expanding tree of ramifications that end up altering the lives of many of the people in the town in largely unexpected ways.

The humor in Three Billboards is pretty spot-on, at least in terms of generating laughs; it’s more overtly funny than In Bruges, certainly, with many laugh-out-loud lines that are perfectly delivered. Dinklage gets the best of them all, sticking a perfect landing on a three-word zinger at Penelope’s expense. But that’s sort of the problem: Nearly all of the gags, spoken or sight, are aimed at the two idiots, Dixon and Penelope, or the little person, James. The actors are all game, and Rockwell has already earned plaudits for his performance as Dixon, taking the character through the movie’s most complete story arc from screw-up to a unique method of redemption, but after a while the jokes about stupid people start to feel very cheap.

The serious side of the script appears at first blush to be a crime story – this girl was murdered, her mother wants justice, and she’ll stop at nothing to get it – but by the second hour it has become a slice-of-life story covering myriad characters, with a noticeable downshift in pace so the individual personae get more time to develop. It reminded me of an interview I saw with Tom Petty for his Into the Great Wide Open album where he voiced his admiration for the lyrics of Bob Dylan, noting how Dylan would often drop the listener into the middle of a story rather than start a song’s lyrics with the setup or introduction. (I wish I knew where I saw this, or even how accurate my memory of it is, but I have always associated it with the video for “Learning to Fly.”) McDonagh’s script does this extremely well: The crime is past, and we hear about it only after the billboards are up. We get very little introduction to any character up front, although we learn relevant details as we go along. And we don’t get much of a resolution at the end, either. The movie is set off by extraordinary events, and driven by them, but the people remain ordinary and the effects almost mundane.

Rockwell is outstanding in his role, as is McDormand in hers, and they have the two most interesting and well-rounded characters in the film. Dinklage has virtually nothing to do, but at least gives his character a little humanity while he’s generally the butt of various jokes. The revelation for me was Harrelson, an actor whose work has never done much for me in the past, but here he takes a character the viewer is predisposed to dislike – after all, Mildred has all but told us he’s a lazy cop uninterested in finding her daughter’s murderer – and makes him complete and sympathetic for reasons beyond his terminal illness. There’s also a character named “Red Welby,” played by Caleb Landry Jones, interesting for two reasons: It can’t be a coincidence that McDonagh named two characters Willoughby and Welby, and Jones may very well end up in three films nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture between this one, The Florida Project, and Get Out.

Three Billboards does turn violent a few times, as is McDonagh’s wont, but not to the extent of In Bruges, nor does it take that film’s tack of using violence for humor. There’s much in this film that is funny, but there’s a clear separation in the script between the laughs and the serious material, so the latter can pose some interesting questions to its audience – most prominently the role of closure in our lives when we are faced with trauma. Mildred doesn’t get it, and she can’t move on with her life. Three Billboards gives that closure to some characters but not others, and then lets us watch the results on everyone in its purview.

EDIT: One last point I forgot to mention – Ebbing, Missouri, is a fictional town. I doubt McDonagh picked that name at random either, and wondered if he was using the word “ebbing,” referring to the movement of the tide back out to sea, as a metaphor for the lives of some of the older characters in the film, or just noting that there is an ebb and flow in every life.

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→ December 19, 2017
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Top 100 songs of 2017.

This is now my fifth annual ranking of the top 100 songs of the year, the sixth year I’ve done such a ranking at all, and they don’t get any easier, really, given the sheer volume of new music released each year – I don’t know if it’s actually more than ever, or if it’s just easier to find it as artists can release singles and EPs directly, even going years before putting out a full-length album. The year in music was a good one, I think, certainly the best year for full albums in ages (despite some huge letdowns from artists who’ve made my rankings before), with far more songs I liked than I could cram on to this list. My list of my favorite albums of 2017 went up a little later.

Previous lists: 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012.

If you can’t see the widget below, you can access the Spotify playlist directly.

100. Wavves – Daisy. I’m constantly amazed by Wavves’ prolific output; this year brought You’re Welcome, the band’s sixth album, plus two non-album singles. This track opened the album, released in May.

99. Spoon – Hot Thoughts. The title track from Spoon’s ninth album was a rare highlight for me on an album that felt a little mailed-in after the stronger They Want My Soul from 2014.

98. Lucius – The Punisher. This quintet became a quartet late in 2016, then released this non-album single back in January, although it would have fit in just fine on their latest album, last year’s Good Grief, which placed “Almost Makes Me Wish for Rain” at #10 on last year’s list.

97. Japanese Breakfast – Machinist. This is the nom de chanson of Michelle Zauner of Little Big League, and the song comes from her second album, which is kind of dark and moody, like industrial wedded to early gothic new wave.

96. The New Pornographers – Darling Shade. I loved TNP’s album Whiteout Conditions, which came out in April, but it seemed to miss its audience, charting lower than their last two albums did both in the U.S. and in Canada.

95. Liam Gallagher – Wall of Glass. The brothers Gallagher both released records this year, and both albums were mostly sad, derivative reminders of what used to be. This was my favorite song from either of the records.

94. The Districts – If Before I Wake. The line “I’m just a narcissist” feels like it speaks so much to our current times, doesn’t it?

93. Sløtface – Nancy Drew. The first of three songs on this list from the Norwegian punk-pop band; I love their hooks but I think I enjoy their witty lyrics even more.

92. Sleater-Kinney – Here We Come. This felt more like a strong album track from the trio than a lead single for a new record, but we’ll take it.

91. Van William – The Country. The lead singer of WATERS (who appear twice further up this list) is working on his solo album, with this the first of two singles to appear thus far from it. Full disclosure: I’ve met Van once and talked coffee & baseball with him, as he’s a diehard Dodgers fan. I believe he is also the second tallest person ever to ride in my car.

90. The Night Game – The Outfield. It’s catchy, and it gets extra points for the baseball reference, but in particular I locked in on how the chorus sounds so much like something the band The Outfield would have sang.

89. Quicksand – Illuminant. Quicksand’s record Interiors was probably the biggest surprise for me in music this year – that it existed at all, and that it was their best album ever. (They hadn’t released an album in 22 years.) They were one of the defining bands of the post-hardcore movement, but rather than just returning to their original sound, they’ve mellowed slightly and added more melodic elements.

88. Sundara Karma – She Said. The Guardian once said this Reading act aspired to the sound of Bruce Springsteen, but I think Oscar “Lulu” Pollock and company are much more of a pure pop act, especially on joyous tracks like this one.

87. Washed Out – Hard to Say Goodbye. I would not say I was a fan of Washed Out’s previous album, Paracosm, but Mister Mellow, while inconsistent, had a slew of tracks I really liked; it seems like Mr. Greene focused more on songcraft this time around instead of creating soundscapes.

86. Confidence Man – Boyfriend (Repeat). I’ll guess now that this will be the first song that folks listening to the playlist in order decide to skip; for me, it’s annoyingly catchy, but if you think it’s catchily annoying I understand that too.

85. Kid Astray – Roads. This Norwegian band, who placed “The Diver” (#39 in 2015) and “The Mess” (#8 in 2013) on previous year-end lists, put out two singles this year, with this my favorite of the pair, ahead of what I presume will be a new album in 2018.

84. Earl St. Clair – Ain’t Got It Like That. I don’t know what to call this song – it’s soulful, but it’s not soul; it’s jazzy, but it’s not jazz – other than to say it’s not a genre I typically even listen to. I do love St. Clair’s singing style and the main hook in this song.

83. Japandroids – Near to the Wild Heart of Life. Remember when they were the industry’s darlings in 2012 with Celebration Rock? Their January release, also called Near to the Wild Heart of Life, didn’t sell as well, didn’t get the same critical acclaim, and barely even got much airplay. I wonder if the nearly five-year gap did them in. Anyway, I’m somewhat alone in that I liked this album much more than their previous one.

82. Wild Beasts – Punk Drunk & Trembling. Wild Beasts announced their breakup in September and released an EP of unreleased tracks from the recording of Boy King, my #2 album of 2016. I guess they’re going out on a huge high note.

81. DJ Shadow with Nas – Systematic. Definitely the best rap song ever to include a recipe for a cranberry cocktail.

80. Artificial Pleasure – Wound Up Tight. I’m expecting big things from this London electronic-rock outfit, who have put out a handful of upbeat, artsy, danceable singles so far, with synth lines to make the Human League proud.

79. Splashh – Closer. Yeah, another band from the “let’s misspell a word by one letter just to annoy Keith” school of nomenclature. Splashh has a bit of a shoegaze sound that really fit in a year when many of the giants of the original shoegaze put out comeback albums.

78. Ten Fe – Twist Your Arm. I thought Ten Fe’s album, Hit the Light, was one of the best of the year, but they’re only on this list twice because two of the album’s best tracks were released as singles in 2016. It’s soft rock, just done really well.

77. The Pale White – Downer. A driving, bluesy rock song, in the vein of last year’s “Down We Go” by With Lions, which showed up in the trailer for Logan Lucky.

76. Daughter – Glass. Daughter’s album this year was the soundtrack to a video game, Music from Before the Storm, yet it worked extremely well as its own work of art apart from the game. The band’s atmospheric sound seems to have translated to the video game world just fine, and this record may have more hooks than their last album, Not to Disappear.

75. No Win – You’ll Be Fine. Former FIDLAR drummer Danny Nogueiras helms this new power-pop act that draws from early emo bands like Jimmy Eat World and earlier acts like Teenage Fanclub and Matthew Sweet.

74. Goldfrapp – Anymore. Goldfrapp has lost all the trappings of their earlier rock-tinged records, with their sound now fully in the electronic/house arena; this hypnotic track led off their 2017 album Silver Eye.

73. INHEAVEN – Bitter Town. INHEAVEN had one of the best rock debuts of the year with their self-titled album; this was my second favorite track from the record, a brief downshift that gets the desolation of the title across in both music and vocals, along with an allusion to “Baba O’Riley.”

72. White Reaper – Judy French. White Reaper does not lack for confidence, naming their sophomore album The World’s Best American Band; I guess I wouldn’t quite go that far, but the record did include two banger pop-rock tracks, this one and another higher up the list.

71. Everything Everything – Can’t Do. E2’s album A Fever Dream was a bit disappointing to me, as it lacked some of the musical freneticism of songs like “Cough Cough” and “Kemosabe” or the breathtaking ambition of “I Believe It Now,” but it still had its moments, including this single, which features some stutter-stop percussion and the vocal gymnastics of Jonathan Higgs. I’m lovin’ the bass, I’m lovin’ the drums, indeed.

70. Hundred Waters – Wave to Anchor. Hundred Waters’ sophomore album, The Moon Rang Like a Bell was my #1 record of 2014 thanks to its combination of subtle but strong melodies and the use of vocals as an additional instrument rather than a mere complement to the synths and percussion. Their 2017 follow-up, Communicating, felt a little safe in comparison, still good but lacking the highs of the previous record. This was the most accessible song on the album.

69. Sløtface – Pitted. Few bands on this list – or anywhere in music now – sound like they’re having as much fun as Sløtface does. The earworm in this song is the line about “playing Marry, Fuck, Kill/with every actor that’s ever played James Bond.”

68. Royal Blood – Hook, Line & Sinker. When these guys get heavy, they get heavy, and it’s so damn good. The main riff here could come from a Black Sabbath album track, but the vocals and the riffs behind the chorus turn it into a tremendous piece of hard rock bordering on pop.

67. The Preatures – Girlhood. I still don’t know what the repeated line in the verses is – whatever makes me a modern girl? A moddie girl? – but it doesn’t matter. It feels very ’90s college rock in a good way.

66. Maisie Peters – The Place We Were Made. Peters is a Youtube star who released this, her debut single, shortly after she turned 17. It’s quite a bit mellower than what I usually like, but I love both the fretwork and the melody in the chorus, and this feels like it’s the announcement of a huge talent.

65. Bully – Kills to Be Resistant. I can’t get behind the critical love for Alicia Bognanno’s band, but this song is a bit more accessible – she doesn’t screech the way she does on some of their other singles – and the theme feels quite relevant at the moment.

64. Hoops – On Letting Go. Lo-fi dream pop from an Indiana quartet that can be quite hypnotic, with that high-pitched synth line repeating like a mantra and taking this song back about 45 years.

63. Portugal. The Man – Easy Tiger. Portugal. The Man had the biggest breakout hit of the year with “Feel It Still,” but their whole album, Woodstock, is excellent, my favorite from them so far (surpassing In the Mountain in the Cloud). They haven’t lost their flair for the dramatic at all, evident on several tracks from the album including this one, “Tidal Wave,” and “Rich Friends.”

62. Black Map – Ruin. This hard-rock trio made my top 100 last year in almost the same spot, as “Run Rabbit Run” landed at #65; that song and this one are both on their newest album In Droves.

61. Ten Fe – In the Air. I don’t usually think of this kind of soft-rock/adult contemporary as ‘driving’ music, but this song absolutely has that feel from how the drum and bass lines establish the tempo from the outset.

60. Are We Static – Heartbreaker. This Manchester band calls itself “alt-rock” and cites some mainstream artists as influences, but this song, by far the heaviest on their album Embers, is more into the shoegaze/Madchester vein than the rest of the record, which is why it’s my favorite.

59. Panama – Hope for Something. Upbeat dance-pop from the Australian quintet led by Jarrah McCleary; this is from their third EP, also called Hope for Something. Their last record produced “Always,” which was #51 on my 2013 list.

58. Afghan Whigs – Demon in Profile. The Whigs’ comeback album, In Spades, was one of several shocking returns this year – Quicksand, Slowdive, and Ride all come to mind – and all of those records turned out to be pretty good. In Spades had two standout tracks, this one and “Toy Automatic.”

57. The New Pornographers – High Ticket Attractions. The second of three songs here from this album, I think this one got the most airplay and it was the lead single from the record, but I preferred the title track.

56. The Riff – Weekend Schemes. It starts out like a Madchester track, but when the vocals come in, it’s more like The Hold Steady, not least because the lead singer sounds a hell of a lot like Craig Finn. I would suggest to these fine lads that they work on their lyrics, though.

55. Quicksand – Fire This Time. Quicksand struck a great balance on this album, Interiors between the heavy, hardcore-inspired riffs fans of their earlier work expect and the need or desire to produce something accessible. The minor-key guitar line that powers this song is a perfect example, as it’s dark and inherently heavy, but also memorable enough that it moves the song forward rather than dragging it into sludge-metal territory.

54. Slowdive – Star Roving. Slowdive’s first album in 22 years had two standout songs on, including this one, which sounds like vintage shoegaze with a little bit of Olivia Tremor Control’s “The Opera House” thrown in for good measure.

53. WATERS – Something More. Van Pierszalowski is pretty good at crafting little earworms for his songs; their latest album, also called Something More!, had two lines in particular that stuck in my head, both of which, coincidentally, included the F word.

52. Coast Modern – Comb My Hair. When I first heard this, I thought it was a new WATERS track, as it has that same sort of laconic California vibe and a similar sound from the lead vocalist. That’s all to the good.

51. Beck – Dear Life. Beck’s album Colors was one of my favorites this year, with my #1 song of 2015 (“Dreams”) and a slew of other great singles, and not just the uptempo songs I tend to prefer from him. This has a more relaxed pace but still works for me due to the recurring piano riff that gives it a different sort of rhythm.

50. Birdtalker – One. Old school folk-rock like the Mamas & the Papas or the Byrds used to make.

49. Death from Above – Never Swim Alone. The heavy, whining guitar lick that starts off this song could have come off one of Royal Blood’s albums, and it marks DfA’s progression on their third record, Outrage! Is Now, to crafting complete songs rather than just pushing an intriguing sound.

48. Alvvays – Plimsoll Punks. I don’t care for Alvvays’ lead singer’s voice, and didn’t really like their latest album, Antisocialites, other than this song, which is also more rock-influenced than the rest of the record.

47. Allie X – Vintage. Allie X’s debut album, Collxtion II, came out in June, and it veers more towards the twee end of electropop than I tend to favor, but this song’s chorus is too damn catchy for me to ignore.

46. Wavves – No Shade. I think this is the shortest song on the list at 1:47, but that’s Nathan Williams’ style: get in, drop the hook, get out.

45. Grandaddy – Brush with the Wild. I remember some newspaper music critic saying Grandaddy would be the next Radiohead right around the turn of the century; that didn’t really work out, did it? They split in 2006 and their album Last Place, their first in eleven years, came out in March.

44. Foster the People – Lotus Eater. I liked their 2014 album Supermodel more than most listeners did, I think, but their latest record, Sacred Hearts Club, mostly just bored me – the big ideas from FtP’s last record seemed absent. This one track takes a different, harder-edged direction, really the only song from the album I even wanted to listen to twice.

43. Anteros – Cherry Drop. Wikipedia has this London quartet tagged as “dream pop,” but this song certainly isn’t that – the thumping, serpentine guitar line behind the vocals is almost punkish and gives the song an urgency that you don’t find in dream-pop tracks.

42. White Reaper – The Stack. If you make the girls dance, then the boys’ll dance with ’em.

41. The DMAs – Dawning. They’re constantly compared to Oasis, which is neither apt nor particularly fair; they’re influenced by Oasis, certainly, but by lots of other Britpop and Australian acts who were in turn influenced by classic rock of the ’70s.

40. Ride – All I Want. Ride’s debut album, Nowhere, was a landmark in the shoegaze scene in England, but by their second album they’d already started to shift more into traditional alternative rock territory, with cleaner production and decipherable vocals. Their comeback this year, Weather Diaries, continues in that vein, almost like their final two pre-breakup albums (which weren’t well received by fans or critics) never happened.

39. Hippo Campus – Baseball. I mean, how could I resist?

38. Washed Out – Get Lost. The beginning does sound like a kid playing with his first Casiotone keyboard, but I promise, once the drum beat kicks in, it’s a real song, my favorite from Mister Mellow.

37. Yonaka – Wouldn’t Wanna Be Ya. It’s obnoxious, but in a good way, both from the lyrics and the droning stoner-rock guitars.

36. Wolf Alice – Beautifully Unconventional. I didn’t think Visions of a Life delivered at all on the promise of Wolf Alice’s first record, with a bunch of songs that sounded like someone imitating My Love is Cool rather than building on its foundation. I did like “Heavenward,” the first track, although it goes on a bit too long.

35. Portugal. The Man – So Young. As I said above, this was one of my favorite albums of the year; it’s a shame it’ll be remembered for That One Hit and not for the complete body of work.

34. WATERS – Hiccups. Another extremely catchy, summery track; this one caught some airplay on alternative stations and I think it might have done better if it had come out when the weather warmed up.

33. Waxahatchee – Never Been Wrong. I like Katie Crutchfield’s musical style more than her individual songs, as she has a great country/folk/rock hybrid sound going on but doesn’t always hit the melodies for me. This one does, of course, since it’s here, including the harmonies in the chorus and the big guitar-driven build in the song’s bridges.

32. Black Honey – Somebody Better. Black Honey appeared twice on my top 100 last year (not including the song “Black Honey” by Thrice, which also made the list), and I have compared them repeatedly to the power-pop act Velocity Girl from the 1990s, which is very high praise from me. Black Honey dropped three more songs this year, but I’m still waiting eagerly for their full-length debut.

31. Versing – Body Chamber. It takes some stones for a Seattle band to name its debut album Nirvana, especially since they might be influenced a bit by Kurt Cobain but certainly don’t sound much like the grunge icons. Their lead singer, Daniel Salas, is a huge fan of the Mars Volta, and I can hear bits of Sonic Youth, Hum, and the Sheila Divine here. The big selling point here is the melancholy passage behind the chorus, which provides a tension that’s never fully resolved.

30. Everything Everything – Desire. A Fever Dream had a few highlights, but I thought the back half of the record was pretty thin; in fairness, E2 has more ideas in two singles than most bands put on an entire album. The title track from the record didn’t make my top 100, mostly because at six minutes it’s about 25% too long, but they do get points for the ambition of the latter half of the song.

29. alt-J – In Cold Blood. There was only one bigger disappointment for me in music in 2017 than alt-J’s Relaxer — I’ll get to the other one in a bit – as the English trio has moved further away from their minimalist leanings on An Awesome Wave and more into self-consciously weird yet radio-friendly alternative rock. They still nabbed a Mercury Prize nomination for the album, which I assume is sort of like how Rafael Palmeiro won a Gold Glove the year he spent as a DH.

28. Beck – Colors. The title track from Beck’s album is the second of three songs from the record to make this list, and if you add “Dreams” from the 2015 top 100, which appears on this album in two forms (one of which has clean lyrics, because the F-word is so scary). There’s no one like Prince out there now, nor will there every truly be, but Beck is the closest we’ve got – a musical savant who can jump between and meld styles like virtually nobody else.

27. The New Pornographers – Whiteout Conditions. Carl Newman is a fountain of great pop ideas and bold arrangements for his supergroup (although this album didn’t include Dan Bejar, who also records as Destroyer). The rising vocal lines here give you the sense that you’re always ascending, something Franz Ferdinand could learn from.

26. Space Above – Let It Still. The new project from the keyboardist for The Naked and Famous, Space Above is … well, spacier than TNaF’s output. It’s atmospheric without sounding like something you’d find on a New Age station, boosted by vocals from Maddie North of So Below.

25. Bad Sounds – Wages. I’ve got my guilty pleasures in music too, although I was bummed that Bad Sounds’ subsequent singles didn’t carry forward this Soupdragons/Space Monkeys kind of pop ebullience. If any song on this list is going to get you moving, this is it.

24. Daughter – Burn It Down. More from their soundtack to Before the Storm and easily the best use of Elena Tonra’s voice, which ripples with angst and keeps the tension going for the whole song. I really need to try this game.

23. Sløtface – Backyard. That’s three songs on the list from their debut album Try Not to Freak Out; “Magazine” just missed, and the album didn’t include 2016’s “Empire Records” (#29 last year). I guess I’m a fan.

22. The Amazons – Black Magic. I heard this song and thought we had another great bombastic British rock act … but there isn’t another guitar riff to rival this one on the rest of their self-titled album.

21. Death from Above – Freeze Me. This song had me right from that introductory keyboard riff, which is just syncopated enough that it throws me off balance and never quite lets me regain it until the song ends.

20. Ride – Lannoy Point. I believe this is the longest track on the list at nearly six minutes, although it doesn’t feel quite that long because the drums keep things zipping along. “Chrome Waves” was one of my favorite Ride songs from their 1990s run, and this has a very similar vibe.

19. Phoenix – Ti Amo. I get the sense the moment for Phoenix has passed, as their album Ti Amo didn’t sell like 2013’s Bankrupt! even though this was a much better record start to finish; they’re not going back to the sound of their Grammy-winning 2009 album Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, nor should they. The French popsters incorporate more international/world music rhythms on this album, including the two-step percussion line on this track, as well as on lead single “J-Boy” and “Goodbye Soleil.”

18. Manchester Orchestra – The Gold. Manchester Orchestra is at its best when they swing for the fences – they’re like the George Springer of rock groups: swing hard or go home. They connected on this one, with the gigantic chorus nicely offsetting the soft-rock verses.

17. The Wombats – Lemon to a Knife Fight. I won’t lie – I’m pretty well in the tank for these guys, as they keep churning out great pop hooks and silly lyrics that nearly always get a laugh out of me. Their next album is due in February, although I am not as enamored of the second single, “Turn.”

16. Hatchie – Sure. If the Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan had partnered with early Lush, you might have gotten this song.

15. Alice Merton – No Roots. Other than the two songs at the top, this is probably the most-played song on the list on commercial or satellite radio. It was an immediate hit with my daughter, whose musical tastes are definitely independent of mine … but when we both like a song, I figure that’s a good reason to stuff it on this rankings.

14. MisterWives – Machine. I find Mandy Lee’s lyrics a bit overwrought most of the time – even here, the “I believe in individuality” line makes me cringe – but they’ve hit on a huge, shout-along chorus here, and Lee sounds more than a little like Shakira while wending her voice around the horns.

13. Porches – Find Me. Porches’ music always feels a little creepy to me, but in the sense of, say, a gothic horror movie; I love how the drum machine is mixed towards the front of this song, setting the dark mood right out of the chute.

12. Beck – Up All Night. This is peak Beck for me; he’s at his best when he’s throwing everything against the wall like he does here, sounding like he’s leading a band of twenty musicians and turning it into a tight, cohesive three-minute pop gem.

11. Django Django – Tic Tac Toe. I suppose “Default” will always be their signature song, but the Djangos aren’t resting on the laurels from that Mercury Prize-nominated album; listen to the interplay between the guitar and the off-beat drum lines behind the chorus here, which is as inventive as anything on their last album.

10. Mastodon – Show Yourself. Mastodon d oesn’t usually get this accessible – and I do like much of their music – which is why I’ve often favored their albums as a whole but rarely highlighted singles like this one. Emperor of Sand has already made a few best-of-2017 lists, as they haven’t lost their progressive tendencies but harnessed them into some tighter and more radio-ready tracks.

9. Dan Croll – Bad Boy. The 27-year-old graduate of the Liverpool Institute for the Performing Arts released his sophomore album, Emerging Adulthood, this summer, featuring this overlooked gem of a track that features big hooks in the chorus and the bridge.

8. INHEAVEN – World on Fire. INHEAVEN absolutely kills it on this song, the best track on their generally strong self-titled debut album, a song that wouldn’t be out of place on a playlist of New Wave of British Heavy Metal tracks.

7. Cut Copy – Black Rainbows. Cut Copy have been around since at least 2004, but in all that time they’ve never quite produced a song I could say I liked and remembered – their style may be in my wheelhouse, but other than 2010’s “Where I’m Going” I don’t think I’ve ever had a song of theirs grab me for more than a listen or two. This song, however, is a hit, a little bit Vince Clarke, a little Spandau Ballet, and a little Heaven 17 all rolled into one.

6. Oh Wonder – Ultralife. Their new album, also called Ultralife, was very inconsistent, but brought two great singles in “High on Humans” and this title track with its whirling, jubilant chorus.

5. Slowdive – Sugar for the Pill. Sorry to bring things down a bit – everything else in the top twelve is upbeat – but of all the shoegaze-revival stuff released this year, this was the one song that did the best job of bringing me back to the early/mid-1990s when bands like Slowdive, Ride, Jesus & Mary Chain, Curve, and Lush were at their creative peaks.

4. Royal Blood – Lights Out. Appropriately sinister and heavy, not as slow as doom or sludge metal but every bit as dark, “Lights Out” gives us the best of Royal Blood and shows us, again, how much you can do with just a bass guitar, an octave pedal, and a drum kit.

3. Arcade Fire – Everything Now. Arcade Fire’s album of the same name was easily the biggest disappointment of 2017 in music for me; at several points, it was downright embarrassing, like the “Infinite Content” diptych, which felt like something from a 14-year-old’s poetry notebook. Winn Butler isn’t afraid to go after big themes on his albums, like suburban sprawl and the vapidity of its culture (The Suburbs) or alienation in the modern world (Reflektor), but this album’s swings at modern materialism were such a whiff that Butler ended up on his ass before the ball hit the catcher’s mitt. The album gave us one truly great song, the only one that works musically (aided by a sample from Cameroonian musician Francis Bebey) and lyrically; the fair “Signs of Life;” and a lot of dreck.

2. Queens of the Stone Age – The Way You Used to Do. When Josh Homme comes up with a great riff, clear the dance floor because we’re going to need some room. I was skeptical that a QotSA album produced by Mark Ronson (“Uptown Funk”) would work, but it absolutely does – Ronson encouraged Homme’s groove/funk tendencies and it gave one of the best songs in their catalogue.

1. Portugal. The Man – Feel It Still. It would be entirely disingenuous for me to put any other song here; “Feel It Still” made my March playlist, hit the Billboard Hot 100 in late June, reached #4 there, set the record for the most weeks any song has spent at #1 on the magazine’s alternative chart, and earned the band its first Grammy nomination. Spotify even confirmed for me that it’s the song I played the most this year, which I assume includes all the times I listened to their album Woodstock in its entirety. And if you missed it, they recorded a fantastic cover of Oasis’s “Don’t Look Back in Anger” back in September. I’d be lying if I said anything else was my favorite song of 2017.

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→ December 18, 2017
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Logan Lucky.

Stephen Soderbergh’s retirement didn’t last very long, which is rather fortunate given how great Logan Lucky (now out on iTunes and amazon), the first film he’d directed since 2013’s Behind the Candelabra, turned out. A funny heist film filled with great dialogue and memorable characters, Logan Lucky deserved a much better fate at the box office than it received, and does a better job of channeling the vibe of his version of Ocean’s Eleven than that film’s sequel did. (I never even bothered with Thirteen.)

Channing Tatum, who was so good in a limited role in last year’s Hail Caesar, stars as Jimmy Logan, who works at a mine in West Virginia but loses his job just after the movie starts. Jimmy has a daughter, Sadie, who lives with her now remarried mother Bobbie Jo (a very gaunt Katie Holmes) but may move out of state to follow Bobbie Jo’s wealthy husband to his new job. Jimmy hatches a plan to rob the Charlotte Speedway, which apparently is right over the mine – I haven’t figured out the geography on this one either, other than that the mine must be several times longer than the Large Hadron Collider – in an elaborate scheme involving his one-armed brother, Clyde (Adam Driver); the Logans’ younger sister, hairstylist Mellie (Riley Keough); a currently in-car-cer-rate-ted explosives expert named, of course, Joe Bang (Daniel Craig); Joe’s two idiot brothers; and a few assists from other assorted friends and family members.

The plot itself is sort of wonderfully ridiculous, the kind of perfect crime that could never be that perfect in the physical universe but comes off almost charming in its Rube Goldberg sort of perfection. It’s the dialogue and the performances, especially those of Tatum and Craig, that really carry the film off. Craig is an absolute riot in the role, not quite mad bomber, but definitely a bomber and also a bit mad, smart (especially compared to his two idiot brothers, played by the sons of Brendan Gleeson and Dennis Quaid), and sometimes amusingly self-effacing. Tatum brings the charm, as he always does, but he gives Jimmy a strong resolve and belief that the plan will work, even when obstacles arise or the people around him try to convince him that it won’t. He’s somewhat used to people assuming he’s an idiot, even though he’s not one, and he seems to just play the role that’s expected of him so that one day he can take advantage of everyone’s ignorance. Dwight Yoakam excels as the fatuous prison warden who repeatedly denies that there’s anything wrong at his facility; Hilary Swank is a bit over the top as the FBI agent assigned to the case, although I thought her near-monotone delivery quickly established her character as the one person the Logan boys might have to worry about.

Not all the performances are so great, however. Driver’s attempt to do some sort of backwoods accent is distractingly bad, not least because he speaks … so … slowly … that you want to push him from the back so he gets to the end of his sentence sooner. (It’s also a bit hard to see how he and Tatum could ever come from the same gene pool.) And Seth McFarlane appears as the obnoxious (duh), unnecessarily British entrepreneur Max Chilblain, whose every word is just as painful as his surname implies, and who is wearing a dark wig of Jheri curls because I have no idea why I’m even talking about this guy. Casting him was a terrible decision and he ruins every scene he’s in.

Soderbergh and the pseudonymous writer Rebecca Blunt (likely Soderbergh’s wife, Jules Asner) keeps the pace moving between action and dialogue, never lingering too long on a scene, never worrying about establishing a Big Moment*, and infusing everything with humor. Just about every scene involving Joe Bang is funny, as are several of the scenes during and while the Logans break Bang out of prison (only to plan to return him to the facility before the day is out in a scheme within the scheme). There’s some humor at the Bang brothers’ – yeah, I know – expense, as well as a bit of a “that’s not funny, but I’m still laughing” moment involving Clyde’s prosthetic arm.

*Okay, the pageant scene near the end of the movie is probably too sentimental by half; I gave it a pass because it ties back to the scene that opens the film, and because Jimmy’s daughter is the primary reason he concocts this plan in the first place.

Logan Lucky died on the vine in theaters, despite glowing reviews and plenty of big names in the cast; it may just have been released at the wrong time, as late July is not a big movie-going time of year and this wasn’t an action flick or a blockbuster. It moves like very few movies I watched this year moved, and manages to fulfill its mission without gratuitous sex or violence, either. I suspect it’ll end up on my top 10 for 2017, or at least very close to it, whenever I end up compiling one.

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→ December 16, 2017
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Stick to baseball, 12/16/17.

The MLB winter meetings were a bit slow this year, but I did have five new Insider pieces this week, covering:

• The Dodgers/Atlanta salary swap and the Matt Moore trade
• The Santana and Cozart signings, plus the Galvis trade
• The Piscotty and Kinsler trades, and the Shaw/McGee signings
• The Marcell Ozuna trade
• A quick take on a few interesting Rule 5 picks
• The Giancarlo Stanton trade

My ranking of the top ten new board games of 2017 went up at Paste on Sunday evening. My latest game review for the site covers Ex Libris, a fun, light strategy game that’s extremely well balanced, and made my top ten as well.

The holidays are upon us! Stick a copy of Smart Baseball in every stocking.

And now, the links…

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→ December 15, 2017
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The Body Keeps the Score.

I’ve been open about my own mental health issues, such as this piece I wrote on being anxious throughout my childhood, but am fortunate in one respect in that my childhood was also relatively free of trauma. I grew up in a loving family, didn’t lose any close family members until I was a teenager – both of my grandmothers lived to their 100th birthdays – and never had to deal with the effects of divorce or abuse, to pick just two possible traumas that affect kids. Events I might recall as “traumatic” pale in comparison to what others grew up with.

I’ve only come to learn about trauma and PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) in the last handful of years, due to several close friends who suffer from it and how its effects can often include problems I’ve dealt with, including anxiety, panic, depression. Somewhere along the way I heard about Dr. Bessel van der Kolk’s seminal 2015 book The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, which I have since learned is an incredibly influential and important book in the world of mental health professionals. Dr. van der Kolk has spent decades working with trauma victims and was one of the leading proponents of the hypothesis, later supported by fMRI and similar evidence, that trauma actually alters the brain in a physical sense rather than just a mental one, and that even minor events can still have traumatic effects on our brains, especially when they happen while we’re young.

Dr. van der Kolk spends the first part of The Body Keeps the Score discussing his own history in working with trauma victims and the difficulty he and other colleagues had in even gaining acceptance for the idea of the aftermath of trauma as a distinct medical disorder. PTSD was only recognized by the American Psychiatric Association as a formal diagnosis in 1980, when it was included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders‘s third edition (DSM-III), thanks to a surge in sufferers among soldiers who returned from fighting in Vietnam. Awareness of the condition dates back to ancient Greece, and is well-documented in medical and popular literature from the 1800s forward under terms like “shell shock” (whence our word “shell-shocked” derives), but people with PTSD prior to 1980 were treated as if they had a panoply of other, seemingly unrelated mental health disorders, which led to problems like overmedication and a lack of any progress back towards a normal life.

From there, the author discusses new evidence from the world of neuroscience to support his and others’ hypotheses that the brain of a trauma victim works differently than the brain of someone without PTSD. Different parts of the brain are activated in similar situations, although among trauma victims there can be varying responses, from panic to dissociation to shutdown. He also discusses the various ways we develop PTSD, often in excruciating details of childhood abuse or wartime atrocities, tying these underlying conditions to changes in methylation of genes that can even be passed on to offspring, a process known as “epigenetics,” that also explains how the brains of trauma victims end up operating on a different BIOS than those of others.

The prose here can feel a bit academic, perhaps the result of van der Kolk’s background but also that he’s a native Dutch speaker and writing in his second language. In part five, which constitutes nearly half of the book, the writing livens up as he delves into various methods of attacking trauma and retraining the brain not to panic, dissociate, or just peace out when the person is presented with a trigger. Some suggestions are obvious or well-known, like using yoga or EMDR therapy (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, which sounds like it shouldn’t work, but does help trauma victims), while others are novel and surprising, including participation in theater or similar role-playing activities, or using a computer program to try to ‘reprogram’ the brain not just in its fear response but all of the time. He includes EEG graphs that show patterns of attention in the brains of study participants where the trauma victims’ brain waves are less tightly connected and even diverge in the milliseconds after the subject was presented with information for the brain to process. Neurofeedback, which allows the user to regulate his/her own brain function with the help of software that displays EEG results, has shown promise for trauma victims and people with other mental health disorders to reestablish control over their brains’ betrayals. Dr. van der Kolk also goes into heart-rate variability training, self-leadership of the different parts of our personality (not quite dissociative identity disorder, but leaning that way), and the pros and cons of cognitive behavioral therapy or medication for PTSD sufferers.

If you or someone close to you is a trauma victim of any sort, even if it seems like a ‘minor’ trauma, The Body Keeps a Score will be an illuminating read that could help alter the course of your/your intimate’s treatment. Even just the final section, where he points out why things like CBT aren’t effective (discussing the trauma over and over doesn’t actually change the way the brain responds to it or other triggers) and gives numerous suggestions for other remedies, would be useful. If you can get through some of the more technical language earlier in the book, though, the entire read is worthwhile, especially as van der Kolk explains his own journey of understanding through decades of working with veterans, children, and other trauma victims to get to this comprehensive theory of how best to treat these people – often people who were considered untreatable by previous generations of psychiatrists.

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→ December 13, 2017
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The Breadwinner.

The Breadwinner just earned a nod from the Golden Globes in the Best Animated Film category, and is very likely to get a nomination from the Academy as well in the same field, where it’ll probably be an underdog to Coco but one with more than a puncher’s chance of winning because of the quality and themes of its story and the old-school feel to its animation. It’s not a movie for kids by any means, and the film lacks the feel-good resolution you expect in any animated feature, but none of that should detract from anyone’s appreciation of just how well-made this movie is.

Based very loosely on a 2000 novel by Deborah Ellis, The Breadwinner comes from Cartoon Saloon, the same Irish studio that produced The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea, and is set in Kabul under the rule of the Taleban. Parvana is the young daughter of a disabled Afghan veteran who lost part of his leg in the war against the Russians. He is sent to prison early in the film for daring to talk back to a hotheaded young Taleban soldier, leaving Parvana, her unwell mother, baby brother, and older sister with no means of support or way to even go out into the market to procure food, since the Taleban forbade any woman to go out in public without her husband or brother to escort her. Parvana cuts off her hair and wears clothes of her late older brother so she can work odd jobs (with her friend Shauzia, who’s doing the same thing) and go buy food, eventually trying to save enough money to bribe her way into the prison and see her father.

The movie doesn’t shy away from depicting the repressive rule of the Taleban, including a scene where Parvana’s mother is beaten, off-screen but audible, for going out in public and possessing a photograph of her imprisoned husband. Those moments are juxtaposed with a story Parvana tells in pieces over the course of the film, first to her baby brother, then to Shauzia, and eventually to herself, about a young boy who goes to challenge the elephant king who has stolen all of the seeds from his village, threatening the villagers with starvation if they can’t plant their spring crops. The tale is fanciful and magical, providing a hopeful metaphor for the Afghan people suffering under the tyranny of a misogynistic theocracy, but also giving us a subtler way to answer the mystery surrounding the death of Parvana’s brother. This last part lies below the surface of the film’s action, but his death and the trauma it inflicted on the family are all explained by the truth of how he died, which tells a greater truth about life under the Taleban while also showing how recovery was never as simple as deposing them – even after their rule ended, there are still widows, orphans, disabled veterans, other grieving relatives, families left without sources of income, and more.

The split narrative does work against The Breadwinner, however, if you’re expecting something linear, the way nearly all animated film stories are. Parvana’s plot itself is bifurcated by the lengthy stretches where she tries to get to her father’s prison, a separate endeavor from what she’s doing to feed her family, and then split further by the tale she’s spinning in bits and pieces over the course of the entire movie, with the two uniting only at the very end. That conclusion is also itself incomplete, which works within the overall structure of the movie (a ‘happy’ ending would be wildly unrealistic, and nothing that’s come before really presages one), and seems to play a little loose with the geography established earlier in the script – although it does provide one sweet moment where the kindness of a stranger helps Parvana avoid disaster. It’s all one more reason this isn’t a movie for kids or even much younger viewers; the lack of a real resolution, especially with children involved, lingered even for me as an adult (and a parent) for days.

The Breadwinner is a beautiful film that makes effective use of perspective, exaggerating the size of many of the adult characters to emphasize how the world might look to Parvana. Some of the animations look incredibly real, while others are more like caricatures, the latter also having the effect of softening some of the more disturbing edges of the story. It’s been a down year for animation in general, with Coco the only other animated release to earn positive reviews; that said, The Breadwinner would likely be an awards nominee even against stronger competition.

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→ December 11, 2017
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Columbus.

Columbus (amazon • iTunes) wouldn’t even have come to my attention had I not heard about it from the Grierson & Leitch podcast, where Tim Grierson mentioned it at the start of its theatrical run and gave it a very strong recommendation. It’s an indie film in name and in spirt, driven entirely by dialogue and scenery, and perhaps not everyone’s tastes – but it is very much to mine, with a wonderfully written script by director Kogonada that reminded me of the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro.

John Cho delivers the best performance I’ve ever seen from him in a turn that should answer any question remaining about whether he can lead a film, starring as Jin, an American-born Korean translator who has left his job in Seoul to come to Columbus, Indiana, because his architecture professor father has fallen gravely ill. Once there, he encounters Casey (Haley Lu Richardson), a recent college graduate who is a bit stuck in neutral, still living at home with her recovering addict mother (Michelle Forbes), working a low-paying library job rather than pursuing her passion for architecture. The two forge a quick, intense friendship, unburdened by romantic or sexual tension, as they talk through their respective problems while touring the Indiana town’s major architectural sights.

(I was totally unaware of this town’s existence, but Columbus, Indiana, is actually a bit of a mecca for architecture fans, with a number of modernist buildings and other public art works, many the result of a foundation started by J. Irwin Miller in 1954 to help fund such efforts by paying the fees for noted architects to help design public buildings in the city. Wikipedia tells me that the American Institute of Architects named Columbus the country’s sixth most important city for architecture in 1991.)

Jin has been estranged from his father for years, and never had much connection with his father, who never speaks in the film but appears in Jin’s and his assistant Eleanor’s memories as a cold, demanding academic with a particular genius in his field. Casey has a chance to leave Columbus to study architecture, with help from Eleanor, but doesn’t want to leave her mother for fear she’ll relapse – and, perhaps, from the natural fear we all have of starting our adult lives in earnest. Their fast friendship comes across as very real, with the vicissitudes of any relationship where you suddenly spend a lot of time with someone you don’t know well, and their deep conversations are often set against stunning backdrops of the great buildings of Columbus or of other landscapes in the town, underscoring Casey’s reluctance to leave even as she’s showing Jin her passion for the subject. (She identifies several buildings by where they rank on her list of her favorite buildings in the town.)

Rory Culkin appears a few times as Casey’s friend Gabriel, an amusing sendup of the college student who’s just learned about hermeneutics and tries to introduce the jargon into regular conversation while also probably trying to get into Casey’s pants. (Spoiler alert: He fails.) The sparse script spills over into an equally scarce cast, most of whom deliver even if in limited roles, other than Parker Posey, who overplays Eleanor as a condescending materteral figure in a film defined by its understatement. The minor subplot of Jin having a crush on Eleanor when he was much younger, and possibly still harboring some of those feelings, felt similarly out of place, not least because I expected this older, worldlier Jin to see through Eleanor’s pretense.

I’m an avowed Ishiguro fan, for his stories, his intense understanding of human nature, and his gorgeous yet economical prose, all of which are in evidence here as well in Kogonada’s script. Jin and Casey speak in a slightly stilted style, a half-grade more formal than the rhythm of normal speech, but it matches the setting of buildings that seem similarly unreal, and the dialogue is thoughtful rather than clipped, with each character offering insight into the other’s emotions and the traumas that have come to define them. Columbus is just a beautiful, heartfelt film from start to finish, powered in particular by Cho’s performance, sadly overlooked already in awards voting but worthy of far more consideration than it’s getting.

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