→ 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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→ June 11, 2024
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Spellbook.

Phil Walker-Harding has designed some of my all-time favorite games, including Cacao, Silver & Gold, Super Mega Lucky Box, Imhotep: The Duel, Sushi Go!, Gizmos, and more. He’s been on something of a cold streak lately, unfortunately, with a number of games that felt unfinished or insufficiently tested, and it continues with his most recent big release, Spellbook, a game with a decent concept that ends way too quickly.

Players in Spellbook get a set of seven cards, each of which shows three ‘spells’ on it (with rare exceptions) that players can cast to gain additional powers throughout the game. On your turn, you may collect spell tokens in the seven colors, and if you collect at least three of a color, you can cast the associated spell, gaining either an immediate bonus or a new action for the rest of the game, plus victory points, but losing the ability to cast the other spells on that card. You may also store a token on your player board on every turn, with spells that allow you to store two or more if you cast them, which awards you the most points and also triggers the end of the game when someone fills all 14 spaces on their board.

In each turn, you get up to three actions, tied to morning, midday, and evening, with all spells fitting into one of those three times of day. In the morning, the base action is to take one visible token from the market or two random ones from the bag. In midday, the base action is to store one token on your board. In the evening, the base action is to cast one spell. As the game progresses, you’ll have better actions available from spells you’ve cast, such as allowing you to swap some of your tokens with those in the market, or allowing you to discard one token with a specific symbol to draw 4 from the bag, so the game speeds up. And that’s the problem: Spellbook ends before you can get anything interesting going at all.

If a player just muddled along and stored a token on every turn, they wouldn’t win, but the game would end after 14 turns, which might be a reasonable number – but the game should never last that long because of the actions available that let you store multiple tokens at a time. The game ends either when someone fills their board, which is the only way we’ve ever had this game end, or when someone casts a spell of all seven colors. I’m pretty confident that the cast-and-store strategy is the dominant one, both because it offers more points and because it ends the game more quickly, but that consistently left us with the sense that we’d barely played the game. Some spells aren’t that useful anyway, but you might cast only three of them before the game ends, and that just isn’t very fun to play. It wants to be an engine-builder, but that would require more turns, and there’s too much randomness involved in getting the tokens you need for spells (with one way to create a ‘wild’ token that’s too difficult to change the calculus). I have a hypothesis that larger publishers in board gaming are pushing to get more titles out rather than fewer, better-quality ones, and this feels like it supports my belief – at best, it just wasn’t tested enough, because there is no way people played this a bunch without saying the game ended too soon.

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→ May 24, 2024
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Night Watch.

Jayne Anne Phillips’ newest novel Night Watch was, as far as I can tell, a surprise winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in two senses: I saw nothing that anticipated its win, and I think it sucks. It is a ponderous, pretentious, pointless, predictable piece of fiction that was an absolute chore to finish and offered far too modest a payoff for the effort required to complete it.

The setup to the plot of Night Watch is far more complex than the plot itself, as if Phillips knew she had a scant concept and decided to mask it with time-shifting, insufficient use of quotation marks, and avoidance of pronouns. A man takes a woman who has stopped speaking for several years and her 12-year-old daughter to a West Virginia asylum several years after the end of the Civil War, cautioning the girl that he is not her father and telling her the story she needs to relate at the asylum to gain admittance for herself and her mother. The girl’s actual father went to fight in the War but never returned and the family received no word of his fate. From there, we jump back and forth to find out who the man was, why the woman stopped speaking, and what happened to the father, before we get to a conclusion that you can see coming from the first fifty pages, if not sooner.

This book thinks it has a lot to say, and that might be its worst attribute, even beyond the leaden, torpid prose and the meager characterization. (It also contains a long, graphic scene of sexual assault that stood out as one of the only scenes in the novel that has that level of detail about anything happening to any of the characters.) There could be a larger point here about the treatment of women during and in the aftermath of the Civil War, and how conflicts tend to save their worst impacts for the most vulnerable populations, such as women and children, which would seem to have a rather apt parallel today in Gaza. There could be something here about the poor treatment of the war wounded and the insane of that era. There could be any number of themes here if Phillips had the insight into the subject to lead the reader there, but she doesn’t. It revels in the misery of its setting like Andersonville, another Pulitzer winner about the Civil War – the judges for that award just can’t seem to resist that setting – without saying anything meaningful about any of it.

The characters are the book’s second major failing, as Phillips seems almost determined to prevent the reader from getting to know any of them. The man never gets a name beyond “Papa,” a sort of cruel joke in the circumstances. The father gets a name that isn’t his own, only after he’s wounded and loses his memory. The mother and daughter each have two names, their own and the false identities they assume when they enter the asylum. There’s also a woman and a horse who are both named Dearbhla, in case you weren’t confused already. They’re all thinly drawn enough that they exist only as one-dimensional villains (Papa) or victims (the mother and father) or sort of impossible fairies (the daughter). The daughter, named ConaLee but known at the asylum as Miss Eliza Connolly, is the closest character here to a protagonist, and is certainly its hero, yet she is a cipher inside her outlines: We only see her as her world has made her, never as who she is as a person.

The sum of these disparate parts may leave you rooting for any sort of happy ending for the central characters, and of course Phillips could not give you one – nor does this novel need one, to be clear. She simply chose the cheapest way out, rather than resolving the plot’s various threads in a way that actually says something about their lives or their time or, as is written in the guidelines for the Pulitzer committee, “dealing with American life.” That this was chosen over North Woods or Tom Lake is appalling, the second massive whiff in three years by the Pulitzer committees for the fiction award after 2021’s mind-boggling selection of The Netanyahus, which really hasn’t aged well. A great novel will justify its existence through its story, its prose, and its characters. Night Watch does none of the above.

Next up: Oliver Roeder’s Seven Games: A Human History.

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→ February 29, 2024
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Maestro.

Leonard Bernstein lived a long and interesting life, earning his place in the pantheon of American music. It’s hard to believe Maestro couldmake him and his life so utterly boring. (It’s streaming exclusively on Netflix.)

Directed and co-written by Bradley Cooper, Maestro is a formulaic biopic that often seems afraid to truly engage with its subject (played by Cooper) or his wife, Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan). The film begins with Bernstein at age 25, thrust into the lead conductor role one night at the New York Philharmonic when the guest conductor is unable to go on, a jumbled mess of a scene that foreshadows the movie’s chronic problems with pacing and tempo. Bernstein is in a relationship with the clarinet player David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer), but soon afterwards meets Felicia at a cocktail party, pursuing and marrying her, although he was gay and had a series of affairs with men throughout their marriage. His career progresses in the background, with nods here and there to his series of successful endeavors (and no mention of his big flop, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, which became his last Broadway musical), while his marriage teeters and he and Felicia separate, briefly, before reuniting because he conducted a great performance in 1973. And then she gets cancer and dies.

Maestro isn’t even bad, or so-bad-it’s-good, but dull. Bernstein was fascinating as a person and a composer, yet the film does neither side of him justice. He wrote the music and score for West Side Story, scored On the Waterfront, and wrote three symphonies and numerous other orchestral and chamber pieces, which you’d barely glean from this film. There’s relatively little of his music, certainly not his most famous pieces, in the movie, yet the script focuses for an eternity on that one 1973 performance, where he conducted the London Symphony Orchestra at Ely Cathedral – a show that, in the film, led Felicia to forgive his infidelities, which seems to be a bit of Hollywood nonsense. If you knew nothing of Bernstein before watching Maestro, you would likely leave the film believing he was a conductor and not a composer, or at best a minor composer of lesser-known works.

His relationship with Felicia is supposed to be the heart of the film, but it’s in cardiac arrest; it’s a series of interactions, but few if any are illuminating, and there is zero chemistry of any sort between the two of them, which matters given how much the film wants us to believe that, despite his homosexuality, he both cared for and needed Felicia. It’s as if the two characters barely inhabit the same universe, exacerbated by both actors’ attempts to mimic the accents and intonations of the people they’re portraying, which makes Mulligan sound like she’s in a Julian Fellowes period piece. The drive for verisimilitude in biopics has some clear drawbacks, from the distractions of Cooper’s makeup and voice mimicry to the sense that these two characters aren’t even from the same era.

Nothing sinks Maestro as much as how boring the story is, though. There are certainly several ways to treat a protagonist who’s a philanderer, and struggling with his sexual identity in a time of entrenched discrimination and bigotry, yet is also an icon in his field and was recognized as a genius in his own time. Maestro seems unwilling to engage with the darker side of Bernstein’s character – that, even if Felicia accepted him as who he was and what he was doing, he seemed to be using her as cover and as an emotional support. There’s a bigger question of whether a relationship like this can even work, or be equitable, but the script never comes close to exploring it. I’m mystified by the wide acclaim for the film, but there’s always one major Oscar-nominated film that I just don’t get.

Speaking of which, Maestro was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Original Screenplay; needless to say, I don’t think it should win any of them, with multiple better choices in each category. Greta Lee (Past Lives) should have had Mulligan’s nod, and Leonardo DiCaprio (Killers of the Flower Moon) or Andrew Scott (All of Us Strangers) would have been a better choice than Cooper. The one race to watch here would be Best Makeup and Hairstyling, given the controversy over Cooper’s use of a prosthetic nose to better resemble Bernstein, a choice that the composer’s children have publicly supported. I don’t believe there’s a clear favorite in that category, since Barbie was snubbed, while Variety and Indiewire have both tabbed Maestro as the likely winner. I haven’t seen three of the five nominees yet, so I’ll defer any opinion on this.

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→ December 12, 2023
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The House of Silk.

I’ve loved much of the work of Anthony Horowitz, who created Foyle’s War, one of my favorite TV series of all time, and wrote the book Magpie Murders and the authorized James Bond novel Forever and a Day. He’s also written two authorized Sherlock Holmes novels – Moriarty, which was well-written but relied too much on a gimmick; and The House of Silk, which, unlike Moriarty, actually features Holmes as the main character. It’s also well-written, and moves along well, but falls into the trap of so many authorized continuations, where the author is trying so hard to be true to or respectful of the characters/settings that the story itself ends up suffering.

The House of Silk builds slowly to the first of multiple murders that all seem to tie to some mysterious entity by that title, although it’s unclear to whom or what it refers. Holmes enters at the behest of an art dealer whose shipment of paintings was destroyed by Irish gang members and whose client is later found murdered. When Holmes uses his Baker Street Irregulars to look for evidence, one of them ends up murdered himself, spurring the detective to continue his investigations even when others, including his brother Mycroft, warn him away from anything involving the House of Silk. Holmes finds himself framed for murder, and Watson has to find a way to spring him before they can solve the case.

Horowitz’s Holmes is the one you expect. He repeats his catchphrase “The game is afoot!” which actually comes from Shakespeare’s Henry V and just made me roll my eyes for its obviousness here. He does his parlor trick of glancing at a person and immediately coming up with a lengthy biographical sketch or a rundown of everything that person might have done that day, which has very little to do with the actual mystery here and didn’t happen nearly as often in the original Conan Doyle works because nearly all of them were short stories. He’s actually less disdainful towards Watson and the police in The House of Silk, where authenticity ends up lost to make him a kinder, gentler Holmes, and nobody asked for that. Watson, meanwhile, is even more of a cipher of a character here than he is in the original stories, retreating mostly to observer and chronicler status outside of the scenes while Holmes is in prison.

That’s one of my two main problems with The House of Silk – the characters are just not very interesting, including the man we all know and love. If you enjoy this sort of fiction, you likely have a favorite detective character; I’m a Hercule Poirot fan, and never enjoy the Miss Marple stories as much because she’s just not as interesting to me. Horowitz’s Holmes feels flat on the page, and none of the side characters are anything more than stock figures, some there because the reader might expect them (Lestrade, Mycroft), some there for the new plot, but none memorable at all once they leave the page.

The other is that the resolution to the story here is exceptionally lurid, and thus out of character with any of the original stories. Such things do happen in the real world, and did during the era of the novel, but putting Holmes into such a story is not only a break with the novel’s otherwise overzealous effort to stay authentic to the original material but requires a huge tonal shift for the character that the author can’t manage. It’s jarring in the wrong way, and Horowitz shows he’s a better craftsman than artist, able to frame and write the story but not to give it the panache or appeal of Conan Doyle’s works.

Next up: I’m currently about a third of the way through R.F. Kuang’s Babel, the most recent winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novel.

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→ November 25, 2023
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Wish.

Wish, the newest film from Disney Animation, would have been much better if they’d just made a fresh video for the Nine Inch Nails song and called it a day. Instead, it’s a self-congratulatory movie with an adequate story, forgettable music, and almost no humor for anyone over four years old.

The movie takes place on the island of Rosas in the Mediterranean, which seems to draw on Spanish, Italian, and Maltese cultures and architecture, where the population is ruled by a benevolent king named Magnifico. Before creating the kingdom, Magnifico lost his family to an invading tribe and chose to become sorcerer, and in so doing learned how to grant wishes. When Rosas residents turn 18 or emigrants become citizens, they give their greatest wish to Magnifico, who stores it in his castle for safe keeping. Once a month, he grants one wish of his choosing. Enter Asha, whose grandfather Sabino turns 100 the day of one of these wish ceremonies, and who wishes to become Magnifico’s apprentice, only to discover that he’s not the benevolent king he appears to be. Since it’s a Disney movie and you know things will work out in the end, it’s not much of a spoiler to say that Asha will lead the people of Rosas as they work to overthrow the tyrant Magnifico and free their wishes.

The story here has potential, and the ending is one of the better ones among Disney movies, at least incorporating the film’s themes of hope and community into a resolution that’s internally consistent. Getting there, though, is a real drag. Asha (Ariana Dubose) is a mostly one-note character, driven by good intentions without much depth or complexity, and she experiences zero growth or development over the course of the film. She wins by being good, and by being smart, but that’s it. She doesn’t have an arc so much as she has a straight line. Magnifico (Chris Pine) at least changes as the film progresses, and while it’s for the worse, hey, at least it’s an ethos. There’s something to be said for a villain who starts out as just a little bit evil and becomes all the way evil by the film’s conclusion, and who gets there for an entirely mundane reason – he’s corrupted by power. He wants something Asha has, but his story is ultimately one of absolute power corrupting absolutely. There’s more depth to his character than there is to Asha’s, and that’s one of the film’s main flaws.

It has more flaws, though, believe you me. It’s just not funny at all – there are a few decent sight gags, maybe, but the Comic Relief Goat (Alan Tudyk) is just painful because you know he’s supposed to get laughs and he doesn’t. I can’t fathom how this script got through the number of people at Disney who are involved in making movies without anyone pointing out just how devoid of humor it is. The music is also wildly disappointing; I would argue there are two decent songs of the seven originals in the movie, the rousing “Knowing What I Know Now” (which feels like a big Broadway number that might take you into intermission) and “This Wish,” which has some clumsy lyrics but solid music, and plays a key role in the story. Magnifico’s main song is dreadful, and “I’m a Star” feels like a deleted track from a Kidz Bop record.

Then there’s the fact that this movie is a 90-minute celebration of the studio that released it. Rosa’s seven friends map one-to-one to the seven dwarfs, without much embellishment or expansion. (Grumpy/Gabo is probably the best of the bunch.) There are direct and indirect allusions to past Disney films, many of which are just too obvious to be enjoyable – part of the fun of references and Easter eggs is finding them, but most of the allusions here might as well have pop-up bubbles pointing them out. Even the attempt to nod back to the classic Disney films with CG animation that evokes the hand-drawn style fails, because the characters look extremely flat and cartoonish.

Wish seems on pace to be the studio’s third financial flop in its last four, after last year’s Strange World (which I haven’t bothered with) and Raya and the Last Dragon (which opened in March 2021, so the pandemic hurt its box office). I don’t think commercial performance has any bearing on a film’s worth, but Wish seems to serve no purpose beyond making money. It’s a movie about how great Disney movies are, except it’s not great and it isn’t doing well at the box office. With a slew of great animated films this year, including the second Spider-verse movie, Nimona, and the upcoming The Boy and the Heron, Wish probably won’t even land an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature, which would mark the first time in sixteen years that two straight Disney Animation films missed the cut. Perhaps that’s as indicative as anything of how far the studio seems to have fallen.

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→ November 13, 2023
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Asteroid City.

I’m not a huge Wes Anderson fan, which I think is a key disclaimer if you’re going to talk about any of his films. I loved both his animated features and felt pretty close to that about Grand Budapest Hotel, but Bottle Rocket annoyed me throughout, and I turned off Rushmore after 20 minutes because I wanted to punch the television. He’s got a style, and clearly actors will go well out of their way to work with him, but you have to get on his wavelength and stay there for the length of a film, which doesn’t always work for me given his stilted dialogue and idiosyncratic ways of framing shots.

Asteroid City might have his most impressive cast ever, with at least three Oscar winners and twice that many more nominees, almost to the point where the value of a star cameo is diminished because you stop being tickled by the time Hong Chau (nominated last year for The Whale) shows up for five minutes. At the same time, the film requires so much of its actors because most of them get relatively little time on screen – and everyone talks so quickly, par for the Anderson course – and because, unfortunately, the story here kind of stinks. (It’s streaming on Peacock or available to rent on Amazon.)

The conceit behind Asteroid City is that we are watching a televised play within the movie, although the play itself shows up on our screens as a movie (rather than taking place on a stage, where we get some interstitial moments instead). The playwright (Ed Norton) and the host of the television series (Bryan Cranston) introduce the setting and, very briefly, some of the main characters, after which we are thrust into Asteroid City, population 78, a desert town in the American Southwest whose only claim to anything is that a very small meteorite hit the town and left a “crater” maybe slightly larger than a divot left by John Daly. In this town, there’s a convention for the Junior Stargazers science competition, and we meet several families, most of whom arrive with one parent and anywhere from one to four children in tow. The convention is hosted by Dr. Hickenlooper (a surprisingly normal Tilda Swinton) and General Griff Gibson (Jeffrey Wright), and after they give out the awards for the best projects, there’s a viewing using pinhole cameras, during which an alien shows up and takes the meteorite. Hilarity ensues. There’s also a group of grade schoolers led by teacher June (Maya Hawke), a weird country band led by Montana (Rupert Friend), and the hotel proprietor and the only resident of Asteroid City we meet (Steve Carell). Outside of the play, we get black-and-white shots of the playwright, the play’s director (Adrien Brody, so underutilized here), an acting teacher (Willem Dafoe), and an actress whose part in the play was cut (Margot Robbie).

Almost all of those folks do the best they can in very limited roles, with Wright and Hawke the real standouts, but the core of the movie is the relationship that forms between Augie (Jason Schwartzman) and the actress Midge (Scarlett Johanssen, made up to look a lot like Annette Bening), and the one that develops between Augie’s son (Jake Ryan) and Midge’s daughter (Grace Edwards). Schwartzman is one of Anderson’s most frequent partners in crime, but he has dialed it way back here in the most likeable performance I’ve ever seen him give, even though Augie himself isn’t all that likeable – it’s Schwartzman giving depth to a father who’s, well, out of his depth on multiple levels. He’s also able to provide a strong foil for Johanssen’s performance as a troubled film star, one that could have overwhelmed a lesser actor in the opposite role. Schwartzman also appears as the actor playing Augie in the play in several black-and-white segments showing us the actor and Norton’s playwright or the actor discussing the play with Robbie’s character.

The script requires a lot of tolerance for Anderson’s stilted dialogue, and he pushes that too far at many points, including most of the interactions among the various prize-winning teens – other than the memory game they play while they’re all quarantined in Asteroid City by the military, which is one of the best scenes in the movie – and some of the dialogue from the side characters. It’s also just overstuffed with ideas, so that quirky bits like Hawke’s nervous, I-didn’t-sign-up-for-this teacher trying to teach astronomy to a bunch of elementary schoolers who just saw an alien, wash over the audience too quickly. It is coherent, but it is not cohesive, and by the time the last tourists pack up and leave Asteroid City, the lack of a real through-line to connect most, let alone all, of the characters overshadowed the many funny or clever bits scattered through the film.

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The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet.

Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is one of the biggest successes in self-publishing in the last decade or so, as she ran a successful Kickstarter to give her the time to finish the book, which sold well enough that Hachette’s Hodder & Stoughton picked it up and published their edition a year later. The book now has three sequels, winning the Hugo Award for Best Series in 2019, and all of the sequels earned nominations for the Hugo for Best Novel. This book, at least, has “first effort” all over it, though, and it’s kind of clunky and overdone in so many parts, especially the world-building, which detracted somewhat from a fun if very light story about a group of misfits becoming an ersatz family aboard a spaceship.

The Wayfarer is that ship, and as the series opens, Rosemary is heading for the Wayfarer to serve as its clerk, handling all of the paperwork the ship needs to move through space, across civilizations and, often, punching holes in the fabric of space to create shortcuts across great distances. These artificial wormholes are the Wayfarer’s main source of income, and they do it with a truly motley crew of specialists drawn from multiple species. Each crew member gets their own moment in the spotlight here, so rather than a single plot we get a series of episodes that allow the focus to move across everyone on the ship, from Corbin, the stubborn, meticulous biologist who grows the algae that helps power the ship; to Dr. Chef, the mechanic and, yes, chef, from a dying species who also serves as the ship’s counselor; to Jenks, the engineer who is – slight spoiler – in love with the ship’s AI. Really. (Needless to say I found that one a bit hard to take.)

I think the real problem I had with Long Way was the extensive exposition as Chambers builds out her universe, with giant civilizations of many species, endless rules, fictional technologies, and at least seven characters who need some sort of back stories. It’s a trap many first-time writers seem unable to avoid, and I at least attribute it to the benign desire to get all of these thoughts – the whole universe they’ve built up in their heads – out on to the page, as well as to prevent too much confusion on the part of readers. It also drives me up the wall, because 1) we can learn about this stuff as the story goes along and 2) if I really, really need to understand the technical details of how interstellar travel works in your books, or get a full description of every species’ cultural norms, that’s a bigger problem than just giving us a few pages of extrapolation can solve. Since Long Way visits a lot of planets and has such a diverse crew, we get a lot of that cultural stuff, and the book ends up spinning its wheels for pages and pages while Chambers describes trivial points about handshakes or mating customs.

The book does tackle some larger social themes, although it does so in a cursory way because there are so many smaller stories in the novel’s 438 pages. There’s a bit about cloning, a part about LGBT relationships, some stuff about war and the ethics of supplying one side (pretty timely right about now) when you’re not involved, and more, but none of tit gets more than superficial treatment.

The Long Way has to stand on the strength of its characters, since the plot is modest and the prose more akin to YA fiction, and there Chambers has some more success, although it’s a mixed bag. Rosemary is fine as the closest character we have to a protagonist, as her wide-eyed views and relative inexperience outside of her home planet make her a sensible lens for the reader to view most of the action. Some of the non-human characters are a little overdrawn, notably the navigator, Ohan, so again we get bogged down in details rather than seeing the characters develop. The more I write, the more I realize I just didn’t care for this book at all, other than that it was light and easy to read. It’s not The Calculating Stars bad, but I hope the remainder of the series spends more time developing the characters than explaining its fictional universe.

Next up: I’m about 2/3 done with Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go.

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