→ November 16, 2011
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Gifts for cooks, part two.

When I posted my list of gift recommendations for cooks last year, it was supposed to be part one of two, with the second part including more expensive kitchen items. That somehow never happened, but I figured there’s at least some symmetry in producing the second half of the post almost exactly a year later. That first list includes items at $30 and under, including the Victorinox 8-Inch Chef’s Knife that America’s Test Kitchen always recommends. (I own a more expensive Henckels, but it’s not worth paying the premium just for a better handle.)

These items range from $13 to $299, and range from “I couldn’t cook without this” to “I just love waffles.” I’ve included basic recipes with most of the devices to give a sense of how I use them.

Cuisinart 7-Cup Food Processor

This is the big one – if you’re going to purchase one major kitchen appliance for yourself, or want to purchase something for a friend who’s just starting out that will get him/her ten or more years of heavy use, you want a food processor. It’s the only way to make a decent pesto genovese, as well as roasted red pepper pesto or any other pesto you desire. It’s great for any sauce requiring an emulsion, like mayonnaise or harissa, or for hummus or homemade nut butters. It can convert stale or dried bread into bread crumbs, almonds into almond crumbs. I made a slightly easier version of sauce aux champignons recently (with brown stock rather than demi-glace – sorry, purists), then pureed the rest in the food processor the next night and used it for bruschetta.

I use my food processor every year to make pumpkin pie – the filling (from Baking Illustrated) is a cooked custard, after all. And I use it to make the pie dough for that and any other kind of pie – I’m sure some folks swear by the manual method, but you get much more even distribution of fat throughout the flour with the machine; the same applies to biscuits and scones any other baked good where you need to work the fat into the flour. I’ve used it to grind regular sugar to make superfine sugar (rather than buying superfine sugar specifically) for meringues.

Any decent food processor will also come with disc attachments to replace the blade for slicing or julienning; I only resort to this when I’ve got a lot of vegetation to plow through, preferring my Kyocera hand-held mandoline when I need a finer slice. If you don’t cook because you hate the prep work, though, a food processor may eliminate that obstacle.

We got our food processor fifteen years ago and it still runs; it’s also a Cuisinart and is a 7-cup model like the one linked above, which is nearly half off at $100. The one application where I wish I had a larger model is the pumpkin pie, which always ends up leaking because the recipe produces more filling than one crust can hold anyway.

* Season a trout fillet with salt and pepper, press it into almond crumbs, then pan-fry for two minutes per side. Add a little more butter to the skillet and a chopped shallot, let it brown, season with salt and pepper, and there’s your sauce. Bonus: deglaze the pan with white wine or – with the flame OFF, please – Chartreuse liquor.

KitchenAid Professional 5 Plus 5-Quart Stand Mixer

The model I own is slightly smaller than the one in that link, and the motor is substantially weaker (275 watts vs 450 in the 5-quart), and those “slightly” modifiers make all the difference; if I was in the market for one today, I’d spend the extra $100 and get the one I linked here. The 4.5-quart model tends to walk on the counter when working something strong like bread dough, and the bowl is a little too small for some applications – I made a genoise years ago that threatened to spill out of it and take over the counter like ice-nine.

Why do you need a stand mixer? Its primary benefit is in baking. If all ingredients are at room temperature, I can use my stand mixer to get cookies in the oven inside of ten minutes*. It’s great for meringues or anything built on egg foams, like buttercream – you really don’t want to stand there for ten minutes while you incorporate a pound of butter, one tablespoon at a time. (That’s 32 Tbsp.) I’ve made Alton Brown’s brownie recipe in here many times; it starts with beating four eggs until well-combined, after which you’re gradually adding various ingredients to build the batter. It’s a huge benefit to have both hands free while the machine is mixing.

The stand mixer is also invaluable for making breads with very wet doughs, like pain francese, or breads that require substantial gluten production that would be hard to achieve by hand, like pizza dough. You can also purchase attachments for the stand mixer to turn it into a pasta maker (I have this one; works well, bit tricky to clean) or a meat grinder (on the wishlist). The lone negative of owning a stand mixer is that there’s a good chance it will live on your counter, because it’s too tall to fit in most cabinets and heavy enough that you won’t want to store it in a difficult-to-reach place.

I’ve hesitated to recommend stand mixers before because of their cost – that model is a steal at $299, but three bills is a lot of money to most people. And that’s why I haven’t upgraded the model we’ve had for sixteen years (it was a wedding present).

EDIT: A reader explained in the comments that newer KitchenAid mixers don’t hold up as well as the model I own, and recommends the Cuisinart SM-55BC 5-1/2-Quart 12-Speed Stand Mixer, Brushed Chrome instead.

* Basic cookie formula: Cream two sticks (½ pound) of butter with ¾ cup each white and dark brown sugar for four minutes. Add two eggs, 1 tsp vanilla, with the mixer running. Turn the mixer off and add (in two installments) 300 g flour premixed with 1 tsp each baking soda and salt. Mix, stop, add the remainder, mix again. Scrape down the sides with a rubber spatula. Stir in mix-ins by hand – chocolate chips, dried fruit, toasted nuts, whatever; I think 1½ cups of mix-ins works for this batch size. Bake at 375 until the edges just start to brown.

Hamilton Beach 6-Quart Slow Cooker

I just got a slow cooker last month and have used it four times – once for short ribs, twice for carnitas (pork shoulder that ends up poaching in rendered fat), and once for dried canellini beans (which overcooked, so the magic time is under six hours, clearly). Based on that limited sample, I am kicking myself for not getting one sooner; not only is using it easy, but it frees up a burner or the oven to make something else, which, unless you’re rocking a six-burner professional stove, is a key consideration. I can fit a 3-pound pork shoulder in this one comfortably, and could probably have cooked 2 cups of dried beans. One suggestion I’ve read in several places is to line the bottom of the ceramic insert with aromatics, like sliced onions, when cooking meat, so that the meat doesn’t burn or stick to the bottom. I’m toying with the idea of braising duck legs in there for Thanksgiving, freeing the oven up for the duck breasts. (No point in making turkey when no one here really likes it.) The one thing I particularly wanted in a slow cooker was an electronic timer; lots of purists, including Alton Brown, recommend older models that have analog dials, but I like computers and wanted one that would shut itself off and free me to leave the house if I needed to, say, pick up my daughter from school just as the short ribs were done.

* Short ribs: Trim excess fat. Season ribs with salt, pepper, and dried thyme and sear on all sides in Dutch oven; remove to slow cooker. Add one onion, diced; two carrots, diced; two celery stalks, diced; pinch of salt. Saute to deglaze pan. Add one bottle/can of good quality beer, scrape bottom to finish deglazing, then pour the entire mixture into the slow cooker. Cook six hours on low until ribs are falling off the bone. Remove ribs, tear into large chunks (removing bones), season again with salt, pepper, and thyme, and bake ten minutes at 450 degrees. Use a fat separator to strain cooking liquid; reduce liquid (after removing the fat) by half to form a sauce.

Kitchen Scale

Again, not the exact model that I have, but it’s the same manufacturer; my model is discontinued, but I’ve been very happy with it and with Salter, who honored the ten-year warranty with a brand-new model when mine malfunctioned about four or five years ago. If you want to cook, you need a kitchen scale – it can be a cheap one if you’re not baking, but baking is chemistry and chemistry requires precise measurements, at which point you’ll want a good digital scale like this one. If you want a different model, look for one that does metric as well as archaic English measurements. The glass top isn’t necessary – and of course it makes the scale more fragile – but it looks awesome.

Black & Decker Grill and Waffle Baker

How much do I love this thing? I bought my first one in 1998. It died this spring and I went online and ordered the same model. The grids are reversible – one side flat for pancakes (or, I suppose, pressed sandwiches), one side for waffles, not Belgian-style, but thinner and better suited to conventional batters that get lift from chemical leaveners but not yeast or an egg white foam. And once you buy one of these (currently half off at $29 through that link), you might want to check out the Waffleizer blog and get creative. (I tried to waffle some polenta once. Took me two days to clean the grids.)

Basic waffles: Preheat waffle iron. Beat 3 eggs and combine in a bowl with 1½ cups milk, ½ tsp vanilla, 1 stick (8 Tbsp) melted unsalted butter, and 4 Tbsp vegetable oil. In another bowl whisk together 220 grams AP flour (roughly 1¾ cups), 1 Tbsp baking powder, ½ tsp salt, and ½ to 1 Tbsp white or brown sugar. (You can also mix the sugar with the wet ingredients, which is slightly easier for brown.) Dump the wet stuff into the dry stuff, whisk just to combine – no dry stuff visible, but not smooth. Pour by ½ to ¾ cupfuls on to the waffle iron and cook until the steaming slows, about four minutes on this iron. Serve immediately, keep warm in a 200 degree oven directly on the oven racks, or cool on cooling racks and freeze. Adapted from Joy of Cooking.

Lodge 12-Inch Cast Iron Skillet

Lives in my oven. Used four nights a week, at a minimum. I buy Dobie non-abrasive pads to clean them and generally just use hot water. I own several nonstick skillets – including this one – but the cast iron skillet is the workhorse. Nothing holds or distributes heat as well, and if you season and clean it properly it will gradually acquire a non-stick or at least less-stick surface.

–

I do own a Krups La Glaciere ice cream maker, but Krups is out of the ice cream maker business, unfortunately. For a home model, it is excellent, as long as you accept you won’t get anything as smooth as you get from a commercial machine. I also have a Le Creuset Dutch oven that I received as a birthday gift a few years ago and love; you can buy the exact model on amazon but if you live near a Le Creuset outlet you can get it for $100 less, and even cheaper than that if you choose a color they’re discontinuing. It’s a splurge, far from necessary, but it’s great for stews and slow braises and easier to clean than traditional cast iron. No-knead bread recipes often rely on Dutch ovens to allow the bread to steam itself and produce a crispier crust.

One thing I don’t own: A double boiler. I had one for years, but it just took up space, wasn’t good for anything else, and took more effort to clean because of the groove in the top pot. I just sit a bowl above a pot of simmering water, or a smaller skillet inside a larger one.

I don’t think I have anything else in the kitchen, other than the espresso maker, that costs over $100. If you don’t bake, you may not need anything (other than major appliances) in your kitchen that will run you more than $60-70 to prepare pretty sophisticated meals. A good knife, three good pots/pans, some knowhow, and the right ingredients will go further for you than all of these toys. The toys just make everything easier.

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→ November 15, 2011
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Tigris & Euphrates app.

Codito is the development group behind Tikal, Puerto Rico, Medici, and Ra, solid offerings but none earning top marks from me. Their latest offering, Reiner Knizia’s Tigris & Euphrates, is their best boardgame app yet, adapting a classic 1997 boardgame from Knizia in an attractive format with a strong tutorial and (I think) very solid AI opponents. It went on sale today for $5.99.

I haven’t played the physical version of the game or reviewed it here, so if you haven’t played it, here’s an overview of the game, ranked 13th overall on Boardgamegeek. Tigris & Euphrates uses an unusual tile system where players are represented on the board by icon rather than color – that is, every player has a red leader, but each player’s red leader has his unique symbol on it. Players build “kingdoms” of adjacent tiles in each of four colors (red, green, blue, black) on a board that includes land spaces and river spaces, the latter along two rivers representing those of the game’s title. Players acquire points by placing leaders on the board and then placing regular tiles in those colors in the same kingdom as their leader(s). For example, if you have a black leader in a kingdom and place a black tile anywhere within that kingdom – contiguous with the leader tile – you earn a point in black. Players earn points in each of the four colors, and the winner is the player with the highest low score. In other words, the score that matters most is your worst score across the four colors.

You can also earn points by making a 2×2 square of tiles of the same color and converting it into a two-color “monument” that produces one point per turn in each of those two colors, awarded to the leaders in the same kingdom. And you can earn “treasures,” wild-card points that can be added to your score in any of the four colors, which the app automatically assigns to your current worst color.

On each turn, a player has two actions, which can include placing a tile, placing a leader, swapping any of the tiles from his hand for new ones, or placing one of two “catastrophe” tiles that destroy the tiles (not leaders) on which they’re placed.

Of course, there’s conflict as players compete to control various kingdoms with their leader tokens. You can place one of your leaders on a kingdom with another player’s leader in that same color, triggering a “revolt” that is resolved by the use of red tiles on the board and from your hand, regardless of the color at stake. Conflicts also arise when kingdoms are merged through tile placement; the leader with the most tiles of the same color currently in its kingdom, supplemented with tiles from that player’s hand, wins the conflict. The loser of either kind of battle removes his leader from the board.

I’ve glossed over a few details, but the key takeaway if you’ve never played the game is that each player has to balance a number of different variables: boost your lowest score, protect your existing leaders, build your hand tiles (you get six at any time) to attack an opponent, watch opponents’ lowest scores and try to sabotage them, and so on. It’s very rich, and once you play a game or two, actually quite simple to play despite the seemingly long list of rules. Knizia’s games are often subtly complex yet very intuitive on the surface, and Tigris & Euphrates qualifies as well.

The app is outstanding. The board is extremely clear and easy to navigate on the iPad; the icons on tiles are very clear, and it’s easy to see what you have available to you at any given time, as well as the percentage of the tile stack remaining. Leaders are labeled with a number indicating their current strength. Conflict resolution is straightforward and the game includes optional confirmation dialog boxes for any move, which prevents you from accidentally tanking the game through an incorrect move. You can undo either or both of your previous moves before you end your turn, unless the move was a conflict that has now been resolved. (One quibble: When playing only AI opponents, you still can’t undo a resolved conflict; since playing AI players is more like training or an extended tutorial, this might be a nice feature to have so you can get a feel for the success rates of conflicts.) Most importantly, your point totals are clear and obvious, with your current low score highlight, and the app handles the treasures for you.

I’ve found the AI players to be strong enough to keep the game challenging. There are five difficulty levels, and after waxing two low-level AIs in my first game I dialed both up to four … and then lost seven straight times. (At least.) The eventual victory, followed by a victory against two level-five AIs, were quite satisfying. There’s some predictability even in the harder AIs, especially early in the game, but their strength is that they don’t miss obvious moves and don’t hesitate to attack via all three methods (revolt, merging kingdoms, catastrophes). I’d like to try this online, but as a standalone app it’s very strong because the AI players are so well-designed. The game also comes with one of the longest, most detailed tutorials I’ve come across, reminiscent of the one in Samurai, which would be my previous gold standard for app tutorials. It takes a while, but it’s worth it.

I’ve ranked boardgame apps without grading them, but I’d say the inner circle of apps – where the underlying game is strong; the app runs well, looks good, and plays easily; the AI players are strong; and online multiplayer works – would now include five games (links go to reviews): Carcassonne, Samurai, Battle Line, Ticket to Ride, and Tigris & Euphrates. This most recent addition is the most complex of the five for those of you looking for a more hardcore experience, but plays reasonably quickly, with three-player games against two AI opponents taking me 15-17 minutes. I highly recommend it if you’re slightly obsessed with these games, as I am.

Full disclosure: I received a free version of this app from the developers prior to its release. Also, would anyone object to me including T&E on the forthcoming updated board game rankings, even though I haven’t played the physical game?

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→ November 3, 2011
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Sugar.

My ranking of the top 50 free agents this offseason is up, and I chatted about that and other stuff today as well.

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I’d had Sugar – the 2008 baseball movie, as there are a few films by that tile – saved up on the DVR for months before finally getting around to watching it last night, since I was distracted by The Wire when I had some free time to sit and watch a show. Sugar might be the best pure baseball movie I’ve seen, except that at heart it’s not really a baseball movie, but a movie about being the ultimate fish out of water, and how baseball exploits one of its most dedicated underclasses.

Miguel “Sugar” Santos is a 19-year-old pitcher in the Dominican Republic with arm strength but no real second pitch who signed at some point with the Kansas City Knights before the movie began for just $15,000. Early in the film, an American scout for the Knights visits the team’s academy in Boca Chica and teaches Sugar how to through a spike or knuckle curve, which becomes a separator for him and earns him an invite to spring training and eventually a spot in the rotation of the Bridgetown (Iowa) Swing, KC’s low-A affiliate. Once there, however, things don’t go as smoothly as Sugar and his family had hoped, either on the field, where a minor injury throws off his entire season, or off of it, where he’s isolated by age, culture, and language.

The film’s pacing was a real strength – there’s no racing through the early stages to rush to get Sugar to the U.S., so viewers unfamiliar with the feeder system in the Dominican Republic see something of where these players come from and how tough the odds are against them even getting to the U.S. This isn’t exploitation along the lines of slave labor or sweat shops, but these players often sign for very little money at 16 because their other economic opportunities are limited or nonexistent. Sugar doesn’t focus too much on the baseball season because the team’s performance is secondary to the story of the players; even when we see game action, it’s backdrop.

(The cinematography during those game sequences was really uneven; close-up shots of players throwing the ball around the infield were jerky and hard to watch, but the shots of Sugar pitching were perfect, right down to the change in angles from showing his face to showing the pitch reach the batter.)

Sugar himself is the only fully-developed character, but unlike many single-character movies, the various side characters who play significant roles still manage to contribute to the story without letting their one-dimensionality get in the movie’s way. Sugar stays with the Higgins family, an older couple on a farm a good distance from Bridgetown, providing the ultimate culture shock for Sugar, establishing just how out of water he is in Iowa and how much he’s hindered by language even in the most basic aspects of life, and adding a few moments of humor (the wife telling him to put “sopa” in the washing machine rather than “jabon”). And when things start to fall apart for Sugar, it’s to the Higgins that he turns, because his family has become so wrapped up in his potential for a lucrative baseball career that they are no longer there to support him. We never learn much about the Higgins’, but we shouldn’t – they fulfilled a critical role without unnecessary tangents.

The actor who plays Sugar, Algenis Perez Soto, wasn’t a professional actor but was seen playing baseball by the directors after their casting call didn’t turn up the ideal candidate. (Or so the story goes.) That use of non-professionals reminded me of City of God, a Brazilian film that also used local kids from the dangerous barrio of that name in Rio de Janeiro in what remains one of the best movies I’ve seen. In both movies, which couldn’t be more different in tone or subject matter, there’s a lack of polish to the central characters that makes them look and sound more real.

I mentioned on Twitter that there were minor inaccuracies, but I was happy to forgive them because they were there in service of a stronger plot and consistent pacing. For a 19-year-old pitcher in the Dominican Republic to pick up a spike curveball one fall/winter, then earn an invite to spring training, and then be assigned to a full-season club as a starter is not impossible, but it’s extremely unlikely – and the type of pitcher who’d travel that path wouldn’t find himself in the position Sugar was in later in the film. And that spike curveball is a problem – Sugar is seen throwing it for strikes once he gets the hang of it, but it’s probably the hardest pitch to command, and very few big leaguers throw it; it’s more common for player development folks to convert pitchers from the spike to a traditional curveball or to a slider because the spike is so often in the dirt. I also found it odd that the Stanford alum was so slow to pick up on Sugar’s lack of English skills, but then again, he was also a really nice guy when we know all Stanford alumni are insufferable.

But the filmmakers here seemed to be in command of the points where they bent reality. Moving Sugar along so quickly is necessary; the alternatives are a much longer film or inserting a “six months later…” gap. The spike curveball isn’t the ideal pitch for that situation, but it has a benefit – the grip used to throw one is so unusual relative to those on other pitches that it would be evident to non-baseball fans that this was a new pitch for Sugar. Even when the waitress in the famous “fren toas” scene read a little false to me when she asked Sugar how he wanted his eggs, but that slight off-note came back around thirty seconds later when she brought the food to the table in one of the best scenes in the film.

It would be impossible to avoid comparing Sugar to that baseball movie that came out earlier this fall, which I didn’t like as a movie or as a baseball movie. Sugar has moments of sentiment, but there’s no manipulation of the audience to create them. The main character’s struggles, even though they will be foreign to most U.S. viewers, resonated far more strongly with me because they get at fundamental human needs – the need to belong, to fit in, to succeed, to live up to others’ expectations. And while Sugar doesn’t have a villain on the order of the fictionalized Grady Fuson, it should open some eyes to how much the current system exploits young Latin American players, particularly Dominican players, and discards them if they’re no longer useful to their parent clubs. Some major league teams are better at assimilating Latin American players – particularly in terms of teaching them English – but some are worse, and I know of none that help players once they’re released. (And don’t get me started on our nation’s immigration policies.) The directors made these issues evident to viewers without letting them interfere with the story. This film is about Sugar Santos and his own personal development because of baseball, for better and later for worse, and it deserves a much, much wider audience than it has received to date.

(I might have been kidding about the Stanford stuff, though.)

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→ November 1, 2011
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Glen More.

Glen More is the first board game from German designer Matthias Cramer, who was subsequently nominated for the Kennerspiel des Jahres award in 2011 for his next game, Lancaster (losing out to one of our all-time favorites, 7 Wonders). I haven’t played that latter game, but Glen More is one of the most interesting new games I’ve come across, second only to 7 Wonders in that department, with particular points for introducing a new selection mechanic for a tile-based game.

In Glen More, players are Scottish clan leaders and begin building their territories with a single village tile and a single clan member (experienced boardgamers will recognize it as a meeple). On his turn, a player takes one or more tiles off a track that goes around the outer edge of the central game board and places it (or them) adjacent to any tile he has already placed. When he places a tile, that tile is “activated” as are any adjacent tiles, meaning the player may receive up to nine actions and/or resources for placing a single tile. Standard tiles may provide resources (wood, stone, cattle, sheep, and wheat), allow for the conversion of resources into victory points, allow for the production of whiskey from wheat, or add new clan members. The game also includes several special tiles that grant bonuses at the time they’re placed or at the end of the game.

The selection mechanic is the biggest difference between Glen More and any other game where players are building territories or edifices independent of other players (such as in Alhambra). Glen More’s track includes twelve spaces, of which eleven are occupied at any time by either a single tile or a single player token. On his turn, the player whose token is at the head of the chain may jump back as far as he likes on to any tile and claim it; therefore, if he is still ahead of all other players in the chain, the player can go multiple times. (Once all players have passed over a particular tile, it is discarded from the game.) Therefore, it is likely that players will receive uneven numbers of turns, something balanced out slightly by a game-ending penalty for players who have more than the minimum number of tiles. The mechanic forces players to weigh the opportunity cost of jumping far back in the chain to claim a specific tile – not only does this leave other tiles to competing players, but it may be a while before the player who moved so far gets to select again.

The other two main strategies in the game involve balancing resource production with conversion into points or whiskey and placing tiles in the most advantageous manner. You need some resources to buy certain tiles, and there are good tile pairings (such as a pasture and/or a cattle tile plus a butcher tile to convert them into … well, delicious victory points) to target. But you can get caught overproducing without enough options to convert or spend those resources, or have the opposite problem where you can’t take certain tiles because you lack the resources. (There is a market to buy and sell goods, but it’s limited, and once three resources of any kind have been purchased by players, the market has no more until a player decides to sell one back.) Whiskey production, while fun on a more general level, also leads to victory points for players who produce more than the player with the fewest barrels has, and can be used to buy certain valuable tiles like taverns, which produce 7-8 victory points whenever they’re activated.

The placement issue is the trickiest one in the game. There are multiple restrictions, but the key one is that a tile can only be placed horizontally or vertically adjacent to another tile with a meeple on it, meaning players must keep their meeples placed to allow for continuous expansion. Village tiles grant “movement points” to allow the player to move his meeples around, or to promote one to chieftain and remove it from the board for future points, but these opportunities are limited. A player also needs to consider the potential for future activations of the tile when placing it – you don’t want to place a tavern at the edge of your territory where you might not activate it again during the game, to pick an obvious example.

Glen More includes three scoring rounds and a final round of additional scoring, much as Vikings did. The intermediate scoring rounds grant points for whiskey barrels, chieftains, and special tiles; the player with the fewest in each category gets zero points, and other players receive 1-8 points depending on how many more tiles they have than the player with the fewest has. A delta of one receives just one point, but a delta of five or more receives eight points. At game-end, players score for their special tiles (some of which carry significant bonuses) plus one point per coin, and then lose three points for every tile they have in their territories above that of the player who has the fewest.

The game is designed for 2-5 players, but with two or three players there is a dummy player represented on the track by a die that has values of 1, 2, or 3. When that die is at the head of the chain, it’s rolled and jumps back over the number of tiles shown on the die. The tile selected is discarded, as well as any others that ended up ahead of all players plus the die in the chain. The dummy-player variant for two players is pretty common – Alhambra and Zooloretto both use it – but in Glen More it works much more smoothly; losing tiles is a bummer, but you’ll adjust your strategy and won’t lose anything too significant along the way. Without the die, tile selection would be way too predictable, and with four players there’s enough variation that that element of randomness wasn’t necessary.

By far the best part of Glen More is the number of ways to win. If there’s a single dominant strategy, I haven’t seen it, and from reading the forums on boardgamegeek I don’t see evidence anyone else has. You can mix it up based on the tiles that come to you, or just pursue a specific strategy (whiskey!) because it’s fun without costing yourself the game. The rules could be a little clearer on activation and player movement, but we figured those out on the fly once it became clear we’d misread them on the first pass. The fact that it plays as well with two as it does with four puts it in very select company among German-style games, most of which don’t scale down to two or only do so with clumsy rules variations. And for whatever reason Glen More isn’t as expensive as most games in the genre – it’s available for as little as $25.50 right now on amazon, including shipping. If you don’t mind a bit of a long ramp-up on learning the rules, I highly recommend it. It’s one of the best games we’ve played on the more complex end of the spectrum, and doesn’t take as long to play (under an hour) as most complex games take.

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→ September 20, 2011
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The Wire, season one.

When I finally started watching The Wire in June or so, I didn’t intend to write about it here because I feel like no show of the last ten years has been written about, and written about so well, as this one. Enough of you have asked for my thoughts that I changed my mind, but I’m not sure I can offer you anything new on the subject.

I was a big fan of Homicide: Life on the Street, Wire creator David Simon’s previous show, also based on Baltimore on a nonfiction book Simon wrote, and a show that stood out for the depth of its characterization rather than its use of the crimes themselves as the primary generator of narrative threads. The show made Andre Braugher a minor star – it should have made him a major one, but the show was buried on Friday nights at 10 pm for much of its run and never found the audience it deserved – and did win four Emmy awards over its run, including one for Braugher, so at least it was noticed by the industry if not by the viewing public as a whole. It was also one of the first shows I can remember that used the ensemble cast as a true ensemble; Braugher was the best actor, and the best character, yet was never singled out in the writing as the show’s main star beyond his character’s story arcs. You watched for the group, not just for him.

That casting and writing mentality – that the ensemble is bigger than the sum of its actors – is the great separator, in my mind, between The Wire and just about any other show I’ve seen in any genre. The acting is strong, the dialogue is strong (still stylized, just not as much as your standard formulaic network crime drama), the plotting is intricate, but at the end of the day, it is the idea that the stage that unites all of these players is the true center of the show that makes The Wire such compelling viewing.

For the four or five of you who haven’t seen this series, season one follows an ad hoc task force in the Baltimore city police department as they identify and investigate a large drug-dealing operation in the city’s housing projects that is also responsible for up to a dozen murders. The show gives more or less equal time to the members of that drug cartel, all African-American, running their criminal operation in an efficient, business-like manner, led by Avon Barksdale and his consigliere Stringer Bell. The good guys can be bad, the bad guys have some elements of good, and there is no question where Mr. Simon’s sympathies lie on the twin subjects of the war on drugs and drug decriminalization – but it’s never preachy the way most network shows (I’m looking at you, Law & Order: SVU) are when they try to get topical. Season one of The Wire shows the impact of the war on drugs and lets those results speak for themselves.

You have to dig fairly deep into this show to find poorly drawn or stock characters – over the course of 13 rich episodes, the writers show us multiple sides of at least a dozen central characters, most amusingly Wee-Bey, and show significant development of at least half of those, including cops Pryz (screw-up nepotista to dedicated researcher) and Carver (clock-puncher to hardcore surveillance guy … but with a twist in the final episode of the season) to Barksdale lieutenant and nephew D’Angelo (grows a conscience) to addict/confidential informant Bubs. Yet even those stock characters have their value, such as personal favorite Proposition Joe (whom I quoted in last week’s chat) or Ed McMahon-in-uniform Jay Landsman.

And then there’s Omar Little, whom I think is the show’s most popular character – a violent, ruthless thief who also speaks unusually formally (never swearing), abides strictly by his own set of ethics, and is gay. He only appears in a handful of episodes in this season before absconding, but he’s the best example of the series’ stylized speech – you may never encounter someone who speaks like this, but it is so memorable and so clever that I can forgive the departure from reality.

For my money, though, the star of season one is Stringer Bell, played (to my shock) by an English actor, Idris Elba, now the star of Luther. Bell is a brilliantly conceived character, the brains behind the Barksdale operation, taking economics classes in the evenings, running front businesses as actual businesses, devising codes and changing protocols, and ordering murders when necessary. Elba infuses this character with tremendous gravity between his baritone voice and this one facial expression where he drops his chin without lowering his eyes, delivering a look that could pin a thought in midair and drop it to the ground without a fight. If he’s on the screen, I don’t want to miss a syllable.

Some scattered remaining thoughts from season one:

* Many of you have told me you consider this the best series in TV history, but I haven’t seen anywhere near enough television to offer that judgment. I actually don’t like most scripted TV series; the medium isn’t the problem, but the industry serves the mass audience a product that just doesn’t speak to me. The best TV series I’ve seen isn’t a series by our standards – that would be Foyle’s War, a British detective series that airs in roughly 90-minute self-contained episodes, with just a few per season. It’s more a series of short movies than an American-style TV series. It’s nothing like The Wire in setting, look, feel, time, or place, but it is everything like The Wire in intelligence, wit, and tension.

* So I mentioned the other day that Unforgiven was the only movie for which I can remember walking out of the theater before the film ended, and the scene that did it was when Eastwood’s character (EDIT: I got this wrong – see the comments) kicked the tar out of English Bob, after which we saw Bob’s companion urinate down his own leg. My wife wanted out at that point, and I can’t say I disagreed, even today: The use of someone pissing himself as comic relief is such unbelievably weak writing that I’d be ashamed to laugh at it, and as a demonstration of terror it’s rather over the top. Contrast that with Wallace’s final scene, when he realizes he’s trapped and that the person who ordered the hit isn’t around to countermand the order. He’s done, and he’s shocked, scared, betrayed, and when he loses bladder control, it’s mentioned in passing by Bodie as a way for the writers to heighten the emotion of the scene – not for cheap laughs. That wasn’t the part of the scene that made the strongest impression on me (that would be Poot having to tell Bodie to shut up and pull the trigger, then taking the gun and finishing the job himself, showing how much of Bodie’s tough-guy act was just that, an act), but it is a testament to the strength of the show’s writing.

* Speaking of Andre Braugher, if you haven’t seen his FX series Thief, for which he won his second Emmy for Best Actor in a Dramatic Series, the entire six-episode run is available for free on imdb.com. Braugher is the clear star here, but the plotting on The Wire reminds me more of this series than any other I’ve seen.

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→ September 10, 2011
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Winter’s Bone.

Winter’s Bone was one of the eight hundred, or more accurately ten, nominees for Best Picture in this year’s Academy Awards, and of the six I’ve seen it was pretty clearly the best movie. It wasn’t the most enjoyable, and I’m not sure I’d be all that eager to watch it again, but for plot, dialogue, direction, visuals, and key performances, this one edges out The King’s Speech.

Set in a backwoods community somewhere in the Missouri Ozarks, Winter’s Bone focus on Ree (played by Jennifer Lawrence), a 17-year-old girl who is her family’s de facto parent. Her mother is catatonic, and her father, a meth addict and meth maker as well, is out of the picture, leaving Ree in charge of her much younger brother and sister. Ree is barely holding things together with a little help from neighbors when she’s told that her father put up their rickety house and property as bond for his most recent court date and has now disappeared. She has just a few days to locate him or face losing the house.

The search for Ree’s father isn’t the main narrative element in the movie; the court date passes and the narrative splinters into an effort to prove he’s dead (if he is, which Ree doesn’t know for sure) and a few desperate plot strands related to it. The central story is the reactions of Ree’s neighbors, all relatives of hers, some distant, some as close as her father’s brother Teardrop (John Hawkes), but most of whom stonewall her in her attempts to locate her father. She’s turned away, bought off, threatened, and eventually beaten to try to get her to stop looking.

You could argue Winter’s Bone is about one of two things. One interpretation a few of you offered on Twitter was that the film (based on a novel of the same name) is about finding slivers of humanity in a situation that bears neither physical nor emotional resemblance to anything most people seeing this film would recognize as modern life. Ree’s people are all broken to various degrees; even Teardrop, who shows the most kindness towards Ree over the course of the movie, is a drug addict who tells his wife “I said shut up once already, with my mouth.” No one seems truly good except Ree and her friend Gail (played by Lauren Sweetser, who appears to be one of the many locals cast in various roles in the film, which was shot entirely on location), and even Ree is pushed to the boundaries of her goodness.

I saw the movie much more as a character study of Ree, one that could only succeed if the writing was strong enough and the performance of the actress matched it. Ree’s love for her siblings pushes her forward into uncomfortable and even dangerous situations; the threat of violence doesn’t deter her, and ultimately the evident strength of her resolve forces her antagonists to change their tactics in dealing with her. Nothing shakes her; her dedication to her task on behalf of her siblings is absolute, much like the Man shows for his son in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. And she’s a child who has been prematurely aged emotionally by the horrific circumstances of her home life, let down explicitly by her father and implicitly by her mother (who had a breakdown related to Ree’s father).

Had Jennifer Lawrence been anything less than perfect in her role as Ree, Winter’s Bone would not have succeeded. Her character is so central to the movie that the actress’ credibility as a child who acts in almost every way like an adult is critical, and Lawrence nailed it. She looks young, and of course is dressed to look young, yet projects adult determination and toughness in confrontation after confrontation with the irrational, unfeeling, often intimidating adults who are standing between her and a possible solution to this looming catastrophe. I found her utterly convincing in look, in tone, in timing, and in conveying this very faint hint of vulnerability, or maybe fear – not fear for herself, but fear that she’ll fail. I haven’t seen Black Swan yet, but either Natalie Portman gave a historic performance, or Oscar voters are every bit as subject to the narrative as baseball writers are.

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→ August 31, 2011
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The Social Network.

The Social Network, a stylized, maybe not all that accurate rendition of Facebook’s origin story, won wide acclaim in last year’s awards season before running into The King’s Speech at the Oscars. Featuring a ferociously quick, smart screenplay by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher (apparently a favorite director of many of my readers), it takes what might otherwise be dry source material and draws you into a technical and legal morass by means of a truly well-told story, one full of flawed characters, interpersonal drama, and plenty of incredibly funny lines.

Although nearly all of the central characters in The Social Network are real, as are the major plot points, much of what fills in the rest of the plot was either exaggerated or just made up to make for a more compelling script. (Since it’s not pitched as a documentary, I don’t have a huge issue with this.) In the film, Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg is shown as a brilliant programmer, business visionary, and interpersonal doofus who is set on the path to start Facebook after he’s dumped (with cause) by a girlfriend after an insane conversation that more or less concludes when he tells her she doesn’t really have to study because “you go to BU.” After that point, the film uses two parallel lawsuits against Zuckerberg to structure the narrative through long flashbacks that follow the history of Facebook from its predecessor, facemash (a hot-or-not type of site featuring only coeds at Harvard), through his interaction with the Winklevoss twins (who may or may not have given him the idea for Facebook), to the startup phase of Facebook and eventually to the move to Silicon Valley and venture capital investments that led to a schism between Zuckerberg and his best friend, CFO, and seed-money source Eduardo Saverin.

The pace and intelligence of the dialogue in The Social Network are frenetic, reliant on actors who can deliver the lines credibly and time everything properly. It reminded me not of any drama or anything recent, but of one of my favorite classic films, the screwball comedy His Girl Friday, a Cary Grant vehicle known for so much dialogue that its script had three times the pages per minute of a typical script of the era. The Social Network isn’t quite that frenzied – characters aren’t talking over each other as Grant and costar Rosalind Russell did – but just about every character speaks quickly, and there’s no mercy with the dialogue, not in vocabulary, in subject matter, or in pauses between scenes. This isn’t merely a movie about really smart people – it’s a really smart movie about really smart people, and it expects you to follow along.

Eisenberg earned plaudits and award nominations for his performance as Mark Zuckerberg, affecting disdain for most of the people around him and perhaps for social connections in toto, yet switching to fanboy mode when Internet rock star/bad boy Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) shows up and talks his way into the company. Timberlake was just as good as Eisenberg in less screen time, playing Parker as more pretense than substance, untrustworthy but never grating. And Andrew Garfield, who’s about to become a huge star as Peter Parker in the next unnecessary Spiderman reboot, was incredibly affecting as Eduardo Saverin, who, in the movie at least, is squeezed out by Zuckerberg and Parker in the latter’s power play. (Saverin was the primary inside source for Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires, which was in turn the source for Aaron Sorkin’s script for The Social Network. I haven’t tackled that book, but one of Mezrich’s earlier books, Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions, was a great read.)

I did enjoy the Harvard scenery and even some campus vernacular. The final clubs’ role in campus life may have been overstated; my sense at the time I was there was that they were very much on the fringes of the social scene, although to be fair I was never “punched” and so I don’t have first person experience to back that impression up. I did notice that Zuckerberg’s dorm room was a good bit larger than any room I ever had at Harvard, and less industrial-looking.

I’ve read some criticism of The Social Network for its portrayal of “nerds” as socially awkward or simply awful people, but I didn’t see that in the film at all. No one comes off worse than the Winklevoss twins, who appear as entitled upper class twits and are, in the script, probably the least intelligent of the central characters. Zuckerberg may be socially inept, but he also ends up getting stinking rich because of his intelligence and work ethic, and I think the portrayal of him as able to outsmart would-be competitors and to work wonders with a modest amount of coding both paint him in a better light than otherwise reported. He’s not depicted as a great guy, but the film’s central debate on his character – it’s bookended by women telling him he’s an asshole (beginning) or that he’s just trying to be one (end) – only covers half of what makes him compelling as the protagonist.

In a rather scathing review of the film’s underlying message, Harvard Law professor Laurence Lessig argued that the script ignores the fact that the Winklevoss’ suit, one of two central plot points, was basically frivolous. The film never mentions an NDA or non-compete agreement, and Zuckerberg says explicitly that he took no code from the Winklevoss’ efforts. So what exactly were the grounds for their suit? You can’t copyright an idea, and you aren’t supposed to be able to patent one (although there are these bogus “business method” patents, the film never mentions that either). Zuckerberg isn’t accused of stealing a trade secret. He settled simply to make the nuisance suit go away. Lessig argues that this is a pox on our economy, and I tend to agree. He also argues that the film omitted the power of the Internet to destroy barriers to entry into new or existing market spaces, which is undoubtedly true but tangential to the human story (real, fabricated, or somewhere in between) at the heart of The Social Network.

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→ August 24, 2011
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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

I mentioned this on Twitter earlier, but The Wire: The Complete Series on DVD is just $73 today on amazon through that link. Disclaimer: I don’t own it, because I’m buying episodes to watch on my iPad (which will cost me more in the long run, actually).

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Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (currently just $8 in paperback on amazon) is, by far, the best nonfiction book I’ve read since The Ballad of the Whiskey Robber, weaving together a scientific breakthrough, a personal tragedy, and Skloot’s own difficult effort in gathering the information required to write the book into a single compelling narrative that succeeds despite the lack of a definitive resolution or even clear “good” and “bad” sides to the central conflict.

Henrietta Lacks was a poor African-American woman who died very young of cervical cancer in 1951, after receiving radiation treatments at Johns Hopkins that started too late to save her very aggressive form of the disease. A researcher at the school had been trying for some time to grow a long-lasting culture of human cells without success, but the sample he took from Lacks’ cancer turned out to be, as the book’s title implies, immortal, launching a scientific revolution that is partially responsible for many medical miracles we take for granted today – and a commercial revolution from the sale of these “HeLa” cells that has paid her descendents a grand total of zero dollars.

In 1951, there were no laws on medical privacy nor were there laws or even good guidelines on informing patients about what might happen to tissues or fluids collected from them during treatment; a doctor or hospital could use extra samples for research and the patient wouldn’t even know about it, let alone require compensation. A lengthy medical case decided in 1990, Moore v. Regents of the University of California, would later establish that the patient has no right to financial remuneration from such usage (unless, of course, he established those rights in advance, such as by patenting any unique genes*), but in Lacks’ era there were no such rules, nor even understanding that these biological samples could have substantial financial value. (The researcher in the Moore case, David Golde, comes off as particularly sleazy in Skloot’s retelling. He took his own life in 2004.)

*This part resonated a little more strongly with me, as my daughter and I do share a unique mutation that causes an inborn error of metabolism called 3MCC, in which the third step in the breakdown of the essential amino acid leucine produces the “wrong” waste product. (The disease isn’t unique, but our mutation had not been seen before. We’re special like that.) I’m largely asymptomatic beyond an inability to build muscle mass, but my daughter has been hospitalized once for a metabolic crisis and has now been a vegetarian for almost three years to avoid excessive protein intake. I’m still trying to get an answer from Children’s Hospital in Boston on their policies in this area.

What’s worse in this case, however, is that Lacks’ family – widower, siblings, and children – were completely unaware that her tissues had been taken, were being used in research, or had generated millions of dollars in value for others. The family, still poor, still mostly uneducated, and without health insurance, learned about HeLa in the 1970s, and it created a mixture of emotions ranging from fear to anger to wonder (including whether their mother could “feel” what was being done to these cells) that opens up windows on to racial inequalities, , medical ethics debates, and the conflict between public good and privacy rights.

Skloot herself worked on this book for nearly a decade, largely because the Lacks family, scarred by past media attention and con artists looking to latch on to their plight, resisted her efforts to interview them for the book. She eventually forged a strong friendship with Henrietta’s daughter Deborah, a fascinating woman whose emotional growth was probably stunted by losing her mother at such a young age yet who abounds with manic energy that drives her (and Skloot) forward on the research path. Deborah never seems to think of the compensation question, but simply wants to learn about her mother and about what has happened to her cells, perhaps to create a connection that was denied to her when her mother died.

The Lacks family gives the book the narrative structure it needs – the rise of HeLa cells from their origins to a major scientific breakthrough would make for a nice pamphlet, but doesn’t have the drama to drive a work of narrative non-fiction. Following the Lacks family’s struggles from losing Henrietta, from media coverage of the HeLa cells, and from their outrage at how their mother’s cells were used without consent, compensation, or even the correct name (she was often referred to as “Helen Lane” in medical journals), makes the book so powerful. The book requires no knowledge of science beyond a high school biology class, as Skloot provides sufficient explanation of cell structure and replication for anyone to follow along, and her presentation of the ethical issues involved is extremely balanced and surprisingly dispassionate for someone who became very close to the human subjects of her research. As easy as it is to react to the Lacks saga by arguing that her family should at least have been paid after the fact, Skloot points out through her story that it’s not even clear who would pay her (the oncologist who harvested the cells didn’t profit personally from them), and that many of the leaps made through the use of HeLa cells for testing, like Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine, relied in no small part on the easy availability of these cells. It’s as complicated as any good story should be, informative, emotionally involving without resorting to sentimentality, and gives you enough of both sides to make you angry and make you question your own outrage as you read.

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→ August 18, 2011
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Half of a Yellow Sun.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s haunting second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2007, tells the story of five people, two couples and the young houseboy who works for one of the men, in Nigeria during the 1960s, a time period when the country’s ethnic divisions led them into civil war, famine, and genocide, a cycle of events that keeps repeating itself on that continent right up to the present-day threat of famine in Somalia. The novel’s tragedies are both large and small, but Adichie weaves her narrative threads cleanly and creates tension and uncertainty even though the disastrous results of the war are a matter of record.

Adichie, born seven years after the war ended, lost both of her grandfathers in that conflict, known as the Nigerian-Biafran war after the Igbo state that tried to secede from Nigeria, but her grandmothers survived it and were primary resources for Adichie, who seems to have put an enormous amount of research into the novel. (She even provides a page-long list of nonfiction books about Nigeria’s history up to and through the Biafran conflict.) The British, who created and even named Nigeria by uniting disparate ethnic groups under a single colonial authority, come in for quite a bit of blame for creating the powder keg that made ethnic conflict inevitable between the minority Igbo, who held positions of political and commercial authority before the war, and the majority Hausa, who resented the Igbo’s status and come off in the book as the African equivalent of the Germans under Hitler.

The brilliance of Half of a Yellow Sun lies in its constant focus on the individual characters; Adichie never steps back to give long-winded explanations of the political situation in Nigeria, instead informing the reader through the characters’ experiences. Each of the five central characters, all of whom are Igbo, gets his or her own plot line, although all five are interconnected, including two fraternal twin sisters, their lovers (one a revolutionary professor, the other an English expat), and the houseboy, Ugwu. All five begin the novel in comfort and relative wealth in the western part o Nigeria, then flee to the new Igbo state of Biafra, where the war and blockade drive the people into increasing levels of poverty and degradation, culminating in the food shortage that led the Biafran government to surrender and accept reabsorption into Nigeria. During the crisis, there are romantic betrayals, losses of friends, a schism between the sisters, forced conscriptions, corruption, and worse, enough to fill an 800-page Russian novel, and similarly rich with metaphors for the larger conflict.

Of those five characters, two share starring roles: Olanna, the beautiful sister who falls for the revolutionary professor Odeniwgo; and Ugwu, Odenigwo’s houseboy. Ugwu goes from poverty to luxury and back to poverty over the course of the book and gives us a perspective on the war largely untainted by historical ethnic hatreds while also providing an outlet for Adichie to demonstrate the war’s effect on the youngest generation (and to provide us with some sliver of hope for Nigeria’s future). Olanna’s reluctance to marry and her role in the betrayals within both relationships test her patience and force her to examine the depth of her love for Odenigwo and for her fraternal twin sister, the “ugly” Kainene. Olanna is victimized, then victimizes another character, but is she fully responsible for her actions or merely paying the pain forward?

Adichie’s choice to structure the novel in four parts, alternating between the prewar period and the period of the war itself, also creates some artificial tension by withholding key plot points until the jump back to the earlier time in section three. But there’s also value in the structure because of the way she reveals some causes of the ethnic conflict, then shows some of the conflict, and returns to the causes before completing the story. Everything that happens within Half of a Yellow Sun has a cause, and often someone to blame along with it, with the British and the Hausa earning their fair shares. The author has even commented on how she believes many of the fundamental causes of the war still exist today; despite Nigeria’s massive natural resources, nearly half the population lives below the poverty line, and ethnic divisions continue to foment conflict in the southeastern part of the country. One of the five characters is no longer present as the book concludes, a metaphor for the unhealing wound left on the country by the war and by the pernicious effects of British arrogance and racism.

I’m a big fan of postcolonial literature in general, and particularly liked Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and its sequel No Longer at Ease, both of which explore the effects of British colonial rule on Nigerians but do so in slimmer works with less intricate plots. Adichie’s great achievement here is exploring that same theme while giving us multiple compelling characters across rich plot lines while presenting the stark realities of the darkest moment in this artificial country’s brief history. From a literary/critical perspective, it’s the best novel I’ve read this year.

Next up: I’m a bit behind on my writeups, but I have already finished the phenomenal nonfiction book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (currently half off at amazon) and have moved on to Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations.

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→ August 3, 2011
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The Secret of Kells.

The Secret of Kells is a stunning hand-drawn animated film that draws on the history of the Book of Kells and on Celtic mythology to create a mysterious and beautiful origin tale for that book, a work of religious, artistic, and cultural significance in Ireland. Nominated for Best Animated Feature in 2009, where it lost to Up (from Pixar, which has won six of the last eight such awards, including the last four), The Secret of Kells deserves a much wider audience than it’s received so far, and shows there is a place for old-fashioned animation alongside the technical marvels of CGI.

The story takes place at the Abbey of Kells, in Ireland’s County Meath, sometime between 900 and 1000 A.D., after the abbey at Iona had been sacked by Viking raiders. The Abbot of Kells, Abbot Cellach, oversees the construction of fortifications around the abbey in expectation of a similar Viking assault, yet also tries to protect his nephew, Brendan, but appears to have more than just a familial interest behind his strict treatment of the boy.

Brendan is fascinated by the work in the scriptorium and becomes fast friends with a refugee from Iona, Brother Aidan (who, like Cellach, is based on a true historical figure), an illuminator who is working on the Book of Kells, an illustrated book of the Gospels that is described in more vague terms in the movie (e.g., that it will “turn darkness into light”). Yet to help Aidan continue his work, Brendan must violate the orders of his uncle to stay within the walls of the abbey, and ends up heading twice into the forbidden forest to find materials for ink and a sacred lens*, meeting and befriending a childlike fairy named Aisling who helps him both by saving his life (several times, as she likes to remind him) and by building his confidence so that he can continue his work with Brother Aidan.

*The lens, called the Eye of Collum Cille in the movie, draws its name from the same saint for whom the church of St. Columbkille in Brighton, Massachusetts, is named – which I know primarily because I used to pass it every time I headed to a game at Boston College.

The star of the movie, despite an intriguing story and strong voicing (led by Brendan Gleeson as Abbot Cellach), is the animation, which draws heavily on ancient Celtic art while also showing more recent influences, from Miyazaki (especially our family favorite, My Neighbor Totoro) to Tim Burton to the exaggerated look of the animated humans in The Triplets of Belleville. The forest backgrounds are lush, while the winter scenes are stark and gothic – it reminded me of a classic Flash game, A Murder of Scarecrows – and Celtic images recognizable to viewers of almost any background abound in the film, including a dreamlike sequence where Brendan fights a snake in the form of an ornate Celtic knot.

Without any knowledge of the history of the Book of Kells, however, the plot is a little obtuse. What little is known of the book’s origins is incorporated into the film, but its religious and artistic significance are assumed rather than explained. (Of course, long explanations can be about as interesting as watching paint dry, so this is hardly a flaw.) The heavy of use elements of Irish mythology, from the Aislings to the pre-Christian Celtic deity Crom Cruach to the cat Pangur Bán, based on a cat in an ancient Irish poem of the same name, was less of an issue because the context of those characters filled in the blanks in our knowledge.

What The Secret of Kells is not, however, is a children’s movie. There’s plenty of implied violence in depictions of Viking raids, including the final sacking of Kells, and a flash of actual violence. Brendan’s quest for the eye of Collum Cille leads him into the battle with the snake and other dark sequences that would be scary for smaller children. It’s a wonderful movie for adults and older kids, however, replete with visual candy, outstanding Celtic-inspired music, and a story that veers from sweet to serious in just an hour and change.

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