→ 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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→ December 4, 2020
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Piranesi.

Has any novel been as long-awaited as Susanna Clarke’s sophomore work Piranesi? Her first novel, 2004’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, is one of the best books I’ve ever read, perhaps the best written this century so far, a brilliantly rendered epic about rival magicians in the 1800s, complete with the funniest footnotes I’ve ever seen. Clarke fell ill after writing it, and other than one book of short stories, published nothing until this year, when Piranesi appeared, as if from another world, in September. While it’s quite unlike her first novel, Piranesi is remarkable – brilliantly rendered, again, but in a completely new way, with a new voice and an atmosphere of mystery and dread throughout.

Piranesi is the name of the narrator, although we come to learn that his story, and his name, are more complicated than they first appear to be. He lives alone in a gigantic castle of hundreds of rooms, some sort of labyrinth, and the only person he ever sees is one he calls the Other, who seems to be conducting some sort of research on Piranesi and the house. As the story progresses, though, it becomes clear that there’s far more to Piranesi than even he realizes, as his memories start to come back to him in dribs and drabs, and he realizes there are other people in the world besides himself and the Other.

The less said about the story, though, the better. This is book about memory and loss, and it’s best to recover Piranesi’s memories, and learn the truth about him and the House that he treats as a sort of god, along with him. Clarke has, once again, created an immersive, dreamlike otherworld that will pull you in, even though this one is as nebulous as the world of Jonathan Strange was clear and familiar. It was easy to look at her first novel and see her influences in 19th century British literature and to understand where she was gently parodying the books she obviously loved from that era. Piranesi, however, is unlike any novel I’ve ever read. The closest comparisons I can think of – David Mitchell’s Slade House came to mind – aren’t really that close.

While the mystery of who exactly Piranesi is and what he’s doing in this house – which floods often, and doesn’t appear to have any exits – unravels, Clarke gives the reader ample time and fodder to consider his plight. He’s alone most of the time, yet oddly at peace with his situation, even though he’s in frequent peril from everything from the rising waters to lack of food. (The Other brings him gifts, including food, although Piranesi largely seems to live off dried seaweed and fish he catches.) There are the bones of 14 other people in the House, and Piranesi seems to think they speak to him, somehow, as do the various statues. Was he always mad? Did solitude drive him to madness? Why isn’t the Other trying harder to help him? And who is 16, the person whom the Other warns Piranesi to avoid at all costs?

The House is a character of its own in the book, especially given how Piranesi interacts with it, and could stand as a symbol for any of several real-world analogues. It’s a dream world, in the sense of the endless structure of dreams, but even more resembles the human imagination – a fractalized rendition of the world of our minds in a series of rooms that might be changing each time Piranesi visits them, in a total space that might have an end that Piranesi hasn’t actually found. There’s a sense of incompleteness within the House that feels like the sort of dream you get when you’re not completely asleep, but where impossible things creep into your mind enough that you know after that you weren’t completely awake, and how within those semi-dreams you can also feel trapped by your own confusion. I’ve had more of these experiences during the pandemic, for some unknown reason, and while Piranesi was in progress long before COVID-19 existed as a pathogen in humans, it takes on a different meaning eight months into the ongoing plague.

There might be a bit too much exposition in the middle of Piranesi, where Clarke has to break the spell a little bit to explain to the reader just how Piranesi got to the House and what might be coming next, but the resolution is gripping and veers from the expected in multiple ways, not least in the timing of events towards the novel’s end. It isn’t Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell because nothing could be, and perhaps it’s for the best that Clarke’s follow-up isn’t in that same universe, as she’d once promised. This new creation of hers is just as magical as the first, but in its own, memorable way.

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→ November 21, 2020
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The Queen’s Gambit.

The Queen’s Gambit, adapted from the 1983 book of the same name by Walter Tevis, is ostensibly about chess, but it’s really a coming-of-age story about a chess prodigy who overcomes multiple family tragedies and drug addiction to become one of the absolute best players in the world. The story is somewhat flawed, and perhaps ties up too neatly at the end, but it’s a compelling ride from start to finish with a very strong cast.

Beth Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy, who is certainly a star now if she wasn’t already) ends up in an orphanage when the series opens after her mother dies in a car accident from which Beth walks away physically unscathed. While in the orphanage, which is strict but not quite Dickensian, she spots the gruff custodian (Bill Camp) in front of a chess board and demands that he teach her to play. He’s a strict teacher, explaining the game and chess etiquette, but realizes how incredible her mind is and introduces her to a teacher at a local high school who runs a chess club. She’s off to the races … except that she’s also hooked on the tranquilizers that the orphanage feeds to the kids to keep them docile, which presages a long battle with substance abuse even as Beth continues to stun male players and rise up the ranks in the chess world, eventually facing the Soviet champions in Moscow.

There’s a lot to recommend in The Queen’s Gambit, not least of which is the dedication to getting the chess scenes right. I’m not a chess expert, or even much more than a beginner, but I never felt like they were faking the ‘action’ on the chess boards – there were no obvious mistakes like moving a bishop straight up a row or column, or claiming a player was checkmated when it was visibly false. The series spends a lot of time on the chess itself, a difficult creative choice given how hard it is to make what is essentially an intellectual activity exciting on screen. The director emphasizes the tension inherent in chess (and most great two-player games of any sort), where you must figure out your opponent’s likely responses to any move you might make, and they use a gimmick to demonstrate Beth’s prodigious chess mind where she visualizes the board on the ceiling upside-down. The gimmick is cute, maybe a bit overused, but the way they parse the moves on the board with shots of the players – and some help from music and editing – makes the matches seem as tense as the end of any close athletic event.

Taylor-Joy has been on a steady ascent over the last few years, from The Witch to Thoroughbreds to this year’s adaptation of Emma, but The Queen’s Gambit is probably going to be the role that makes her a star. She’s especially good here when she’s not speaking – she’s good at expressing a broad range of emotions just with her face and body language, and handles the transition from awkward teenager to fashion plate (someone had a lot of fun dressing her in mod clothes highly evocative of the mid-60s) with aplomb. Her speech can come across a bit affected, although that’s a minor quibble. This series doesn’t work without her nailing the lead role.

There are a lot of very strong supporting performances, including Camp, Marielle Heller as Beth’s adoptive mother, and Thomas Brodie-Sangster as Beth’s obnoxious rival Benny Watts, but none made a stronger impression than Harry Melling, whose transformation into a series and versatile actor has been a remarkable surprise. Melling plays Harry Beltik, an early competitor whom Beth defeats on the board and enraptures off it, turning him into both a suitor and a friend whose loyalty she doesn’t always deserve. He shows up as an arrogant, overconfident local chess champ, but softens as he grows up, and eventually becomes a voice of maturity and reason that Beth needs, even if she’s not always willing to heed it, and Melling plays that second version of Beltik with compassion and a very amiable nerdiness that makes him the most compelling character in the retinue of men orbiting Beth’s star. Melling was good in The Old Guard as the villain and excellent in a small role in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, but this is the best thing I’ve seen him in since he finished up his run as Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter movies.

The Queen’s Gambit has a couple of problems that didn’t detract from its entertainment value but did keep it from becoming a truly great series (that might, say, win all the awards). One is that its depiction of drug addiction and alcoholism is facile, and there have already been many thinkpieces accusing the series of glorifying substance abuse by depicting it as essential to Beth’s chess genius. That isn’t the ultimate lesson of the series, but she’s probably far too functional as a chess player for someone who is constantly shown drinking and taking benzodiazepines. A second is the use of Jolene, a Black girl whom Beth meets in the orphanage, as a Magical stereotype that ends up coming across as racist even though Jolene’s inclusion was probably an attempt to make the cast more diverse.

The one flaw in the show that did detract from the entertainment value is that Beth’s story arc is just too smooth in its upward trajectory, so there isn’t as much drama at the chess tables as there might have been. Some of this is unavoidable: she’s not going to bomb out in the first or second round of a chess tournament, playing some junior player, because chess has absolutely no luck or randomness in game play. But much of the potential fodder for drama away from the chess board is frittered away by the script, including multiple tragedies after she’s adopted, where potential difficulties are just resolved by good fortune or exceptional foresight. By the time we get to Moscow in the final episode, it’s all seemed a bit too easy for Beth to go from the orphanage basement to a match against the best player in the world.

That wasn’t enough for me to dislike the show; I was still hooked, and my partner and I watched the whole thing inside of three days. It’s paced so well that my attention never flagged, and several of the episodes ended sooner than I expected. I could have used more balance in the story, and the way Jolene returns in the last episode is borderline cringey – a shame, as the actress, Moses Ingram, does the best with what she’s given – but I completely understand the hype. The Queen’s Gambit is worth the binge.

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→ November 17, 2020
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Fort.

The deckbuilder Fort is the newest title from Leder Games, who’ve had two pretty sizable hits with their medium-heavy games Vast and Root (which got a very strong digital port this fall from Dire Wolf). Unlike those games, though, Fort is light, quick, and whimsical, with artwork from Leder’s Kyle Ferrin that really works to enhance game play.

In Fort, two to four players compete to build the most appealing clubhouse or tree fort for neighborhood kids, playing cards from their hands each turn to acquire more pizza or toys and then using them to upgrade their fort from level 0 to level 5. All of your cards depict kids in the neighborhood, but they come in six different ‘suits,’ and cards may have a public action, a private action, both, or neither.

You deal yourself a hand of five cards after each turn, since you may get to play cards on other players’ turns, and when your turn begins you can play one card from your hand that has at least one action on it. You get to execute the public and private actions if you wish; other players can follow the public action, but not the private one. If either action has the symbol X and a suit symbol, you can play further cards showing that suit to multiply that action – gaining more resources, for example. (Other players can follow by playing one card of the matching suit, but can’t multiply by playing additional cards.)

Any cards you play go to your discard pile at the end of your turn, as do your two Best Friend cards if they’re still in your hand. Any other cards you didn’t play go to your Yard, where you might lose them to other players during the Recruit phase. During your own Recruit phase, you get to take one card for free either from another player’s Yard or from the display of three cards from the main deck. So turns are quick: play a card and use its actions, discard, recruit, deal yourself a new hand of five cards. At the start of your next turn, you’ll take any remaining cards in your Yard and put them in your discard pile.

Nearly all of the points you’ll get in Fort come from upgrading your fort, which you do by paying resources, with the cost increasing as you move up the fort track. However, you do have some other avenues to gain points from cards. One is via Made-Up Rule cards, which each player gets when they get to fort level 1, which are private objective cards that can give you additional points at game-end for things like all your blue suit symbols on cards, for trashing both of your Best Friend cards, or for stopping at fort level two. Another is the Lookout, where you can tuck cards under your board, up to your current fort size plus one, which makes them unavailable for the rest of the game. There are cards that you can play that will give you one point per card in your lookout, and those cards do count toward Made-Up Rules. Your storage is limited to four resources of each type, but you also have a backpack space on your board, and can store resources in there up to your fort level plus one, and can play cards that will get you points for what’s there as well.

Fort encourages player interaction, which distinguishes it from a lot of deckbuilders. You can steal cards from other players in the Recruit phase. You can also play certain cards that encourage you to trash cards from other players’ Yards or even discard piles, often netting you resources for doing so. The gist is that you’re all competing to build the coolest hangout, and then you have to entertain the kids you attract enough to keep your competitors from wooing them away.

Ferrin’s art is great – it’s colorful and imaginative, and each kid has a nickname, many of which are wonderfully goofy. We all immediately had our favorites, from Puddin’ to The Ant to Bug to the Noodle Twins (no actions, but worth two suits), and there are two copies of many of those cards, so there are only a few cards where if someone else gets it you’re out of luck until it ends up in their Yards. (There are two cards that are unique, but shouldn’t be, which let you score one point for each pizza/toy resource you have. At least one of those cards is essential if you get the Make-Up Rule for keeping your fort at level 2.) It might almost make you think it’s a game for kids, but it’s probably too complex for players under 10 – it’s actually a retheme of a game I’d never heard of before, 2018’s SPQR – between some of the strategy and the iconography, which is language-independent but not intuitive. There are too many cards that have actions written in forms like (do this -> that) X suit, and I don’t think that’s going to be obvious to new players unless they’ve played a lot of games before.

Fort’s definitely one of my favorite new games of 2020, between the art, the interaction, the smarter twist on deckbuilders (a genre that often disappoints me), the replay value, and the small box for portability. I would take this over Root, which is one of the most highly-regarded strategy games of the last decade, at least, because it’s just that much more accessible, and plays in well under an hour once everyone knows the rhythm of turns. It’s also just plain fun, which is something I think gets underrated by the online board game community, which values high strategy (and complexity) over everything else. There’s something to be said for threatening your daughter if she thinks about stealing The Ant from your Yard that you just won’t get in a two-hour worker placement game. Now if you need me, I’ll be in my clubhouse.

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→ November 16, 2020
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Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.

Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm can’t match the shock value of the original Borat film, since we already know the deal and that Sacha Baron Cohen is willing to do anything for the sake of the gag, but I think in the end it’s actually funnier for it. There are still a few moments here where he and his new co-star, the Bulgarian actress Maria Bakalova, go too far with a joke, but Cohen seems to have also realized that the real staying power of the original was that he could get the unwitting subjects to go along with him and show their worst selves on camera – which said more about America than it did about his fictionalized Kazakhstan.

After some early setup, the once-disgraced Borat returns to America on a second mission for the Kazakh government, this time to deliver a bribe to a high-ranking U.S. official – eventually settling on Mike Pence. He’s joined after some silly plot contrivances by his daughter Tutar (Bakalova), whom he decides to “offer” to Pence as a bribe, traveling across the southern United States and speaking with many ordinary Americans and some not-very-ordinary ones, most of whom come off far worse for the encounter. He gets a bakery employee to write “Jews will not replace us” on a cake, goes into a “pregnancy crisis center” with Tutar, and spends several days living with a pair of QAnon believers. He also meets a very kind and open-minded Jewish woman after he walks in a synagogue dressed as a giant pile of Jewish stereotypes, and hires a babysitter for Tutar who turns out to be the heart of the film and so popular with fans that a GoFundMe started by her pastor has raised over $180,000.

There are many laugh-out-loud moments in Borat 2, most of which come when one of Cohen’s jokes lands and the Americans he’s mocking do more or less what he’d hoped they would do. You’ve probably heard about the Rudy Giuliani scene – in which he doesn’t acquit himself well, at all, despite his later protestations to the contrary – but that’s not even among the top half-dozen scenes in the film for humor or impact. Borat takes Tutar to a Houston plastic surgeon, who takes the bait and describes how a “Jewish” nose would look by drawing the shape in the air – someone who’s highly educated and likely deals with high-income customers is completely comfortable trafficking in anti-Semitism. There’s a long setup to get to the pregnancy crisis center, but the result is a combination of old-school sitcom misunderstanding and the most cringey behavior imaginable by the pastor at the facility, who clearly has no concern at all for Tutar’s well-being.

Some of the jokes don’t land, though. There’s a menstruation joke that’s just about grossing out some Southern snobs at a dinner for debutantes, which is both unfunny and useless at exposing their elitism or the anachronistic nature of the whole practice. The end of the Giuliani sequence doesn’t really work either. It’s actually funnier to watch Cohen try to avoid fans who recognize him on the street in Texas than to watch those scenes or the drawn-out way in which he tries to reunite with Tutar after she runs away (thanks to the babysitter, who is beyond patient in explaining things to Tutar, including that women in the United States have actual rights).

Nothing is so damning as how easily many white Americans in this film show themselves to be racist or anti-Semitic, even when they know full well they’re being recorded, much as the South Carolina frat boys did near the end of the first Borat when they wished slavery still existed. The plastic surgeon is unapologetic for his comments on “Jewish noses” or his lecherous comments towards Tutar. I don’t think the bakery employee or the propane salesman who says his tank can wipe out a whole van of Roma people have said anything publicly or all the people singing along with the racist lyrics of “Country Steve.” And what would they say? This is who they are, and this is who we are. All Cohen had to do was turn his cameras on Americans and let us do the work.

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→ November 11, 2020
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Lanny.

Max Porter’s second novel, Lanny, has a more conventional structure than that of his first, the brilliant Grief is the Thing with Feathers, but has the same ethereal feel and prose that’s entirely dialogue, inner and spoken. This story is bigger, but still short, with a sense of closeness about it that matches his first book and makes it another powerful, compelling read.

Lanny is an 8-year-old boy, an only child, different from the other kids – highly imaginative, prone to statements that sound like they should come from an adult, and possibly communicating with some sort of spirits in his small English town. His parents’ marriage is strained, but they do love him, and his mother is both incredibly attached to him and constantly anxious about his well-being, including his social life. Things look up a bit when the eccentric local artist, Pete, offers to give Lanny painting lessons for free, just because he enjoys Lanny’s company so much. Everything implodes when Lanny fails to arrive home from school one day, setting off a series of events, most of which you’d probably expect from this setup, but with the one complication that we knew from the start: one spirit with whom Lanny is probably communicating, a shapeshifter named Dead Papa Toothwort, exists, a legend among the village who has been there for centuries (at least) and who might be menacing Lanny from the start.

The bucolic town turns very dark when Lanny goes missing, like a shade going down on the story, with Pete coming in for obvious suspicion. He’s a bachelor! Why would he have such an interest in a little boy like Lanny! He’s devastated, and wants nothing more than to help find his missing friend, but the town devolves into gossip and recriminations against Pete and against Lanny’s parents, looking for anyone to blame for the unspeakable horror of a child gone missing and possibly dead. Once the search for Lanny starts, the attributions by character disappear, giving us as little as a sentence at a time from unnamed speakers, adding to the sense of disorder amidst a frenetic search.

Dead Papa Toothwort ‘speaks’ in a rambling stream of consciousness that also incorporates snippets of other, unnamed characters’ speech, presented on the page in a nonlinear and often overlapping fashion that looks like someone put an e.e. cummings poem through a Zalgo text generator. His intentions are unclear, but he seems to stand as a metaphor for nature and our environment, which we ignore at our own peril, and Toothwort’s goal turns out to be less evil than simply self-serving, as he feeds off the speech of humans while inhabiting the very soil beneath the village. (Toothworts are part of a broad genus of plants, Cardamine, that tend to grow on forest floors, especially where the soil is damp.) His connection with Lanny relies on the boy’s fairylike character, as Lanny often speaks in riddles or makes observations beyond his years, wandering off to places he finds to be magical, and gives the sense of being barely there even before he goes missing. His mother isn’t immediately alarmed on the day he fails to return home from school because it’s so in character for him to not be where she expects to find him.

There’s a film adapation of Lanny in the works, with Rachel Weisz attached, but I have a hard time seeing this translate to any screen given how much of the book’s value derives from Porter’s poetic prose. There isn’t even that much plot to go around, which makes me fear some screenwriter will invent something to fill in the gaps, rather than letting the search for Lanny play out in something like real time, emphasizing the agony faced by Lanny’s parents and Pete as days pass without any trace. Porter is such a gifted wordsmith that I doubt any filmed version can capture what he puts on the page.

Next up: I’ve been burying myself in genre fiction during these stressful last few weeks, but I’ve got David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten next up on the shelf.

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→ October 28, 2020
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The Everyday Parenting Toolkit.

The Everyday Parenting Toolkit is a very specific set of tools for parents, with guidelines that apply to kids of just about any age but a stronger focus on kids younger than about nine. The subject here is behavior, and behavior change, and the book, authored by Dr. Alan Kazdin, describes some pretty simple rules for engendering behavior change in children that focus on positive steps more than negative, certainly different than the way I think most or at least many people parent. It’s often difficult to get through because Kazdin calls every step of the method by its technical name, but this is evidence-based behavior management, and could help all of us with kids get out of the cycles of discipline and punishment that don’t really work to create the changes you want.

The basics of the method revolve around the A-B-C framework of Antecedents, Behavior, and Consequences. Before you can do any of this, however, you have to define the behavior you want, and do so in clear terms that you can communicate to your child and that your child can understand in a way that they can execute. If you can’t explain it to yourself, or to your spouse or partner, in simple terms, then your child isn’t going to be able to follow it and make the change you want.

Antecedents come before the behavior in question, and changing them can change the behavior – thus, you create an environment with incentives (or disincentives) to encourage the behavior you want. Depending on the child, the behavior, and how far the status quo is from the desired behavior, you might even choose to simulate the activity and the behavior so that your child has a chance to practice the behavior you want in stages – for example, ‘practicing’ a tantrum, but one with less screaming, or where they keep their body more under control. You need to identify specific behaviors you want to change, rather than general traits like generosity or kindness, and then use Kazdin emphasizes that what you do before the behavior occurs can have far greater impact than what you try to do afterward.

The Behavior stage of his method involves providing reinforcement when you get the behavior you want, or even just part of the behavior you want. This might be the ‘positive opposite,’ where your child is doing the polar opposite of the behavior you want, and thus getting to your desired outcome requires working in stages. You create a plan to get from point A (present behavior) to point B (desired behavior), and develop a program, with any co-parents, to encourage progress with reinforcement – primarily praise, specific praise that is delivered as close in time to the good behavior as possible. The plan should set specific, achievable goals for the child, and each positive step should be met with praise, effusive praise for younger kids especially, and maybe with very modest rewards like a point system.

Consequences are not what you might think, or at least not what I thought they’d be. Kazdin emphasizes the importance of positive reinforcement programs, arguing that they’re just more effective than negative reinforcement (what we usually think of as punishment). Punishments should be mild when used at all, and should be accompanied by a reinforcement program that encourages the ‘positive opposite’ of the offending behavior. (He points out that parents should never use physical discipline, and there is substantial research on the long-term negative outcomes associated with even ‘light’ corporal punishment like spanking, from worse mental health outcomes to decreased immune function. Don’t spank your kids.) You may also need to withhold reinforcement from undesirable behaviors; every parent knows the situation where they’ve had to stop themselves from laughing at something their kid did that you really don’t want them to repeat, but that was actually quite funny. I remember my daughter, then four and a half, saying “Daddy!” and clapping twice to get my attention for something, and I had to turn away so she couldn’t see me cracking up; that would have provided positive reinforcement for a behavior that, while pretty astute (I had clapped a few times to get her attention before), was not something I wanted to see become a habit. Withholding that reinforcement thus would have been a key part of a behavior-change program, had I instituted one at the time.

Kazdin states multiple times that punishment doesn’t work on its own and should be rarely used, and only to decrease some behavior. It can confuse your child if you’re trying to use punishment, especially as a restorative method, while also working to change behavior and ‘impart other lessons.’ Punishment doesn’t teach positive behaviors, only works in the very short term, and often provokes side effects like crying, avoidance, and even aggression (especially if you use corporal punishment). He describes the most effective way to use time outs, including that the first minute of time out does most of the work, and that time outs beyond ten minutes probably do nothing at all.

The remainder of The Everyday Parenting Toolkit is devoted to the need to develop a strong environment, or context, in your home to allow better behaviors to develop; and to real-world examples from families who’ve visited the Yale Parenting Center, where Dr. Kazdin is the director, and the programs the center developed to help those families implement sustainable behavior changes. The context chapter would probably apply to the greatest number of readers, because the eight steps he recommends could start at any time, regardless of how old your kids are, to encourage better behavior or just discourage undesirable behaviors, and perhaps limit the need for you to use the A-B-C method so that it’s more effective and easier for you to maintain.

My daughter is 14, but I still found value in The Everyday Parenting Toolkit for parenting her, as well as far more tips for my partner’s kids, who are both still in the single digits. I have zero background in psychology, but much of what Kazdin recommends here follows principles from behavioral economics – not just incentives and disincentives, but timing (rewards and reinforcements must happen very soon after the behavior), misaligned incentives, and the nonlinear effects of many of these steps, like time outs. Kazdin does rely too much on jargon here, even though it’s a book for the lay audience, and I found it to be a slow read for that reason – seeing “positive opposite” fifty times didn’t make the phrase more meaningful in my head, for example – but there are lessons here I’ll be able to use at home for a long time, and that I think every parent should know.

Next up: I’ve finished Max Porter’s Lanny and am now reading Emily Oster’s Cribsheet.

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→ October 23, 2020
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Mumbo Jumbo.

I can’t believe Ishmael Reed’s 1972 Mumbo Jumbo escaped my notice until just this year, when I grabbed it for $2 for the Kindle. It would have fit perfectly in the class I took in college called Comedy and the Novel – which, as great as it was, did not include a single book written by a woman or a person of color – and should be in high school curricula around the country. It’s postmodern yet largely accessible; it’s funny, yet incredibly serious; and it deals with timeless topics of race and culture. It’s also about a nonlethal pandemic, making it an interesting read in the time of COVID-19. There were certainly parts I didn’t follow, some of which is a function of my cultural illiteracy, but the end result is an important and very compelling work of magical realism and postmodern fiction.

The pandemic at the heart of this story is called “Jes Grew,” and the primary symptom is the desire to dance and have fun. Needless to say, the white powers that be can’t abide this, and the Knights of Templar (who still exist) team up with the shadowy Wallflower Order to fight it, while various Black leaders, many of whom are voodoo clergy, work against them. The story twists and turns while incorporating major historical events from the first half of the twentieth century, placing great emphasis on the 19-year U.S. occupation of Haiti, with appearances by a cornucopia of real-life figures, including President Warren Harding, dancer/author Irene Castle, and W.E.B. Dubois.

In the world of Mumbo Jumbo, voodoo is real, but its history has been suppressed by white people (as have many elements of Black culture), and the true history of Judeo-Christian religions is quite different from the one we’re given today, involving a gallimaufry of spirits and prophets going back to ancient Egypt. The voodoo priests are led by PaPa LaBas, a voudou priest who is named for one of that religion’s spirits known as loas, but the characters themselves are secondary to the “anti-plague” of Jes Grew, a fairly obvious metaphor for the spread of Black culture and white efforts to stop it and, when they can’t, their efforts to appropriate and assimilate it. The story winds through jazz clubs and speakeasies, including Harlem’s famous Cotton Club, and art museums housing stolen art from the developing world. It works in the search for a mystical text from the goddess Osiris that may explain the origins of Jes Grew and hold the key to stopping it. Reed even works in the since-debunked story that Harding was part Black.

There’s plenty of intrigue here, including several murders by the warring factions, a demonic possession, and a tense hostage scene, which was more than enough to hold my interest for its scant 200 pages (and something like 50 chapters). There’s a lot of subtext here that I know I missed, though, from Black cultural history to voodoo and spiritualism, caused by gaps in my own education, that I’m sure limited how much I could understand and appreciate what was going on in Mumbo Jumbo. I understood his points about Black culture and the long history of white attempts to suppress it, probably because I’m at least old enough to remember mainstream resistance to rap music – and more than one adult telling me in the late 1980s that rap was “a fad” that wouldn’t last – and how it was characterized. The levers of power in the entertainment world are still controlled by white people, mostly white men, which is why Tyler Perry had to finance his own productions, and why some people of color have to produce and direct films in which they star. That’s part of why I said Mumbo Jumbo should be taught in schools – that aspect of the book is still extremely relevant – although I think this is also a text that would reward the closer reading of an academic setting, with guidance on some of the book’s allusions that I probably missed. It was rewarding enough as is, but I think reading it in a class would be even more so.

Next up: I just finished Graham Swift’s new novel Here We Are and am about halfway through Dr. Alan Kazdin’s The Everyday Parenting Toolkit.

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