→ December 2, 2025
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Materialists.

I loved Past Lives, the first feature from writer-director Celine Song, which more than deserved its Best Picture nomination and should have nabbed one for its start Greta Lee, for the depth of its story, its beautiful yet spare dialogue, and its deep understanding of the complex feelings we experience while in love or moving beyond it. Song’s follow-up, Materialists, has some similarly strong dialogue and flashes some of the same emotional intelligence as the prior film, but this time the script goes nowhere and the lead character’s journey is hard to accept because she herself is just not credible. (It’s streaming on HBO Max and available to rent on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

Lucy Mason (Dakota Johnson) is a matchmaker in New York City, and very good at her job; as the film opens, she accosts a handsome middle-aged man in a suit on the street, asks if he’s single, and gives him her card. She’s just reached her ninth wedding, although she’s struggling to find a good match for her client Sophie (Zoë Winters), whose bad luck with men – with men being men, specifically – seems to be the one thing about the job that triggers an actual feeling in Lucy. While at her ninth client wedding, Lucy meets Harry (Pedro Pascal), a charming, obscenely rich, well-dressed single guy. Lucy takes an interest in Harry as a potential client, while Harry takes an interest in Lucy, period. By sheer coincidence, Lucy’s ex-boyfriend John (Chris Evans), a struggling actor, happens to be working as a server at the same wedding, which puts the two of them back in touch. Harry and Lucy begin dating, as he sweeps her off her feet with meals at exclusive Manhattan restaurants – including a real $950/person omakase bar that has since closed – and they have long, thoughtful conversations on the real meaning of marriage. Is it merely a business transaction? Does love need to be a part of it? Is there real meaning in Lucy’s job? Of course, John is Chekhov’s gun, here, and when something goes very wrong at work, he’s the one Lucy calls, not Harry, setting up a denouement where she has to choose between the handsome rich guy and the handsome poor guy.

Lucy is just not a compelling central character. She is not very complex; she talks endlessly of “checking boxes” and seems to want to reduce everyone and every relationship to a matter of data. (I suppose you could argue she is just the matchmaking world’s version of sports analytics.) She ended her five-year relationship with John because they were broke and constantly arguing about it, and she wanted some of the finer things in life. Then she spends a good bit of her time with Pedro saying that she’s not a good enough match for him, implying that he should be her client rather than her boyfriend, which doesn’t even seem to add up in her version of math – all three of these people are very good-looking, and Lucy is gainfully employed, making enough money to afford her own apartment in New York City. She and Harry seem like they’d be a perfect match, not just in the sense of a coherent narrative, but in the sense of how Lucy views relationships and marriage in the first place. To have her suddenly break out into the chorus of “Seasons of Love” at the end of the movie (figuratively) makes no sense whatsoever, and Johnson is such a stolid actor that she can’t express Lucy’s joy or sadness or possible love for John well enough to make either of them believable.

There are also multiple twists in the movie that it didn’t need, including Lucy’s work subplot and a secret Harry has been hiding that refers back to something earlier in the film but adds up to nothing at all other than giving Pascal a chance to do something extremely charming for a moment in his $12 million condo’s kitchen. The plot seems forced as a result, as if those twists had to happen to propel anything here forward, such as setting up a reason for Lucy to reconnect further with John than she had after they ran into each other at the wedding.

I’ve seen Materialists pitched as a comedy or rom-com – Wikipedia’s entry calls it a “romantic comedy drama film,” which are words – but if that was the intention, it failed. Materialists is never funny. It might be too serious at points, but it is never frivolous. There are no jokes or gags, running or sitting still or standing in the corner or anywhere else. The closest this comes to humor is when we see male clients of Lucy’s detailing their insane demands for dates, including the 47-year-old who won’t date a woman over 29, but it’s not that comical when it’s just mirroring reality. It didn’t need to be funny, so I can’t hold this against the movie, but anyone who has called Materialists a comedy lacks a sense of humor badly enough to live in the comments on BlueSky. It could have been Song’s attempt to deconstruct the rom-com, or invert it, but the ending is far too traditional, to the point of cliché, for that to be the case. Materialists has some very strong moments hidden within it – Harry and Lucy’s conversation in the Italian restaurant stands out – but ultimately doesn’t reach the heights of Past Lives.

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→ October 1, 2025
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The Naked Gun.

One problem the new Naked Gun film, now streaming on Paramount+ and rentable on iTunes/Amazon, has is that it’s not funny enough. The bigger problem it has, however, is that it’s not funny often enough. This movie shoots more blanks than me since my vasectomy.

The hallmark of the Zucker-Abrams-Zucker oeuvre, which includes AirplaneI, the Police Squad TV series (still the funniest show in the history of the medium), and the original three Naked Gun movies, was rapid-fire jokes that gave you little chance to catch your breath. That trio of writers had an endless capacity for humor, especially wordplay and sight gags, but they also understood that for jokes like theirs, it’s best to just keep them coming, so if one doesn’t land, there’s a better one right around the corner. Police Squad was the most joke-dense of their work, but most of their movies threw out jokes like automatic fire, so no one remembers the dull parts or jokes that weren’t as funny. You left all of those movies marveling about the jokes that did land.

So unfortunately the new Naked Gun film doesn’t follow that style at all, and is weirdly concerned with something the ZAZ crew rarely bothered with at all – plot. The film opens with a bank robbery where a very villainish-looking guy comes and retrieves a piece of electronics helpfully labelled as a “P.L.O.T. Device,” which I took as a wonderful sign that we were in for some silliness. Instead, there’s an actual plot, as Richard Cane (Danny Huston, unconvincing as an evil billionaire because he’s utterly charmless) wants to use this device to send out a frequency that will allow him to (the Brain voice) take over the world. It’s at least 50% more plot than the movie would need if there were more gags, and it seems like the writers made a deliberate choice to replace humor with plot, to the movie’s great detriment because the plot isn’t interesting or all that necessary.

Liam Neeson steps into some giant shoes – there’s a sight gag they could have used – as Frank Drebin, Jr., although he doesn’t have the same deadpan style or oblivious look that Leslie Nielsen brought to the Drebin role. (I still marvel at maybe the best joke from the TV show: “Who are you, and how did you get in here?” Drebin: “I’m a locksmith [pause] … and I’m a locksmith.” There is nothing as funny as that scene in this entire movie.) Drebin thwarts the bank robbery with a surprising display of combat skills and agility, although some of it is really quite funny, but of course it lands him and his partner Ed (an underutilized Paul Walter Hauser) in hot water with their boss (CCH Pounder, who gets one great scene). Frank is off the case, and gets reassigned to a car crash that might be a suicide, except it’s actually connected to the bank robbery and to Richard Cane and brings Frank into the orbit of femme fatale Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson, the best part of the movie). She wants revenge, Frank wants Beth, and along the way they’ll both get what they want, along with a little hanky-panky with a snowman.

I was as primed to like this movie as anybody; I knew going in that it wouldn’t be the same as the original films or TV show, because it’s not the same writers, but I expected this film to mimic the original’s style a lot more than it does. Instead it tries to bridge the chasm between a conventional crime story and a ridiculous ZAZ comedy, and that just doesn’t work. There are many funny bits in the film – the windshield, the bedroom scene with Ronald, the name of the arena for the climactic scene – but they’re sparse. When Drebin asks Beth to take a chair, and she says that she has plenty of chairs at home, it’s such a callback to the original – and so rare in this movie – that it just left me with nostalgia for the first movie. You’ve got to follow that up with another gag, and another, and another. This film lets that joke hang, and revisits it at the end of the scene, without filling in the gaps with more one-liners, puns, and visual gags.

The ZAZ film Top Secret! had a bestiality joke that’s one of its funniest gags (and one I still can’t believe didn’t get the film an R rating), but it’s very quick and the scene quickly moves to the next joke. Compare that to the new Naked Gun’s bestiality joke, which is an eye-roller when it’s first on screen, and then it goes on … and on … and on. The writers failed to understand what made the ZAZ films and Police Squad tick: They would deliver a joke, and whether or not it worked, they’d just keep rolling to the next one. Instead we get the Krusty in the Big Ear Family treatment, even when a bit starts out promising (the Tivo gag).

Neeson doesn’t have Leslie Nielsen’s impeccable timing, which particularly shows up when his character delivers one of his nonsensical lines. When Drebin asks Cane to see some security footage, Cane asks “Oh. May I ask why?” and Drebin says, “Go right ahead.” The joke is great. The movie then screeches to a halt while Danny Huston screws up his face in confusion, as if they’re waiting for audience to laugh rather than just moving on to the next gag. The joy of the originals was that you often couldn’t catch your breath from one bout of laughter before the next, and you’d have to rewatch to see the jokes you missed from laughing the first time.

There are good jokes in The Naked Gun, from the snowman sequence to the Drebin’s conversation with a bartender to the football joke about Drebin’s late wife (where he was most reminiscent of Nielsen’s portrayal). There are a handful of great one-liners. There’s a very good running gag about coffee cups, something that the originals did well, going back to the same joke enough that a mediocre joke would become funny. There are even some pretty bold attempts at jokes that don’t work – the Bill Cosby one was probably too much – where you can at least respect the effort. They’re just dwarfed by fart jokes, shit jokes, a lengthy description of Drebin’s penis, and lots of lowbrow bits that don’t pay off. Fart jokes are the laziest type of comic writing there is, and in a movie that doesn’t even run to 90 minutes, it feels like padding the essay to get to the teacher’s word count.

It’s possible I am just too biased in favor of the originals and was hoping for something more similar to them in pace and style, but I’ve seen multiple reviews of this film that claim it’s a lot closer to the first Naked Gun film than it actually is. If ZAZ hadn’t set such a high standard, perhaps the new Naked Gun would seem stronger.

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→ July 29, 2025
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Headshot.

I’ll start off the review with the conclusion: Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot, one of the three novels shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize this year by the nominating committee that the board passed over in favor of Percival Everett’s James, is just not very good. It’s probably the best of those three, but that is damning with faint praise. I’ve often suspected that the Pulitzer process was skewed by non-literary considerations, but never more so this year.

Headshot follows a series of eight relatively anonymous and uninteresting teenaged women competing in a boxing tournament held in an empty (maybe abandoned) warehouse in Reno, with modest prize money that hardly justifies the investment in time and pain required of its contestants. Bullwinkel uses the tournament as a gimmick to give personality sketches and life stories, backwards and forwards, for the various contestants, showing a broad range of archetypes but a surprising lack of insight into what makes any of these young women tick beyond some very general tropes (e.g., sibling rivalry). The plot is extremely beside the point; I don’t even remember who won the tournament.

Indeed, I barely remember anything about these characters, and I’m flabbergasted by all of the reviews specifically praising the characters as the novel’s strength. They’re not all the same, far from it, but they are all fairly boring. Most of them box because they have some kind of hole inside they’re trying to fill – broken families, bullying, dead-end lives – but the sheer number of characters means none of them gets the kind of page time they’d need for any depth, never mind actual development.

And some of those characters’ names are amateurish. Artemis Victor is one of the best of the eight boxers – she may have won the fictional tournament, I don’t know – but I’ll call Fowl on that one. Others just have weird character traits that don’t add to their definition, like the one woman who has memorized pi to 50 digits and uses it as a sort of mantra/coping strategy, like meditating, but appears to have no other interest in math or just school in general.

There’s a deep sadness throughout the scenes in the ring and around it, even though Bullwinkel’s descriptions of their later lives at least hint at richer futures to come – families, marriages, careers, lives longer than many people who get hit in the head this often end up with. (There’s no mention of concussions or CTE.) Those are the stories that mean something here, but the structure leaves them as afterthoughts because the focus is far more on what’s happening in the ring and in the girls’ heads as they prepare to fight or trade punches. That just leaves those flash-forwards feeling like throwaways, sops to lighten the mood of what is overall a rather depressing novel, because it’s easy to say “and then she had a good life” rather than exploring just what that meant and implying that this tournament, which loomed so large in the girls’ minds as it happened, turned out to be irrelevant in the grand scheme.

I don’t know what the committee was thinking here with the three choices, all written by women, none of which was even good enough for me to recommend. Everett’s James is one of the best novels written this century. Kelly Link’s The Book of Love was also eligible, and is better than any of the three shortlisted novels by a country mile. Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars was better. I’m sure there were other works of literary fiction more deserving than these three novels. The Board made the right call.

Next up: I’m slowly making my way through Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Tainted Cup, nominated for this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel.

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→ May 20, 2025
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Mice 1961.

Mice 1961 was one of the three finalists for this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which ended up going to a fourth book, Percival Everett’s James, causing a minor kerfuffle that I didn’t think was warranted, given how amazing James is and the awards it had already won. In the interest of completeness, however, I decided to read all three finalists to see if any had a reasonable case. Not only does Mice 1961 not have any argument that it should have won over James, it’s just a badly written, badly constructed book, one that never should have sniffed the final three (four).

Mice 1961 is built around two sisters, Jody and her albino sister nicknamed Mice, who you might have said at the time was a little off or perhaps “touched,” and today we might speculate was on the spectrum or something of the kind. The sisters are orphaned, their father long out of the picture, their mother recently deceased, and they live on their own in an apartment with the narrator, a peculiar woman named Girtle who was herself an orphan and ran away from some kind of institution. Mice, the younger of the two, is still in high school and is mercilessly taunted and bullied by the other girls because she’s different – she looks different, of course, and she tends to fixate on small things and ask the same questions repeatedly. The story takes place the night of a big party, to which their whole Miami-area town has been invited, and Jody’s efforts to get Mice to the party so she can socialize while also keeping an eye on her sister.

The fundamental problem with Mice 1961 is that these characters all suck. They’re not interesting, they’re not three-dimensional, and they’re certainly not sympathetic. Mice feels like a parody of an autistic person, and the fact that she’s an albino (Levine never uses the word, but I’m fairly sure that’s the case here) and also somewhat developmentally disabled feels particularly insulting; albinism is a recessive genetic condition unrelated to intelligence. Jody is constantly worried about her sister, but in the way you might worry about a valuable piece of jewelry, not another human; there’s no sense anywhere in the book that Jody cares about Mice, and she does almost nothing to addressing the bullying other than complain to the police officer who (I think) is sweet on Jody and humors her whining. I spent most of the book wondering if any of these characters weren’t really there, especially Girtle, because so much of what they say and do seemed nonsensical, and Girtle often describes things that she couldn’t have seen without becoming part of the scene. It might have been a better book if she were a ghost or spirit or something else unreal, because I couldn’t figure out what her purpose was other than to be a sort of third-party narrator without requiring Levine to use the third person.

The party takes up most of the latter half of the book, and it’s full of local people who speak and act in bizarre and totally unrealistic ways. The party is a potluck, and at some point there’s a contest, sort of, although it’s more like each person announces what they brought and then maybe someone jumps in to insult them. I mean, I wasn’t at any potluck parties in 1961, but I think they were probably more fun and less full of assholes than this one.

Needless to say, I hated this book from start to finish – and I can’t even figure out what its point is. Why does this book exist? What is it telling me? This isn’t some moment in time or history or the culture that required documenting. It’s not a story about interesting people, and it’s not a story about larger issues like gender or race or the times a-changing (which they were in 1961). Absurdity for its own sake wears out its welcome very quickly. How this book made the final three in the Pulitzers is completely beyond my understanding.

Next up: I just started Josephine Tey’s The Man in the Queue, the first of her six mysteries featuring the character Inspector Alan Grant.

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→ March 20, 2025
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The Apprentice.

The Apprentice is a decidedly mediocre movie about a decidedly mediocre man. That man, who at the moment I write this is the President of the United States and is driving a serious constitutional crisis, is not boring, whatever you think of his behavior and professed beliefs. It makes it so hard to believe just how boring The Apprentice is, even when it’s trying its hardest to find something interesting in the story, often by humanizing its main character. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

The story begins with a young Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) trying to buy a decrepit building near Times Square with the intention of turning it into a luxury hotel, against skepticism from all corners – including his father, Fred, a real estate developer himself and a dead stereotype of the father who never likes anything his kids do. Trump happens to be in a private club where Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) is holding court, and Cohn, hearing Trump has just been accepted for membership, calls him over to meet him, clearly seeing business opportunities for the future. Trump turns to Cohn to try to get a gigantic tax break from New York City, which was in dire financial straits at the time, and Cohn extorts a city official to make it happen, setting off a decade-long business partnership where Cohn teaches Trump the secrets of his success, much of which you can see in Trump’s last decade in the political sphere, including repeating lies long enough for people to think they’re true and to never admit defeat regardless of the evidence. Along the way, Trump meets Ivana (Maria Bakalova), seduces her with his money and apparent largesse, has a couple of kids we barely see, watches his brother Fred Jr. drink himself to death, and pays very little to no taxes anywhere.

I’m obviously no fan of Trump’s, but there is plenty in his life story to provide enough fodder for an interesting biopic. The Apprentice is more of a connect-the-dots picture of Trump, giving a more intriguing picture of the last decade of Roy Cohn’s life than it does of anything about its putative protagonist, and seeks to explain Trump’s rise as a truth-denying right-wing politician as the result of his father not giving him enough praise when he was younger, leading Trump to become the sort of striver for whom no victory is complete and no success is ever enough. It’s simplistic and hackneyed, and means that when both men are on screen, Cohn is always the more compelling figure – something that is helped by Strong’s better performance, while Stan’s performance is an impersonation, one where you can’t forget that it’s just Sebastian Stan in a bad rug enunciating certain words the way Trump does. (Stan getting a Best Actor nomination for this movie is really ridiculous. Ethan Herisse of Nickel Boys was far more deserving, to pick just one actor from another acclaimed 2024 movie.) You’re not that likely to forget that it’s Jeremy Strong as Cohn, but there’s more depth to the portrayal here, especially near the end of Cohn’s life, as he was dying of AIDS (or a related illness) and still refused to concede that he had the disease or even that he might not be heterosexual.

There’s a thread within the movie that attempts to humanize Trump by showing the dynamics of his immediate family, including a successful father who belittles Fred Jr. for choosing to become a pilot rather than joining the family business and then belittles Donald for failing to live up to (perhaps unreasonable expectations). Fred Jr. is an alcoholic from the get-go in the film, but the script implies that their father drove him to drink, and he’s really here just for the one scene where Donald refuses to help him before he dies from the disease. This thread seems to imply that Donald Trump was, at one point, a regular person with some empathy and the ability to feel things like grief, fear, and sorrow, but that an emotionally distant and abusive father pushed that out of him and created an insatiable need for the tangible trappings of success – money, power, fame, and women – that eventually led him to run for President.

The Apprentice also makes a regrettable choice in showing Trump raping Ivana, based on her accusation in her divorce deposition, a claim she sort of walked back later. The issue isn’t whether it’s true, but whether it belongs in the movie: It doesn’t say anything about Trump’s character we didn’t already know, and the film isn’t otherwise interested in much of anything about Ivana or her marriage to Trump, so the result is it appears that the scene is included just to be controversial or lurid. If the script had spent more time exploring their relationship, which often seems transactional in the depiction here, maybe there would be some justification, but Ivana is mostly a prop and Bakalova is largely wasted in the role anyway. It just comes off as cheap, lazy writing in a script that has very little time for any women characters.

I find it hilarious that Trump and his organization tried to stop anyone from showing or distributing this movie – there is nothing here we haven’t heard before, and if anything it shows him doing the stuff his adherents believe he’s good at, like making deals and running roughshod over his adversaries. The film did come out, and hit theaters, and earn praise and award nominations, and it didn’t make a whit of difference. Most people already have an opinion of Trump that is set in stone; if the Access Hollywood tape didn’t dissuade his supporters, this movie isn’t going to do anything, either. It’s just a mediocre biopic of someone who, at this moment, is busy trying to hollow out the federal government and use what’s left to target his real and perceived enemies. Maybe after he’s dead someone will make a better film about his life and motivations. This ain’t it.

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→ March 10, 2025
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The Substance.

The Substance has a great concept for a sci-fi/horror film, and an even better theme. Writer/director Coralie Fargeat depicts Hollywood’s obsession with women’s looks and youth, and the patriarchy’s obsession with the same through an aging actress and fitness-show star who learns about a cheat code to become a 20-year-old version of herself again – but only every other week. It is such a shame that Fargeat had no idea what to do with the story once she got the setup in place; the second half of this movie is a literal and figurative mess, so much so that it’s appalling that this profoundly stupid movie got Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay nominations. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc., or watch it free on Mubi.)

Demi Moore plays the idiotically-named Elizabeth Sparkle, a Jane Fonda-ish figure who was once a huge star and now hosts a daily aerobics show, because I guess this movie is set in 1985 (although it never specifies when it’s set). On the day she turns 50, the show’s producer Harvey (as in Weinstein, because this film is just that subtle) fires her because she’s too old. (Harvey is played by Dennis Quaid, who hams it up as the role demands.) Elizabeth is so upset as she’s driving home that she gets into a car accident and ends up in the hospital, where somehow she doesn’t have any broken bones or internal bleeding or anything of the sort, but a creepy young nurse with ridiculously smooth skin slips her a flash drive that tips her off to a fountain-of-youth scheme called The Substance. She jumps through all kinds of hoops to get a hold of it – the film’s best sequences, really – and eventually tries it out: A second, younger version of herself (Margaret Qualley) emerges, literally, and takes over the lead spot on Elizabeth’s show. The hitch is that each week, Elizabeth and this new her, who takes the name Sue, must switch places: one goes into a sort of coma, and the other gets to run around and be alive and such. But when one of the two decides to take a little more than the allotted time, the center cannot hold and things fall apart – including the plot.

The whole setup is pretty brilliant, like something from a modern Philip K. Dick fable. (PKD did write at least once about “anti-gerasone,” a serum that reversed the effects of aging.) The attention to detail in the way the whole scheme works, right down to the packaging of the various parts of the Substance, would seem to presage a really thoughtful, smart conclusion, regardless of whether it works out for Elizabeth. There’s a wide range of points this story could have made about how society as a whole and the media industry in specific treats women as disposable assets with early expiration dates. It applies to women on screen in films and on TV, even news and sports anchors, but also applies to general societal attitudes towards women, even in what is supposed to be a more equitable and enlightened era. (Or was, I suppose.) Men who are Elizabeth’s age see her as old, then fawn over and leer at Sue, including, of course, Harvey.

Instead, we get a thoughtless, gross, and sloppy conclusion to all of that early promise. There’s an inexplicable rivalry between the two halves – which I interpreted as a commentary on women who step on or attack other women rather than standing together against the patriarchy – that leads each of them to try to sabotage the other during their waking weeks. And when one starts stealing time from the other, things go very awry, and it becomes clear that Fargeat never figured out the end of the story. The big concluding scene is a bloody mess, either way you want to interpret that phrase, and is also absolute nonsense: The hyperrealism that fills every part of the film outside of the use of the Substance is gone, and we’re no longer making or even pondering a point. We’re just covered in blood. There’s no further exploration of the entrenched misogyny across our society, or our obsession with youth and beauty. There’s no biting, satirical conclusion that takes down the Harveys of the world – or even the just normal, just innocent men who are probably contributing to the environment in all manner of little ways (and I’m not exempting myself here, either). Fargeat wrote herself into a corner, and instead of writing herself out of it, she just went for gore. I

Moore’s performance in The Substance earned her a Golden Globe Award and a SAG Award, as well as a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress; I don’t think this was a close contest between her and Mikey Madison, who won the Oscar for her performance in Anora. Moore is very good, but there’s some sentiment in the plaudits; she’s not even in the movie as much as a typical lead performer. There’s some daring to the performance, certainly, and she also has to act out some pretty gross scenes that couldn’t have been easy. Qualley didn’t get anywhere near the same attention, but she’s excellent and essential to the movie – she has to play a sort of scheming ingenue, and in any of her scenes at the studio, especially anything with Harvey, she nails the look and demeanor of someone who knows how to manipulate the hell out of the idiot man in front of her. She’s not better than Moore in the film, but she could have gotten some supporting actress support.

This just isn’t a good movie by any definition I would use. It’s very smart and entertaining for about half its length, and then it falls apart. It’s not smart, or interesting, or even entertaining in the second half, beyond the tension because we’re watching Elizabeth-Sue heading for some kind of terrible crash. I’m almost offended that it got a screenplay nomination, because the writing is the whole problem here. The performances are good, the effects and makeup are fine, but the writing is just lazy. A big violent finish is the easiest and least thoughtful way to end a story. This story, and the women it’s ostensibly supporting, deserved better.

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→ November 20, 2024
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Emilia Pérez.

Emilia Pérez has so much going for it that it seemed like a can’t miss – it’s a musical, it’s a redemption story, it’s about a trans person coming out and finding themselves, it’s a comedy. Unfortunately in trying to be all of those things, it ends up almost nothing at all. It’s an incoherent babblefest, salvaged only a little by its three main performances, notably that of Zoe Saldaña. (It’s streaming on Netflix.)

Saldaña plays Rita, a lawyer in Mexico who is disgusted by her work as a defense attorney, as she’s helping defend a man who killed his wife by arguing that she killed herself – and she doesn’t even get the ‘glory’ of arguing the case, as she writes the words and her dim-witted boss gives the big speech. She’s then contacted by the cartel boss Las Manitas, who reveals that he wants to come out as a trans woman, including undergoing gender confirmation surgery, and wants Rita to make all of the arrangements – including faking his death so she can begin a new life as Emilia Pérez. (She’s played in both incarnations by Karla Sofia Gascón, a trans actress from Spain.) Las Manitas was married, however, to Jessi (Selena Gomez), with two kids, and after transitioning, Emilia decides she can’t live without her children, so she poses as a wealthy cousin of Las Manitas and invites the them and their mother to come live with her, which goes off the rails when Jessi takes up again with her old lover Gustavo. Meanwhile, Emilia decides to make amends for her past by helping relatives of people presumed killed by drug cartels find out their loved ones’ fates, using her money and her connections to the underworld, becoming a popular hero for her efforts and her criticism of the authorities.

That would be enough plot to fill a ten-part TV series, but not only does Emilia Pérez try to pack it all into two hours, it does so in song. There are sixteen songs in the film, some of which are actually quite good (“El Mal,” sung by Saldaña during the gala dinner, is a real standout, and she nails it), although I’m not sure if “Vaginoplasty” ever really needed to see the light of day. The result is that a plot already stretched to translucency ends up so shallow that the film never actually says anything – even though it seems to think it has a lot to say.

The kernel at the heart of the story is fantastic: A drug lord fakes his death, comes out (privately) as transgender, establishes an entire new identity as a woman, and becomes a crusader against the violence of the drug trade and the government’s war on the cartels. That’s all this film needed to be an epic satire of the current state of Mexico, and Gascón would have been up to the task, as she’s perfectly menacing as Las Manitas, then entirely credible as a remorseful Emilia who uses the same determination that made her a successful criminal to become a serious reformer – even though the violent resolve is still there in reserve.

This isn’t that film, starting with the decision to make Rita the main character rather than Emilia, even though Emilia is in the title. Rita’s just nowhere near as interesting as Emilia is, not through any fault of Saldaña’s, but because she’s written so austerely, while Emilia is the one truly three-dimensional character in the film. Her trans status is more of a detail; it makes the plot work, but it’s not a part of why her character is so interesting. Emilia has the emotional depth and range that the other characters lack, and she should have been the central character, but the script has no interest in, say, exploring her emotional growth, or just her change of heart, or perhaps questioning whether she really understands the wrongs she committed. There’s a faint implication that she was just so deeply unhappy that it drove her to bad acts, but that’s pretty facile (if that’s even what writer-director Jacques Audiard intended) and I think could even lean into the whole “queer as mental illness” myth.

Saldaña is as good as she can be with a poorly written character, and when she sings and dances – she’s a trained dancer, which I admit I didn’t know until after I watched the movie – she owns the scene. Her songs look like scenes from a Lin-Manuel Miranda musical, in the best way: she grabs the camera with both hands and won’t let go until the song is done. And she gets just about all of the best songs, which is ironic with a pop singer elsewhere in the cast. It’s fun to see Gomez playing a vixen, even if the film doesn’t give her much time to vamp it up, and she barely gets to sing at all. She and Gascón are wasted by roles that don’t really make enough use of their talents.

The result is a film that is oddly boring for one that has some comic elements, a lot of song and dance, and eventually a big action scene. That last bit isn’t even that well earned, and leads to an ending that is an inexcusable copout where Emilia is no longer even in control of her own fate. That conclusion also underscores just how superficial Emilia Pérez ultimately is as a film: It has so little to say that it was completely fine resolving its plot with a figurative lightning bolt from the sky to wrap things up. What a waste of an opportunity.

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→ October 3, 2024
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Happier Hour.

I heard Dr. Cassie Holmes talk about her book Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most and her approach to time management, making sure we get the most out of the limited free time most of us have, on the Hidden Brain podcast a month or so ago. She was an excellent guest, telling some great anecdotes and offering a superficial look at her recommendations for people to reorganize their time around the activities that give them the most joy or pleasure. The book, however, goes no deeper than that, and really could have been a pamphlet for all the insight it offers.

Happier Hour’s main advice is simple to understand and plan, albeit perhaps not to implement. Holmes asks readers to spend about two weeks tracking their time in small increments, writing down what they’re doing and how they felt while doing it. The goal is to identify the activities that give you the most happiness, however you may define that. That’s often social activities with family, friends, etc., but it will vary by person – you might enjoy solving a puzzle by yourself more than playing a game with friends, and if so, then you should enter that in your little journal.

Once you’ve gathered that information, you should then create a schedule of your week, filling in the activities that you must do before you get to anything else. Holmes distinguishes between types of required activities, however; for many people, there will be aspects of work that you enjoy, and aspects that you don’t enjoy but have to do anyway. (One recurring problem with Happier Hour, though, is that this is very much a book for privileged people. Here, you have to have a job that gives you some flexibility in when you perform required tasks, at the very least.) Her advice is to isolate the best parts of work – the ones that give you some positive feeling, however you wish to define that – and dedicate time to them at the time(s) of day when you feel best. She’s a morning person, and she likes the deep work parts of her job, so she sets aside a few hours each morning for it, delaying the lesser parts of the job, like answering emails, to the afternoon when she’s not at her best anyway.

She counsels the same approach to your leisure hours – some of which will, again, involve required tasks, like making dinner, chauffeuring children or other family members, or performing certain chores. As I write this, I just emptied the garbage and recycling bins in the kitchen, dealt with the cats’ litter, and took the trash bins to the curb, a required task I perform every Wednesday. That would be on my calendar, each Wednesday night, taking up maybe 15 minutes at most. Once those fixed tasks are in place, I would then fill I the remaining time with activities that give me the most joy and with required tasks that can be performed at any time, again prioritizing the good stuff for times when I feel my best. (This also would require that I know when I feel my best. It depends on the day.)

That’s all there is to the Happier Hour system, aside from some minor details. Beyond that, the book is fluff – a little research here and there on how social activities tend to make us happiest, how experiences beat acquisitions (no kidding), or how social media sucks, plus some mostly cute stories from Holmes’ own life (along with one pretty lousy one). I don’t mind hearing about the author’s experiences when they relate to the book; her decision to leave a prestigious but intense job that was cutting into her time with her young children is understandable, and there’s a straight line from that to the research she does now at UCLA. However, they also underscore how this book is only for a small sliver of the population: It is way, way easier to execute the program in Happier Hour if you’re either rich, or in a flexible job (like mine, come to think of it), or both. So many of her stories just scream wealth and privilege: oh, you have a weekly coffee-and-hot-cocoa date on Thursday mornings with your preschool-aged daughter? How nice for you, but most of your readers with kids that young will take them to day care or similar arrangements so they can go to their not flexible jobs.

I say this with full awareness that my job is flexible – I’m a writer, and as long as I hit my deadlines, I could write at any time of the day I wanted. I could do it from 2 to 4 in the morning if I wanted to. (I do not.) And I could write from anywhere; in the offseason, I don’t even need to be in this hemisphere, as long as I have a phone and an internet connection. I am in the target audience for this book. I just didn’t feel very moved by it, and by the time I was about 2/3 of the way through, I was just annoyed by how much extra verbiage there was around something that could be described in under ten pages. This book could have been a podcast, and in fact, it was.

Next up: Still reading Adam Hochschild’s To End All Wars.

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→ September 17, 2024
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Dorf Romantik.

I’ve played the solitaire video game Dorf Romantik, and found it kind of mindless – yes, there is some scoring to consider, but you always have a ton of options, it’s pretty easy to hit the basic objectives, and the game goes on way too long. I don’t really get the appeal, but I’m also not a video gamer of any stripe.

The board game adaptation of Dorf Romantik won the Spiel des Jahres in 2023, and man does that baffle me. The game isn’t bad; it’s just boring, even with the various additional rules you unlock as you play the campaign and get a handful of new tiles and tokens. I’m baffled by its victory, or the claims that either the board or video game is some sort of gentle or relaxing activity. It is aggravating in its dullness, in that while playing I thought of all of the other things I could do.

The board game is sort of a cooperative game, but the rules are the same as in the solo mode and I have no idea how or why you would play this with others. You draw a new hexagonal tile on each turn and place it on the board, making sure it is adjacent to at least one tile already on the map along a side (not a vertex). Tile edges only have to match if there’s a river or a railroad on the edges; otherwise, you can place tiles anywhere you’d like. Some tiles have a flag icon indicating that you must draw and place a scoring tile on them, which will display a number and show the color of one of the terrain types (including the river and railroad). To win the flag and its victory points, you must then create a continuous region of that terrain type, including the tile with the flag on it. Some require an exact number of tiles, while others have a minimum number that you can exceed. (Once a flag is removed, you can of course go beyond the number.) You can’t place a tile with a flag on it in such a way that its flag requirement will already be satisfied, of course. You must have at least three active points tokens on the board at all times; if you finish one, you draw a new tile from a separate stack that will give you a new flag.

At game end, you add up the values of the flags you completed and then score your longest river and longest railroad. That’s the first game, at least, as the box comes with a soft campaign where you mark off circles on a separate sheet to track your progress and then get to open additional boxes that add new rules and tiles once you reach certain milestones. The new stuff adds a little complexity and some additional ways to score, along with some different tiles that do things like combine a river/railroad with a terrain so the latter isn’t split in two, but none of it fundamentally changes the game.

The video game is actually worse, although I know it’s been a massive hit, probably aided by its low price (I got it on sale on Steam for under $10). That game gets longer as you complete its objectives, adding tiles to the stack every time you finish a flag, so you actually have to play worse to get it to end sooner. I suppose in that sense the board game is an improvement, because the tile stack is finite and thus so is the playing time. The video game version also sets objectives based on the number of trees or houses in a contiguous set of tiles, which becomes just the number of tiles showing these things in the board game, another big upgrade because in the video version you’re really just taking the app’s word for it.

I don’t think this game needs to exist in the first place – it’s not so much that it’s bad, but there is nothing original here, and it seems like little more than a brand extension. It’s like solo Carcassonne, which isn’t a thing. Nobody gets in your way and if you don’t get the tile you need this time, you’ll get it soon, because nothing is scarce in the tiles, not even the railroads or rivers. It just … is. I need a whole lot more than that from a game.

(There is a two-player version called Dorf Romantik: The Duel that just came out this month. That might be a lot more interesting, as it has a module that involves some direct player interaction. Or maybe it’s just another cash grab.)

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→ June 18, 2024
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Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Anthony Doerr won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his World War II novel All the Light We Cannot See, a marvel of storytelling and character development that ranks among my 20 favorite novels of the century. His follow-up novel, 2021’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, follows a similar template of intertwined narratives, each centered around a single, well-developed character, but he fails to bring these narratives together in any sort of coherent fashion, and the entire enterprise comes off as a failed attempt to mimic Cloud Atlas instead.

Cloud Cuckoo Land comprises five narratives in three distinct time periods, each of which has a lost Greek novel/saga called Cloud Cuckoo Land at the center of its plot. One is set in the 15th century, as we follow two young people, Omeir and Anna, who both know of the story, and who sit on opposite sides of the 1453 siege of Constantinople – Anna trapped inside the walled city while Omeir is a reluctant aide to the attacking forces, helmed by a 21-year-old sultan. The second is set in our present day, again with two narratives, one centered on the octogenarian teacher Zeno, who translated what he could of the tattered pages of the novel, and the other centered on Seymour, a neurodivergent teenager who befriends an owl in the woods near his home, only to turn to eco-terrorism when developers raze the trees where the owl lives. The third, and least coherent, is set at some unknown point in the future, on a spaceship called the Argos that is taking a group of humans to an exoplanet where they might be able to start anew after climate change and ocean acidification have destroyed Earth. Those sections follow just one character, Konstance, who ends up alone in a sealed vault on the ship, copying out the text of Cloud Cuckoo Land from what she can find in the ship’s massive virtual library.

Doerr creates memorable, three-dimensional characters, and all five of his main characters in Cloud Cuckoo Land feel fully developed and strong enough to anchor their individual plot strands, each with some specific quirk or detail that helps define their personalities. Konstance is probably the least developed, although her circumstances and Doerr’s desire to keep some of her back story in his pocket until the last third of the novel both justify that choice. Seymour is infuriating at times, but also internally consistent and easy to understand even if, as a parent, reading about him made me want to pull my hair out. Zeno has the strongest back story of all of them, although his one key detail is pretty obvious from the start. Anna’s story does drag at times because much of it revolves around her sister, Maria, whose death is well foreshadowed from the start of that plot strand, although this sets Anna out on the course of autonomy that leads her to a copy of the book.

The book within the book, of which we get many snippets as the opening epigrams to various chapters, is supposed to be the throughline that connects all five stories, a testament to the power of books to transform our lives and deepen our understanding of the human condition. I didn’t find the novel within Cloud Cuckoo Land to be all that interesting, and the gimmick of having some of the text lost, so many words and sentences are missing, just makes the metafiction even more remote and inscrutable. The three timelines never intersect at all beyond the point that Anna and then Zeno uncover and/or create new copies of the book to make it available to future readers, so there’s no payoff to the extremely frequent jumps between timelines. It moves quickly, especially since the chapters are very short and there’s a lot of white space in the paperback’s 574 pages, but that velocity doesn’t change the weakness of the book’s resolution. It’s too long to call it a trifle, but Cloud Cuckoo Land lacks the depth and the emotional power of All the Light We Cannot See, which makes it a disappointment given that we know what Doerr can do at his best.

Next up: I’m going to try to tackle Alasdair Gray’s Lanark.

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