→ March 6, 2025
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Nickel Boys.

Nickel Boys, adapted from Colson Whitehead’s outstanding, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys,  is a daring experiment that tells the stories of its two protagonists in first-person perspective, giving the viewer the unsettling feeling of being in the abuse-ridden Nickel “Academy” for Boys. It’s easily one of the best films of 2024, earning just two Oscar nominations (Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay), although the script’s fidelity to the novel ended up blunting some of the suspense of the film for me.  (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc., or watch it free on that MGM+ thing nobody has.)

Nickel Boys starts by following Elwood (Ethan Herisse), a bookish young Black man in Florida in 1962 who ends up arrested as an accomplice to a theft he didn’t commit and is sent to a segregated reform school, based on the real-life Florida School for Boys, which was only closed in 2009 after decades of reports of abuse, rape, and murder of the children imprisoned there. Elwood becomes an easy target for some of the bigger, tougher boys there until a longer-term inmate, Turner (Brandon Wilson), comes to his aid, and the two become friends. When the pair see all of the corruption and violence going on behind the scenes, they hatch a plot to try to get the abusive school leader removed from power. Scenes from 1988 are interspersed through the film, showing Elwood, now an adult living in New York City, running his own moving business, eventually running into a former classmate from the institution and hearing how many others have died or fallen into substance abuse since they were “graduated.” We also see Elwood’s grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) in the beginning of the movie before Elwood’s arrest, in her attempts to visit him and use a lawyer to get him released, and in some of Elwood’s flashbacks to his life before Nickel.

This is the first full-length feature from director and co-screenwriter RaMell Ross, who directed the Oscar-nominated short Hale County This Morning, This Evening in 2018, making it even more impressive that he  chose to film it in first-person perspective, and to do so from the viewpoint of two different characters. There are several scenes we see twice, which naturally changes the way we interpret the events we’re watching, and even in scenes we see once the shift in perspective can be disorienting – deliberately so, mimicking the sense that the student-inmates must have had in an environment where punishment, including getting “disappeared,” could be arbitrary and capricious. The intense focus on only what Elwood or Turner could see means that the audience’s understanding of how brutal and corrupt the school leadership was is entirely defined by the boys’ understanding of the same. We might suspect it more than they do, of course, but the evidence comes to us through their eyes, so that their disbelief – especially that people in positions of authority could so blatantly ignore the rules and act unfairly – is more palpable.

That this film missed out on the Best Cinematography category is the great snub and mystery of this year’s Oscars; I understand the movie wasn’t that widely seen, but it got a Best Picture nomination, so enough people saw and appreciated it for it to land one of those spots even over some films that (I think) were seen as more likely to make the cut. The cinematography in this movie is everything; it is the defining feature of the film, and it elevates a story that was already fantastic to another level, making this one of the very best movies of the year. The two leads give excellent performances, but I can see the argument that both are too understated to become awards fodder, not when they were competing against impersonations and dancing lawyers and the like.

Nickel Boys is ultimately an experience, or a movie to be experienced, something that I seldom saw in this movie cycle; Anora, which won Best Picture and a slew of other honors, is one of the others, and I’d say the underrated A Real Pain is as well. All three movies draw you into their stories in the early moments and never break the spell until the final scene or two. I was at a slight disadvantage here, because I read the novel and remembered the twist, so the gut-punch moment that comes late in the film didn’t land the same way with me. That’s not a criticism of the film, but a comment on the particular experience I had in watching it. However, Ross made an editorial choice at the very end, after the resolution of the main narrative, showing some real-life images and footage that, unfortunately, did break the spell for me before we hit the credits. It was the only misstep for me in what was otherwise a superb film and tremendous directorial debut, one that I hope is a harbinger of more great work to come.

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→ March 4, 2025
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Arlington & San Antonio eats.

Just some smaller eats of note this time, with two spots I particularly wanted to mention. The first was a very unassuming Lebanese restaurant called Beirut Grill that’s about ten minutes from Globe Life Field. That might be the best baba ghanouj I have ever had, and if not, it’s very close. It was smoky, garlicky, and incredibly bright, and I almost could have made a meal of that alone, as I think the appetizer portion was one entire eggplant and came with five or six large, warm pitas. I did, however, order an actual main course, the tawook sandwich with shish tawook (marinated, grilled chunks of chicken breast) with tomatoes, parsley, and toum (garlic sauce) wrapped in a thin bread that I think was markook, since it was thinner than a pita or laffa. The chicken was still juicy and had the brightness of the lemon juice in the marinade, and the toum … well, it’s mostly garlic, so I’m a fan, but that’s the sort of thing you’ll probably love or hate. Those two items plus a sparking water came to about $19 before tip. I’ve been thinking about the baba ghanouj for three days now.

I was in San Antonio for part of the day on Saturday and found a food hall in the city called Make Ready, where I ate at Four Brothers, a Venezuelan food stand that sells arepas – two for $12.99, to be precise, so I got one with chicken and one vegan one with black beans, both with sliced avocado, maduros (sweet plantains), garlic sauce, onions, and more. The chicken one was so stuffed it fell apart before I could finish it, but that was the winner of the two, just because the chicken itself had so much flavor, smoky and salty and a tiny bit spicy. The vegan arepa was perfectly fine, but it missed the extra flavors from the sauce on the chicken itself. I’m trying to eat less meat in general, but on both my trips to Texas in the last three weeks, I’ve had narrow windows to eat, and usually that means chicken is involved somehow. I also got the yucca fries, but I’d give those a miss; they definitely needed more salt, but also they just weren’t necessary given the size of the two arepas.

I revisited Smoke ‘n Ash, the Ethiopian/Texas BBQ fusion spot in south Arlington that earned a writeup in the New York Times two years ago, and ended up ordering almost the same thing I did last July, with some small modifications. I will say having had the chicken and the ribs both with and without the Ethiopian awaze seasoning, I’d pay the upcharge to add it every time. Without is good; with is divine. I tried the ye’abasha gomen, listed on the menu as vegan collard greens to distinguish them from the “beefy collard greens,” which I believe contain beef. I’ve never had collards like these and I honestly don’t know how I feel about them; they’re very gingery, with garlic, cardamom, and coriander, so they also come across as very earthy in flavor. The collards themselves were extremely well cooked, tender but not mushy, and the whole thing had plenty of salt; it’s also just possible that it didn’t meld well with the other flavors on the plate. I still love this place and wish there were more things for me to try.

I’ll also vouch again for Nehemiah Coffee, a local coffee shop maybe 7-8 minutes from Globe Life up on Lamar. They’re open till 10 pm and serve some food and some beer and wine later in the day; their coffee is the best I’ve had in the area, and I really love their simple breakfast sandwich because of the chipotle aioli they put on it. It’s also a very appealing space in which to sit and work or read or just relax, because it’s open and gets a lot of natural light through the windows. That’s become my morning stop every time I’m in Arlington now.

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→ March 3, 2025
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A Complete Unknown.

A Complete Unknown looked for all the world like another hagiographic biopic of a musician who deserved better, but, much to my surprise at least, it’s a solid and at least somewhat balanced portrayal of a short window of Bob Dylan’s life. It’s well-paced, gets the right songs in the right places, and brings two outstanding supporting performances. It’s just unfortunate the guy playing Dylan is so tied up in an impersonation that the portrayal says nothing remotely insightful about the main character. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.; I received a review code from the studio’s publicity department.)

The story begins with Dylan’s (Timothée Chalamet) arrival in New York City, upon which he tracks down one of his idols, Woody Guthrie, by that point in hospital as Huntington’s Disease had affected his ability to control his muscles. Sitting by Guthrie’s bedside is Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), who invites Dylan to come stay with him and his wife Toshi (Eriko Hatsune, in the film’s most thankless role), where Pete quickly realizes that “Bobby” has some talent. We follow Dylan through little shows in New York City coffee houses and in slightly larger spaces where Seeger gets him on the billing – which is where he meets Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) – and onwards and upwards until Dylan gets to play the Newport Folk Festival. His first two appearances there were huge successes, but when he returned as the headliner in 1965, at the point where he was incorporating more rock sounds and was about to release Highway 61, he found himself in conflict with the festival’s organizers and many fans while also at a major inflection point in his career.

A Complete Unknown dispenses with the music biopic trope of some sort of adversity – usually drugs or alcohol – for the subject to overcome before the triumphant conclusion, likely because Dylan simply hasn’t had anything like that. The dips in his career were far less dramatic; the biggest one is probably his flirtation with Christianity, leading to a trio of albums that are generally considered his weakest, and all of that is more than a decade after the time period of this film. Instead, the script just lets the natural vicissitudes of the life of a rising musician define the narrative arc, such as his on-again, off-again affairs with Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning, playing a fictionalized version of Suze Rotolo) and with Baez, along with his conflicts with music industry suits and the Festival organizers. The slope of the curve is always positive, but there’s enough variation here to keep the story interesting – and the music doesn’t hurt.

That said, there’s a clear choice here to portray Bob Dylan as some sort of pop star, and it doesn’t exactly work with the source material. This is Bob Dylan, not just any songwriter or singer or musician. He won a Nobel Prize. He’s been covered by over 600 artists, running the gamut from Jimi Hendrix to Adele to Ministry to Bryan Ferry to XTC to the Ramons to Guns ‘N Roses to Van Morrison (with Them). He’s one of the most influential songwriters in the history of recorded music, but there’s very little to indicate that in A Complete Unknown. The portrayal here, which has fans recognizing him everywhere and hounding him in the streets, doesn’t even seem to line up with his commercial results in the film’s time period; his first album to reach the Billboard top ten came out in 1965, near the very end of the narrow window the movie covers. Maybe he had screaming groupies following him around, maybe he couldn’t go out in public to see his friend’s band play, but that doesn’t seem to jibe with the facts or Dylan’s persona.

I’m writing this just an hour or two after the Oscars ended, and although I haven’t seen The Brutalist to comment on whether Adrien Brody was deserving, I’m not upset that Chalamet didn’t win. He’s doing an extended impersonation, and in his case, it feels like Timothée Chalamet impersonating Bob Dylan impersonating Timothée Chalamet. The scene in the elevator when he meets Bobby Neuwirth for the first time is cringeworthy, as Chalamet is trying so hard to mimic Dylan’s voice and mannerisms that it comes off as bad parody; Richard Belzer never sank to such depths. Edward Norton and Monica Barbaro are both marvelous in their supporting roles, however, and while neither had much of a chance, especially not Norton, they really help A Complete Unknown keep its momentum and its general atmosphere, Norton – as charming as I’ve ever seen him – in the first half, Barbaro in the second. There’s also a brief cameo by James Austin Johnson as an emcee, which is a brilliant nod to Johnson’s impersonations of Dylan on Saturday Night Live.

The film also completely ignores Toshi Seeger, even though she was a significant figure in several of the events the movie depicts. She helped set up the original Newport Folk Festival; she produced and directed the TV series starring her husband on which Dylan appears in the movie; she later won an Emmy for a documentary about Pete’s career. Yet A Complete Unknown barely gives her any lines, and in most scenes she’s busy frowning or scowling, with a near-constant expression on her face like someone has placed a rotten onion just below her chin. The film has one nonwhite character of any significance at all, and she gets whitewashed out of the story. There are a lot of details here that are made up or combined into single events, typical artistic license in this kind of film, but the erasure of Toshi Seeger is almost unforgivable. (The New York Times’ obituary for her has more details on her life and legacy.)

The screenplay for A Complete Unknown, adapted from Elijah Wald’s book Dylan Goes Electric!,does veer enough from the clichés of the genre to maintain enough narrative greed to power through two-plus hours without a big dramatic twist to overcome my two pretty significant reservations about the film. Chalamet plays well and sings passably, even when imitating such an oft-imitated voice, and the performances around him hold him up in the moments when he descends too far into impersonation. I recommend it with the caveat that it could have been so much more, especially in terms of delving into Dylan’s character, perhaps in the hands of a different screenwriter and lead actor.

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→ March 1, 2025
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Stick to baseball, 3/1/25.

Two new posts this week at the Athletic, one looking at the top 25 prospects just for potential 2025 impact, and another draft scouting notebook from my trip to San Diego, looking at Tyler Bremner, Gavin Fien, and Nick Dumesnil.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the game Harvest, a big update to a smaller-box game of the same name from the defunct publisher Tasty Minstrel Games. I’m a huge fan of the new version.

I keep pushing back another issue of my free email newsletter because I’ve been writing so much other stuff, but it’ll come … soon. No promises, though.

And now, the links…

  • And they’ve already begun the process of banning trans people from obtaining visas to enter the United States. The absolute war on this tiny, highly vulnerable population should make everyone nauseous. It is just evil.
  • I’m embarrassed to say I did not know that many counties charge prison inmates “lodging fees” or “room and board” or some other bullshit – even if the convictions were later overturned. Pennsylvania’s Dauphin County has not only ended this practice, but forgiven over $65 million in such debts “owed” by past prisoners.
  • An unvaccinated child died from measles in Texas, the first death in the ongoing measles outbreak there that resulted from high vaccine-denialism rates there. The measles vaccine, part of the MMR shot, is extremely effective in preventing illness, and even if you survive a measles infection you can die years later from an incurable, degenerative neurological condition called SSPE.
  • That Mississippi town (Clarksdale) that sued a local paper to force them to remove an editorial they didn’t like backed down under public pressure, withdrawing their lawsuit.
  • The current Supreme Court is very friendly to states that want to kill prisoners, but they issued a surprising ruling in one recent case of an Oklahoma man who wasn’t even accused of killing anyone and where the prosecutors withheld critical evidence.

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→ February 28, 2025
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All We Imagine as Light.

All That We Imagine As Light might be better known for the controversy over its exclusion from the Oscar nomination than for the film itself; India’s film board, which has a history of dubious choices in this regard, declined to submit it as the country’s entry for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, instead submitting a comedy called Laapataa (Lost) Ladies. That film did not make the Academy’s shortlist, further enraging supporters of All That We Imagine As Light, and leading to some recriminatory comments from the Indian film board, including some cheap shots at this film and its director, Payal Kapadia. Much of this is the result of the Academy’s one-film-per-country rule, of course, but after India also passed over RRR two years ago, the criticism of their selection process seems to have some merit. (You can rent All We Imagine As Light on iTunes, amazon, etc.)

The shame is that Kapadia’s feature-length debut is a lovely film, following two women from Mumbai out to the country, where they go to help a local woman who has been evicted from the flat where she has lived for over 20 years because she has no papers to prove her residency and developers are throwing her out. Prabha is a nurse whose husband via an arranged marriage now lives and works in Germany and hasn’t called her for over a year, while her roommate, the younger Anu, has a clandestine affair with a young Muslim man, Shiaz, which neither Anu’s Hindu family nor Shiaz’s would approve. Prabha’s colleague Manoj, a doctor at the hospital, is clearly interested in her, but she demurs because she’s married.

This is a leisurely film, one that sprinkles in some bits of daily life without fully explaining them or connecting them to the main story. Prabha receives a gift in the mail without a name attached, and while we might infer where it’s from, it simply doesn’t come up again. Once the two women follow their neighbor to the rural village where she’s returning, however, there is at least some tension, as Shiaz follows Anu to continue their rendezvous, and Prabha discovers what’s really going on behind her back.

The film has the coveted 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with 145 reviews, and it feels like a movie that critics should love. It has a simple story with a small set of characters and goes deep on the two main ones, allowing them to develop over the course of its two hours in a very natural fashion, with absolutely nothing extraordinary or unbelievable in the plot to break its spell. Yet beneath this ease is a precision in movement, direction, scene, even music, with songs by the late Ethiopian nun Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, whose estate granted Kapadia the rights to use her songs. It has the feeling of a model ship assembled in a bottle: It is such a small thing, yet the labor and patience required to put it together are evident if you just look for it.

That said, I’m probably a lot lower on All We Imagine as Light than most professional critics – I recognize the skill and the care taken to make it, but it is quite slow, and my unquiet mind was wandering a bit in the middle third or so. (Also, just watching it made me feel hot. I don’t know when exactly in the year it was filmed, but everyone looks very uncomfortable. I would not survive long in India, clearly.) I wanted to connect more with the two characters, but the film is demanding a little more of the audience than I could give. I recognize this is my issue, not the movie’s. It’s easy for me to say “this could have been 20 minutes shorter,” but when I offer that criticism, I usually have specific content I think the director or editor should have cut. Nothing here feels extraneous, though. Its pace is the natural result of its story, and it took just shy of two hours to tell it. Your mileage may vary.

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→ February 27, 2025
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Memoir of a Snail.

Memoir of a Snail is almost too much of a bad thing: Its protagonist, Grace, suffers tragedy after tragedy in her life, confirming her fears about the world to the point that she’s left entirely alone as the film begins and she starts telling her life story. It is so beautifully told, however, that it holds itself together just long enough to get to the finish line, where it all comes together in an ending that brings hope with just a touch of sentiment. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

Nominated for this year’s Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, Memoir of a Snail is the second full-length film from writer/director Adam Elliot, who apparently has a reputation for these sort of bleak stories. It follows Grace Pudel (voiced by Sarah Snook), who we see as an adult at the beginning, watching her closest friend, Pinky (Jacki Weaver), die of the most old age. Grace then steps outside to the garden, where she releases one of her pet snails, Sylvia, and then begins to tell the sad story of her sad life, from her birth with a cleft lip, for which other kids make fun of her for years, to when she and her twin brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) became orphans – their mother died giving birth to them – and then their miserable lives in separate foster families. Gilbert ends up with an evangelical Christian family near Perth, where he’s forced to work on the family orchard and to speak in tongues while praying, while Grace ends up with a pair of nudist hippies who eventually just abandon her. Her life gets worse and worse, other than her friendship with the eccentric Pinky, who buried two husbands in tragicomic circumstances, but has a devil-may-care approach to life and is determined to have a good time.

Pinky’s death is, naturally, the spur that Grace needs to leave the house and go live her life for the first time, although how we get there is part of the magic of the film. There’s probably one tragedy too many – one of them definitely had me shout “enough!” at the screen – but there is so much exploration of Grace’s feelings that she ends up one of the best-developed characters in any film this year, live-action or animated. It also means that when she gets a happier ending, the film has earned it, even the one slightly implausible bit (which you will probably see coming) that makes her happiest of all of her new fortunes.

Elliotuses stop-motion animation in his films, with a style that naturally calls to mind Tim Burton’s work in the genre, with elements of Charles Addams and Edward Gorey in his characters’ appearances. They’re cute in a grotesque sort of way, especially Grace with her ridiculous snail-hat (it has two ping-pong balls on wires or pipe cleaners, painted as eyes) and Gilbert with his Harry Potter-ish hair. They’re weird, and that makes it easy to see why they’d be bullied and ostracized, and why they’d feel alone and scared of the greater world. It’s also easy to empathize with them, and root for them in their Dickensian circumstances, because he depicts them as real enough to keep them from becoming pathetic. Snook’s voice performance is also fantastic, so much so that she won Best Lead Actress at this year’s AACTA Awards, the Australian equivalent to the Oscars, with Weaver winning for Best Supporting Actress, both over actors who appeared in live-action films.

Best Animated Feature is the only category in this year’s Oscars where I’ve seen all of the nominees, and that’ll probably still be true on Sunday night. I expect Flow to win, as it won the Golden Globe and won the Best Animated Feature – Independent award at the Annies (the most significant awards for animated productions), but this isn’t even a close call; Flow is fine, but has no dialogue and very little story, just some beautiful animation work and a bunch of animals who turn out to secretly be civil engineers. It would be my second choice, with The Wild Robot third, Inside Out 2 second, and the very disappointing Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl last, because it just wasn’t funny at all.

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→ February 26, 2025
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James.

Percival Everett has been writing novels for over twenty years, but he’s having a moment right now: his 2001 novel Erasure was adapted into the film American Fiction, which won its screenwriter Cord Jefferson an Academy Award; and his latest novel, James, won the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize for Fiction while making the Booker Prize shortlist. (It should have won that too, but lost to Samantha Harvey’s Orbital.) James retells the story of Jim, the escaped slave who accompanies Huckleberry Finn in Mark Twain’s novel, from Jim’s perspective, completely reimagining the character and most of the narrative, in a book that is far more of an adventure than the novel that inspired it while also giving its protagonist far more humanity than his creator ever did.

James narrates Everett’s novel, and does so in an erudite voice that, of course, has nothing to do with the slave dialect the character uses in Twain’s work. In this novel’s universe, slaves know how to speak as well as or better than their white tormentors, but they feign all manner of ignorance to make the whites feel better about themselves and thus try to improve their own odds of survival. The plot starts out on the same track as in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, with Huck faking his own death to escape his abusive father while James runs away to avoid being sold and separated from his wife Sadie and daughter Lizzie. (Twain mentioned Jim’s wife, but didn’t name her; Everett is following the convention of other writers who’ve used these characters.) The two flee upriver, with James seeing the corpse of Huck’s father but not telling the boy, Huck witnessing the murderous feud between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons, and the two encountering the con men who call themselves the King and the Duke and who eventually sell James to a local slave owner.

Everett fills in the blanks in Twain’s novel by following James rather than Huck, giving James’ dialogue with other slaves – all in proper English, generally more proper than what the white characters use – and his own inner monologue on his life and on philosophy. He’s visited in dreams by Locke and (I think) Rousseau, reads Voltaire and John Stuart Mill, and eventually gets a hold of a pencil at great cost so he can begin to write some of his thoughts on paper. James’s narrative diverges from the original when the King and Duke briefly leave him with a third man, who sells him to a traveling minstrel group, where James meets a man named Norman and escapes with him while looking for Huck, who’s still with the two bandits. This arc returns James to their home in the end, without an appearance from Tom Sawyer, and leads to a conclusion that is far more satisfying than Twain’s, if less realistic.

James, or Jim in Twain’s work, is just not a well-developed character in the original stories, even as Twain wrote him in a far more sympathetic manner than just about any of his contemporaries did when writing of slaves or even of Black people in general. Everett’s James is intelligent, sure, but the difference is that he is whole: he has fully-developed thoughts and ideas, values, a sense of justice, empathy for others, and a desire for even a little agency over his own life. It stands above nearly every other continuation or adaptation of a famous novel I’ve ever encountered, with the possible exception of Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys’s similar retelling of Jane Eyre from the perspective of the madwoman in the attic – but Everett’s novel is angrier and wittier and much better paced than Rhys’s.

Everett also mimics Twain’s use of the picaresque format both for its thrilling elements and its satirical ones, although here the satire is subtler than it is in some of Everett’s other works, like the absurdist Dr. No or the violent fantasy of The Trees, the other two of his novels I’ve read so far. James reads like Everett was trying to stay authentic to Twain’s work as much as possible until he veered away from the plot in the last third of his own novel – and it works, because of the familiarity of the original (one of the few novels I’ve read twice, and the only one I had to read in high school and in college) and because of how well-structured it was in the first place. Everett is brilliant and wildly imaginative, so his restraint here isn’t just impressive, but makes the whole work more powerful in the end. I have read very few works of great literature with this sort of haste, because the story and the character are so compelling I never wanted to put the book down.

Next up: Sarah Pinsker’s A Song for a New Day, winner of the 2020 Nebula Award for Best Novel.

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→ February 25, 2025
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Cascadia Rolling Hills & Rivers.

Cascadia is one of my all-time favorite games, as it’s incredibly elegant: It has a simple rule set that’s easy to learn or teach, but the play is fun and challenging, requiring you to think on your feet and rethink your strategy on many of your turns. It’s also limited in time, as each player will get exactly twenty turns, and those turns are quick. (You can buy it here.)

Cascadia was a huge hit, too, so it was inevitable that we’d get expansions and brand extensions, including last fall’s roll-and-write versions, called Rolling Rivers and Rolling Hills, the two of which are mostly the same game with just some slight differences in the die faces and the maps on which you’ll be writing. I played Rolling Rivers and it is absolutely fine. It’s a solid roll-and-write game that works well and should be very easy for Cascadia fans to pick up. I didn’t love it, though, and I think it’s missing one of the facets of some roll-and-write games that I especially enjoy.

The theme is where it draws the most from the original game, as you’re going to gather the same animal types from the dice rolled on each turn, and then you’ll try to collect enough to match the requirements of the public habitat cards. You start the game with one of each of the six animal types, plus one nature token. On every turn, all players play at once; someone rolls the four common dice, and each player rolls their two personal dice. One of the common dice has special functions on it that I’ll explain in a bit, but the other dice all show various animals or combinations of animals on their faces. An individual player looks at their own two dice plus the common ones and picks a single animal type to collect, marking that number in the appropriate row on their animal sheet – so if you see three elk on the dice, and you choose to collect elk, you’ll write a 3 in the next open space on the elk line (rather than checking off three boxes, which I think is the more common way to go about it). You then see if you have enough animals to satisfy the requirements of any of the four habitat cards currently on the table. If you do, you may choose to cross off the matching animals and then take the reward(s) from the habitat card: You mark off a completed habitat of that type on your habitat sheet, and then take any associated bonus that was below the habitat card, which might include a bonus animal or some free nature tokens.

The fourth die in the common pool grants some extra power for that round, like letting you use one of your personal dice a second time (as in, counting it again), or letting players collect a second animal type on that turn. The nature tokens let you manipulate the dice for yourself: spend one to turn a single die into the next ‘lower’ animal type on your sheet, spend two to turn it into the next higher animal type, and spend three to take a second animal this turn.

Each game comes with four distinct habitat sheets, and they’re slightly different in the two games. The fundamental mechanics are the same – you write the value of the habitat card you’ve completed in a matching space on the sheet, and once you’ve completed a set or a row or a column, you’ll get an interim reward. The points at game-end all come from the habitat sheets as well, mostly from the cards you’ve fulfilled but with more points coming if you completed specific areas or sets, depending on the shapes shown on that sheet.

What I think the Cascadia Rolling games lack is the chaining of bonuses that make most roll and writes incredibly addictive. Setting yourself up to get three or four or more rewards on a single turn is a huge part of the fun of games like That’s Pretty Clever, Three Sisters, and French Quarter; the fact that the Cascadia games don’t have that just cuts into my desire to play them versus playing one of those others, or some of the other roll and writes I have in the collection. That may be my personal taste, though; it’s the one thing I like the most about this type of game.

There’s nothing remotely wrong with these games, though; if I sound a little down on them, it’s because a) I love roll-and-write games and probably have a high standard for them and b) I really love Cascadia. In the end I wouldn’t choose to play the Rolling versions, even solo, when I have Cascadia …

…which reminds me that there’s an app version now! Dire Wolf Digital are on a hell of a roll lately, with Dune Imperium, Clank!, and now Cascadia as digital board game adaptations in the last year or so. Dire Wolf has never missed for me – every one of their games I’ve tried has been awesome, and Cascadia is as good as all of them. It looks great, is very easy to navigate, offers all of the variations in scoring from the original game, and has a campaign mode with challenges to make it a little more interesting. I didn’t think the AI was that strong, but I also tried a beta version and it’s possible it’s improved since then. I still recommend it, even as a solo endeavor, because it’s so seamless and looks so great on any screen.

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→ February 24, 2025
→ By

The Seed of the Sacred Fig.

Shot in secret in 2022-23, The Seed of the Sacred Fig was banned in Iran and its release abroad led to arrest warrants for the director, Mohammad Rasoulof, after which he and most members of the cast fled the country. It’s a nearly three-hour epic film that starts out as a political drama, morphs into a sort of psychological thriller, and ends up as almost an action film, as we follow a single family during the 2022-23 protests against the theocratic regime, unrest that takes this apparently quiet household and shatters its peace and the fragile mind of its patriarch.

Iman was a low-level investigator for the Islamic dictatorship that has ruled Iran since 1979, and as the film begins he’s been promoted to a more senior investigative role, one that will pay better, grant him better housing, and that also gives him a gun, invoking Chekhov’s rule. His family doesn’t know what he does for work at first, but he tells his wife Najmeh, and the two of them then have to explain to their two daughters, Rezvan and Sana, that they must be particularly rigid about following the laws, including wearing the hijab (which was at the root of the protests) and avoiding posting pictures of themselves on social media. Rezvan’s friend ends up injured by the police while the two are leaving a university building, and Najmeh helps patch the friend up briefly while getting her out of the house before Iman knows she’s been there, but this is just the undercard for what’s to come: The gun goes missing, and Iman assumes the culprit is in the house. That shifts the entire tenor of the movie to one that looked outward to the brutal police response to the protestors into one that looks inward at how Iman’s new job, where he is rubber-stamping dozens if not hundreds of executions per day, has warped his inner self and made him into a tyrant who will gladly repress the women under his command at the slightest provocation.

The fact that it was filmed in secret only underscores the movie’s broader themes of how authoritarian regimes destroy the fundamental bonds that hold us together, with family above all: They turn neighbors against neighbors and family members against family members. Iman has no reason to distrust or suspect his compliant wife or his daughters of anything until the government sends him home with a metaphor. He and his wife are both true believers in the regime and in their Islamic faith, while their daughters, who have access to social media and can see that the government is lying to them, want the same kind of freedoms that the protestors are fighting for. The conflict in their home mirrors the conflict in Iranian society, and when Iman goes around the bend and begins terrorizing his family after their address and his picture appear online, he resorts to increasingly harsh and inhumane tactics to force their obedience, with somewhat predictable consequences for everyone. The final moment and image are further loaded with symbolism, as the hollow foundation beneath one character’s feet gives way, arguing just how tenuous the power of a dictatorship truly is.

This is easily one of the best films I’ve seen from 2024, even if it drags a little in the final third, as Rasoulof seems less adept at managing the action sequences than he is at the psychological thiller bits; there’s a long section where several characters are chasing each other through some ruins, but you could easily put the Benny Hill music over it and it would work just fine. The shift from the macro lens to the micro one is just brilliant, as the script sets up the context with real footage from the protests, making especial note of just how much the violence came down against women (in a country that already is one of the most repressive in the world when it comes to women’s rights), before moving to the family drama, where it becomes increasingly clear that these three women are just serfs who exist at the whim of their father. It’s a brutal and unstinting look at Iranian society; no wonder the authoritarian clerics didn’t like it.

(I don’t think this film has a chance at the Best International Feature Film Oscar this year, for which it’s one of the five nominees, as I’m Still Here is also in that category and has a Best Picture nod as well, which probably means it will end up taking the spot everyone assumed would go to Emilia Perez before that film’s implosion in the last few weeks.)

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→ February 22, 2025
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Stick to baseball, 2/22/25.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I posted my first draft scouting notebook of 2025, covering the players I saw at the Shriners College Classic, which probably includes anywhere from three to six first-rounders and maybe ten guys who’ll go on day one. I also held a Klawchat here on Thursday.

Coming up, I’ll have my ranking of the top prospects for impact in 2025 on Monday, plus a draft scouting notebook from this weekend probably Tuesday, and then I believe my first ranking of draft prospects will go up around March 5th.

You can also sign up for my free email newsletter, which didn’t go out this week because I was recovering from some sort of respiratory infection that wasn’t flu or COVID but still sucked.

And now, the links…

  • Many Americans are leaving the country for good, or at least for the foreseeable future, as the new Administration is slashing and burning through science and other federal budgets while threatening a level of authoritarianism never seen in this country. I don’t blame them one bit.
  • The mayor and city council in Clarksdale, Mississippi, sued a local newspaper for publishing an accurate story on a secret vote that the council was required to announce to the public before holding. The paper took the editorial down, but other sites are publishing it to get the word out.
  • Rock Manor Games has one up for StarDriven: Gateway, the second go-round after they pulled a campaign in the fall to tweak the game somewhat. I’ve demoed this game, as the publisher is a friend (our kids go to school together), and I recommend it.
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