→ March 5, 2021
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Wolfwalkers.

Wolfwalkers is the latest film from the Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon, the 2-D specialists who have received Academy Award nominations for all three of their previous full-length films, Song of the Sea, The Secret of Kells, and The Breadwinner. Based on an original story by Will Collins, writer of Song of the Sea, this film – available only on Apple TV+ right now – is Cartoon Saloon’s best yet, with its most cohesive story and stunning hand-drawn animation, enough that it should win the studio their first Oscar, even though that won’t likely come to pass.

The story takes place in the 1600s in Kilkenny, a town in southern Ireland, where Robyn and her father Bill Goodfellowe have just arrived. The town is threatened by wolves in the nearby forest, which the town’s Lord Protector wishes to clear-cut, which would kill off the wolves or force them to move to another stand. Bill is a soldier, and wants Robyn to stay at home, for her own protection and other reasons that will become apparent, while Robyn is every young person in every animated movie ever – she wants to go out, explore, be a warrior, and so on. She gets into trouble multiple times, and ends up in the forest herself, where she discovers a Wolfwalker, a young girl named Mebh who can project herself into a corporeal wolf, leaving her human body in repose. The two become friends, and Robyn realizes that her father and her town will destroy Mebh’s entire pack – and kill Mebh’s mother, who left in her wolf form some weeks before and has yet to return.

The themes here are pretty straightforward – mankind’s inability to find balance with nature or respect other sentient species, and the dangerous combination of superstition and ignorance – and the Lord Protector character is fairly one-note, although he’s less overtly evil than the typical villain in animated fare. The relationship between the two girls is the real heart of the story, and the best sequences are when the two are together in human or wolf form, from their initial bickering to a very real argument that starts because Robyn tries to protect Mebh without respecting the latter’s agency. The relationship between Robyn and her father could have been more fleshed out early in the film, although it’s authentic enough as it is.

What sets Wolfwalkers apart from other animated films, and even Cartoon Saloon’s prior work, is the animation style. Cartoon Saloon’s animated people have a certain look to them, which is no different here, but the world around the characters explodes off the screen in color and texture – and that includes Mebh’s hair, which you’ve seen if you’ve seen any promotional materials for the film. The Breadwinner‘s setting required a grim color palette and harsh backgrounds, but Wolfwalkers is set on the Emerald Isle and the animators make sure you never forget it. It’s a visual feast, and even the occasional shot within the town walls, where colors are muted and you can almost feel the dust and soot in the air, can still be a marvel of layering and imagination.

You can guess most of the story’s ending by its midpoint, although the way our heroines defeat the Lord Protector has at least one surprise in it, so the development of Robyn’s character, and her relationship with Mebh, end up carrying the weight in the plot. It’s fortunate that the script is up to that task, and the two young women who voice those lead characters, Honor Kneafsey and Eva Whittaker respectively, are so good, with an on-screen relationship reminiscent of the one the Fanning sisters showed in My Neighbor Totoro. There’s a little violence here that would make this inappropriate for the youngest viewers, but less than you’d find in a typical super-hero movie (including Into the Spider-Verse). I haven’t seen all of the possible nominees yet, but I’m high enough on Wolfwalkers to say it’s going to be the best animated film of 2020.

Wolfwalkers was nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature Film, but lost out to Pixar’s Soul, which seems likely to recur at the Oscars, where Onward (meh) and Over the Moon will probably get two of the other three nominations but have no chance to win. I don’t think there’s any comparison here; Soul is the more technically impressive film, and funnier, but has a far less interesting story, worse character development, and isn’t as visually appealing.It’s just very hard for other studios to beat Pixar/Disney; those studios have taken 13 of the 19 Oscars in this category, and 7 of the last 8. They often deserve the wins, but have also won several for no apparent reason other than commercial popularity – Frozen over both The Wind Rises and Ernest & Celestine comes to mind, as does Brave over, well, anything decent – so the odds seem to be stacked against any competing studio. Wolfwalkers is clearly the better film, however, and if you are one of the 18 people in the United States who has Apple TV+, add this to your queue.

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→ March 2, 2021
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Judas and the Black Messiah.

Daniel Kaluuya’s Golden Globes win might bring some more attention to the superb Judas and the Black Messiah, available now on HBO Max, a biopic that focuses on the final months of Fred Hampton’s life by focusing equally on the man who betrayed him. It’s a different angle than a more typical biography, and I can see an argument that it gives Hampton short shrift, but the two lead performances absolutely drive this movie.

Fred Hampton (Kaluuya) was the head of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party when Edgar Hoover’s FBI decided he was a threat to the nation and, with the help of the members of the Chicago Police Department who weren’t busy assaulting protesters, executed him in his bed while his pregnant girlfriend listened from the next room. The FBI was able to do this because one of Hampton’s lieutenants, William O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield), was an FBI informant who ratted out Hampton to avoid a felony charge of car theft. O’Neal not only provided information to his FBI handler, Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons), but slipped a sedative into Hampton’s drink the night of the execution so he’d be unable to flee or fight back.

Judas and the Black Messiah follows O’Neal’s story from his arrest to Hampton’s murder, bookending the film with footage from Eyes on the Prize II, in which O’Neal gave his only public comment on his involvement in Hampton’s assassination. The narrative focus shifts away from O’Neal to Hampton as needed, giving more time for Hampton’s character to develop, and more time for Kaluuya to show how a magnetic speaker like Hampton could develop such a strong following in such a short period of time – he first became active in social justice movements at 18, and the FBI had him executed when he was 21. (Kaluuya and Stanfield are both much older than the men they portray.)

Stanfield is the lead actor here, at least by how the film’s producers have submitted the pair’s names for awards, but most of the film’s strongest moments belong to Kaluuya. It’s unsurprising, given his superb performances in Get Out and Widows, but he is an unbelievably compelling Hampton whenever he’s speaking to any sort of crowd, friendly or hostile. Kaluuya was positively creepy in Widows as a remorseless, vindictive killer, and here he channels that same implacable calm in any situation, such as when Hampton speaks to a group of Appalachian whites, transplants in Chicago, who rallied under the Confederate flag but also shared some progressive views with the Panthers (a meeting, and subsequent alliance, that occurred in real life).

Meanwhile, despite a strong performance by Stanfield, the script doesn’t give us enough insight into why O’Neal was willing to betray Hampton, to work with the FBI and against his own community, even when he gets clear evidence that the Panthers were creating positive change. His initial willingness to sign up as an informant, avoiding what the film says would have been six years in prison, is easy to grasp, but as the demands on him grow, and he’s more entrenched within the Panther organization, why wouldn’t he balk? Where’s the hesitation beyond what the script gives us in a phone call or two where he threatens to walk away and then changes his mind when reminded of the charges hanging over his head. Stanfield is very good at portraying anguish, speaking through clenched jaws with his head slightly bowed, but there’s something lacking in the character’s portrayal here – although even the actual interview O’Neal gave shortly before his death (the same day that Eyes on the Prize II aired) fails to provide a satisfactory explanation, as he seems unwilling to confront the consequences of his own actions. It’s at least plausible that director Shaka King and writers Keith and Kenneth Lucas made an active choice to leave O’Neal’s character vague because of the paucity of information on his motivations and feelings after the fact.

Between this film and the contemporaneous The Trial of the Chicago 7, it’s a strong year for ACAB in movies (or perhaps ACCAB, since both films involve gross misconduct by Chicago police), which speaks to much of the present mood in large portions of the country even though both events took place over 50 years ago. The idea of our own government executing a 21-year-old citizen in his sleep, where the police fired 90 shots and the Panthers in the apartment fired just one, should still shock and horrify us, and Judas and the Black Messiah doesn’t shy away from the corruption and police-state authoritarianism that allowed these events to take place – and the men behind them to walk away unscathed. It’s infuriating without feeling manipulative, unlike Sorkin’s film, because Judas’ script hews far more closely to the true story. It’s a film-world crime that The Trial of the Chicago 7 got a Best Picture – Drama nomination at the Globes, and a screenplay win, when Judas received neither, something I hope is remedied when the Oscars come out with their own slate of nominees in two weeks, with Kaluuya also deserving of a nod. Judas is an imperfect film in a few ways – I could have done without some of the inside-the-FBI stuff too – but between Kaluuya’s performance and the sheer power of the story behind it, it’s one of the year’s best.

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→ February 26, 2021
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The Nest.

Writer-director Sean Durkin’s first feature film, 2011’s Martha Marcy May Marlene, was a marvelous, gripping story with a star turn from a then-unknown Elizabeth Olsen – or, if she was known, it was for being a younger sister – that seemed to herald great things for Durkin once he had more resources available for another project. He finally returned to the screen in 2020 with The Nest, another extremely taut, well-acted, psychological thriller, returning again to themes of emotional manipulation and broken people, this time in a nuclear family where the couple are frantically trying to ignore the cracks in their marriage’s foundation.

Set in the 1980s, which is evident from the music to the clothes to the hairstyles, The Nest follows Roy (Jude Law) and Allison (Carrie Coon) as they relocate from New York City to the English countryside, where Roy believes he’ll find new business opportunities with a previous employer. They move into a giant Victorian house in Surrey that’s far too big for them and their two children, but it becomes evident that it is another symptom of Roy’s penchant for magical thinking and aspiration. The move isn’t for new opportunities, but because he’s broke, as Allison learns when construction on the stables for her horse-training business comes to an abrupt halt, and the lucrative deal he thinks he’s going to strike with his old firm turns out to be another pipe dream. The illusory world Roy has built around himself begins to crumble, while Allison tires of pretending everything is fine and becomes increasingly contemptuous of him, while her teenaged daughter, adrift and also recognizing an opportunity as teenagers do, rebels against them and the changes they’ve forced upon her.

The Nest is a movie of privilege, not about its exercise, but about its mere existence. Roy and Allison worry about things like status and appearances because they can – somehow, even with his chicanery and extravagance, they still have enough money to support themselves, and send the kids to private school, and, in Allison’s case, to keep a cash box hidden in the house because she knows full well that Roy is unreliable when it comes to money. The wounds here are self-inflicted, and we do get some brief glimpses of why as we learn a little of Roy’s and Allison’s histories, so this film is concerned with the suffering we create for ourselves rather than that the world imposes on us – more so if we are poor, or nonwhite, or just outside the circles in which these two people travel.

Coon is a treasure, as always – she was the best part of the one season of The Leftovers I watched – and she gives Allison all of the texture that this three-dimensional character requires. She becomes openly derisive of Roy, but also reckless in her own way, and runs the gauntlet of emotions and moods over the course of the film, notably in her growing unease in this house that they can’t afford and that could hold them and all their possessions many times over. She also takes a small step that emphasizes her independence, or at least her refusal to be dependent on such an unreliable man, that also has the side benefit of embarrassing her husband when it comes to light. My cousin Jude is also quite good as Roy, and certainly convincing as that sort of suave confidence man who is just plausible enough that you can see what Allison may have seen in him, but Coon is the absolute star of this movie, and it’s a shame she’s received so little attention on the awards circuit for it, with just a few nominations from local film critics’ circles.

The Nest, like Durkin’s first film, is a slow burn, and the tension lies mostly beneath the movie’s surface, although there’s more of an overt climax in this story than there was in Martha Marcy May Marlene, and also a less ambiguous conclusion. It’s a more polished work, with stronger characterization and a better story arc, although the first film’s ending played better into the idea of a sort of existential terror that this film evokes but doesn’t entirely drive home. They’re both quiet, simple films, however, in a way that might make them hard to sell to a larger audience, but that draw you in because they have the immodesty of reality, and all the pain and suffering it can bring.

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→ February 22, 2021
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Nomadland.

Nomadland has been the front-runner for Best Picture for several months now, taking home the Golden Lion at Venice, winning Best Film or Best Picture from multiple cities’ film critics associations (Boston, Chicago, Toronto, San Francisco, Houston, DC, Dallas, Seattle, and London), and landing four nominations at the upcoming Golden Globes. It’s a very different sort of film than anything I’ve seen, layering a traditional, fictional narrative on top of a work of cinema verité, based on an acclaimed non-fiction book but with Frances McDormand delivering what might be her third Oscar-winning performance. The movie is now streaming exclusively on Hulu.

Nomadland is about vandwellers, people who have chosen, or been forced to choose, to live itinerant lives in their vans or RVs, traveling around the country and taking on seasonal or other short-term work, but avoiding the fixed lifestyle and long-term obligations of home ownership. The book, by Jessica Bruder, was non-fiction, and explored this subculture of outcasts, misfits, and nonconformists, and the movie brings in many of the same people who appeared in Bruder’s book as the backdrop for the fictional story of Fern (McDormand), who is forced into this life when her job and the company town where she lived all go away in the span of a few months in 2011. (She’s not a real character, but the town, Empire, Nevada, became a ghost town, and the factory shown in the movie is still shuttered, although the gypsum mine has since re-opened and there are about two dozen people living in Empire.)

Fran is widowed and has nothing to tether her to Empire, including, it would appear, no real ties to friends nearby, so she buys a van, refits it for nomad life, and hits the road, starting out by working at an Amazon warehouse for her first seasonal job, then connecting with a group of nomads who teach her a little about the lifestyle and offer some tips. Many of these wanderers are real vandwellers from the book – Swankie, Linda, and the evangelist of the vandwelling lifestyle, Bob Wells, whose history of failing to pay child support is not mentioned in the story. One who isn’t is David, played by David Strathairn, whose voice would give him away even if you didn’t recognize him through his unkempt hair and white beard. He’s smitten with Fern, and the two run into each other multiple times, with David trying to convince Fern to come along with him and, eventually, to join him when he decides to give up van life and settle down with his son’s family.

Director Chloe Zhao’s previous feature, The Rider, also used non-actors in most of its roles, with its protagonist playing himself, so she’s mining some familiar ground here, but it is hard to imagine this movie without McDormand in it. She is utterly essential to this film, not her story specifically but the way she inhabits this niche in our world and makes it entirely plausible that she is, in fact, Fern, a woman abandoned by fortune who is trying to avoid going over the cliff. Her portrayal of an anguished, grieving person looks so effortless and so delicate that it reminds me of when extremely athletic players (often players of color) are accused of showing too little effort when the truth is that they’re just that talented.

Zhao also films this in a way that empathizes with the vandwellers without patronizing or mocking them. This could easily be misery porn, or a screed about our broken economic system (especially around health care), or a sort of weird cautionary tale about how people end up living out of their cars. Instead, Zhao presents this world without judgment, giving us the people in it as they are, so that their humanity is at the heart of the film, not their choices, and not their misfortune.

Nomadland is also frequently gorgeous as Zhao gives us soaring landscapes across the American West and some close shots of forests or other natural vistas, including the view from what I presume was supposed to be Fern’s old house, now abandoned but still intact. The film doesn’t romanticize the vandwelling life, but there’s a certain romance in the idea of getting in a van or an RV and just driving across these great unpopulated swaths of land, without so much as a destination in mind, although I find it hard to fathom doing that alone – and that’s without the added concerns that a woman would have making the same sort of journeys by herself.

Right now, Nomadland is my #1 movie from 2020, and my wife’s as well. I’ll go out on the shortest of limbs to say it’s going to take at least four nominations at the Oscars – Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Cinematography – and I can at least see why it’s the favorite to win the first one, because it’s a great movie and, in a roundabout way, speaks to the economic uncertainty of modern American life. It also gives Zhao an excellent chance to become the second woman and the first woman of color to win Best Director (Kathryn Bigelow won in 2010 for The Hurt Locker). We should see two women nominated in that category in the same year, with at least one of Regina King (One Night in Miami) and Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman) joining Zhao, which would be a first, although knowing the Academy’s history I wouldn’t be shocked to see them screw this up too and give one nod to, say, Aaron Sorkin instead.

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→ February 19, 2021
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Calico.

Calico is a deceptively cute game, ostensibly a simple game about cats and quilts but in fact a much deeper strategic experience that asks you to plan every tile and think about every move. It would have made my top 10 last year had I seen and played the game in time to write it. It’s between printings right now, but its amazon page is still active.

Calico is a tile-laying game where each player gets a board that has a frame around it showing pieces of hexagonal quilt tiles, and three scoring hex tiles placed on the three designated spots on their boards, each showing a specific scoring method associated with it, such as AA-BB-CC (three pairs) or AAA-BB-C (a triple, a pair, and a singleton). Over the course of the game, players will draw tiles from the supply and place them on their boards to try to surround those scoring hexes with six quilt tiles of different colors and patterns to meet those scoring tiles’ requirements. The tiles come in six colors and six patterns. If you meet the scoring tiles’ rules in just color or pattern, you score the lower number, but if you meet it in color and pattern, you score more.

There are also cats in this game, three each time you play, who are looking around to lay on your quilt, but only if it matches the patterns they like in specific alignments of tiles. That can mean something as simple as three tiles in a row, or something more complicated like five tiles in two rows (a row of two and a row of three, forming a sort of trapezoid), or a chain of seven contiguous tiles in any shape. Cats only score based on tile patterns, not colors – the latter are immaterial – and in each game, you’ll get one easy cat to score, one moderate one, and one difficult one, with multiple options for each at the start of every game; they score 3, 5, and 7 points respectively. You can count the partial tiles in the frame towards these patterns.

And there are buttons, which you can get by placing three tiles of the same color together, either in a row or in a triangle, and once again you can count the frame’s partial tiles to create those trios. You can’t create a group of six for two buttons, however; each group of three has to be separate. There are six colors of buttons, and if you collect one of all six colors, you get a bonus rainbow button. They’re all worth 3 points apiece.

You start the game with two random tiles from the supply, and on each turn, you’ll place one of them on your board, then replace with one of the three tiles in the supply. The game proceeds until all players have filled their boards, at which point they score their points from the scoring hex tiles, their cats, and their buttons.

That’s as detailed a description of Calico’s rules as I can give, and it’s not even 500 words. It’s an extremely elegant game that you can learn in a few minutes, but the game changes each time you play depending on the hex tiles, the cats, and the random draws of quilt tiles from the bag to supply the market. The first two options can be random, but you can also use them to fine-tune the game to the difficulty level you want; the rulebook suggests a starter game with specific tiles and cats for first-time players, which I think is also useful for learning the game’s icons and symbols.

The one drawback to game play is that you’re limited to the tiles that appear on the table, and, with only three tiles of each specific color/pattern combination and 108 tiles in total, you can easily find yourself waiting for a tile that never comes. You have to play in a way that allows you to capitalize if you get the tiles you want but prepares you for the more likely outcome that you get some of what you need, and even so, you can still lose just because the right tile never appeared. That randomness can also help level out the playing field between older and younger players, or more experienced players and newer ones, and in this case I’d say the randomness is in service of the game’s larger goals rather than just being there for its own sake.

The art in Calico is cute, maybe a little over the top in that regard, but artist Beth Sobel is one of the best in the business, with Wingspan, Lanterns, and the new edition of Arboretum all to her credit. Those cats on the scoring tiles are, in fact, actual cats, and they get their own bio section in the back of the rulebook, if you care about such things. Ultimately I’m swayed by the combination of easy-to-learn rules, subtle strategy, and replayability, though, all of which make Calico (belatedly) one of the best new games of 2020.

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→ February 14, 2021
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The Shadow King.

Maaza Mengiste’s 2020 novel The Shadow King was nominated for the Booker Prize last year, making the shortlist before losing to the Scottish novel Shuggie Bain. An epic war novel that also comes across as deeply personal – which, it turns out, it is – The Shadow King also tells a forgotten story of the roles women play in wartime, roles that are not limited to staying home waiting for the men.

Set in Ethiopia in 1935, the main narrative revolves around Hirut, an orphaned girl taken in as a servant by a neighboring couple, Kidane and his wife Aster, as well as the nameless cook who also works for them. Kidane was friendly with Hirut’s parents and agreed to care for her, but Aster sees her as a romantic rival, and becomes increasingly abusive to Hirut through the novel’s first section. The cook has her own complicated, longtime relationship with Aster, and now tries to protect Hirut, as the two share cramped quarters while the vain Aster appears to live in relative luxury, demanding material rewards from Kidane and clutching them like heirlooms.

Then war arrives, in the person of the Italian fascisti, as the Italian tyrant Benito Mussolini attempted to annex the kingdom of Ethiopia, which they had tried previously to control via two prior wars and a disputed treaty. Their arrival leads Kidane to head off to war, but rather than waiting behind, Aster also grabs a gun and departs separately, also intending to fight, bringing Hirut and the cook with her. While at the front, they meet Minim, a poor man who happens to bear a strong resemblance to the Emperor, Haile Selassie, who ruled from 1930 to 1974 and was the last in a dynasty of rules that dated back to the 13th century. Selassie had fled to England, where he was ruling in exile (and comfort), so the leaders of the Ethiopians’ untrained army, with simple weapons and no armored vehicles (compared to the Italians’ modern weapons and tanks and highly trained soldiers), realize that seeing their king would help motivate the soldiers, so they use Minim as a stand-in so the fighters would believe Selassie had come to join them at the front.

Mengiste sets you up to think Hirut will be the downtrodden heroine with whom you should sympathize, with Aster the antagonist, but the novel isn’t that linear in plot or purpose. Aster takes on a new role when the war begins, while Hirut also just becomes less central, and Kidane turns out to be less a protector than Hirut originally thought. Mengiste also introduces a second subplot around the Italian photographer Ettore, a Jewish man who is serving a government he knows may choose to end his liberty or his life at any time, and that he learns has likely killed his parents, even as he continues to document the war and the army’s killings by photographing every Ethiopian they execute in their final moments. His story and that of the women will, of course, intersect before Ethiopia falls and the novel ends.

This is a war novel, and a feminist one too, but in no way does Mengiste let the latter mitigate or soften any part of the former – her women are strong, and unwilling to be limited by any social customs that keep women from fighting when the country’s existence is at stake. The Shadow King is brutal and violent. Her descriptions invoke the dry, hot, dusty climate where the soldiers gathered to plan guerrilla attacks and futile defenses – the Ethiopians fought for about 16 months, but succumbed in 1937 – and where Minim takes on the role of body double. They also add to the sense of desperation around Ettore, a noncombatant in the service of a country that views him as less than human and that will, soon enough, be willing to send him to his death, but who is every bit the stranger in a strange land in Ethiopia and visibly an intruder and enemy to the native population. The juxtaposition of the stories can be jarring, certainly incongruous, but their intersection is one of the novel’s most powerful moments, combined with the return of Haile Selassie from exile and the aftermath of the Italian occupation. I haven’t read Shuggie Bain and can’t comment on whether this is better, but I easily understand its nomination.

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→ January 30, 2021
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One Night in Miami.

One Night in Miami marks the directorial debut of Oscar-winning actress Regina King, and seems set to earn a passel of nominations, including one for King and one for Leslie Odom, Jr., the current favorite to win Best Supporting Actor. It’s originally a play by Kemp Powers, but King expands the zone here to avoid the often claustrophobic sense we can get when scripts move from stage to screen, the result gives the four lead actors room not just to breathe but to fill out their roles as four towering figures in Black history. (It’s available on Amazon Prime.)

The night in question is February 25th, 1964, when Cassius Clay defeated Sonny Liston at the Hampton House in Miami, a significant upset at the time that was followed ten days later by Clay’s announcement that he had joined the Nation of Islam and would thenceforth be known as Muhammad Ali. The script brings together Clay/Ali (Eli Goree), Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), singer-songwriter Sam Cooke (Odom Jr.), and NFL star Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge), who had just rushed for a record 1863 yards and would later lead the Browns to the NFL championship that December. The four men engage in a wide-ranging and often contentious conversation about the civil rights struggle, their roles in it, and what responsibilities they might have given their platforms.

The script is talky, like most plays, but with four lead characters and multiple side characters appearing (two played by actors from The Wire), it doesn’t feel so much like you’re watching a play on screen, and King’s direction – particularly the shifting camera angles – gives the audience more the sense of being in the room while the characters are talking. The dialogue is quick, alternating between banter and more serious philosophical commentary (as well as some insults), so the pace only lags when we get one of the four men away from the others. And all four of these men deliver performances that would be strong enough to lead the film if there weren’t three other guys doing the same thing.

Odom, Jr., is masterful as Sam Cooke, the least militant man in the room by a mile, who comes under fire from the other men for their perception that he’s selling out, as an artist and as a Black man, for money and fame, although he has a rejoinder to the argument and the debate circles onward. All four men get their fair share of dialogue, but Malcolm X is probably the next most important character to the plot, and Ben-Adir is just as good as Odom Jr. – perhaps aided by the makeup, hair, and glasses that make him a reasonable likeness for the man he’s portraying, but also because his character might have the most emotional range of the four. Ben-Adir has to give us Malcolm X the confident firebrand, and Malcolm X the ordinary human, with large ambitions and deep self-doubts. And his character is the straw that stirs the drink of this particular conversation (which did really happen, although we don’t know what was discussed).

The four men are certainly more complicated than the script allows, and in some ways it makes Cooke and Brown seem more heroic than they were or are. Cooke had multiple issues with women and was killed in highly dubious circumstances. Brown’s history of violence against women and men was well-documented thirty-plus years ago, before the cultural awareness of domestic violence was a fraction of what it is today. If you knew nothing of Brown before watching One Night in Miami, you’d think he was a pretty cool cat, but this is a decidedly one-sided view of a man with a long history of domestic violence allegations.

King has done something quite marvelous here by making a stage play feel less like a stage play than just about any recent film I’ve seen that made the same shift to the big screen. The film hums along, and there’s so much good dialogue here that I’d like to watch it again to see if I missed anything – and I say that as someone who almost never re-watches films, and certainly not twice in quick succession. Much of the praise for Onie Night in Miami might be because the film and its subject are important and timely, but don’t lose sight of the fact that this is a good story, well-acted and well-told, regardless of the moment in which it appears.

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→ January 25, 2021
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Boys State.

One casualty of the new streaming wars is that some good films are going to go unseen by a wide swath of the audience, and may miss out on awards consideration for the same reason. The documentary Boys State looks like one of those, as Apple bought its rights after it won the top documentary prize at Sundance, so now it’s on Apple TV+ and unavailable any other way. I only know about it because Will and Tim discussed it on the Grierson & Leitch podcast, and both had it on their top 25 for the year (Will had it at #3), but right now it’s one of the ten best movies I’ve seen from the 2020 slate.

Boys State takes its name from a nationwide series of events run by the American Legion – yes, there is also a separate slate of Girls States – where high school students from around each of the 50 states gather for a long weekend, split into two fictional parties, and then hold elections for major state offices all the way up to Governor. The filmmakers followed the kids at Boys State in Texas in 2018, focusing on four boys in particular who went into the event hoping to run for prominent roles, from party leaders to Governors, while also getting solid representation of ethnic backgrounds and political views.

It’s hardly surprising that we hear a lot of reactionary political statements from these boys as they give speeches early in the film to vie for various positions in their two parties’ apparatuses, notably hardline opposition to gun control and misogynistic views against any sort of abortion rights, with a dash of homophobia and some generally anti-government sentiments thrown in for added flavor. (I do wonder how different that last bit might be whenever they next hold Boys State events, in the wake of the terror attack on the Capitol earlier this month.) What is far more interesting, however, is the extent to which at least some of those comments are performative, or just plain Machiavellian, as one participant who seems to be a hardliner says in a one-on-one moment with the filmmakers that he doesn’t believe these things – he just sees Boys State as a game, and voicing those views is a path to winning.

The four main stars of the film all turn out to be extremely compelling for their presences on camera and for the diversity of their backstories. Steven Garza, who runs for Governor, is the son of a woman who came to the U.S. from Mexico as an undocumented immigrant, and makes his mark on the conference with his compassion and his willingness to find common ground with potential voters through individual discussions. René Otero grabs your attention early in the film with a powerful speech that helps become chairman of one of the two parties, coming across as progressive compared to the room but also managing to sound that way without committing himself too strongly to specific policy ideas. He’s Black, and Garza is Latino, which is notable given how overwhelmingly white the entire student body at Boys State is – the filmmakers clearly made a choice here to follow some nonwhite students. The other two boys at the center of the film are Ben Feinstein, a double-amputee due to childhood meningitis, and seeks to lead the opposite party from Otero; and Robert MacDougall, a good likeness for a young Blake Jenner, and more of what I expected to see from the film – a good ol’ boy, an athlete, and someone who says all the right-wing things.

Where it goes from there surprised me, as not every kid is quite what they seem to be at first, various conflicts arise between and within the two parties, and we see some real growth from a few of the boys even though the event takes place in just a few days. There’s also some organic drama in the run-up to the final elections, including some underhanded tricks on social media, and the ending is far more emotional than I anticipated given the film’s subject. There’s some fat the filmmakers could have trimmed, like the glimpses we get of the event’s talent show, time that could have gone to showing more of the conference’s press corps, who seem to play a more important role than the film lets us see. I might have a little more of a connection to Boys State because I attended some similar events in high school (but not Boys State specifically) and helped run a Model Congress event while I was in college, but Boys State is so well-crafted, and so generous towards its subjects, that I think it’ll appeal to anyone who is able to see it.

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→ January 16, 2021
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Grand Austria Hotel.

Grand Austria Hotel came out in 2017, from designers Virginio Gigli (Egizia, Coimbra, Lorenzo il Magnifico) and Simone Luciani (Tzolk’in, Lorenzo, the Voyages of Marco Polo), both of whom tend towards heavier worker-placement or economic games in their designs. Egizia is an all-time classic for me, and Tzolk’in is one of the best heavy/complex games I’ve played, although the learning curve is pretty steep. Grand Austria Hotel might be their best – it’s heavy, but not excessively so, and the complexity here is enough to present a good intellectual challenge without presenting too much cognitive load, and, most importantly, it’s fun.

Grand Austria Hotel, which I assume is a nod to Wes Anderson’s best live-action movie Grand Budapest Hotel, has you running a Viennese café and hotel, where the main mechanic in the game involves attracting guests to your café and serving them four different dishes (resources), after which you can move them to open rooms in your hotel that you’ve already prepared. You can also hire more staff members who can provide extra benefits – one-time bonuses, recurring bonuses, or end-game bonuses. There’s also an emperor track, which is checked three times over the course of the game, providing a one-time bonus if you meet the threshold, but with a stiff penalty if you fall short. And every game has three ‘politics’ cards, with objectives that provide 15 points to the first player to achieve them, 10 to the second, and 5 to the third.

It is a lot to keep in mind, but the genius of Grand Austria Hotel is how well every element of the game works together. The key is that almost every guest provides some kind of benefit in addition to the points they provide. Each guest requires one to four resources to be moved from your café, which has just three tables, after which you get whatever benefit is on the card – money, resources, moving the emperor track, hiring employees (often at a discount), taking guests from the queue, preparing rooms (often at a discount), or even switching rooms from prepared to occupied.

The game has seven rounds, with players going twice in each round in a snake format, so you know from the start you’ll get 14 turns. At the start of each round, the start player rolls a set of dice and sorts them by value. On every turn, you may take a guest from the queue if you have an open table in your café, with the two rightmost guests free and the others costing one to three dollars to choose. Then the player chooses all dice of any one specific face value and uses the action associated with that number:

  • 1: take one brown and/or white resource per die, but not more brown than white
  • 2: take one red and/or black resource per die, but not more red than black
  • 3: prepare one room per die
  • 4: move up one space on the emperor track OR take one dollar per die (in any combination)
  • 5: hire one staff member from your hand for a discount of $1 per die
  • 6: pay $1 and then use all value-6 dice for any of the five actions above

You can also pay $1 extra when selecting dice to use the action one more time, as if you had an additional die of that value.

Any resources you get from dice can go directly on to your guest cards in your café for free, and you may pay $1 to move three resources from your stash to guests. You can then move any completed guests to prepared, unoccupied rooms in your hotel.

The rooms come in three colors, and may only house guests of their specific color, or guests with green backgrounds, who may go into rooms of any color. When you complete blocks of a color, you get a set reward tied to the color (points, money, or progress on the emperor’s track) and block size. Preparing rooms on the first floor is free, with the preparation cost going up by $1 for each floor on which rooms are located.

There’s still more to it, but the real selling point of Grand Austria Hotel is that all of these elements work together. You need to craft a flexible strategy around guests to acquire, blocks to fill, and employees to hire, without losing sight of the emperor’s track or the objectives on the politics cards. And you will almost certainly be strapped for cash early in the game – you start with $10 but you’ll need it to prepare rooms and buy staffers early on, and may choose to use some of that money to fill some blocks sooner for other benefits.

My one criticism is that Grand Austria Hotel has very little player interaction – it reminds me in many ways of Wingspan, in fact, another game that has a lot under the hood, but also doesn’t involve much player interaction. You could take a guest card someone else wanted, and those politics cards do reward the player to achieve those objectives first, but you can’t do much if anything to stop another player who’s off to the races. It just means that you have to figure out your plan and execute it, while also staying agile in case you don’t get the cards or dice you need. I’ve scored 188 points, which is close to the highest I’ve seen from any player, and I’ve scored 50 points and less, even after I’ve learned the game, usually because I didn’t have enough money. It’s not as good as Wingspan but it’s on par with Egizia, offering a more solitary game but with a comparable level of complexity and harmony from all of the moving parts.

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→ January 11, 2021
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Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.

The movie adaptation of August Wilson’s play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (on Netflix) has been overshadowed by the death of one of its two stars, Chadwick Boseman, last August, making this his final film appearance. The command performance he gives here is a mournful reminder of how talented he was, and the stardom he had right in front of him, as he even manages to outshine Viola Davis, who’s already won one Oscar and is going to be nominated for another one for playing the title character here.

Ma Rainey was a real-life blues singer, sometimes called the “Mother of the Blues,” who achieved not just popularity but a measure of autonomy for herself in the 1920s, even writing some of her own songs and recording as early as 1923. The black bottom was a dance, and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” was one of her singles – although I’m sure the double entendre wasn’t lost on audiences at the time. The film just covers the time of one recording session for that song, a fictional rendering of the day that revolves around Rainey and a talented, ambitious, and volatile trumpet player named Levee, played by Boseman.

This Rainey, at least, is a diva, demanding of her musicians and the producer alike, insisting that her nephew voice the introduction to the song, even though he has a stutter that makes the task a bit difficult. Levee, meanwhile, has dreams beyond merely playing trumpet in someone else’s band; he writes his own music, has put together his own band, and is busy trying to convince the (white) producer to pay for him to record his songs himself.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, like Fences, comes across like a play on screen, with all the action taking place in just a few settings, and dialogue that never stops. The actors have to convey far more than in a typical film, but they also run the risk of overpowering it, which was the main issue I had with Denzel Washington’s performance in Fences – he dominated every scene he had without Viola Davis, and it took an Oscar-winning performance out of her just to compete.

Here, Boseman and Davis don’t share a ton of scenes, so each can take over in their own way, but neither crosses that line that made me leave the theater thinking Denzel Washington had been yelling at me for an hour and a half. Although Davis’ character is in the title, Levee is the bigger character within the film, getting – in my impression, at least – more screen time and more words than Ma Rainey does. Boseman infuses Levee with both the naked ambition of his character and the innocence required to make his decisions plausible. Levee doesn’t understand how the world works, believing in some level in a meritocracy that doesn’t exist in a world that is already predisposed against him because of the color of his skin. It requires a precise performance to ensure that this character doesn’t become ridiculous. Levee is not a fool, but he’s arrogant enough to think he’s the exception, and when the world doesn’t conform to his beliefs, the cognitive dissonance causes him to erupt in unexpected violence.

Boseman is going to win the Oscar, of course, because of his tragic death before the movie was even released, but there won’t be a plausible argument that the performance itself was undeserving. He puts Levee on a knife’s edge and holds him there for the bulk of the film, so that when he breaks, as you know he must, it works, because you’ve been waiting for him to explode. It makes Davis’ performance seem showy by comparison, although she also is likely to get (and deserve) a nomination for this role.

The story here is somewhat scant, although that seems typical of stage adaptations to screen, and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom adheres to the play’s use of just a few settings, with the bulk of the film taking place in the recording studio or in the musicians’ room below it. That also means we don’t have much time for back story, and outside of the two main characters, everyone is pretty one-dimensional. The producer who takes Levee’s songs and promises to look them over might be well founded in history, but he’s nothing but a penny-pinching, greedy white man taking advantage of Levee’s race and ignorance here, bordering on a dangerous stereotype. (It’s worth noting, however, that Wilson and this script both changed one word of the lyrics to “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” here substituting “new baby prances” for “Jew baby prances.”)

Levee’s big speech towards the end of the film broaches questions about being Black in a society that has always treated Blacks as second-class citizens when treating them as citizens at all, and even goes beyond that to an existential question about Blacks and a God who seems to have forsaken them. It is the clip I expect we’ll see when Boseman’s name is announced at the Oscars in April, because it is his biggest moment and the best pure writing in the script. I imagine this will earn a Best Picture nomination as well, but the reason to watch Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is for Boseman’s performance – not because he’s gone, but because he’s just that good.

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