→ November 13, 2024
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NYC eats, November 2024.

My work trip to New York didn’t quite go as planned, but I did eat well. My first stop was at San Matteo, a pizzeria on the Upper East Side that I found because my mom emailed me this Italian list of the best pizzerias in the U.S. (with other lists for other regions/countries plus a global one). I don’t agree with a lot of the list – excluding Pizzeria Bianco yet including Pizzeria Pomo is inexplicable – but I’ve been to 15 and all of them are at least a 55. I’ve got my work cut out for me, though. Anyway, San Matteo looks completely ordinary, like your typical New York Italian-American restaurant, with a massive menu that only gets to pizza on the last page. I got the porcini tartufo pizza, a white pie with fresh mozzarella, porcini mushrooms, Parmiggiano Reggiano, and truffle oil, as none of the red pies was especially grabbing me, although it didn’t matter – the star of this show is the dough, one of the lightest I have ever tasted on any pizza of any style. It is Neapolitan, recognizably so at the edges and with a damp center, but this dough was as airy as a meringue. It’s not that it has giant air bubbles; the whole texture is pillowy soft, yet doesn’t lose the slight tang you get from long fermentation. The porcinis were excellent – I’m glad they used those rather than cremini, as porcini have a ‘meatier’ flavor thanks to their high concentration of glutamates – and while truffle oil is generally a big meh for me, it was definitely good quality olive oil. They also make a very solid Negroni, still among my absolute favorite cocktails. (I’m becoming a Manhattan guy, though. I think it’s age.)

So by sheer coincidence, my sister, who lives in northern Virginia, was also in Manhattan for a meetup with some friends, and she texted me the pin of her hotel … which was at the same intersection as mine. There are over 100 hotels in Manhattan, and we happened to end up at two hotels located at literally the same pair of cross streets. Anyway, we had a lovely lunch on Saturday at Aragvi, a Georgian restaurant, by which I mean the country in the Caucasus, not the American state, although both seem to have a desire to roll back civil rights. Aragvi’s menu comprises traditional Georgian classics, and I think we ended up with three of the big ones, acknowledging that I’d never had Georgian food before and actually did a little reading before we went so I might know what we were eating. We started with a plain cheese khachapuri – extremely similar to the Turkish dish peinirli if you’ve had that – which is a baked bread bowl that had three cheeses melted in the center along with an egg yolk and a small knob of butter. I only knew one of the cheeses, feta, but the combination reminded me of a mixture of mozzarella and ricotta salata, and I think it’s an enriched dough given the texture and outside color. I’d eat this every day if it wouldn’t kill me. We also got a plate of cheese khinkali, which are Georgian dumplings akin to pierogis, shaped like giant xiao long bao – sorry, I’m not even sure what to italicize any more – with what I can only describe as ricotta inside. They were fantastic but absolutely enormous and our best efforts only got us through three of them. The final dish was chicken mtsvadi, and you’re god-damned right I copied and pasted that word from their website, grilled chicken thighs with the texture of smoked meat, served with pickled cabbage and fresh onions and parsley on one bit of lavash bread and a red sauce of unknown origin. (I think it was adjika, although it was a 0 on the spice scale.) This was a welcome change from all of the cheese we’d been eating, although I wish they’d brought more lavash or other bread to make eating the meat with the toppings easier. All told, though, I am now a fan of Georgian cuisine. They do also have a list of Georgian wines, and I got a white that, like Michael Scott, I couldn’t name for you. It was medium-bodied and kind of crisp, better than the full-bodied one the server had me try that had an overwhelming green apple flavor.

Moving along rapidly … Saturday dinner with a grad school classmate (wu-hoo!) came at Abbey Tavern, which is his favorite spot in Manhattan, and they do Guinness properly – it wasn’t too cold, so I could really taste the beer. Guinness is one of the only mass-market beers I would actively choose to drink, because I think it tastes good – it is more than an alcohol delivery device. And it goes well with fish and chips, which was my order, and which was also really solid, with my only real complaints being that 1) it was way too much food and 2) they didn’t bring malt vinegar, although to be fair I didn’t ask because we were busy talking. I hadn’t seen this friend since our 20th reunion back in 2019, and I missed the 25th because it was the weekend of my daughter’s prom, and while I was super bummed to miss the reunion I made the right choice. Back to the food, I demolished the fries, and ate two of three very generous fillets of cod, super crisp and well seasoned, as well as extremely hot when they hit the table.

Sunday morning was the day of the one game I went to, so I loaded up by walking the 15 minutes to Tal’s Bagels on the east side, which was on my employer’s recent list of the best bagels in the city, of which I had been to exactly none. (Zucker’s was my favorite to this point, and might still be.) I figured I likely wouldn’t get lunch at the ballpark, so I went all out with an egg, bacon, and hash brown sandwich (no cheese) on an everything bagel. You probably only care about the bagel, and the truth is it was fuckin’ awesome. I would eat that bagel every day. This is why I love New York – you eat stuff there that makes you think the rest of your life is being frittered away on subpar food. I don’t know if this is the best bagel in New York or Manhattan or in Midtown, but I know it satisfied my innate need for a real New York bagel. Also, not to get too far afield here, but I generally don’t ‘combine’ starches – potatoes on pizza is almost as much of an abomination to me as pineapple is – yet this one absolutely worked. The crispy hash browns offered a textural contrast to the soft interior of the bagel. Win.

My last meal before leaving the city came at Empanada Mama on the west side, and the company was Joe Sheehan, whom I’ve known for twenty-plus years but hadn’t seen since before the pandemic. Joe mentioned this is a longtime favorite of his, and as you may have figured out from reading me for years or just from reading this one post, I will eat almost anything if it is somehow wrapped in dough. I tried three different varieties and my favorite was the Bombay, a wheat-flour empanada filled with curried chicken and chickpeas. The curry flavor was light, clearly there but more of a supporting player, and the chicken and beans were balanced too, which is what I wanted since I also got the very meaty Reggaeton (filled with pernil, a form of roast pork). The corn flour-based rice-and-beans missed the mark a little because of the crust – the filling was fine but the texture of the crust was off for me. I was also pretty full before I even started that one, so keep that in mind.

For coffee, I went to two longtime favorites, Culture Espresso and Blue Bottle, the latter because I think their espresso is still a pinnacle of the form, with an inherent sweetness to their beans that few others can match. (Archetype in Omaha has hit that mark too.) I was a little disappointed at Culture, where the barista spooned foam into my espresso macchiato rather than pouring it – I know that’s almost a religious debate at this point, but I think you always want pourable foam. I’ve only seen the spooned foam as standard when I was in England and Wales in 2022, but to me a macchiato means poured foam. I suppose that’s more preference than anything else. Blue Bottle nailed it, of course. I’ve truly never had a bad shot at any of their locations in any city.

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→ November 12, 2024
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Woman of the Hour.

Woman of the Hour is the directorial debut for actor Anna Kendrick, who also stars in this loosely adapted story about the contestant on the TV show The Dating Game who chose as her date a serial killer – and probably narrowly eclipsed dying at his hands. I’ve never been a fan of Kendrick as an actor, but she shows significant promise behind the camera, elevating a script that overplays its hand repeatedly to make for a solid thriller.

Sheryl Bradshaw (Kendrick) is a struggling actress in 1978 whose agent books her a spot on The Dating Game, which often had its four seats – one woman and three bachelors – filled with would-be actors and comedians. It is her misfortune to have Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto), a smart, charming photographer who has already killed multiple women in sadistic fashion, not just as one of her three bachelors, but, as the film tells it, the most charismatic and suave of them. (One of the other bachelors on her episode was an unknown actor named Jed Mills, although the film never names him or the third man.) A huge portion of the film’s running time takes place on the show’s set as we watch Sheryl navigate the ridiculous process and deal with the obnoxious host (an underutilized Tony Hale) while Alcala keeps giving the best answers. It’s only afterwards, when the two meet off set, that Sheryl sees more of his personality and becomes sufficiently creeped out to call off the date – but not before their interaction takes a very scary turn.

Woman of the Hour actually gives Alcala a substantial amount of screen time, which establishes his character in important ways but also makes us privy to some disturbing scenes. It opens with a an unfortunately fairly accurate depiction of one of Alcala’s murders, where he strangled his victim, resuscitated her, raped her, and then killed her again, and later we see another murder and a kidnapping, also close to the true story. On the one hand, it shows the audience just what Alcala is capable of, and since most viewers will know going in – or could probably just guess – that he’s going to be her pick, it shows that the stakes are life or death. On the other hand, it’s macabre, and leering, not quite in a celebratory way, but in a way that ends up establishing Alcala as at least as much of a central character as Bradshaw.

Contributing to this imbalance is Zovatto’s performance; he makes Alcala’s ability to charm everyone, notably women, totally plausible, overshadowing everyone else on screen except when he and Kendrick are on opposite sides of the game show set. That’s also where the script begins to diverge from reality; the actual dialogue on the show was typically racy and oversexed, but in the movie, Bradshaw ditches the questions she’s been given and engages in witty, highbrow banter with Alcala while mocking the other two bachelors. It makes Bradshaw into a bit of an implausible heroine, while it shows a different Alcala than the one Bradshaw and viewers saw. The film veers further and further from reality, and more into unnecessary melodrama, right up through the text over the closing scene, which is a complete fabrication where none was necessary. (And yes, that especially annoyed me.)

This could easily have gone off the rails once the story gets the characters on set, where we get another subplot as an audience member recognizes Alcala as the man who she believes killed her friend. Kendrick handles the scene-shifting and the need to maintain the pace extraordinarily well for a first-time director – or any-time director. Once we’re on the show, the script tries so hard to ratchet up the tension, and Kendrick manages to keep it in check until the parking lot scene after the show, where the tension is real, and earned. It’s the best scene in the movie, one where so much happens without a word spoken, and takes this one woman’s bizarre experience and uses it to express something far more universal: the fear of violence that women face even in seemingly routine interactions with men, like a simple date, because of the pervasiveness of violent men.

Woman of the Hour could so easily have ended up a woman-in-jeopardy Lifetime movie in different hands. Kendrick wouldn’t have seemed like the person to steer it straight, but by taking a hyperventilating script just down a notch, she turned it into a more interesting and riveting film.

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→ November 11, 2024
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Stick to baseball, 11/11/24.

We updated my ranking of the top 50 free agents in baseball this offseason on Monday after all options were declined or exercised to reflect the actual free agent pool. My next article there will probably come when we have a big transaction.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter, covering my feelings on the election, on Saturday.

I locked my Twitter account earlier in the week due to the site’s change to allow blocked users to see your posts. At this point, I will only post links to my work there, and I’ll be more active on Bluesky and Threads. Of course, I’ll still be here, and in the comments under my articles on The Athletic.

And now, the links…

  • Multiple women have accused University of Florida men’s basketball coach Todd Golden of stalking and sexually harassing them, according to a report in the independent site The Alligator. The University received a Title IX complaint against Golden on September 27th.
  • A 13-year-old girl in Florida went to the police after she was raped by her adoptive father; the police didn’t believe her and charged her with lying. When he raped her again, she recorded it on her phone. Taylor Cadle, now 21, came forward this week in a PBS story on the police’s complete mishandling of the case.
  • Prof. Donald Fanger taught my favorite class at Harvard, Comedy and the Novel, where we read several novels I still love, including my all-time favorite, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. Prof. Fanger died this July at age 94.
  • France is prosecuting seven people involved in spreading the lies that led to the beheading of a French teacher who had shown an example of the cartoons from Charlie Hebdo that Islamist terrorists cited as their reason for murdering 12 people at the magazine’s offices in 2015. The actual killer was shot dead by police shortly after he murdered the teacher, Samuel Paty; this trial is about the online “hate campaign” that took place before the attack.
  • Trump’s Truth Social platform outsourced coding jobs to Mexico even as he threatened companies with retaliation for sending jobs outside of the U.S. American Second to Profits.
  • Elon Musk’s false or misleading claims about the election, including those about the major candidates, were viewed over 2 billion times, according to an analysis by CNN. I’m sure that had no effect on anyone’s voting choices, though.
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→ November 2, 2024
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Stick to baseball, 11/2/24.

My ranking of the top 50 free agents available this offseason is now up for subscribers to the Athletic; we’ve updated it now to reflect two players on the list coming off the board as their clubs picked up their options, adding two new players to keep it at 50. I also held a Q&A on the Athletic site on Friday to talk about the list.

For Paste, I reviewed Stamp Swap, a light new game from Stonemaier Games, whose products always have excellent components and art. The game play was meh for me – it was mostly stuff I’ve seen before, and in one case I think a mechanic just makes the game worse/slower.

I need to get another issue of my free email newsletter out soon, but got held up by the FA rankings and the relative lack of sleep I had thanks to the World Series.

And now, the links…

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→ November 1, 2024
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Music update, October 2024.

After all of that – by which I mean all the new tracks I listened to in the past month – October was one of the weakest months of the year for good new music. We did get two very strong albums that I’ve already featured on previous playlists in Katie Gavin’s What a Relief and Japandroids’ swan song Fate & Alcohol, and I’ve got a few left to work through. In the meantime, here are 24 songs that made the cut; as always, you can access the playlist here if you can’t see the widget below.

Waxahatchee – Much Ado About Nothing. A brand-new track from Katie Crutchfield just seven months after she released her latest album Tigers Blood … and this might be better than anything on the LP, which is really saying something.

Humdrum – There and Back Again. This is about as perfect a jangle-pop track as you’re going to find in this decade. Holy cow. I haven’t gotten to their debut album, Every Heaven, yet, but it’s next up in my queue.

Royel Otis – If Our Love Is Dead. The algorithms have been trying to convince me to like Royel Otis for a year, at least, but I just haven’t liked any of their songs all that much, or even remembered them. This track has a great little hook in the chorus, though. This indie pop due is huge in their native Australia, earning 8 ARIA nominations for their debut album PRATTS & PAIN; this song comes off the deluxe edition, retitled PRATTS & PAIN – It Ain’t Over Til It Ends.

The Tubs – Freak Mode. The Tubs are led by the former guitarist from Joanna Gruesome; Pitchfork’s review of their 2023 debut album Dead Meat referred to the “chiming sound of 80s college rock,” and it definitely has a lot of that sound – jangle-pop is back, baby – but this song has an incredible urgency to it that goes beyond those college-radio staples that didn’t stick except for their nostalgia value. It reminds me a little of The Dead Milkmen’s “Punk Rock Girl,” but more melodic and less annoying.

Momma – Ohio All the Time. Momma broke out a little in 2022 with “Speeding ’72,” which made my top 20 of that year, but it’s just been a few scattered singles since then. This new track is pretty solid, with a great hook in the chorus and a similar contrast between the sweet-sounding vocals and the ‘70s-style distortion of the crunchy guitars.

The Smile – Eyes & Mouth. The Smile’s third album, Cutouts, includes some tracks recorded during the sessions for their last LP, but the sound is so different – the three tracks I’ve heard so far are all way jazzier funkier, with much clearer influence from drummer Tom Skinner of Sons of Kemet and less of the mopey sound that Radiohead critics deride.

Black Doldrums – Hideaway. Darkwave trio Black Doldrums released their second album, In Limerence, in October, highlighted by this Bauhaus-y track driven by a twangy guitar line that almost begs for resolution.

Crows – Every Day of Every Year. I’m a huge Crows fan, as they come in somewhere between post-punk and hard rock; they should do a double bill with Kid Kapichi, who I unfortunately missed on their U.S. tour because I was out of town. Crows’ third album, Reason Enough, came out at the very end of September.

Kid Kapichi – Newsnight. Speaking of these lads, they released this track in October, one of four new songs on the deluxe version of this spring’s There Goes the Neighbourhood.

The Murder Capital – Can’t Pretend to Know. Sitting somewhere between punk and post-punk, this Irish group are more true to their style than their more ambitious and expansive countrymates Fontaines D.C. This track comes from the ongoing sessions for their third album, release date unknown.

Corker – Distant Dawn. Corker hail from Cincinnati, and this track sounds like a mash-up of Preoccupations and very early Killing Joke, complete with vocals that sound like they were recorded through a string connected to a coffee can.

Anxious – Counting Sheep. Anxious’s debut album Little Green House was one of my favorites of 2022, but then they dropped completely out of sight for almost two years. I was thinking about how they’d vanished a couple of weeks ago, only for this song to show up on my Spotify Release Radar a few days later. Serendipity, I suppose. Anyway, Anxious gets labelled as emo but they’re sharper and more interesting than just a revival of that subgenre. Their second album is due some time next year.

Sløtface – Quiet on Set. Sløtface’s latest album, Film Buff, is their first as a de facto solo project for vocalist Haley Shea, and the good news is that it’s on par with their previous two releases. If there’s a downside, it’s that there’s nothing new here, either; it’s really catchy pop-punk with witty lyrics.

La Sécurité – Detour. This Montréal-based “art punk” group released its debut album, Stay Safe!, in 2023, and returned last month with this throbbing, dissonant, and very dance-heavy track.

The Cure – A Fragile Thing. I read somewhere that Robert Smith wanted to go back to the Disintegration era of The Cure on this comeback album, and on this track, at least, he has succeeded. I think that’s their best record, so I may be biased in my opinion here.

Pastel – Leave a Light On (Velvet Storm). The last time I included a Pastel song, one of you commented that it was a blatant ripoff of The Verve; I don’t exactly hear that, but I get the criticism, and I think it’s as pronounced a similarity this time – although I hear more Primal Scream on this track.

The Horrors – The Silence that Remains. It’s a little ponderous, maybe a little pretentious, but Faris Badwan has earned at least some benefit of the doubt at this point. The Horrors’ sixth album and their first in nearly six years, Night Life, is due out in March.

Mindy Smith – Quiet Town. Mindy and I met in second grade in 1979, and we happen to share a birthday, although I’m a year younger than she is (I was the youngest person in my class). This is the title track from her latest album, her first one in 12 years, which also features “Jericho” and “The Hour of My Departure” (the latter with Daniel Tashian). I believe we are the only two members of our high school graduating class to have our own Wikipedia pages.

Lucius – Old Tape (feat. Adam Granduciel). A one-off single, for now, featuring the lead singer/guitarist of The War on Drugs; I saw both artists in September at the Mann in Philly, at which point Lucius’s Jess Wolfe was something like 11 months pregnant.

The Wombats – Sorry I’m Late, I DIidn’t Want to Come. This is mid as Wombats songs go, mostly because I think they’re capable of much catchier tracks, but I’ll take a mid Wombats song over a lot of other bands’ singles.

Orla Gartland – Backseat Driver. I wasn’t familiar with Gartland, an Irish singer-songwriter who released her debut album Woman on the Internet (great title) in 2021, until I heard this song, off her new album Everybody Needs a Hero. It’s a bouncy slice of indie-pop, slyly nodding at teen popstars but with lyrics that belie her age (she’s a ripe old 29).

WOOZE – Fantastic Fever. WOOZE is half of a defunct band first called Movie and then called Screaming Peaches; they put out a handful of songs, including the ridiculously fun “Mr. Fist,” then split up. WOOZE’s sound is more trashy glam-rock, although there’s still a danceable beat to all of their tracks. This is the best of the three singles I’ve heard from them this year, over “Sabre Tooth Spider” and “Weapons of Mass Seduction.”

Goat – Goatbrain. One of you suggested I check out the latest album from this anonymous Swedish fusion group, also called Goat; it was a solid tip, as I do like a lot of what they’re doing, blending sounds from various global music styles into a pretty cohesive whole, although the vocalists aren’t very strong and it holds the album back.

Blood Incantation – The Stargate [Tablet II]. Blood Incantation’s latest album Absolute Elsewhere is the most highly acclaimed metal album of 2024, and it is an impressive work of musicianship, comprising two songs, each in three “tablets,” running a total of 43 minutes and running the gamut from spacey 1970s prog-rock to Spiritual Healing-era Death. That latter bit means parts of the album are just unlistenable; the combination of blast beats and death growls just turns into noise to me, and I’m really here for the guitarwork anyway. This is the one track out of the six that is largely free of that nonsense, and despite running just five minutes, it gives you an idea of the stylistic range of the album.

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→ October 30, 2024
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Conclave.

Conclave takes a mass-market paperback novel by Robert Harris and turns it into a prestige drama that already has jumped ahead in the awards conversation. The surprise is that it’s pulpy good fun, with a strong cast led by a masterful performance by Ralph Fiennes, until it goes a little off the rails with the first of its two big twists and reminds you of its shallowness.

The Pope is about to die as Conclave opens, and, oops! His Holiness is dead, may the jockeying for his job commence. The Church must convene a conclave of all of its cardinals, but everyone already seems to know who the contenders are, primarily the Italian reactionary Goffredo Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), who wants to roll back the clock a few hundred years; the Canadian schemer Joseph Tremblay (John Lithgow), whose ambition is so naked Jesus would clothe it; the Nigerian Joseph Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati), whose views range from liberation theology to virulent homophobia; and the pragmatist American Aldo Bellini (Stanley Tucci), whose interest in the papacy may stem as much from a desire to stop Tedesco from destroying the institution as his own ambition. Lording over the sequestered group is Thomas Lawrence (Fiennes), a friend of Aldo’s who recently tried to resign his position over a crisis of faith. Meanwhile, there’s a secret cardinal who arrives unannounced to the conclave, Vincent Benitz (Carlos Diehz), who has been working in multiple warzones and whose identity the previous pope protected for his safety. What happens from there is sort of Election with old men – there’s backstabbing, scandal, and vote-buying, with Cardinal Lawrence trying to gather information from beyond the sequestration, which is supposed to protect the Cardinals from all news of the outside world while they cast their votes.

For about three-fourths of Conclave, it’s a slick, dialogue-heavy, prime time drama that keeps moving from one controversy to the next, with Cardinal Lawrence’s nervous energy and some campy plot turns powering the film. It’s quite fun, with Fiennes at the top of his game, Tucci more or less playing Stanley Tucci in a Cardinal costume, and Castellitto leaning hard into his villain’s role. (The film’s philosophical heart could not be clearer.) Then the first twist happens, and it bursts the realistic bubble enough to take you completely out of the film’s environment and remind you that this is just a page-turner adapted for the screen. The twist would itself have been enough to upend the film, but the timing is just heavy-handed, not to mention ridiculous, and the whole sequence relies on something outside of the conclave to redirect the course of events – which undercuts the film’s greatest strength, the sequestered nature of the conclave itself.

The second twist, which ends the film and apparently is straight from the book, is probably going to be the more controversial one if Conclave gets some legs in award season, but despite its similarly “WTF?” nature, it is more effective than the first twist because it’s funny, and in a script that largely dispenses with humor, that’s a pretty powerful way to wrap things up. It does lead Cardinal Lawrence to have to make a quick decision with huge consequences, with one (divine?) hand on the scale already, but the twist’s bigger impact might just be the reminder that, hey, this has all been good pulpy fun, and don’t take it all so seriously. And it is fun – I enjoyed the movie for what it was. It never drags, Fiennes is great in every scene (and he’s in just about every scene), and I certainly didn’t see the second twist coming. If you take it at face value, it’s a good time at the theater, nothing more.

I’ve seen none of the other Oscar contenders so far except for Dune 2, so I’m only guessing whether Conclave will end up in consideration for any of the big awards, but my gut says it’s going to sneak in as one of the last Best Picture nominees because it feels like a Serious Drama and has a lot of accomplished actors in its cast. Fiennes, who has two Oscar nominations to his name, feels like a lock to get one for Best Actor, and this is a fantastic performance from him; his combination of understated speech and telling expressions is perfect for Cardinal Lawrence, a man bedeviled (pun intended) by doubt yet driven by responsibility and love for the institution. Lithgow, a two-time Oscar nominee with six Emmys and two Tonys, is a Very Serious Actor who is kind of hamming it up here as Tremblay, wearing this “who me?” expression throughout the film that makes it pretty clear that, yes, you, almost from his first appearance. Tucci. The film utterly wastes Isabella Rossellini, who plays a nun who runs the housekeeping and catering staff for the conclave and is there to provide information on one of the scandals and, I presume, to be Isabella Rossellini. Of all of the supporting players here, Castellito might deliver the best performance, even though his character is rather two-dimensional, as he gives Tedesco such a fiery personality that he makes the threat of his papacy more palpable, with, perhaps, an unanticipated parallel to an imminent election of another sort.

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→ October 26, 2024
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Stick to baseball, 10/26/24.

I spent last week in the Arizona Fall League and filed three scouting notebooks, one with some initial observations, a second was all about pitching, and a last one that wrapped up a bunch of additional position players.

I sent out another issue of my free email newsletter this week; with Twitter increasingly overrun with misinformation and white nationalists, I’m there less and less, and the newsletter or one of the Twitter alternatives (Threads, Bluesky) are better ways to keep up with my work.

I appeared on All Things Considered’s Weekend Edition on NPR to preview the World Series (before the LCS actually ended!) and then did the same on NBC Morning News yesterday. One of my tweets made this SI roundup of people mocking former Reds infielder Zack Cozart’s incredible ignorance.

And now, the links…

  • Two stories from ProPublica: Arizona’s school voucher program is supposed to help low-income families, but they’re not the ones using the vouchers – it’s wealthy parents doing so. A claimed lack of prosecutors in Anchorage is leading to dozens of cases, some involving serious crimes like domestic violence or child abuse, being dismissed without trial. Other dismissed cases include 270 people arrested for suspected DUI.
  • Thanks to Arizona’s 15-week abortion ban, a pregnant woman who learned at 18 weeks that her fetus had a very high likelihood of spina bifida had to travel to Las Vegas for an abortion and ended up recovering in a casino hotel room. Abortion is health care.
  • This week in Bad Decisions: a doctor leading a large study on transgender youth said she didn’t publish her research findings because the results might be weaponized by anti-trans forces – which, of course, got out, and was promptly weaponized by anti-trans forces, even though the key quote here is this: “Puberty blockers did not lead to mental health improvements, (the doctor) said, most likely because the children were already doing well when the study began.” It’s also news that the children on puberty blockers didn’t get worse. Regardless of the results, her decision to withhold the results hasn’t helped anyone at all.
  • Israel threatened a Palestinian teen reporter, telling him to stop filming in Gaza, and when he didn’t, they killed him.
  • The hypothesis that Barnard’s Star, the second-closest star to our own, might have a planet orbiting it dates back at least to when I was a little kid. Now there might actually be some proof.
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→ October 25, 2024
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His Three Daughters.

His Three Daughters is not, as it turns out, a King Lear adaptation, as all three of the daughters of the title do in fact live to see the end of the movie. It is instead a very theatrical (as in, like a play) story about how we deal with grief and with watching a loved one die, and how such situations bring out the best and worst in us – especially with our siblings. (It’s streaming on Netflix.)

The film opens with Katie (Carrie Coon) delivering one of the most obnoxious soliloquies you’ll ever see on screen, and it’s a few minutes before we even see who she’s haranguing. It’s her sister, Rachel (Natasha Lyonne), who looks stoned because she is, although in her defense that might be the only way to listen to this tirade without being driven to violence. The interminable conversation, if you could even call it that, breaks when the third daughter, Christina (Elizabeth Olsen), emerges, and it turns out she, like Katie, can’t stop babbling, although in her case it’s far more self-directed than Katie’s style of lashing out at Rachel. The three women are staying in their father’s apartment as he is receiving hospice care at home for terminal cancer. Rachel is the only one who lives in the Manhattan apartment, while Katie lives elsewhere in the city with her family (including a rebellious teen daughter) and Christina lives in California with her husband and a young child. The three could not possibly have less in common, from personality to habits to appearance, and the tension of living together temporarily and of watching their father drift away leads to some dreadful fights and eventually some moments of tenderness and common understanding, showing two different sides of how familial ties bind us – even if, as it turns out, we’re not actually all tied by biology.

Almost every scene takes place in the apartment, and the vast majority of those take place in the common living/dining area; that, coupled with a cast that numbers about eight people in total aside from a few extras, gives the whole thing the feel of a play that has been adapted to the screen. It also is nearly all dialogue, which further enhances that sense, and puts a lot more pressure on the performances, especially the three leads, and to my surprise, the best one by far is Lyonne. She may have the hardest role of the three, since unlike her sisters, Rachel holds her emotions inside, and has a much harder time articulating – or facing – what she’s feeling, which, of course, may be why she seeks solace in THC. She is the only one who refuses to go into her father’s room, even when the hospice nurses encourage it, and the script does eventually explain a bit more of why her relationship with their father is slightly different than her sisters’. Coon and Olsen are both solid actresses whose characters are more one-note, and later attempts to soften both of them through more dialogue fall a little short. You don’t have to like these characters, but both are quite grating in different ways, and the way Katie treats Rachel is so offputting that I found it hard empathize with her even in scenes where she does open up and show some vulnerability. Perhaps Coon is just very good at playing someone who is capable of being extremely awful to others.

With so little change in the scenery of the film, His Three Daughters has to rely on subtler cues to help the audience follow the changing states of the main characters. Katie’s hair seems to grow increasingly unkempt as she becomes more frazzled and volatile, and Christina’s ‘together’ appearance also starts to break down; Rachel, on the other hand, is supposed to be a mess, but actually holds steady pretty well in appearance and mostly in how she deals with her two sisters.

The dialogue makes it clear at the beginning of His Three Daughters that the father is going to die at the end, but the way in which the script handles that is probably going to divide a lot of viewers. This movie tries so hard to be realistic that the brief detour into some kind of fantasy is both jarring for its complete tonal shift and useful for its introduction of a different mode for the three women to interact with each other. It does set up the resolution, even if there may have been a better way to handle it.

His Three Daughters appears to be nowhere in the awards race, although if it gets anything at all, I hope it’s a nod for Lyonne, who is pretty remarkable in this film; she sounds like Natasha Lyonne, because I don’t think she can sound like anyone else, but this is by far the most range I’ve ever seen from her, and I hope it opens the door for her to play more dramatic roles. I could have seen Best Original Screenplay consideration as well, although at this point I’ve only seen about ten movies from this calendar year so I’m just speculating.

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→ October 24, 2024
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Dune: Part Two.

The first Dune movie from Denis Villeneuve was fantastic, ranking among my top 5 movies of 2021 for its scope, its pacing, multiple strong performances, and outstanding visuals. The film did well enough for Villeneuve to finance a sequel to complete the story from the first (and only worthwhile) of Frank Herbert’s novels. While Dune: Part Two still has the same strong special effects, the script isn’t as strong as that of the first film, and the limits of Timothée Chalamet’s range become all too apparent as the film progresses. (It’s streaming free on Max, as is the first one, or can be rented on Amazon, iTunes, etc.)

Dune: Part Two picks up right where the first film left off, after the Harkonnens have taken over Arrakis, killing most of Paul Atreides’s (Timothée Chalamet) family, while he and his mother (Rebecca Ferguson) have joined up with the Fremen, a tribe of nomads who live in the desert, led by Stilgar (Javier Bardem), who help the pair escape after Paul wins a duel against one of their warriors. The sequel tracks two major plot lines that will intersect at the film’s conclusion. The first covers Paul and his mother’s time with the Fremen, hiding from the Harkonnens and coexisting with the skeptical nomads while they plan how to retake the planet. The other follows the Harkonnens’ effort to control the planet’s spice trade, with Rabban (Dave Bautista) serving as his uncle’s (Stellan Skarsgård) proxy, but Rabban’s brother Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler), a sadistic lunatic, is angling for the job.

The film seems to stay true to the book by devoting substantial time to Paul’s tenure with the Fremen, including how he works to convince them that he’s worth their protection but isn’t a prophet or a hero, just someone fighting the same evil forces he is. What works on the page doesn’t work as well on screen, though, as the result is a film that can’t manage its pacing, with long scenes of explanations and far too much of the movie’s constructed languages. There are some great action scenes, and the intrigues of the Harkonnens pulse with their own energy, even if Feyd-Rautha’s madness is over the top. Unfortunately, the script gives too much time to Paul, and not in a way that lets his character fully develop – and a lot of that comes down to the portrayal.

Chalamet is a highly decorated actor, with an Oscar nomination and three Golden Globe nominations under his belt, but I’m starting to think he’s more limited than it first appeared. (As if I weren’t already dreading the Bob Dylan biopic enough, now I’m worried we’re going to get Paul Atreides on the guitar and harmonica singing “Shelter from the Storm”.) There’s too little variation in his tone or expression here, which not only doesn’t fit the story, it doesn’t fit the character of the novel, either. Paul Atreides matures and develops substantially over the course of the book, and the script clearly allows him to do so as well, but there’s little to no difference between his affect and his delivery from the first movie to even the end of this one, when we get to the Big Speech and then the story’s resolution. I’m just starting to think he’s not as good of an actor as we thought he was, or as we thought he’d become.

Chalamet’s mediocre performance is even more stark because of the strength of many of the other people in the film, notably Bardem, as Stilgar, the leader of the Fremen and the one who believes that Paul is the prophet of their religion; Ferguson, as Paul’s mother, who becomes the spiritual leader of the Fremen, in accordance with the prophecy; and, of course, Zendaya, as Chani, Paul’s love interest, a much stronger character in the film than she is on the page, thanks also to Zendaya’s assertive portrayal. The cast even includes two other Academy Award winners beyond Bardem, Christopher Walken and Charlotte Rampling, both of whom play small roles without a ton of dialogue, but they help further overshadow Chalamet’s toneless performance.

Perhaps Dune: Part Two would work better if viewed immediately after the first film, rather than three years later – and I’m sure it would play better on the big screen than on my home television. It sounds like it’s going to get a Best Picture nomination, and possibly a Best Director nod for Villeneuve, neither of which is an outrage, although I’m guessing I’ll find ten movies I rank higher by the time this cycle is over. It’s just a disappointing ending given how great the first film was.

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→ October 23, 2024
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Daughters.

Daughters is a documentary about a single father-daughter dance, remarkable because the fathers are all incarcerated, some for many years to come, and the dance is part of a program that began in Richmond, Virginia, called Date with Dad.

The film follows several daughters and an entire circle of fathers at a prison in Washington, D.C., from when the men start their required fatherhood coaching sessions about ten weeks before the dance through the event itself and its immediate aftermath. There is no narration, as the subjects do all of the necessary talking to the camera or in groups. We hear from the girls and some of their mothers about how hard it is for them to grow up without their fathers around, sometimes going months or years without touching their dads and maybe talking to them once a week for 15 minutes – for which the mothers are charged outrageous fees. The fathers open up quite a bit about their feelings about being absent fathers, sometimes as children of absent fathers themselves, and the film wisely avoids telling us anything about why they’re incarcerated. Some of the strongest scenes are the smallest ones, like the one where the men, who are provided with suits and haircuts before the dance, are tying their ties, with one man showing a group of the others how to tie a Windsor knot; or the one of Aubrey, the youngest of the daughters we meet, as she rattles off her multiplication tables but who is too young to fully grasp how long her father will be gone. The daughters we see range in ages from 5 to about 15, and their feelings range from sorrow to confusion to outright anger at their dads for their life choices.

When we finally get to the day of the dance, and those girls start walking down the hall towards their fathers, who are sitting in a row of plastic chairs in their suits and polished shoes, I dare you not to cry. I just dare you. Those reactions, both of the daughters and the fathers, are as pure a distillation of what it means to be human as you will see in years of movies. There is far more to the movie than that – the conversations the fathers and daughters have in the dance itself are illuminating and direct and often heartbreaking – but that one moment is the perfect unscripted scene.

I can’t relate to these men completely, because I have never been in that situation, where I couldn’t see my daughter, or hold her, or even talk to her whenever I wanted. That scene where the dads see their daughters for the first time the night of the dance did remind me of one thing, though: the fear that gripped me for almost all of my daughter’s childhood that I would die before she was an adult. I just imagined the grief, the hole in her life, all the things I didn’t get to do or say. When they tell you that being a parent means living with your heart outside of your body, they aren’t even scratching the surface. Being a parent meant living for her more than I was even living for myself.

Daughters follows the dance with brief looks at the aftermath for both sides, with one man, whose daughter couldn’t make it but who is there in suit and tie (and perhaps thought she was coming?), giving a speech to the other dads that is so open and vulnerable that it underscores again their humanity and the cruelty of our prison system. The film ends with two-sentence updates on a few of the incarcerated dads and their daughters, one of whom is now in a facility that doesn’t allow visitation rights. I don’t think I knew that was possible outside of people held in solitary confinement (which is, itself, cruel and unusual punishment), but what Daughters underscores is that such a policy harms more than just the inmates: Regardless of what the father did, depriving his children of the right to even see him – not for a dance, or even a “touch visit,” but literally just to see him to talk to him – harms the kids, and I can’t imagine what the benefit or justification is for the policy other than spite. Our national addiction to incarceration is bad enough, but this film makes it clear how the carceral state also harms succeeding generations. The damage done when we are deprived of a parent, regardless of the reason, is immense. The Date with Dads program boasts a 5% recidivism rate, meaning 95% of fathers who go through the program and are subsequently released from prison do not reoffend. That such a simple program has such powerful results should be reason enough to expand its reach.

Avoiding mention of the fathers’ crimes, alleged or otherwise, is a choice, of course. If we found out that one of these men was responsible for someone’s death – which I don’t think is true given what we hear about the lengths of their sentences – it would alter our view of him whether we want it to or not. That choice by the directors, documentarian Natalie Rae and activist Angela Patton, keeps the focus where it belongs, on the people themselves and the essential relationship between fathers and daughters that will resonate with most of the viewing audience. There are some outtakes from the dance that play alongside the closing credits, and they are definitely worth hanging around to watch, as they show more joy from the night itself than is immediately evident from the main footage, which doesn’t show a whole lot of actual dancing, a choice I understand (this is about their relationships, not the Harlem Shuffle) but that they could have balanced differently.

Daughters won two Audience Awards at the Sundance Film Festival this year, U.S. Documentary and Festival Favorite, after which Netflix picked it up; it’s already showing up on top of predictions for the Academy Award for Best Documentary, along with another Netflix documentary, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, that premieres today. I imagine the powerful social justice angle here will help Daughters in awards season, and I hope that encourages more people to watch it and to consider doing something to help fight the incarceration cycle.

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