→ July 29, 2011
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The King’s Speech.

Lots of baseball content the last few days, including breakdowns of the Colby Rasmus trade, the Carlos Beltran trade, and the Kosuke Fukudome trade, plus my regular Klawchat yesterday.

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I can’t say if The King’s Speech was truly the best picture of 2010, although it was honored with the Academy Award of that name, since I haven’t seen the other contenders. It is, however, a completely worthy recipient of the honor, one of the best-acted films I have ever seen, with a screenplay that takes some fairly dry subject matter and turns it into a rousing, emotional film even though the audience already knows how the film must end.

The King’s Speech dramatizes the relationship between the stammering Prince Albert, Duke of York, later King George VI, and an Australian speech therapist, Lionel Logue, who used unconventional methods to help the Prince overcome both the stammer and his resultant fear of public speaking. The Prince avoids most public speaking duties until, in the movie at least, he is forced to surmount this obstacle when his brother Edward, Duke of Wales, abdicates the throne to marry an American divorcée. While not quite historically accurate in its chronology or its portrayals of certain secondary characters, the film avoids the less forgivable sins of lionizing (or demonizing) its central characters or crafting an excessively sentimental narrative.

Colin Firth, as the titular King, and Geoffrey Rush, as Logue, both deliver command performances. Firth won the Oscar for Best Actor with a tense portrayal that conveys a constant sense of anxiety whenever he’s asked to speak in any kind of difficult situation, often evoking that dread through slight changes in his facial expression or a sudden explosion of temper (where the rage is merely a cover for an inner fear). But while Rush was challenged less by his role, his performance seemed totally effortless, exuding a calm confidence when his character is at work that proves superficial in the handful of scenes when he’s outside that sphere. (Rush won the Oscar for Best Actor in 1996 for another brilliant performance as a musical prodigy who suffers a breakdown due to schizoaffective disorder in the marvelous film Shine.)

No other character receives close to the screen time of the two leads, although there’s talent in abundance. Derek Jacobi is somewhat wasted as the sycophantic Archbishop of Canterbury, while Helena Bonham Carter provides a cornucopia of pained, worried expressions as Albert’s confident wife Elizabeth. I didn’t even recognize Guy Pearce as the rakish yet vaguely effeminate Prince Edward. The film also reunites Firth with Jennifer Ehle, who plays Logue’s wife Myrtle here but is best known for playing Elizabeth Bennet to Firth’s Mr. Darcy in the BBC’s canonical adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.

Where screenwriter David Seidler and director Tom Hooper succeed most is in the film’s pacing. The story requires scenes of struggle for Prince Albert, but aside from the first, which introduces the film’s main dramatic element to the audience, we are never forced to endure the embarrassment for long. And while they sacrificed some historical accuracy by condensing the time Logue and the Prince worked together and by delaying the benefits the Prince received from the therapy until the final speech, it gave the film the necessary tension to allow that final speech – after England’s declaration of war on Germany in 1939 – to become an emotional crescendo that closes the film.

The most touching scene, other than the King’s success and the applause he receives from his inner circle (after they all clearly doubted his ability to do it), was when he returns from his coronation and his two daughters see him in full regalia. The two young actresses playing Princesses Margaret and Elizabeth (the current Queen Elizabeth II) are asked to do very little in this film, but their expressions are priceless: he left the house as “Daddy,” but returned as a king, and I doubt there’s a little girl in the world who wouldn’t be impressed to see her father in that costume.

Two interesting side notes on this film: The writer delayed pursuing production of the film at the request of King George VI’s widow Elizabeth (known to my generation as the Queen Mother or the “Queen Mum”), who asked him to wait until after her death because she found the memories of that period too painful; and (per Wikipedia) nine weeks before filming began, someone discovered several of Logue’s notebooks from that time period, allowing the writer to incorporate some of that material into the final version of the script.

Next film in the queue is True Grit. Several of your top suggestions, including Inception, The Lives of Others, and The Social Network, aren’t available for rental on iPad, so they’ll have to wait a bit.

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→ July 26, 2011
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Winnie the Pooh.

I’ve got a new column up on how relievers are overvalued in trades and I appeared on today’s edition of the ESPN Baseball Today podcast.

—

We took our daughter to see the new Winnie the Pooh movie on Saturday, as the two original books (Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner) are among our favorites. The books are largely sweet and gentle as you might expect given Pooh’s reputation, but there’s a fair amount of dry wit sprinkled throughout the books, with somewhat sharper characters than you might expect if you’ve only seen earlier Pooh films, such as the supercilious Rabbit or the disdainful Eeyore. (Obvious disclaimer: I work for ESPN, which is owned by Disney, which is the studio behind this film.)

The movie, produced by Disney Animation Studios (which is, of course, run by two Pixar executives, Ed Catmull and John Lasseter), has the hand-drawn look and feel you’d expect from a Disney film with some nods to the drawing style of Ernest Shepard’s original illustrations. It draws from three stories from the two books – “In Which Eeyore Loses a Tail and Pooh Finds One,” “In Which Piglet Meets a Heffalump,” and “In Which Rabbit Has a Busy Day and We Learn What Christopher Robin Does in the Mornings” – although only the first one has its story survive the transition more or less intact. The three are intertwined with new elements, including the Jasper Ffordian construct of having the characters interact with the printed words and letters in multiple scenes, in a single story arc that sees Pooh in search of honey for his noisily empty tummy, Eeyore in search of his tail, and all of the animals in the forest setting a trap for a monster called the “Backson” that they presume has kidnapped Christopher Robin. That Backson stands in for the mysterious Heffalump – the “backson” bit in the book was just a misunderstanding of Christopher Robin’s sign, not a creature – but a hint of the grotesque in a song and animation sequence that seems to allude to the interludes like Salvador Dali’s segment in Hitchcock’s Spellbound … or the dream sequence in The Big Lebowski.

Much of the grown-up humor in Milne’s books is in the tone of the descriptive text – it always reminds me a bit of Wodehouse’s style – that might not translate well to the screen, or might leave the movie a bit too sedate if they tried, even with the narration from John Cleese*. To compensate, the movie contains far more physical comedy than the books, including Rabbit (probably the character most changed in appearance from the books) standing in front of a door that is about to be violently opened, with predictable results. But those scenes earned some pretty substantial laughs from the youngest audience members, so they served their purpose even if it occasionally did feel like Bugs Bunny was about to make a cameo.

*It amuses me no end that Cleese, the front man for the greatest and perhaps most subversive comedy troupe in history, has now become a beloved elder statesman, appearing here and as the lead sheep in Charlotte’s Web.

The great strength of the film, though, is the voices. Jim Cummings voices both Pooh and Tigger, giving the latter the same voice he uses for the Disney character Pete while adding Tigger’s trademark lisp, while the former is as good an approximation of the classic Pooh voice as you might find. (And tell me he doesn’t look like a certain GM currently working in Los Angeles.) Craig Ferguson’s Owl is haughty and imperious as Owl should be, but beyond those two Disney stuck with professional voice actors rather than bigger names, such as choosing Tom Kenny, the voice of Spongebob, for the underutilized Rabbit. The decision points to an emphasis on quality and even legacy over short-term commercial gain; these are iconic characters whom viewers expect to sound and act in certain ways, and it looks like the way to achieve that is to use professional voice actors over celebs.

They did bow to celebrity with the theme song, although if you’re looking for a cute voice you could do a lot worse than Zooey Deschanel, who does two other songs in addition to the classic “chubby little cubby all stuffed with fluff” tune. The film also features seven original songs by Robert Lopez, co-creator of Avenue Q and The Book of Mormon, although I’d only call “The Backson Song” memorable.

The film runs a quick 69 minutes and is preceded by the short film The Ballad of Nessie, a very cute take on how the Loch Ness Monster came to be, animated in a distinctly Seussian style. Winnie the Pooh did bother the Milne purist in me for some of the modern flourishes, but judged on its own merits it’s a wonderful film for the preschool (or kindergarten, in our case) set, right up there with My Neighbor Totoro among our favorites.

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→ June 28, 2011
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7 Wonders.

New post for Insiders on interesting guys in this year’s Futures Game.

—

The Spiel des Jahres award, the most prestigious (and commercially important) prize in the boardgame industry, has now been split into two separate awards; one retains the old award’s name, but focuses on simpler, more mainstream games, while the other, the Kennerspiel des Jahres (roughly the “Connoisseur’s Game of the Year”), goes to more complex strategy games. The inaugural Kennerspiel des Jahres award was handed out yesterday, and the winner, 7 Wonders, is more than worthy of the honor.

7 Wonders hits the sweet spot of German-style boardgaming: The structure is complex, but game play is simple, with a three-player game taking about 25 minutes after our first abortive run through it. (The rules could be written more clearly. A lot more clearly.) That combination means that gameplay is pretty rich, with many different strategies and no clear path to victory. And one quirky mechanic manages to go a long way to balance out the randomness that is inherent in almost any game that revolves around a deck (in this case, three decks) of cards.

In 7 Wonders, each player has a home city representing one of the seven cities to house one of the Wonders of the Ancient World. During the three stages of the game, called Ages, the players build buildings that allow production or trading of resources, add military power, or just give the player victory points. These buildings come on cards, some of which may be played for free while others require expenditure of money or resources (although some of those become free if you’ve played another card in an earlier Age). Each Age has six turns, so a player can build up to six buildings; resource-producing buildings produce on every turn, and there’s no accumulation or depletion of resources. The ultimate goal is to finish the game with the most victory points, but with seven different ways to earn points there are many, many ways to win the game.

The one great mechanic of the game is the distribution of the cards. At the start of each Age, each player receives seven cards, and gets to play one of them, usually to construct the building on the card’s face. After that, the player passes the remaining six cards to a neighboring player, so the decision of what card to play depends on what suits the player now, what his/her neighbor might need, and, depending on the number of players, what cards might still be there when the hand comes back around. During each Age, six cards from each hand are played or discarded, and the last remaining card is removed from the game. So in each round of a game, you can be assured of seeing the majority of the cards at least once; in a 3-player game, you’ll see 18 of 21 cards, and with 4 players it’s 22 of 28. (The game is for 3 to 7 players, with rules for a 2-player variant included.)

There’s also a strong trading component in the game, as it’s very hard to produce all the resources you’ll need yourself. You can buy any resource you need from a neighboring player who produces it for 2 coins, which can be reduced to 1 by certain commercial buildings; those purchases can’t be refused, but don’t affect the selling player’s production, either. Therefore, you could choose not to produce a certain good, or to produce less of it, because you know your neighbors will have some available for you even if the price is steep.

In our handful of 3-player test games, we found gameplay to be far more straightforward than the rules, which are written more like a reference work than like a straight explanation of how to play a game from start to end. The mechanic that allows you to build one card free because you built another related card earlier is very powerful, while the mechanic that gives you points for building the three levels of your Wonder using any card from your hand (without considering what’s on its face) is the least powerful aspect, as none of our winners ever completed his/her Wonder. One facet that I thought was insufficiently explained in the rules was that you can only build production buildings for the seven resources in Ages I and II; by Age III, you’re just going for points. We didn’t find huge differences between the Wonders except for the Colossus of Rhodes, which has a military power that was worth 18 points if its holder made a few relatively simple moves to maintain that advantage, and in a game where winning scores were in the 45-55 range that’s a significant bump.

I can imagine that with six or seven players this game would get messy, and the luck factor in what cards you get to see starts to increase once you get past five players. For three players, however, gameplay is smooth with a hint of randomness but nowhere near enough to make the game frustrating, as great decision-making won’t be undone by rotten luck. I can see why it won the Kennerspiel and is ranked #12 overall on BoardGameGeek’s global game rankings, but if you do buy it, be prepared for a little confusion the first time you read the rules. The game isn’t as complicated as they make it sound.

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→ June 8, 2011
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The Big Lebowski.

The 2011 draft is safely in my rearview mirror; you can read my team-by-team recaps for day two, separated into the American League and the National League. I also wrote a recap of day one on Monday covering ten teams who did well or made me scratch my head.

—

I finally rectified a major hole in my movie-viewing history by seeing The Big Lebowski. (It’s also the first movie I’ve watched on the new iPad, and, well, f-yeah-movies-on-the-iPad and all that.) So how exactly do you write about a movie that 90% of your audience – conservatively speaking – has already seen, many of them more than once? I’m guessing I’ll say nothing that hasn’t been written before about the film, so please forgive any unoriginal thoughts that slip in here.

There’s no real reason that I never watched the film; I liked Fargo despite its brutality, and might be one of the few people on earth who liked The Hudsucker Proxy (too saccharine for Coen brothers fans?). I like quirky comedies and dark comedies and films with great characters. I just never got around to this one when I was watching movies more regularly in the early 2000s, then my daughter was born and I ended up in a job that often has me watching baseball games at night rather than films or TV, and now I look up and realize many of my readers/followers have been speaking a dialect I didn’t understand. At least I finally get the title of Matthew Leach’s blog (which, by the way, got the biggest laugh out of me of any line in the film).

My favorite aspect of The Big Lebowski was its connection to the hard-boiled detective stories I love, even though The Dude isn’t actually a detective by trade. He’s intricately involved in the crime, which itself involves at least one con (I don’t want to ruin it for the four of you who haven’t seen the film), and ends up threatened by multiple elements, a standard of Philip Marlowe novels. The motives of everyone else involved are generally unclear. There’s a lot of drinking, although the Dude’s drink of choice seemed a little more soft- than hard-boiled, and a lot of petty violence like whacks on the head. He spends a good chunk of the story suspecting the wrong people. The familiar story arc made the movie much more enjoyable for me and I could concentrate on the witty dialogue*, from “obviously, you’re not a golfer” to “he fixes the cable” to “thank you, Donny” to “I’m just gonna go find a cash machine.” And John Turturro … well, now this makes a little more sense, too**.

* Did anyone else think Tara Reid’s one significant line was delivered a little too, um, naturally?

** I was convinced that Turturro’s character would somehow figure more prominently in the main plot. The fact that he is pure comic relief turned out to be even better.

About the only criticism I could offer is that there was no question how the scene with the new red car was going to end. Maybe that’s the point – you’re supposed to cringe and laugh simultaneously as you watch the metaphorical trains collide – but for a movie with so much obvious attention to detail, like The Dude’s obsession with making sure the half-and-half is fresh, the car seemed a little like a cheap laugh. It’s not like we didn’t already know Walter had a temper to match his exceptionally bad judgment.

That’s sort of like saying that Troy Tulowitzki should steal more bases, though. Julianne Moore was phenomenal. The nihilists (and the nod to Kraftwerk) were hilarious in their mannerisms and their incompetence, and I loved the cameos by Flea and Aimee Mann. (Pretty good German accent from her, by the way.) I can see why it’s such a cult hit and hang my head in shame for not watching it sooner. Anyway, tell me what else I missed about this film’s greatness while I figure out what to watch on my next flight.

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→ May 16, 2011
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Money: A Suicide Note.

Here’s another piece about that chick who’s dying in her teens because, according to the Line, she’s allergic to the twentieth century. Poor kid … Well I have my problems too, sister, but I don’t have yours. I’m not allergic to the twentieth century. I am addicted to the twentieth century.

Martin Amis’ Money: A Suicide Note, which appeared on the TIME 100 and at #90 on the Guardian 100, is a hilarious modern picaresque novel that marries crude, over-the-top humor with serious themes of materialism and modern identity as well as a healthy dose of metafiction that called to mind Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds.

The protagonist of Money, John Self, is an English director of TV adverts who is tabbed by Fielding Goodney to write the treatment for a new feature film titled Good Money, except when it’s instead titled Bad Money, although the film within the film is largely a Macguffin, with a plot that sounds comically awful but allows Amis to work in several caricatures of Hollywood actors and actresses. Self does very little actual work, spending most of his time drinking, whoring, masturbating, and spending gobs of money that Fielding provides, promising that there’s always more to be had. Along the way we meet Self’s live-in, transparently gold-digging girlfriend; his even more transparently dodgy father; and a number of friends and business acquaintances who may only tolerate Self because he serves as their connection to money.

Money is the true central character in Money even if it never has a line of dialogue. Characters are treated differently based on how much money they have; the more Self has at his disposal, the more doors open for him in the boardroom and the bedroom. When the money runs out, and I don’t think I’m spoiling anything to say that it does at one point, Self undergoes an existential crisis but still can’t let go of the dream of more money around the corner. And that question of identity – who are we without our things, or without our ability to do or buy more things, in an age of rampant materialism – fit the times in which the book was written (the 1980s, with the action in the book happening in the leadup to the last big royal wedding) but seem just as applicable today. Self himself comes to take the money for granted; there’s certainly no accounting going on, and he just assumes its supply is infinite and that he’s entitled to it, even though he’s doing little to no actual work within the book.

The humor, meanwhile, is decidedly lowbrow, not that there’s anything wrong with that. Self gets drunk, falls down, embarrasses himself, starts fights, deals with a stalker, cheats on the women he’s using to cheat on his girlfriend, says awful things, and blacks out on a regular basis. Amis is clearly a fan of creating silly character names in the P.G. Wodehouse tradition, and inserts himself into the book as a novelist who annoys Self and ends up working on the script to Good Money, while portraying the language of the slovenly, sodden Self (as narrator) as you might expect from the son of a great author who enjoyed a good tipple.

There was one line that struck me as familiar in a coincidental way – when Self says (of his time in a pub on one of his many benders, “I play the spacegames and the fruit-machines,” the song “Faded Glamour” by Animals That Swim came to mind with its line about “You tell me about cheap tequila/Place names and food machines.” I have no idea whether they’re connected, although I always thought the back half of that line might have been lost in translation.

Next up: I’ve already finished Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans and just started Richard Russo’s That Old Cape Magic.

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→ April 30, 2011
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Home & A Good Man Is Hard to Find.

My latest top 50 ranking for this year’s Rule 4 Draft is up. I’ll also be back on College Baseball Live this Thursday night at 7 pm EDT and on the postgame show as well.

—

The old man nodded. “Maybe I’m finding out I’m not such a good man as I thought I was. Now that I don’t have the strength – patience takes a lot out of you. Hope, too.”
Jack said, “I think hope is the worst thing in the world. I really do. It makes a fool of you while it lasts. And then when it’s gone, it’s like there’s nothing left of you at all. Except–” he shrugged and laughed “–what you can’t be rid of.”

She’s only written three books, but Marilynne Robinson has to be in any discussion of the best living American novelists, and there is no living writer whose prose I’d rather read. Saying a writer writes “from the heart” can be like saying a player “sees the ball well,” but Robinson produces some of the most moving, heartfelt scenes and passages I’ve ever seen and does so without the excess of sentiment or cloying language that could turn a book with a similar setup into mass-market chick lit.

Home, currently on sale for $10 through that amazon link, is the parallel novel to Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead. (It’s worth mentioning that Robinson’s three novels have each won a major award – Housekeeping won the PEN/Faulkner award for the best debut novel of its year and Home won the Orange Prize for the best English novel written by a female author.) Gilead was a series of notes or journal entries from an older priest named Ames who, nearing his death, wishes to leave a testament for his young son. That journal also showed scenes of his complex relationship with his friend and fellow preacher Robert Boughton and Boughton’s prodigal son Jack, named for Ames, who returns to Gilead after a twenty-year absence. That return is the subject of Home, as Jack, a lifelong alcoholic who didn’t even come back for his mother’s funeral, shows up carrying two decades’ worth of secrets and memories, with arguably four decades’ worth of loneliness and sorry as well. His timing is propitious, with his father’s health declining even more rapidly than Ames’, and Jack’s sister, Glory, living at home again after a disastrous courtship that has left her resigned to spinsterhood.

Despite the presence of just three characters for most of the book, with everyone else accounting for maybe 10% of the dialogue and whatever passes for action in a Robinson novel (she has never in three books resorted to plot twists or other tricks of the trade to spice up the story), Home is Robinson’s most complex work. The developing relationship between Jack and Glory, separated by enough years that they were never close as children, is one side of a highway where the other direction contains the gradual yet accelerating deterioration of the relationship between Jack and the dying father who has confused decades of worry over his wayward son with decades of love; it’s not clear that anyone was or is capable of helping Jack, who has what would today most likely be diagnosed as depression, but Boughton, already starting to lose control of his emotions in the earliest stages of dementia, faces the crushing disappointment of seeing the failure and tragedy of Jack’s life incarnate, in his kitchen or his living room. And yet Jack, first welcomed and then rebuked by his own father, draws closer to the old man and to his sister … but never so close that he can make the place he refers to as “home” his actual home, instead revisiting the childhood feeling that he wished he lived there in spirit rather than simply in body.

That dualism symbolizes one of Robinson’s central themes, the gulf between our spiritual selves (or souls) and our corporeal existence. Robinson writes honestly of religion, or more specifically of religiosity, as her many religious characters are neither caricatured nor placed on pedestals; religion is simply intrinsic to their lives, and Home is suffused with conflicts between religious tenets and human behavior, as well as the doubts that have plagued Jack for his entire life, further isolating him (although it was far from the main reason) from a family of believers.

And part of Robinson’s gift is that she can write about religion without creating an overtly religious novel. Home is very much about life on earth, about the weight of memories, about choices gone awry in the distant past with ramifications in the present day. Glory’s broken engagement has left her back at home, unemployed, and without romantic prospects; one of the most heart-rending scenes comes near the book’s end as she remembers her own daydreams about her own future family, about children that will probably never exist, a warmth and happiness that she feels is now permanently denied to her. (I don’t believe the characters’ ages are mentioned, but Glory is probably in her early 30s, and I suppose in a small Midwestern town in the 1950s this would make her marriage prospects fairly slim.) Jack, meanwhile, slowly exposes layers of his sorrow to Glory, but not to his father, a permanent barrier to the old man understanding his son; the woman who helped Jack get back on his feet and remain at least partially sober for the past ten years is now denied to him, a severance that seems to have driven him back to Gilead and, in his mind, has cut him off from salvation in this life or any other. Unfolding these relationships in a way that gets at the heart of family dynamics, of loneliness, of regret, and of the ultimate comfort of home without ever relying on unrealistic plot twists to force characters into false corners is more evidence of Robinson’s mastery of language and of character. She went 25 years between her first and second novels but just three years between Gilead and Home; I can only hope the gap before her next novel is as short as the last.

–

Flannery O’Conner’s first short story collection, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, is even more theologically-minded than Robinson’s work, combining stories about the meaning of faith, salvation, and what it might mean to be “good.” The stories are largely twisted, even macabre, as in the title story where an escaped convict wipes out an entire family so O’Conner can show us the difference between saying you’re a good person (or, more specifically, a good Christian) and actually being one. O’Conner dreams up killers and con artists, thieves and rascals, putting “good” people in bad situations to see how they might react.

Aside from the notable title story, the most interesting to me was the longest story in the book, “The Displaced Person,” about a rather high-minded Southern widow named Mrs. McIntyre who takes in, under some duress, a family of Jewish refugees from Poland who fled the Nazis. Her ignorance of conditions in Europe at the time is particularly stark to us now, given the passage of time and our deeper understanding of the extent of the genocide and the horrible conditions in and outside of the camps for Jews. But her lack of charity and her unusually defined ideas on race/origin stood out for her post hoc construction of ethnic identities; even as the Jewish husband works harder, without complaint, than anyone else she’s ever had on her farm, she is appalled to find him trying to bring over relatives trapped in German death camps and potentially marry them off to black workers on the farm. The priest who organized the placement of the refugees is no help, as he’s a single-minded, simpering man who sees Mrs. McIntyre only as a shell, as a person to be saved and as a settlement place for the refugee family but not as an individual, an oversight that leads to the story’s ultimate tragedy. That climax is one of the strongest depictions I’ve seen of the banality of evil, a phrase which, not coincidentally, was coined to describe the complicity of German citizens with the Nazi’s plans for extermination of Jews and other minorities.

Anyway, the title of this collection inspired me to create my second Tumblr post.

Next up: Haruki Murakami’s English-language debut novel, A Wild Sheep Chase.

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→ February 28, 2011
→ By

Battle Line game and app.

Battle Line is another two-player card game from the prolific Reiner Knizia, the man behind Lost Cities, Samurai, and Ingenious, one that brings a little more randomness to the table than Lost Cities offers but with plenty of opportunities for strategy – the type of randomness that forces you to rethink your approach to the game, rather than the kind that makes you throw up your hands in frustration. There’s also a very good Battle Line app available for iOS, with good graphics and a solid AI but as yet no online play option.

The main deck in Battle Line includes 60 cards, 10 cards numbered 1 through 10 in each of six different colors. Players begin with seven cards in their hands and on each turn play one card and draw one replacement. In between the two players sits a line of nine flags, and at each flag players place cards to try to create a winning formation, one that ranks higher than the opponent’s formation at the same flag. A completed formation contains three cards. The first player to either win five of the nine flags or to win three adjacent flags wins the game.

A formation’s value is determined by the numbers and colors of the cards it contains. The game has its own lingo, but you’ll notice a correlation to poker hands as well. The top formation is the game’s royal flush – three consecutive cards in one color, with a tie going to the formation with the highest sum on his cards, leaving 10-9-8 as the best possible formation in the game. (If a player completes a 10-9-8 formation at a flag, he wins the flag even if his opponent has yet to finish his own.) Next highest is three of a (numerical) kind, followed by a flush, a straight containing more than one color, and last just any assortment of three cards. When both players have identical formation types at a flag, the above tiebreaker applies. It’s also possible to claim a flag before the other player has completed his formation if it is no longer possible for the second player to create a formation to top the one that’s already on the board.

The twist in the game is the existence of a second deck of ten Tactics cards, each unique, which may be drawn instead of cards from the main deck. These cards run from the lifeline (Hero and Champion, two wild cards that can stand in for any card you want, although each player is limited to playing one of these per game) to the attack card (Traitor, stealing a card your opponent has played and using it yourself; or Deserter, trashing a card your opponent has played). The number of Tactics cards you can play is restricted by how many your opponent has played – the delta must not exceed one, so once you’ve played your first Tactics card you can’t play a second until your opponent has played one.

Battle Line strategy breaks down into two major areas. One is deciding how to fill out formations – if you have the green 9 and the green 8, do you play those together and hope you get the 7 or 10, or do you break up the 9 and 8 to try to build the easier three-of-a-kind formations? But the more interesting part is deciding when to fill out formations. Holding back the second or third cards in a strong formation might entice your opponent to waste a valuable card there – but playing that second card might open the door for him to waste your cards by dropping a stronger formation there. And do you challenge his formations early or try to play at empty flags and create large obstacles in the center of the board? It’s one of those “simple rules but different every time” games, like Lost Cities, that work very well for a quick two-player match.

The game’s card constraints are more confining than those in Lost Cities, which makes it a little more random because of how much you’re at the mercy of the deck. In Lost Cities, you’re just waiting for a larger card in any color you’re using, preferably not too much larger. In Battle Line, you have more formations in play but are often looking for a specific card or one of two in a specific color, and can’t discard a card without using it as you can in Lost Cities. If you want a change from Lost Cities, however, Battle Line is the most comparable two-player game I’ve found.

The Battle Line app (a.k.a. “Reiner Knizia’s Battleline”), from Gourmet Gaming, features two AI opponents, allows you to play two-player against someone sitting next to you, and offers a basic game that involves six cards in your hand and no Tactics cards if you want a tutorial. The strong AI player uses Tactics cards well, doesn’t do anything stupid, and will seize on player mistakes nearly every time. Flags are claimed automatically regardless of the winner, and the graphics involved are very clear. The app had problems with crashing and with incorrect values on two Tactics cards, but both glitches appear to be gone since an update about three weeks ago. It’s been my go-to app of late when I don’t want to get sucked into a long game of Carcassonne since you can knock out a game quickly and there’s enough random variation to keep it fresh.

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→ January 31, 2011
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The Gun Seller.

I’m off duty this week, since we close on our house today, but hope to post here a few times. As it turns out, today’s my wife’s birthday, so I tried to convince her that the house was her birthday gift from me, but so far it’s not working.

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There are plenty of reasons to be jealous of Hugh Laurie. He plays the title character in one of the best television shows I’ve ever seen, and playing it well. Before that he played one of the leading characters in the definitive adaptation of P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories (the full series is now $25.75, almost 60% off, on amazon, less than half what I paid for it years ago). And he started with a classic sketch comedy series with the inimitable Stephen Fry, many clips of which can be found online, such as this man on the street bit about wine.

Judging by his one published novel, the madcap spy novel The Gun Seller, he’s a damn good writer, too.

The Gun Seller almost reads like Wodehouse doing John Le Carré, although there’s a more modern feel to the prose than you’ll find in Wodehouse’s cheerfully patrician writing. But the wry observations, absurd analogies, and quick shifts of focus are present, as in the title character’s statement (after he’s been shot under his arm) that “I ordered a tonic water for myself and a large vodka for the pain in my armpit.” The plot is over-the-top, borderline farcical, but holds together surprisingly well and has plenty of tension and narrative greed to keep you turning pages.

The narrator and main character is Thomas Lang, a mercenary with an aversion to doing actual violence, who is approached by a man with a request to kill someone, only to find himself (at the book’s open) nearly killed by the target’s bodyguard, and then by his daughter. That one inquiry opens the door to a giant covert operation involving a next-generation attack helicopter and a disgustingly underhanded scheme to sell them to governments around the world, a scheme in which Lang plays a central role.

The book has two parts, the first of which leans more toward humor, the last (the book’s final third) works on resolving the intricate plot Laurie has assembled. That first part includes plenty of dry English wit to savor, much of it laugh-out-loud funny, some more smirk-inducing:

To follow somebody, without them knowing that you’re doing it, is not the doddle they makei t seem in films. I’ve had some experience of professional following, and a lot more experience of professional going back to the office and saying ‘we lost him.’ Unless your quarry is deaf, tunnel-sighted and lame, you need at least a dozen people and fifteen thousand quids-worth of short-wave radio to make a decent go of it.

The action picks up substantially in the second half as Lang finds himself inserted into a terrorist sleeper cell with plans that unfortunately foreshadowed later events in Lima, Nairobi, and Dar es Salaam. There’s a bit less time for the humor of the first half, but Laurie manages to keep the tone light even when bodies are dropping.

When he got there, he sat down very slowly. Either because he was haemorrhoidal, or because there was a chance that I might do something dangerous. I smiled, to show him that he was haemorrhoidal.

Laurie also manages to strike just the right note of cynicism in the book, avoiding the out-and-out misanthropy that can infect any book that looks into the dark recesses of the human soul and finds a cash register there. There is a point, one that resonates more strongly today than it might have when the book was published in 1996, that seemingly “democratic” governments fall under the sway of money, particularly corporate money, and will do things that we would consider abominable if we knew they were up to them in the first place. Rather than beating you over the head with rhetoric, however, Laurie just incorporates it into the book and channels Lang’s anger into action rather than tedious monologues on the nature of republican government or the need for transparency or whatnot. Those would sink a book that, at heart, was written to be fun to read. And fun to read it is, a spy novel for people who like to laugh, or a comic novel for people who like a spot of bother in their books.

Next up: Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.

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→ January 12, 2011
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The Billionaire’s Vinegar.

Benjamin Wallace’s The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine is the best nonfiction book I’ve read in almost two years, since reading The Ballad of the Whiskey Robber in February of 2009. Vinegar is a bit of literary pinot noir, starting with the auction of a bottle of wine allegedly owned by Thomas Jefferson and left in Paris when he fled the Revolution, a sale that smashed the previous record for a single bottle and helped accelerate the trend of high sale prices for ultra-rare wines. Of course, we wouldn’t have a book about it if there wasn’t an underlying controversy. Was the wine legitimate, or was Hardy Rodenstock, the German who purportedly discovered the cache of wines, a fraud and a forger of the highest order?

The ability to make money through doctored wines wouldn’t exist with a market willing to pay top dollar for what those wines purported to be, and Wallace documents the role of auction houses, particularly Christie’s, in marketing and selling rare wines and troves to a changing market, one that saw collectors bidding up bottles as investments or trophies rather than as libations. The man who built Christie’s wine-selling business over a period of four decades, Michael Broadbent, is a central character in the book for his role in selling the Rodenstock/Jefferson wines and impact on the rare-wine industry. (Michael’s son, Bartholomew, makes a few cameos, and has become a successful importer of fine wines.) The rich men who chase these wines also become significant characters in the book, including millionaire scion and America’s Cup winner Bill Koch, fellow scion Kip Forbes, and wine merchant Bill Sokolin, who bought one of the Jefferson bottles only to damage it and have most of the wine leak out on a restauarant floor as he carried the bottle to show off during a tasting.

The is-it-real storyline is paramount in Billionaire’s Vinegar, but, as an oeneophyte, I found the lay descriptions of wine chemistry fascinating, particularly explanations of how wine’s character changes over time, which also ties into how someone might alter a wine to make it seem older than it is – and how difficult it was until very recently to test a wine to determine, even within a narrow range, its age. The book also dabbles in the politics of wine manufacturing, culture, marketing, and the culture of wine connoisseurs, including massive tastings like “verticals” (many different vintages of a single wine) or “horizontals” (many wines, one year).

But at heart, the book is a mystery, starring Rodenstock and Broadbent, both eccentrics given to showmanship and bravado, one a dealer, the other an auctioneer, one a German of unknown background, the other a Brit of impeccable credentials. (Other eminent authorities on wine also gave their imprimatur to Rodenstock’s Jefferson wines, including Robert Parker, the most influential American wine critic of the past three decades and creator of the now-ubiquitous 100-point scale for rating wines.) The answer to the question of the wines’ provenance isn’t that hard to figure out, but Wallace plays it straight, only gradually revealing more information as the people involved the story themselves would have learned it, giving the book that mystery/detective feel – not to mention a surfeit of narrative greed – that sets it apart from most nonfiction books I read. I needed to put this book down so I could do other things, but found myself picking it back up repeatedly, finishing it inside of 72 hours.

Of note: the book is actually not available for sale in the U.K. because Michael Broadbent sued and wrangled a settlement from Random House, although he didn’t name Wallace in the suit and, having read the book, I’m hard-pressed to understand Broadbent’s complaint from a my non-lawyerly perspective. Wallace himself stated that U.K. libel laws are “notoriously plaintiff-friendly,” and I have to say that Broadbent might only have brought more bad publicity for himself by drawing attention to the book. He hardly comes off worst of the many shady characters populating the book’s pages.

Next up: Humorist and erstwhile sportswriter Roy Blount Jr.’s Alphabet Juice, a compendium of mini-essays on various words and their etymologies.

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→ January 10, 2011
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A Pale View of Hills.

Kazuo Ishiguro is best-known today for Remains of the Day, which really means he’s best known for making the book that they turned into that movie, although another one of his novels, the dystopian heartbreaker Never Let Me Go, was recently made into a movie starring the human dimple. (Both books are on the Klaw 100.) His debut novel, A Pale View of Hills, was critically acclaimed at the time of its release but has been obscured by those two later works, although it showcases both Ishiguro’s strong yet beautiful prose and his ability to create dreamlike settings that keep the reader off balance through shifts in time or realistic unrealism.

The narrator of A Pale View of Hills is Etsuko, a Japanese widow living in England after the suicide of her older daughter, Keiko, her only child from her first marriage, to Jiro, a traditional Japanese man. Her younger daughter, Niki, from her second marriage, comes to visit from London, triggering a series of flashbacks for Etsuko to when she was pregnant and struck up a relationship with the peculiar widow Sachiko and her daughter Mariko shortly after the end of World War II. Sachiko and Mariko have an odd relationship; Sachiko leaves the ten-year-old Mariko home alone for long periods and doesn’t require her to go to school, while Sachiko herself pursues a lopsided relationship with the American serviceman known as “Frank.” Mariko appears to be bright, but is scarred by horrors she witnessed during the end of the war, and her mother appears unable to help or even cope, escaping instead into her alternate reality with her paramour.

Those flashbacks are intertwined with another series of reminiscences to a time when Jiro was alive and his father, Ogata-san, came to visit Jiro and Etsuko for several days. Jiro himself was fairly cold and distant with his father, who seemed at that stage to have a stronger relationship with his daughter-in-law than he did with his son, as the latter is poisoned by the gap between Ogata-san’s views on the loss of Japanese culture with their defeat in war. (Ishiguro explored that topic, of coming to terms with Japan’s imperialistic, jingoistic past after World War II, in An Artist of the Floating World, a book I found less successful and less enjoyable than Hills.)

Ishiguro enjoys creating layers of mystery, then revealing only some of the answers as the book nears its end, a habit that covers this book from start to finish as well. One of those mysteries is left up to the interpretation of the reader, and I’m going to discuss my own belief, so consider this your spoiler warning.

Near the end of the book, Etsuko shifts without warning when relaying a conversation between herself and Mariko from referring to Sachiko in the third person to speaking in the first person – that is, she is suddenly Sachiko. Their two stories have substantial, if slightly imperfect, parallels, but Mariko could easily be Keiko, sharing her alienation and depression, since Keiko is depicted through memories as withdrawing herself gradually from her family and life, eventually doing so completely to the point where her body isn’t discovered for several days because she lived alone with no contact with family and apparently little or none with friends. Sachiko-Etsuko is convincing herself that she’s acting in her daughter’s best interests when she is attempting to smother her grief through this chase of a foreign man whose interest in her is mainly sexual; if you believe the two women are one, the strongest interpretation is that the American, Frank, is not the man Etsuko eventually marries, not just because of the different nationalities but because of Frank’s irresponsibility.

In this interpretation, Ishiguro’s overriding theme is that of guilt and regret, something he covered again in Remains and Floating World – our difficulty or even inability to come to terms with the past, with our own actions and those of others that affected us, with the hurt we dealt to others (with or without intent) and with how our choices crippled our own chances for happiness. Etsuko’s dissociation from her memory of Mariko-Keiko is her way of coping with her own guilt: As she grieved the loss of Jiro, her quest for her own happiness (or simply a facade of normalcy) forced her daughter’s best interests into the background just when she needed more of her mother’s love and attention. Etsuko acknowledges at one point that she knew the move from Japan to England would exacerbate her daughter’s problems, but clearly she made the move anyway, for what must have been purely selfish motives. Neither Japanese society of that time nor English or American societies since then accept selfishness on the part of the mother relative to the needs of the child, and Etsuko has to whitewash her own memories to live with them.

A Pale View of Hills includes Ishiguro’s usual digressions about music and art, and Etsuko and Ogata-san have an exchange on the art of cooking that spoke to me:

”Are you really planning on becoming a cook, Father?”
“It’s nothing to laugh at. I’ve come to appreciate cooking over the years. It’s an art, I’m convinced of it, just as noble as painting or poetry. It’s not appreciated simply because the product disappears so quickly.”

When Ishiguro was writing the book, in the very early 1980s, he probably couldn’t imagine our modern culture of celebrity chefs, who earn far more than painters or poets, although I think his point about the lack of respect for a product that is consumed rather than observed or read is a sound one.

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