→ 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
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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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→ February 21, 2025
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How to Be Enough.

On my dormant (hopefully not extinct!) podcast, I had Dr. Ellen Hendriksen on as a guest to discuss her first book, How to Be Yourself, about dealing with social anxiety and the penchant many of us have for self-doubt and self-criticism. Her second book, How to Be Enough: Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics and Perfectionists, shifts its focus to the perfectionist in most of us, if not all of us, running through enough facets of perfectionism that you’re very likely to find something in here that applies to your own life.

Full disclosure: I haven’t met Dr. Hendriksen, but I know her brother well enough that I have stayed at his house and discussed dinosaurs with his kids.

Perfectionism isn’t an actual diagnosis, although it can be a symptom of or just come along with some psychological conditions, including anxiety and depression. Hendriksen makes it clear up front that she is talking about a sort of small-p perfectionism here, the sort that can show up in just about anybody, whether or not you’re dealing with anything else at the same time. The little voice that won’t let you forget something you did that wasn’t perfect, or that won’t let you try something because you might not do it perfectly? That’s her target, with some easy to implement tips to get around that voice, since, if you’ve heard it, you know ignoring it doesn’t work. It’s a narrow focus that works in the book’s favor, especially since she still covers a lot of ground in a modest page count.

Hendriksen begins by comparing two iconic perfectionists, Walt Disney and Fred (as in Mister) Rogers. Both were successful in their lines of work because they were so exacting, with high expectations of others and perhaps even high expectations of themselves. The difference is that Disney was, by this account, a rather miserable person, and equally miserable to be around, while Rogers remains famous for his magnanimous and empathic nature, not just on air but in his everyday life. The argument here is that Rogers was a paragon of self-acceptance and self-compassion, while Disney never learned those skills.

I certainly recognized myself in several chapters of How to Be Enough, whether it was the way I am now or the way I was when I was younger. The way Disney and others in the book would lash out at others was definitely me earlier in my career and personal life; it took a lot of therapy and practice to accept that my own failings weren’t always someone else’s fault, and that others didn’t have to live up to my arbitrary and often ridiculous standards, nor was it right to be rude or unpleasant even if they did do something wrong. People make mistakes. It’s a platitude to say to err is human, of course, but it’s not a matter of divine forgiveness to brush it off and move on; it’s just being a decent person, whether it’s to your colleague or some random customer service person on the phone – or to yourself, which is just as much a focus of this book as how you treat others.

Perhaps the greatest value in How to Be Enough for me was to see that things I always thought were unusual about my brain are apparently pretty common. She cites many examples of people dealing with intrusive thoughts of ‘mistakes’ from earlier in life, even childhood, and often needing to clear those thoughts with a profanity or a shake of the head or something similar. I do that all the fucking time, often over things that happened 40 years ago. She also has several people describe how external pressures deterred them from pursuing whatever subject or skill they excelled at, whether it was straight burnout or the weight of expectations that they’d be perfect or else they failed. For me, it happened with math first, and then STEM as a whole – I was good at them at an early age, and so the spotlight was increasingly on me for that, and anything less than a perfect grade or score was a disappointment. I loved math, both applied and theoretical, and enjoyed almost all science (except biology, not mathy enough) and anything relating to coding. By the time I got out of high school, I was so over being the math kid, or dealing with everyone’s expectations that I’d become a scientist or a doctor, that I went completely the other way into the soft sciences – political science first (‘government’ at my college, which was more akin to political philosophy), then sociology and economics, which are about as soft as you can get. I took one math class, for fun, and of course I enjoyed it because it didn’t matter at all how I did. If I could do it all over again, I’d major in applied math, because I would have absolutely loved it and probably would have done really well as a result, but my experiences as a kid – especially those god damned math fairs they held in my county – made math very un-fun for a while.

How to Be Enough covers a lot of ground in only about 260 pages. There’s a chapter on why we procrastinate and how to get around it; on how perfectionism makes us take fun activities and turn them into tasks, even scolding ourselves for doing things that are fun and nothing more; and on how it’s okay to like doing something even if you’re not good at it. That last one is definitely aimed at me; I have a lot of hobbies, and when I pursue one, I go all in, because I want to keep getting better. I don’t like doing things I don’t do well. It’s why I seldom enjoy dancing (unless I’ve had a few), which of course is a very common condition and which Hendriksen covers in the book rather uncomfortably. Some of the problems she describes are inward-focused, where we judge ourselves to a ridiculous standard and thus lose pleasure or interest in something, while others are more outward-focused, where we believe others are judging us and thus we lose pleasure or interest in something. It all stems from the same source, and the result is the same: We are less happy, and we do less of the stuff we want to do. The way Hendriksen structured How to Be Enough should let anyone who deals with this issue, no matter how much or how specific, find something to help them break out of the perfectionism trap.

Next up: I’m halfway through W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, and I think I hate it. 

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→ February 20, 2025
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Klawchat 2/20/25.

There’s now a complete index to my offseason prospect rankings over at The Athletic, and my first draft scouting notebook of 2025 is up now for subscribers.

Keith Law: I’m tripping, I’m sliding, I’m riding through the back like Klawchat.

Mjay: I bought and enjoyed both of your books. I know you’re busy but I live in hope that you’re planning another. I’m don’t have hope for much else right now
Keith Law: I don’t have one in the works yet, but this is definitely the year for me to start one.

davealden53: Who will be at shortstop for the Dodgers on Opening Day 2026 (next year)?  Mookie Betts, Alex Freeland, or the field?
Keith Law: Not Betts, I hope. He’s just not good enough to play there. Freeland is probably the best bet for a single name – he was on my top 100 this year and is pretty close to the majors. I’d like to get a better read on his defense at SS in AAA.

PhillyJake: How do you explain the fall of of Henry Davis. I don’t expect players to duplicate their AAA numbers in the majors, but a drop of OBA from .401 to .283 and a slugging drop of .555 to .212 is an outlier!  One would think both of these should be at least .100 points higher.
Keith Law: I really think pushing him to a new position (RF) in the majors derailed his development, especially because he wasn’t good there at all, and that leaked back into his at bats. The gap between his high-minors performance and his major-league performance has no other clear explanation.

davealden53: Many projections put 2025 starts for Noah Schultz at a half-dozen.  Over or under?
Keith Law: Under.

Mike: Klaw, Love your chats. Its why I subscribe to the Athletic. Question on the Mets. They have so many position players that overlap. I know not everyone will pan out, but are they best off trading one of Jett, Acuna, Gilbert or even Mauricio as they overlap?
Keith Law: Yes. Probably not Mauricio until he’s back and shows he’s healthy enough to play somewhere on the dirt.

Dr. Bob: You always argue against promoting a player based on ST performance. I understand the reasons. However, how does a team fill roster spots that have not already been decided? ST has to factor in there somehow.
Keith Law: I think teams should enter ST with a preference list for each of those spots, and then use the exhibition games to see who’s healthy, who’s in the best shape, who might have changed something (new swing, new pitch, better pitch/batted-ball data) that would upend that order. I don’t think using superficial ST results like batting average or homers should impact the decision at all.

Mike: Klaw, what are your thoughts on both automated balls/strikes or the challenge system? I have seen the challenge system in minor league games. I like it. Quick answers on a challenge.
Keith Law: Yes. Yes to all of it.

Nils: I often hear of prospects’ ceilings, in terms of high ceiling, low ceiling, unlikely to reach ceiling, etc.  I know we can assume the stars in the league have reached their ceiling but I would be curious of what big leaguers are/were stars yet didnt even reach what you thought of as their ceiling and vice versa what every day players reached their respective ceilings.  Any examples?
Keith Law: Carl Crawford comes to mind – I mentioned that in passing in his son’s (Justin) writeup last offseason and people took it to mean that I thought Carl was a bad player. I just think he had HoF upside. I remember seeing him at 20 and being astounded by his athleticism and how easy he made the game look on both sides of the ball. But he never seemed to work at his craft and at some point he didn’t keep up his conditioning. He had one superstar-level season, his walk year (7.0 bWAR), at age 28. The remainder of his career he produced just 3.6 bWAR and he was effectively done at 32.

Buckner86: Can Bobby Miller still be a #1 starter?   What do you want to see from him this spring and what do you expect?
Keith Law: Health first, then some semblance of the control he showed in the minors.

Mike Trout: Is there any hope to convincing people Trump’s actions are bad, especially when they sound good? For example the Gaza ceasefire, ending the Ukraine war, and DOGE seem well-received but all it takes is a little extra thought to see each is setting up more problems.
Keith Law: I don’t think you’re convincing true believers that anything this Administration does is bad. It’s the people who are getting hit by these actions – people who’ve lost their jobs because of these arbitrary job and program cuts, or know someone who lost their job from them – who are going to be the most open to rational arguments.

Nervous Flyball Pitcher: Would you ever publish a top 200?
Keith Law: Absolutely not. I’m one person. I couldn’t do that well, and I think it would be more clickbaity than informative.

CK: What sort of package would it take for the Cubs to get Cease back?
Keith Law: Sorry, I don’t know the answers to questions like those. We have other writers who are more plugged into the trade market.

Afterthought: It seems like some teams will pick multiple players from a college (sometimes across several years). Is this just coincidence, or is there an implication that teams rate the colleges’ player dev especially high or low?
Keith Law: It could also be that certain colleges are very good at recruiting or developing specific types of players. Any team that drafts a lot of college guys is going to see a lot of SEC/ACC schools pop up again and again. You could also have a scenario where a team feels like they have particularly good connections to a college so they get better access to the players and know their makeup well.

Jason: What are your thoughts on Jesus Made? Future star? Better than Chourio?
Keith Law: The answer to that is in the top 100 and in the Brewers org report (same player capsule in both places).

Billy: I know you don’t pay attention to other lists, but there was a mention that Blake Mitchell has poor plate discipline on another list. I’ve seen his chase rate was around 19-20% this past season which seems more than good to me. Am I missing something? Is it more his swing decisions need work or is that evaluation just incorrect?
Keith Law: I don’t know who said that or why, so I can’t comment.

Braydon: If you knew a draft prospect would become a Top 10 closer (or high leverage reliever) during most of their control years but have no chance to start, what would be the draft range of that prospect?
Keith Law: Second round. Maybe the comp round in a thin year.

Corey: Is a true 6 man rotation sustainable for a full season like what Boston is likely to attempt ?   Likely there are injuries which is the point but in the event they all stay healthy ?
Keith Law: Why wouldn’t it be? It might be the future if it means starters can pitch deeper into games more effectively – we’ll see if the times through the order penalty is mitigated at all by the regular extra day of rest – and I don’t see the downside risk.

James: Is there any MLB team that actually loses money? Not fancy accounting trick losses, but actual losses?
Keith Law: I highly doubt it. Maybe the A’s and Rays if you take out their revenue sharing, but they are anomalies. The first team is trying to move, and the second is … well, trying to move, just in a different way. MLB is very bad at accepting that some markets don’t work. It’s like this New Orleans/NHL rumor – that’s a worse idea than an MLB team in Vegas. Good luck putting a hockey team in a city with no real history with the sport, a very small population, and a good chance it’ll be underwater in 10 years.

Luke: Next country to have its first MLB player?
Keith Law: Uganda. Pirates have a reliever from there, David Matoma, just 18 years old but a prospect. If they had a weaker system he would have made their list.

Ross A.: Would *you* have given Vlad $500M+?
Keith Law: I don’t know the actual offers with deferrals and backloading, but yeah, I’d pay the guy. At some point, you have to pay someone.

Nick: Do you think Chandler Simpson hits enough to hold down an every day role for the Rays?
Keith Law: He’s #12 in the Rays’ system. You may infer my answer from that, but I explain it in their org report.

RH: With the disclaimer that I would get rid of all amateur drafts if possible, if an international draft is inevitable would it make more sense to raise the age minimum to 18 and have one single amateur draft?
Keith Law: Yes but I also think that’s going to wreak a lot of havoc on the baseball infrastructure in Latin America (except Puerto Rico), as it’s all been built up around the signing age of 16, and in many places it’s not like those kids are in school waiting to sign. Any switch to a draft is going to hurt the kids, but increasing the signing age may exacerbate it further.

SC1230: Hey Keith. Any chance you’d put out a list of the best MLB prospects for fantasy baseball (so just offense and pitchers)? Or maybe toss a top 10 in here?
Keith Law: No, sorry, I don’t play any sort of fantasy baseball so I don’t know how value there differs from what I’m talking about.

JR: As spring training is here again, we need to know – are you in the best shape of your life?
Keith Law: Definitely not.

Bruiser Flint: Question re the 2025 draft class. Is there any pitcher out there that you think could perform well enough to merit consideration at #1 overall? I’d love to see the Nats get an awesome young pitcher but obviously LaViolette would be great too
Keith Law: Laviolette struck out 80+ times last year. Barring a major change in his results this spring, I can’t see taking him at 1. I’ve heard UCSB right-hander Tyler Bremner (who I should be seeing tomorrow) and Florida State LHP Jamie Arnold as 1-1 possibilities. I’ve got probably six names now of college starters who are in or trending towards top half of the round picks. I’ll do a ranking for the draft either next week or the week after – I got sick through the weekend and we pushed my 2025 impact prospects column to next week so I could rest.

James: Trout going to RF. Will that really “save his legs?” I don’t get how baseball players get that many injuries given how little they run in the field compared to other sports
Keith Law: It’s a lot of zero-to-60 running, though – going from nothing to all-out. Also we see a lot more oblique/lat strains in hitters now, I think, which I assume is because guys swing so much harder, because pitchers throw much harder, which also leads to more injuries.

Guest: Is Andy Pages an everyday regular if he can get an opportunity to play in another organization? Is there an opportunity to be a part of a platoon with Conforto with the Dodgers this year?
Keith Law: Everyday guy for me.

Pat: Whenever I think of “very good player/star for a few years” that didn’t hit their ceiling, Garry Templeton comes to mind. He was a guy that SHOULD have been a HOF’er, but, just didn’t want it bad enough, I think.
Keith Law: Touch before my time – I remember him, but by the time my memories start he was already a Padre.

JR: Any free agents that you’re surprised are still available? I know Quintana is no spring chicken anymore, but at 36 and coming off a decent year and given teams never have enough pitching it’s a little surprising he hasn’t found a one year deal to his liking.
Keith Law: Good name. I just checked my own rankings and Andrew Heaney is another one. I think Alex Verdugo is my highest-ranked unsigned hitter, but he’s a platoon guy and I understand that a bit more.

Frank: The Giants are stuck in mediocrity with a bad farm system.  Seems like the worst of all places to be.  How does a team get out of that predicament without totally blowing it up and going into full rebuild mode?
Keith Law: Their system (org report & top 20) has a lot of untapped/underdeveloped talent, IMO. I think this will be a big year given the changes in leadership. But I also think they have to hit on some of the big picks – the first-rounders and the high-dollar IFAs. That’s been a weak spot for them in the last five years.

Bret: I was at the UCONN-Penn State game in Puerto Rico Sunday night. Looked like 7-8 scouts were watching Ryan DeSanto of Penn State. Is he a legit prospect? From my naked eye he looked good and didn’t give up a hit in four innings.
Keith Law: No, he’s not, they were down there to see Virginia (Ford, Godbout) and Michigan (Vigue) primarily.

Ryan: Have you listened to Epica? Recently discovered them. Was curious your thoughts if you have.
Keith Law: Not familiar with them. Tuning in now.

Buckner86: When is the breakout column?   Walker was there last year.  You’ve been early on multiple player.  Is Walker one of them?
Keith Law: Some time in March. Sorry I don’t have a more specific answer. Jordyn Walker may be my Rickie Weeks … I can’t believe he’s never going to hit. It’s just unfathomable.

James: Is there any chance of normalcy if the media is in the tank for Trump? Twitter paid Trump $10M to settle a case they had gotten dismissed and it doesn’t make a blip when it’s an obvious bribe. Where is the courage?
Keith Law: What I don’t get is why major media outlets are failing to cover the obvious stuff. He called himself a king! He fired a whole bunch of veterans! How is that not front page news?

Billy: Guess a better way to phrase that Mitchell question is do you have concerns about his plate discipline?
Keith Law: Not huge ones. If you check out my report on him (Royals top 20) I noted his improved swing decisions in 2024.

Tim: Considering how much emphasis is placed on velocity at all levels including youth baseball, do you think a modern day high school Greg Maddox would get the attention from scouts he deserves?
Keith Law: Yes. One, he wasn’t a soft tosser for his era. Two, we still love guys who can pitch.

MJ: Watch any good shows lately? Are you into Severance at all?
Keith Law: Very much on my list but right now I’m just catching up on movies on my flights/in hotel rooms. I’ve seen four of the animated feature nominees and have Memoir of a Snail queued up.

James: Do you like the pitch clock?
Keith Law: Yes, unreservedly. Makes going to games much more fun, and I think it’s better for my focus. Also I’m not screaming “throw the fucking ball” in my head every couple of minutes.

Chewbalka: Welcome back and thanks for doing these chats. Jordan Westburg is pretty solid but do you think he may have another level, and is walking more possibly the key?
Keith Law: I don’t think I have a good answer here – I haven’t dug into him much since he established himself. What’s the thinking here? Just the low OBPs? I think that’s who he is, and it’s rare (not impossible) for a 26-year-old to suddenly start walking more.

Jon: Was curious about your thoughts on Victor Scott II. Made his debut clearly before he was ready last year and was overmatched, can he still be an above average player?
Keith Law: Yes.

Pat: I think the mass media are a bunch of chickens afraid of lawsuits. Trump sued the Des Moines Gazette for saying Kamala was going to win Iowa. They made an honest mistake & he’s going after them.That’s one of many & been a Trump playbook staple from the 1980’s onward. Even if you win the lawsuit, it’s time for people to fight it/get deposed/trial & $$ to hire lawyers. My gut says they’re thinking it’s easier to “go along”…which is awful & a shirking of their duty.
Keith Law: And it’s probably better business sense to settle than fight. But when you give in to a blackmailer, an abuser, a bully, etc., you just tell them that it worked and they should do it again.

Mike: You said you would sign Vlad. How much would you give him? Over/under 10/400?
Keith Law: I’d be fine with that deal but I would probably want to put something in there about his conditioning – we’ll pay you plenty, just keep yourself in shape.

James: Target went anti-DEI and their stock tanked. Best bet on first big company to realize being anti Trump and anti racism is the path to success beyond it being just the right thing to do
Keith Law: I also noticed that Costco’s stock has done very well in the last two months, since the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion divide happened. (Calling it “DEI” really helps people avoid what it actually means. And it’s now showing up as a sort of proxy for a racial slur.) Costco recommitted, and now a bunch of red-state AGs are threatening to sue them. But they got more of our business as a result – money we quite likely would have spent at Target otherwise. So I guess it’s not just us.

Robert: Do you think that Schanuel is ever going to tap into more of his raw power?
Keith Law: Eventually, yes.

Jon: What do you think about the hires the Cardinals have made for their front office/player development?
Keith Law: Love it. Some great people I knew already, some people I didn’t know but who get rave reviews from others.

Mike: No longer a prospect, but how do you see Jose Tena fitting into Wsh’s plans. Maybe a solid utility infield piece?
Keith Law: Everyday 3b or 2b. Third is his best chance now, although I’m not a big believer in Luis Garcia, whose 2024 was well out of line with previous performances.

Dr. J: Thoughts on the likelihood of Noelvi Marte bouncing back to have the type of career most people projected for him 12 months ago?
Keith Law: I’m still buying.

James: Along the same lines, is there any Dem Senator who will become a hero and obstruct and delay things as much as somehow even Tubberville was able to figure out?
Keith Law: Still waiting. If you live in a blue state, call your Senators.

Lee: What’s Kristian Campbell’s ultimate position?  Seems like a no brainer to move Devers to DH, 3B goes to Bregman and you leave 2B open for Campbell when he’s ready this season.  And they have the ultimate placeholder at 2B with Vaughn Grissom if he needs a bit of time in AAA.
Keith Law: That is pretty much what I said in his capsule on the top 100.

Guest: Atlanta has 4 years left on the ludicrously underpriced Acuna/Albies deals (presuming all options are exercised).  Should they not be all-in on patching their few holes (SS, LF, SP) instead of hoping to see progression and staying under the tax threshold?
Keith Law: I agree in principle, but they signed Profar for LF and I don’t see who’s out there at SS for them. Quintana would be a good pickup as rotation insurance. There’s no way the current group stays healthy for even half the season.

Sam: How long does a player have to succeed with funky mechanics (thinking something like Hunter Pence’s hitch in his swing) before you consider him the exception to the rule?
Keith Law: Double A is a big test level for me. But also we can see some better data at lower levels that might show if the funky mechanics are causing an actual issue under the hood that isn’t evident in the superficial stat line.

DG: Have you seen HS Junior CJ Sampson from Tomball Texas (son of former Astro Chris Sampson)? Saw him throw a gem in state finals against Kayson Cunningham’s team. He came to mind reading the previous question about kids who pitch rather than just light up guns. He looks like the real deal to my amateur eyes.
Keith Law: I haven’t and tbh I don’t know anything about him yet since he’s an underclassman.

davealden53: Will the idea of turning Michael Fulmer back into a starter go anywhere?
Keith Law: Eh, I don’t mind it.

Nick: Do you see Brett Baty ever hitting enough to be an above average every day player?  Seems like this is a big year for him, but he doesn’t have a role with the Mets.
Keith Law: Yes. I hope he’s traded before Opening Day. Let him go to a non-contender so he can try to reset without the pressure.
Keith Law: Wouldn’t be the first guy to struggle in a high-pressure debut and then figure it out somewhere else.

Kyle: Your thoughts on some kind of salary cap/floor? How long can we see big market teams pretty much dominate the small market teams? Does Pittsburgh/Oakland?tampa have any shot other then one out of every 7-8 years?
Keith Law: Tampa’s been to the playoffs five times in the last six years. The Brewers, who I think play in MLB’s actual smallest market, have been six times in seven years. The level of difficulty is harder for these low-payroll teams, but 1) it can be done and 2) these owners can absolutely choose to spend more and pocket less. The system needs to make winning more profitable, and coasting less so.

Krontz: My 7 year old is just getting into more advanced board/card games? He loves Sushi Go and Dixit. Any games from last couple years you’d recommend we try with him?
Keith Law: King of Tokyo, Splendor, Ticket to Ride, SCOUT, Cascadia, Tower Up (brand new).

Robert: There is a lot of speculation that Colson Montgomery will be the White Sox opening day SS.  Putting aside long term projections, does it make sense to do this in the short run?  Wouldn’t there be some benefit to “proving” he’s ready in AAA (given how last season went)?
Keith Law: Yes and he’s not good at shortstop.

Guest: Thoughts on Wombats new album?
Keith Law: First few songs I heard were all kind of mid. Is the whole album out yet?

Philip Lee: As Ichiro was a slam-dunk Hall of Famer, the media needed another story; hence, the ‘outrage’ about his selection not being unanimous. I’ve neve seen the word ‘unanimous’ on a plaque. Aren’t we risking dishonoring  great players with this narrative?
Keith Law: Yeah, it’s a classic “dead time of year” nontroversy. I’m over it. And the mob trying to find the person who didn’t vote for Ichiro … yeah, I think it’s dumb, I would like that voter to be accountable, but the furor over it was ridiculous. It’s not worth ruining someone’s life.

Bruiser Flint: If you’re the union, do you take some sort of salary cap if the cap is relatively high but paired with a high floor? e.g., imagine a salary cap of $300m with a floor of $150m. is it possible to envision a trade off where it’s worth it to accept a cap if it makes the pirates, rays, nats, brewers, a’s, etc. spend up to a floor?
Keith Law: If they give in on a cap, that’s it. It’ll never go away, and it won’t rise as quickly as the sport’s revenues do. It’s an irreversible loss.

David Law: Hello fellow Law.  Is it time for an International Draft?  The Dodgers signed Sasaki and the rich got richer.  But doesn’t make sense for baseball as a whole to give smaller market teams a better chance at elite talent like Sasaki? What would it take to implement an Int Draft? Make the Qualifying offer less of a penalty? Demand teams have a salary floor?  Thanks!
Keith Law: Why shouldn’t Sasaki, a 23-year-old major leaguer in his own country, get to choose where he goes? Your question centers the league and teams, but ignores the wishes of the player.
Keith Law: OK, gotta wrap this up. I’ll have at least two things next week, another draft notebook and that 2025 impact prospects list. I’ve also got a review of the game Harvest going up at Paste in the next couple of days, so look for that too. Thanks for reading!

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→ February 18, 2025
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Hard Truths.

Mike Leigh’s 1996 film Secrets & Lies was a breakthrough for the British writer-director, earning him Oscar nominations for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay along with nods for both of its leads, including a then relatively unknown actress named Marianne Jean-Baptiste. The two reunited last year for Hard Truths, a film delayed several years by the pandemic, this time putting Jean-Baptiste in the lead role as quite possibly the literal Worst Person in the World in a story that just barely scratches the surface of why she is who she is. (You can rent Hard Truths now on Apple and Amazon.)

Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy Deacon, who we first see as she is obsessively cleaning her house, taking time out to scold and denigrate both her 22-year-old son Moses and her husband Curtley, both of whom seem unable or unwilling to defend themselves against her verbal onslaughts. She takes the same misanthropic attitude into the world, starting fights with a furniture store employee, other patrons in a grocery store, and, eventually, her younger sister Chantelle (Michele Austin). Chantelle first appears to be the opposite of Pansy, as she’s bubbly, outgoing, and trying to move forward where Pansy complains about likely imagined health ailments and uses them as excuses not to leave the house. Even Chantelle’s household is livelier; her two adult daughters live with her, and we see them acting silly and loving, where Pansy’s house is sterile and ruled by fear.

Most descriptions of Hard Truths describe Pansy as ‘depressed,’ but that’s not how the film depicts her; there is, at least, a hell of a lot more going on here. The script gives all sorts of little clues that maybe she’s anxious, or has a phobia of germs or dirt, or has OCD, or something else, but avoids any sort of diagnosis or other facile explanations for how she acts: The point is that this is who she is, not what a piece of paper might say. The only tangible cause we learn that might explain some of Pansy’s behavior is that her mother, Pearl, died five years earlier, and Pansy has still not processed or faced this. She has unresolved feelings about how her mother treated Chantelle differently, and the role Pansy was forced to play in the family once their father died. She fights Chantelle over the latter’s annual visit to their mother’s grave on Mother’s Day, using it as an excuse to belittle her son and husband for failing to acknowledge her on the holiday (which may not even be true, as it’s clear she’s not a reliable narrator). She’s also beset by nightmares that are never explained, another subtle hint that there is much going on below the surface that we can’t see – as the bromide goes, you never know what someone else is going through. It doesn’t excuse the vicious things she says to strangers or family members, or the way she responds to innocuous comments as if they are hidden insults or provocations for fights, but it underscores that even a seemingly irredeemable, one-note character may be more complex than they first appear to be.

Hard Truths is more a character study than a traditional film, as the narrative is slight and there is very little resolution for anyone, certainly not for Pansy. Chantelle and her daughters have their own struggles and obstacles – we see slivers of everyone’s lives even though Pansy’s life is the dominant plot strand – but they muddle through, and they’ll likely continue to do so. Both of her daughters have pretty lousy days at work when we first see them, yet when they meet for drinks afterwards, neither lets the setbacks affect them – perhaps confiding too little in a sibling, a person who is likely to accept you for who you are and will probably take your side in any conflict, but better than taking their anger over injustice in one area and lashing out at someone else as a result. The result of the focus on character is that this is a movie where very little happens, so the main cathartic moment is expository rather than explanatory. That won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, whether you want Pansy to get her comeuppance (she doesn’t) or turn around and apologize to everyone (also, she doesn’t) or realize that the real treasure was the friends she made along the way (I’ll let you figure that one out). It’s such a well-written story of unpleasantness, with Jean-Baptiste – who really should have earned a Best Actress nod over Karla Sofía Gascón – giving such an intense portrayal of a woman whose inner spring is so tightly wound inside that the slightest touch makes her explode, that the meager plot didn’t matter much to me in the end, even if I perhaps wanted a little more in the resolution.

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