→ September 16, 2011
→ By

Black Swan.

Black Swan is an extremely well-acted psychological thriller about a tightly-wound ballet dancer who may or may not be losing her mind as a result of the stress of her job (and, perhaps, malnutrition from her bulimia). It’s also thinly plotted and hard to watch because of (I assume deliberately) shaky cinematography and dim lighting.

A New York ballet company is putting on a production of Swan Lake just as its longtime star, now 35, is being forced out of her role due to age. Nina, a shy but very talented technical ballerina, wins the central part playing both the White and Black Swans in the show, but finds herself beset by doubts, hounded by impossible visions, and threatened by a new dancer just in from San Francisco who may or may not be trying to steal her role.

The movie rests heavily on the depth of its four main characters and the performances given by those actors. Natalie Portman won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her central role as Nina, a fragile, childlike ballerina who is perfect for the White Swan role but is so obsessed with perfection that she can’t provide the passionate, reckless dancing required for a convincing seductress Black Swan. Portman, like Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone, has to be on pointe throughout the film to pull it off, as her character is in every scene and she must be credible as an adult whose emotional and physical growth has been stunted. I was put off by her wispy voicing of almost every line through the first hour and a half, although it did help cement her nervous, timid personality.

Mila Kunis probably earned more notoriety for her sex scene with Portman than she did for her work in the rest of the film, but whose work as a free-spirited, gregarious colleague who must create suspicion in the viewer’s mind about her ultimate motives was as essential to the film’s credibility as Portman’s work. Vincent Cassel, whom I’d only seen before in Eastern Promises, is outstanding as Thomas, the creepy-but-not-always-creepy director of the ballet company, a man who is probably abusing his position and yet gives no doubt that he is committed to coaxing a command performance from his star. Barbara Hershey, playing Nina’s mother, alternates between a vindictive Mommie Dearest and a loving if overprotective mother who is desperate to prevent ballet from ruining her daughter’s life while living vicariously through her daughter’s success.

But how much of what we see is real, and how much is filtered through the distorted lenses of Nina’s hallucinations? Much of what we see in the film is clearly faulty wiring in her head, including a scene where she peels a thick layer of skin off her finger, or another where her legs spontaneously break in absurd directions. But those obvious illusions could be tipping us off that much of what seems real isn’t, something backed up by frequent decisions to use a vantage point directly behind Nina’s head. Is her mother actually the witch we see in half of her scenes, or is that Nina’s perception of her? How much of Lily’s two-faced personality is, again, Nina’s jealousy manifesting itself in imagined or distorted conversations that are shown to us through her mind? I don’t think there’s a correct answer on this one, but after thinking about the movie for the last 36 hours, I’m inclined to believe that she is the film’s unreliable narrator, and virtually none of what we see before the final scene can be taken at face value.

The story itself contains enough small twists and turns to maintain a moderate level of tension, even though it should be clear from the start where we must finish, since Thomas explains the plot of Swan Lake and the script doesn’t hide the parallels between the film and the ballet within it. But the decision to shoot so many scenes from behind Portman on some kind of handheld camera made for very rough, shaky cinematography – again, possibly a conscious decision to reflect the turmoil inside of Nina’s head, but hell to watch at long stretches. That’s exacerbated by the fact that the lighting in just about every scene in the film is poor and everything is dank and gray, good for keeping the mood bleak but, again, tough to watch for a hundred minutes.

My wife danced for about seven years as a child at a local ballet school, so I defer to her on questions about the dancing in the film. Her gut impression was that we were seeing much more of Portman’s dancing double, Sarah Lane, than we were of Portman, saying the key was to watch the character’s feet – a non-professional dancer couldn’t point her toes or arch her foot half as well as someone who’s been dancing for a decade, because of muscle and bone development. She assumed that any time Nina’s feet were out of the shot or her face wasn’t visible – we had a lot of scenes where her face was blocked by another character or only visible in a blurry reflection in a mirror – that it was her double.

To answer two questions I’m anticipating from the regular readers among you:

* I’m torn on Best Actress between Portman and Lawrence. Both roles were difficult. Both women executed them about as well as I could expect. I think Lawrence’s was more difficult, but feel like I’m unqualified to make that judgment when it’s such a close call; it seems to me like playing a child who acts convincingly like an adult would be harder than playing an adult who acts convincingly like a child. I know Lawrence was more critical to Winter’s Bone than Portman was to Black Swan, but is that not analogous to judging an MVP candidate by the caliber of his teammates? I still lean Lawrence, but without confidence that she’s the right call over Portman.

* Best Picture: I’m through seven, and this would be at the bottom of the seven for me. Good movie, but not on par with the previous six I’ve seen. I think The Kids Are All Right is on its way to us from Netflix.

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→ September 14, 2011
→ By

Moneyball.

Moneyball, the movie, is an absolute mess of a film, the type of muddled end product you’d expect from a project that took several years and went through multiple writers and directors. Even good performances by a cast of big names and some clever makeup work couldn’t save this movie, and if I hadn’t been planning to review it, I would have walked out.

The movie failed first and foremost for me as a movie, not just as a baseball movie. (I’ll get to the baseball parts later.) The general plot here is that the A’s lose their 2001 ALDS to the Yankees and are about to lose three major players to free agency, so Billy Beane goes hunting for a new way of doing business. He runs into a stats geek working in Cleveland’s front office named Peter Brand, hires him, and Brand brings the sabermetric philosophy that we now associate with the early 2000s Oakland teams. This causes friction with Oakland’s scouts, who are all idiots, and Art Howe, who was a stubborn idiot (this is the movie, not my opinion), and Billy might even lose his job until the A’s get hot and win 20 games in a row. Meanwhile, we are to believe that this is all so Billy can purge the personal demons created by the failure of his playing career.

Billy is the only fully realized character in the entire movie, and even at that his disparate pieces don’t tie all that well together. Peter Brand, a.k.a. Paul Antipodesta, is a mousy number cruncher who looks like the lay viewer would expect a stat geek to look – unathletic, dressed in dull collared shirts and ties, intimidated by the players, with no complexity to the character. Howe is nothing but a holier than thou obstacle for Beane whose entire motivation for his stubbornness is his desire for a contract extension – a hopelessly tired plot device that makes for a one-dimensional character. Even Casey, Billy’s daughter, who is shoehorned into this weird plot strand about him possibly losing his job, is nothing more than the plot strand requires her to be.

The lack of multi-dimensional characters is exacerbated by the languid, aimless plot and stop-and-start pacing. The film mopes through Opening Day and the beginning of the A’s season, races through their midyear turnaround, then jumps through most of the winning streak until the twentieth victory, at which point we’re handed slow motion views of the A’s blowing an 11-0 lead … and of Art Howe thinking, with no sound at all. Even the paces of conversations are strange and often forced; one of the “action” scenes, if I could call it that, involves watching Billy juggle three GMs (Shapiro, Phillips, and Sabean) to try to acquire Ricardo Rincon. All three GMs come off as stooges, but more importantly, it’s boring as hell to watch anyone, even Brad Pitt, talk on the phone.

Pitt is very good with the stilted material he’s given and clearly made an effort to look and act the part, from his hair to his tone of voice to his facial expressions. He’s also frequently eating or drinking, which he seems to do in every movie in which he appears. Jonah Hill, as Peter Brand, is very good when he can use his character’s dry, monotonous delivery for comedic effect, drawing laughs from lines that aren’t inherently funny because his timing is so good. Chris Pratt has several funny moments as Scott Hatteberg, very recognizable if youve seen his work as Andy on Parks and Recreation, although he really only has two scenes of any significance in this movie. Philip Seymour Hoffman was wasted as Howe, unfortunately, playing a one-note character who would like you to know he doesn’t care what you have to say about baseball. Robin Wright Penn is also wasted as Beane’s ex-wife who is apparently married to a closeted gay man.

I could have tolerated a lot of flaws if Moneyball had just given me a good baseball movie, with some real tension to it, or perhaps a strong character study of Billy Beane. But the film provides neither, and I spent most of the movie wondering what was really on the line here. The A’s don’t win a playoff series in 2002, so the script can’t set that up as a goal or use the playoffs as a climax. Beane took a $39 million team to the playoffs the year before; he wasn’t going to be fired in May for taking a few risks that his owner more or less told him to take (and if he had been fired, he would have been hired by someone else in a heartbeat, despite the character’s later claim to the contrary). His daughter is worried about him because she doesn’t see the big picture, but neither she nor her father is in any real jeopardy at any point in the film. We’re not playing for anything here.

—

Then there’s the baseball stuff, which is not good. For starters, the lampooning of scouts, which draws from the book, isn’t any more welcome on screen (where some of the scouts are played by actual scouts) than it was on the page; they are set up as dim-witted bowling pins for Beane and Brand to knock down with their spreadsheets. It’s cheap writing, and unfair to the real people being depicted. Current Oakland scouting director Eric Kubota also gets murdered in a drive-by line that depicts him as a clueless intern given the head scouting role after Beane fires Grady Fuson in April after a clubhouse argument (that never really happened). I’ll confess to laughing at the scout referring to “this Bill James bullshit,” although the A’s bought into that bullshit years before the film claims they did – and, in fact, hired Paul Depodesta three years before the movie-A’s hired Brand. (In the film, Fuson refers to Brand as “Google boy,” a term applied to Depodesta by Luddite beat writers in LA three years later.)

The film also relies on some pretty gross misrepresentations or oversimplifications of the business. The idea of a GM getting on a plane and flying two thirds of the way across the country to meet another GM to discuss a trade for a left-handed reliever is so absurd that it should set off alarm bells in even the casual fan. Do you really think that GMs only talk trades in person? That they fly to meet each other for tete-a-tetes before consummating any deal? Similarly, teams don’t sign injured players to guaranteed contracts by flying out to their houses (on Christmas Eve, apparently) without having them go through physicals.

I wasn’t as concerned with the script having Beane trade Carlos Pena to Detroit for a reliever and some money (as opposed to the actual three-team, seven-player deal including Jeff Weaver and Jeremy Bonderman) as I was with seeing Pena, an intelligent, gregarious person, depicted as a sullen Latino player. I also find it hard to believe Beane would ever say he didn’t care about pitchers’ platoon splits. And the film’s emphasis on Beane not making it as a player seems to point to questions about his makeup, especially his confidence, which hardly ties into a film about how makeup is overrated.

If you do end up seeing the film, and I imagine most of you will, there is one scene towards the end that stood out for me as incredibly spot on, so much so that it didn’t seem to fit with the rest of the film. Beane is sitting in what was then called the .406 club at Fenway Park with John Henry, who is about to offer him a record-breaking deal to become the Red Sox’ new GM. Henry expounds on how Beane’s method of doing things is going to sweep through the industry, and how critics within the game weren’t just trying to protect the game, but were expressing their own fears about their livelihoods. That speech applies just as well to any industry undergoing the kind of creative destruction ushered in by Bill James, Sandy Alderson and Billy Beane. Remember that when you see the next written attack on “stat geeks” who are ruining the game along with a defense of RBIs or pitcher wins.

If you haven’t already done so, go read the book before thinking about seeing this movie, and maybe go watch Brad Pitt steal every scene he’s in in Snatch instead.

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→ September 13, 2011
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Top 15 iOS boardgame apps.

I’ve been promising this for a while, and kept delaying it to buy and review more apps, but I think we’ve reached a brief lull in major boardgame app releases, so here’s a ranking of the 15 that I’ve tried so far. All but two are iPad compatible – several are iPad-only, in fact – and all are adaptations of existing physical boardgames. Most include multiplayer through GameCenter and I believe I’ve highlighted (and downgraded appropriately) those that don’t.

If I’ve reviewed an app in full, I’ve linked to that review in the game’s name. The link on the price goes to iTunes for you to purchase it (yes, I get a 5% commission if you click through and buy).

One extra bit of awesome from all these games, at least for me, has been playing some of you – not coincidentally, all four of the games where I’ve played readers appear in the top five.

(EDIT, 12/26/11: One app that came out after I produced this ranking that I also recommend is Tigris and Euphrates, which I’d rank fourth, just after Ticket to Ride.)

(EDIT, 3/30/13: I’m due for a bigger update, but I also recommend Caylus, Le Havre, and Stone Age, with the last one just releasing an iPad version this week.)

1. Carcassonne. ($9.99) The best boardgame implementation on iOS happens to be of one of the best boardgames, period, although its ranking here is based more on how incredible the app is. The graphics are superb, the toughest AI players are very good, the easy AI players are still enough of a challenge for rookies, and the game offers networked play that works easily and smoothly. It’s the most expensive app on this list ($9.99 for a universal app) but absolutely worth the cost.

2. Samurai. ($4.99) Seven of the ten apps on this list are adaptations of Reiner Knizia games, led by this one. It’s classic Knizia – a simple concept leads to complex game play: Players compete to control specific hexes on the board, with special pieces that allow players to steal hexes at the last second. The AI player is also very good and despite the small board the game is very playable on an iPod Touch.

3. Ticket to Ride. ($6.99) Days of Wonder, the publisher of Ticket to Ride and Small World, put a tremendous amount of work into their apps, which are clean, bright, and robust. Ticket to Ride falls short of the two above here because the AI players are so weak, but DoW linked GameCenter multiplayer to their own thriving online multiplayer community, so finding games is easy at all hours of the day. They currently offer three in-app expansions as well, of which I’ve purchased one, the essential 1910 expansion.

4. Battle Line. ($2.99) A two-player card game from Knizia where players compete to capture five of nine flags (or three adjacent flags) laid out in a line between them, using poker-line hands of three cards at each flag. It’s simple and quick, made better by the use of tactics cards (you have the option to play without them, but you should use them). The AI player could be a little stronger, but the randomness of the cards tends to flatten out the game to make the AI more competitive. Note: The linked review was before a major software update that all but eliminated crashing, added GameCenter multiplayer, and added much sharper graphics.

5. Puerto Rico. ($7.99icon) A good implementation of a complex (and very, very good) boardgame, with competent AIs and functional multiplayer, including a two-player variant that makes it a little easier to get a game going. The screen is fairly busy and I imagine the app would be confusing to someone who’s never tried the boardgame, so the in-game tutorials are a must. You can beat the AIs pretty regularly with a shipping strategy (corn/harbor or corn/wharf), but if you eschew that you get a tougher challenge.

6. Ingenious. ($2.99) A simple two-player game on a hexagonal board where the victory condition calls for a lot of counterintuitive play. Also by Knizia.

7. Small World. ($6.99) Another Days of Wonder app, without multiplayer but with a somewhat better (but not great) AI player. The app only plays two players (the physical game plays two to five), but with a clever tabletop mode that allows the players to sit across from each other without having to move or rotate the iPad. Graphics are superb, although an “undo” option would be nice considering how easy it is to drop a token in the wrong spot. A multiplayer option would bump it up the list, but if you’re looking for a really slick two-player game you can play with someone who’s sitting next to you, this is a great option.

8. Through the Desert. ($1.99) I really like the underlying game and the graphics on this app are strong, but it doesn’t play that well on the iPod and the glitch where you can’t see the bottom of the screen in four-player mode on small devices still isn’t resolved. The AIs improved noticeably after the last update. It’s another board-control game with lots of opportunities to sabotage other players, if that’s how you roll, and at $1.99 for the iPad version it might be the best value on this list.

9. Tikal. ($3.99) After a recent update this moved up out of the cellar, and while it’s available for all devices the small graphics play much better on the iPad. It’s a solid strategy game with aggressive AIs that play fairly predictably despite multiple difficulty settings; GameCenter integration was a big boost.

10. Wabash Cannonball. ($1.99) A no-luck, auction-driven, train game where players compete for shares in railroads that they then develop across the map from the eastern seaboard to Chicago. This app, adapted from the boardgame Chicago Express, gets the award for the cleanest presentation of in-game information, of which there’s a lot. However, the app is designed for iPhone/iPod screens, not for iPad, and really needs online multiplayer. Give me those two things and I’ll rank it higher.

11. Medici. ($2.99) And another Knizia game, this one built around auctions of sets of goods on ships where players compete to ship the largest quantities of specific goods.

12. Zooloretto. ($3.99icon) One of the best-looking games on here, with fun sound effects and an unlockable (free) in-game expansion … but the lack of networked play is a real handicap. It looks to me like the developers have walked away from this one, which is a shame since it functions properly and looks so good; better AIs or networked play would help. I did discover a strange bug as well, where the in-game expansion somehow relocked itself after I didn’t use the app for a few months.

13. Catan. ($4.99) The AIs improved with the Seafarers expansion, but they’re still not very tough. It’s a good introduction to Settlers of Catan if you’ve never played the physical game and want to try it out before investing, but once I had defeated the AIs in every level I didn’t feel the need to go back to the game. The first major update improved the graphics, but the AIs still aren’t great, although it added multiplayer through GameCenter.

14. Kingsburg: Serving the Crown. ($4.99icon) This app looks great, runs smoothly, includes what I think are competent AIs, offers GameCenter multiplayer, and takes absolutely forever to play. I’ve never played the physical version, which probably doesn’t help matters, but one of the things I look for in a good boardgaming app is the potential to bang out a quick game, whether solitaire or online. The game is currently iPhone/iPod only, although an iPad port has been promised as “coming soon” for several months.

15. Ra. ($3.99) I’ve never reviewed this game here, mostly because I didn’t care much for it. It’s another Knizia game, with an auction component but way too many moving parts and an AI that I beat the first time out despite not knowing what I was doing. Medici takes a similar concept and executes it better.

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→ September 10, 2011
→ By

Winter’s Bone.

Winter’s Bone was one of the eight hundred, or more accurately ten, nominees for Best Picture in this year’s Academy Awards, and of the six I’ve seen it was pretty clearly the best movie. It wasn’t the most enjoyable, and I’m not sure I’d be all that eager to watch it again, but for plot, dialogue, direction, visuals, and key performances, this one edges out The King’s Speech.

Set in a backwoods community somewhere in the Missouri Ozarks, Winter’s Bone focus on Ree (played by Jennifer Lawrence), a 17-year-old girl who is her family’s de facto parent. Her mother is catatonic, and her father, a meth addict and meth maker as well, is out of the picture, leaving Ree in charge of her much younger brother and sister. Ree is barely holding things together with a little help from neighbors when she’s told that her father put up their rickety house and property as bond for his most recent court date and has now disappeared. She has just a few days to locate him or face losing the house.

The search for Ree’s father isn’t the main narrative element in the movie; the court date passes and the narrative splinters into an effort to prove he’s dead (if he is, which Ree doesn’t know for sure) and a few desperate plot strands related to it. The central story is the reactions of Ree’s neighbors, all relatives of hers, some distant, some as close as her father’s brother Teardrop (John Hawkes), but most of whom stonewall her in her attempts to locate her father. She’s turned away, bought off, threatened, and eventually beaten to try to get her to stop looking.

You could argue Winter’s Bone is about one of two things. One interpretation a few of you offered on Twitter was that the film (based on a novel of the same name) is about finding slivers of humanity in a situation that bears neither physical nor emotional resemblance to anything most people seeing this film would recognize as modern life. Ree’s people are all broken to various degrees; even Teardrop, who shows the most kindness towards Ree over the course of the movie, is a drug addict who tells his wife “I said shut up once already, with my mouth.” No one seems truly good except Ree and her friend Gail (played by Lauren Sweetser, who appears to be one of the many locals cast in various roles in the film, which was shot entirely on location), and even Ree is pushed to the boundaries of her goodness.

I saw the movie much more as a character study of Ree, one that could only succeed if the writing was strong enough and the performance of the actress matched it. Ree’s love for her siblings pushes her forward into uncomfortable and even dangerous situations; the threat of violence doesn’t deter her, and ultimately the evident strength of her resolve forces her antagonists to change their tactics in dealing with her. Nothing shakes her; her dedication to her task on behalf of her siblings is absolute, much like the Man shows for his son in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. And she’s a child who has been prematurely aged emotionally by the horrific circumstances of her home life, let down explicitly by her father and implicitly by her mother (who had a breakdown related to Ree’s father).

Had Jennifer Lawrence been anything less than perfect in her role as Ree, Winter’s Bone would not have succeeded. Her character is so central to the movie that the actress’ credibility as a child who acts in almost every way like an adult is critical, and Lawrence nailed it. She looks young, and of course is dressed to look young, yet projects adult determination and toughness in confrontation after confrontation with the irrational, unfeeling, often intimidating adults who are standing between her and a possible solution to this looming catastrophe. I found her utterly convincing in look, in tone, in timing, and in conveying this very faint hint of vulnerability, or maybe fear – not fear for herself, but fear that she’ll fail. I haven’t seen Black Swan yet, but either Natalie Portman gave a historic performance, or Oscar voters are every bit as subject to the narrative as baseball writers are.

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→ September 9, 2011
→ By

The Score.

Littlefield leaned closer to him. “You’re a young man, you can still learn. Pay attention to this. You can steal in this country, you can rape and murder, you can bribe public officials, you can pollute the morals of the young, you can burn your place of business down for the insurance money, you can do almost anything you want, and if you act with just a little caution and common sense you’ll never even be indicted. But if you don’t pay your income tax, Grofield, you will go to jail.”

Donald Westlake, writing under the pseudonym Richard Stark, produced a series of hard-boiled crime novels starring the thief known as Parker, a series that began with the book The Hunter (later adapted for the screen as Point Blank and Payback). The University of Chicago Press has reprinted the first twenty Parker novels (out of 24), including The Score, which is currently available as a free eBook through amazon and is also free on BN.com, with the promotion running through the end of September.

The crime at the heart of The Score is certainly ambitious – Parker finds himself drafted to join a group that intends to knock over an entire town in North Dakota, led by the unreliable Edgars, who devised the plan because he knows the town’s layout and when they could maximize their payout. Stark spends about two thirds of the novel on the setup, with Parker leading the effort to assemble the ideal team and handling some of the logistics, including an interesting scene where he goes to purchase weapons from a blind arms dealer who stores the goods in boxes for children’s toys. The bickering starts from the moment Parker, who has little to no tolerance for bullshit, meets Edgars, and while it never explodes into a complete meltdown, the undercurrent is always there and threatens to undermine the solidarity of the team in an effort where one screw-up will sink the entire operation.

The real appeal of the novel is in the interplay between the characters, mostly between Parker and the others. Parker’s experience and limited tolerance for frivolity makes him the ideal field general for the operation, but he’s also forced to delegate as the group takes over the town almost building by building. Three group members eventually deviate from the plan in one way or another, forcing Parker to adapt on the fly, and his reaction to one of those three was one of the few big surprises in the book. But Westlake’s knack for clipped, quick dialogue keeps everything moving even through that first two-thirds of the novel where nothing actually happens beyond the planning; even the masters in the hard-boiled field, Hammett and Chandler, would typically drop a body or two and have their protagonist get a blackjack to the dome before the halfway point, although both had the brighter, more literary prose that they could have dispensed with those plot devices and still kept me riveted.

I am enough of a fan of heist stories that I knocked out The Score inside of forty-eight hours, and appreciated reading one that’s the antithesis of the overly stylized heist motif popularized by Ocean’s Eleven. I could have done with a little more explanation of the big twist from the mouth of the character responsible, although Stark does provide the basic back story, and Parker’s sudden decision to go soft on one of his partners in the heist, although not terribly consequential, felt oddly out of character. Parker’s simple, direct, no-nonsense approach is the real appeal of the novel for me, even with those quirks, a rare example of a likeable protagonist who’s actually the bad guy.

Next up: Michael Ruhlman’s The Soul of a Chef: The Journey Toward Perfection. Ruhlman’s Ratio remains an essential, often-used item on my cookbook shelf. (Shelves, really. Three so far.)

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→ September 9, 2011
→ By

Ticket to Ride app.

Ticket to Ride, reviewed here, is one of our favorite games to break out with friends who haven’t played many of the German-style boardgames we like because a new player can learn how to play in a few minutes and the game is long enough for a new player to start to catch on to strategy before it’s through. The publisher, Days of Wonder, has operated a very successful online site for several of their games for several years, and their Ticket to Ride app for iOS (or for Android devices) is fully integrated with the online site, so you get a robust community of experienced players right out of the chute.

The app is close to perfect if you’re playing online. The graphics are exactly those of the physical game and are very easy to navigate on the iPad’s screen. Route cards go in the lower left; you can cycle through them by clicking once, and completed routes get a solid-colored outline and a punch mark on the left side, with a count of total routes and incomplete routes next to it.

Your train cards display in the bottom center, and when you have enough to complete a track between two cities, you click on the relevant cards and drag them to the track, waiting until the right track is highlighted (both city circles start to glow as well) before releasing. That’s a little trickier than it sounds, and my wife and I have each once incorrectly placed trains; a setting allowing players to insert a confirmation option would be helpful, but right now the only confirm/cancel option appears when you select new route cards.

Opposing player icons sit at the top with number of trains remaining, number of train cards in hand, number of route cards in hand, and number of points all clearly visible. You can see an online opponent’s ELO rating (at least, I assume that’s an ELO system) and “karma” by clicking on the player’s icon.

The app itself runs very quickly with only a few unnecessary animations that didn’t unduly hinder play. Online play may lag due to slow connections or slow players, of course, and you can turn some of the animations and the entirely harmless music off.

Online play is the game’s strength. Players can log in via GameCenter or via the Days of Wonder site, and can create games or join existing ones in the “restaurant” accessible two clicks from the main screen. Open games are identified by different icons that indicate whether you are eligible to join the game and which board and cards are in use – the 1910 expansion, the Europe board, and the Swiss board are all available as in-app purchases. Players also tend to describe games as fast games or no-blocking games where applicable, although that’s on the honor system. So far, I’ve only played on the US board with the 1910 expansion and have found online opponents tend to go hard after the long, cross-country routes (sensible) and are obsessed with getting the longest route (potentially counterproductive). Then again, I think I’m at two wins in five or six games, so perhaps my opinions on strategy hold as much water as a plastic sieve.

The app has two flaws that put it below the standard-bearer in the space, Carcassonne. One is the aforementioned potential for a misplay that would be solved by a confirmation dialog. The other is that the Ticket to Ride AI players are horrible – they play linearly and won’t present any kind of challenge to even a novice player. It’s also less than ideal for pass and play because you can see other players’ routes too easily unless you’re sitting rather far apart. I did have one unexplained crash that hasn’t recurred.

However, if you like playing online opponents, it’s very strong and I’ve found the half-dozen or so games I’ve played to move very quickly. And if you’ve never played any of the boardgames I’m always yammering about here, on Twitter, or in chats, this is one of the best places to dip your toe in the water of smarter, better games that also play well for socializing.

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→ September 7, 2011
→ By

Pulp.

I waited until that night, drove over, parked outside. Nice neighborhood. Definition of a nice neighborhood: a place you couldn’t afford to live in.

Charles Bukowski wrote his final novel, Pulp, as he was dying of leukemia, and passed away before the book was published. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise then that the overarching theme of the book is death – facing it, fleeing from it, and wondering what there is to life other than speeding towards it.

The protagonist of Pulp, Nick Belane, is a private detective who is simultaneously lucky (his cases have a habit of solving themselves) and down on his luck (he’s somewhat broke and usually heading to the bottom of a bottle) when he receives a visit from a new client, who calls herself Lady Death, and most likely is the Grim Reaper in more attractive form than we’re using to seeing. She wants Belane (which I presume rhymes with “Spillane”) to track down a man she believes to be the French author Celine, who should be dead by about thirty years but is apparently running around Los Angeles. Nick picks up a few more clients, including a man who believes his controlling new girlfriend is a space alien, another man who believes his wife is cheating on him, and a friend who hires him to find the elusive Red Sparrow but doesn’t actually know what it is. (The Red Sparrow is most likely a reference to Black Sparrow Press, a small publisher whose financial support allowed Bukowski to become a full-time writer at age 45.)

On its surface, Pulp is a hard-boiled detective novel reminiscent of the clipped tones of Hammett and tight yet rich prose of Chandler, although Belane’s toughness is more superficial than that of the Continental Op or Philip Marlowe. Belane bemoans his inability to catch a break in between catching breaks, dropping into deep depressions that last until the next barstool, where he typically orders a few drinks, starts a fight, and leaves more or less victorious. Clients find him, as do clues, yet he still manages to encounter no end of trouble, much of it because of his own bad decisions.

In between drinks and fights, Belane muses on the nature of life and often doesn’t like what he sees, looking at the indignities of this mortal coil from bodily functions to the need for money to questioning his own sanity. One of the book’s most memorable scenes puts Belane in the waiting room for a psychiatrist he wants to question; the waiting room is full of apparently crazy people, but when Belane’s name is called and he’s ushered in, the apparent psychiatrist claims he’s just a lawyer and Belane is yet another crazy person who’s entered the wrong office. Is Belane crazy? Did he black out? Did reality change on him, as it has a habit of doing to him throughout the book?

As much as Belane looks at life and cringes at what he sees, he’s not running headlong into death, even though Lady Death tells him a few times that he’ll be seeing her again soon. But it’s his inner monologue that really makes Pulp memorable and often very funny in a wry sort of way; it’s an accumulation of decades of wisdom, much of it not all that useful, wrapped up in a fast-paced detective story where the ultimate case is solving the mystery of life. I won’t spoil the ending, although you can probably figure out where the book is heading, and even so the plot is hardly the thing there. Bukowski managed to pay homage to my favorite genre through a black-comic look at the end of life. It’s quite an achievement.

Next up: Richard Stark’s heist novel The Score, available as a free eBook for the Kindle (or Kindle iPad app) through that link. Stark was one of Donald Westlake’s pen names, and I reviewed the first novel in this series two years ago.

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→ September 7, 2011
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Job opening in the baseball industry.

An industry contact of mine is looking to fill an entry-level analyst position and asked me to post this here for my readers. It’s a good opportunity for someone who fits their requirements. Just to be clear, this job is not connected to ESPN or to me personally, and I can’t answer any questions about the position. Good luck.

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We have a position available for recent college graduates with a passion for baseball. We are a well-known sports entity, and we are hiring an analyst in our MLB research group. This position is in Southern California (relocation not provided).

Ideally, we are seeking a recent graduate (entry level or 1-2 years of experience). A bachelor’s degree (or better) from a prestigious university is preferred, but sufficient relevant experience will be considered. Experience in the team-sports environment is heavily preferred.

If interested, please reply to the following address by September 9: baseballresume@gmail.com

In the subject line of the email, please put “Research Job.”

The body of your email should first contain your resume, appropriately formatted. In addition to the traditional resume information, please be sure to include any details about athletic experience.

Below your resume, please put 1) your full contact information, 2) how you obtained this listing, and 3) your minimum annual salary requirement. The salary requirement needs to be a specific dollar figure. Applications without that information will not be considered.

No cover letters or attachments. Responses with attachments will be discarded.

Candidates must be able to get themselves to Southern California for an interview. Thank you for your interest!

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→ September 6, 2011
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Empires of Food.

My 2700-word column on the rehab process from Tommy John surgery, with comments from a TJ surgeon, a rehab specialist, and three pitches who had the operation, is now up for Insiders.

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The point of Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, by Evan D. G. Fraser and Andrew Rimas, is a good one: Civilizations, like ours today, have risen during times of plenty, periods where favorable weather and trading booms have led to rapid growth of populations and cities, but that they tend to fall, often catastrophically, when the food supply is interrupted. We are nearing the end, they argue, of an unusually good era for agriculture, but a cataclysm approaches as climate change, irresponsible farming techniques, water waste, and profiteering all catch up to us and put our future food security at risk. These are all issues that we as consumers should consider when deciding what to eat and where to get it, but a book that’s full of histrionic statements like “cancerous is exactly the state of our twenty-first-century global food empire,” factual errors, and serious omissions isn’t the way to argue the point.

The point of Empires of Food is to show readers the history of the food supply and how civilizations rose and fell with their sources of food, and in that regard Fraser and Rimas largely succeed in their efforts. They use the story of Francesco Carletti (link in Italian; Carletti’s memoir, My voyage around the world, is available used on amazon), a Florentine merchant whose disastrous eight-year trip around the world brought him into contact with many trading societies of the late 1500s and early 1600s, as the narrative hook to connect the various chapters, each describing a key variable in the construction of “food empires.” Those variables are fundamental to agriculture, husbandry, and food commerce – water, soil, distribution channels, refrigeration – with the final additions of “blood” (not just war, but subjugation and oppression in prime growing areas of the world) and money before their one chapter with an iota of hope, describing movements toward organic farming, slow food, and fair trade. The framework is here for a powerful wakeup call to anyone willing to step back and examine his larder and his table.

Unfortunately, when it comes to connecting problems to prescriptions, the authors fall back on hysteria and run light on facts. You can’t do an entire chapter on the declining quality of soil, including descriptions of the effects that heavy tilling and overfarming have on soil erosion rates, without even a single mention of no-till farming as a potential solution, even a partial one, to the very real problem at hand. Similarly, you can’t talk about nitrogen loss through waste and erosion without discussing the same problem of phosphorus, an absolute gating factor on the amount of life that this planet can sustain. (Untreated sewage dumped into the ocean sends loads of phosphorus to to the bottom of the sea, where it’s of little use to life on land.)

The authors’ sins aren’t limited to science or agriculture. They openly praise Marxism with nary a mention of the food shortages that have plagued every society that implemented (always via political repression) Marxist economic policies, including famines in North Korea and milk rationing for Cubans over the age of eight. Meanwhile, they excoriate capitalism and misstate Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” by accusing him of advocating cost-plus pricing. Rather than point out how government subsidies can distort market decisions, or argue for taxes that reflect the externalities they (correctly) point out are not reflected in free-market prices, they want to throw capitalism overboard and send us back to the Middle Ages. They’re similarly dismissive of comparative advantage without considering its wealth-generating capabilities – if you want to argue that localism trumps comparative advantage, acknowledge the latter’s benefits and explain why the former is in our best collective interests.

There are even the sort of tiny errors that don’t necessarily affect the larger point of the book but serve to undermine the credibility of the text because checking these facts is so easy yet wasn’t done. The authors repeat the dubious story of Roman commanders salting the earth around Carthage (per Wikipedia, which has a solid source for this, “ no ancient sources exist documenting this. The Carthage story is a later invention, probably modelled on the story of Shechem.”) They also mention the million-plus city of “San Jose, Texas,” which is probably news to the residents of the San Jose in California or to the residents of San Antonio, Texas.

The intent of Empires of Food is a good one, I think – raising awareness of the fragility of our current infrastructure for feeding the world. It’s certainly relevant to me out here in Arizona, where we depend on dwindling water resources and import much of our food because the local environment isn’t ideal for agriculture (and a lot of local farms out here are selling out to developers). But it’s relevant to anyone in the U.S. because, even though we’re not necessarily the world’s greatest offenders (China is the real villain of the book, although the authors seem too skittish to say so explicitly), we are in the best position to do something about it. The problem with the book is that it gets sloppy and devolves too often into a polemic rather than sticking to well-argued advocacy.

Next up: Nearly done with Charles Bukowski’s bizarre twist on the detective novel, Pulp.

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→ September 2, 2011
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Tikal boardgame & app.

Winner of the 1999 Spiel des Jahres (Boardgame of the Year) award, Tikal has two to four players exploring a Mayan jungle, uncovering temples and discovering treasures for points, but with the added twist that you can steal control of temples or forcibly trade treasures with your opponents to maximize your point scores.

On a turn, a player draws the top hex tile from the stack and places it wherever s/he wants on the board as long as it is accessible from a hex that’s already placed. The tiles include temple tiles, treasure tiles, and empty tiles. A temple tile is worth points to the player who has the most worker tokens on it at each scoring round, and temple tiles can increase in value as players “uncover” higher levels, ultimately worth one point per temple level each time it’s scored. The treasures on temple tiles are “discovered” by workers and come in six types, with points per treasure increasing as you add more examples of each type – one point if you only have one treasure of that type, three points if you have a pair, and six if you collect all three. The empty tiles are useful primarily for a player’s ability to place one of two new base camps on one (or on a treasure tile from which all treasures have been collected), allowing the player to place new workers closer to unclaimed temples and treasures.

Once a player has placed a tile, he has ten action points to use on his turn. Actions include placing a new worker or his one leader token for one point; moving a worker to another tile for one point per “step” between tiles; uncovering a temple level for two points; collecting a treasure for three points; trading treasures with an opponent (in which s/he has no choice) for three points; placing a base camp for five points; or guarding a temple, thus protecting it for the player for the remainder of the game, for five points. Uncovering temple levels, gathering treasures, guarding temples, and scoring points for temples all require the use of workers, so placing and deploying them constitutes the critical decision in the game.

In those scoring rounds, players score for treasures as described above and for controlling temples. When multiple players have workers on a temple tile, the points go to the player who has the most workers on that tile, counting any leader tokens as three workers. But each player takes a turn in the scoring round before counting up his points, so before you score, you get to move workers around to control as many temples (or dig up as many treasures) as possible. And since the three scoring rounds before the final one are somewhat randomly timed, each player has to keep one eye on his positioning for the next scoring round – both how well he’s defended temples he’s controlled and how quickly he can move workers and/or his leader around to grab control of another temple. Guarding temples does help, but a player can only guard two temples per game, and when guarding a temple the player loses control of all workers on that tile for the rest of the game.

One other constraint covers new temple levels: Uncovering a level requires placing a small square game piece with the next level number on top of the highest current level. If all game pieces with the next level number have been used, that temple can’t get any higher.

Because there are multiple scoring rounds and the types of tiles revealed vary as the game goes on, Tikal almost plays like a game with two halves, similar but far from identical. In the first half, players are primarily uncovering temple levels and guarding their highest ones, but as the game moves on to the second half, the inability to uncover new levels means players use more action points on stealing control of temples and/or swapping treasures. Of course, the first half can set up the second half, such as controlling temples that are remote from the rest of the action, thus guaranteeing the player a few points without having to spend action points or workers to shore up his defense.

The main flaw in the boardgame is the length of time between a player’s turns. With each player given 10 action points and an ever-widening number of options on the board, a single turn can take several minutes as the player maps out a plan to use up all 10 points in the most efficient and effective way possible while also setting himself up for the next turn. The compensation for this is that the tension created by the knowledge that the other players are likely to screw you out of some points, so while nothing good is going to happen while it’s not your turn, you will want to watch to see just how badly you get screwed. I’ve also seen the suggestion on boardgamegeek that players use a timer to limit just how long each turn takes, which isn’t the worst idea for a four-player game.

Tikal players two to four players, but the board size doesn’t change, so with two players there’s somewhat less interaction or need to steal from other players. With four players, you’re fighting for smaller pieces of the same pie, and there’s more movement and intrigue involved.

One final positive on the game is the box, which is well-designed for easy cleanup given how many different tokens and tiles there are in the game.

Several other commenters at BGG compare Tikal to El Grande, saying the latter game uses a similar mechanic with a better implementation. I’ve never played El Grande, but I’m sure many of you have and am curious whether that should be an upcoming purchase and whether it plays reasonably well with just 2-3 players.

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The Tikal app for iOS received some pretty tough reviews when it was first released because it was a buggy mess, very crash prone, hard to decipher on screen, with really weak AI players; I bought it early and had all of those problems, but heard about a forthcoming update and decided to sit on a review until that update arrived. The update has made the app much more stable, cleaned up the UI significantly so it’s easier to follow what’s going on, and I think the AI players are a little better – but not a lot, making it more of a training app if you’re not going multiplayer through GameCenter (which I haven’t tried). At $4.99, it’s definitely worth the trial run if you have an iPad and want to try Tikal before you purchase the physical game. One comment I’d offer is that the game graphics are different from the boardgame, including trucks instead of workers, and the screen is a little dense on an iPod or iPhone. On the plus side, however, the AI moves pretty quickly, so you can run through a solo game without dragging, and the animations make it clear what the AI players are doing.

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