→ April 13, 2022
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Black Swan Green.

My reading of the entire David Mitchell catalogue continued during the offseason, as I read but never reviewed The Thousand Autumns of Jasper de Zoet (which I loved – brilliant prose and a compelling story), and now brings me to Black Swan Green, an autobiographical memoir set in Ireland in 1982. It’s the most straightforward of Mitchell’s novels that I’ve read, with relatively few references to people and events in his other novels, and a lovely, bittersweet coming-of-age story that reads like a way better Belfast.

Jason Taylor is Mitchell’s stand-in, a 13-year-old boy who lives with his parents and his older sister Julia, attending a boys-only school where he’s one of the less popular kids, due in part to his stammer. He’s friends with Dean Moran, one of the few kids less popular than he is; gets bullied by a few of the street toughs from the town; and harbors a quiet crush on Dawn Madden, who ends up dating one of the worst bullies in Black Swan Green, Ross Wilcox. Jason’s misadventures nearly always start in mundane ways – he’s at school, on the bus, at a carnival, at home, or just playing in the woods – but end up touching on one or more of the major themes: his parents’ fractious marriage, his difficulty in almost every social situation due to his stammer, and the difficulty of fitting in that teenage boys everywhere face. So much of Jason’s inner monologue revolves around trying to be cool enough that he’ll be accepted – or at least not bothered – by the town’s bullies, but not to attract undue attention and thus becomes a target for them for an entirely new reason.

Jason is a fantastic character, one I wish we’d see come back again in another novel – although I suppose he’d be a successful writer as an adult. I certainly saw enough of myself in him, despite the outward dissimilarities between us (I never had a stammer, and Jason is more comfortable fighting & playing sports than I was), to feel like both he and his story were realistic. Mitchell gives him everything a protagonist should have, building out Jason’s moral compass and personality through a series of normal events that many kids would face, from finding a lost wallet to standing up to bullies to coping with the conflict between loving your parents and recognizing that it’s not cool to be seen with them. It’s a more modern interpretation, but you can interpret Black Swan Green as the protagonist’s struggle against a world where toxic masculinity is the norm, a world into which he does not fit.

That does mean that the other characters are less fleshed-out, especially Jason’s dad, who is just kind of a dud as a person – although I would guess most of us know a Michael Taylor who talks a good game but doesn’t post when it’s his turn to be a good father or husband, and it’s hardly surprising when he eventually fails at all of his roles. Julia doesn’t get enough time on the pages, as she heads off to college partway through the book, but she’s the most interesting secondary character, as she softens towards her younger brother as both her time at home comes to a close and she better foresees the storm brewing in their parents’ marriage.

Black Swan Green – which has put the Charlatans’ “Sproston Green” in my head for the last week – doesn’t have the mystical elements that appear in most of Mitchell’s books, and other than a mention of Robert Frobisher, none of the major names who pop up in the Mitchell Literary Universe appear here. (Some characters here show up in minor roles in other books, especially Cloud Atlas, but none rang a bell for me so long after I read that work.) That’s for the better, as it would have been jarring to have that stuff show up in a roman à clef, unless the Horologists really did show up in Mitchell’s childhood. One warning: There’s a fair bit of homophobic language here, although I’m sure this is accurate to the time period and setting – I was 9 in 1982, in New York rather than Ireland, but this was the vernacular of teenaged boys in the 1980s – and it’s hardly glorified. It’s unsurprising to see Mitchell do straight fiction this well, and as much as I enjoy his broader and more inventive plots, this is among the best coming-of-age novels I’ve ever read.

Next up: Ellen Hendriksen’s How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety.

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→ March 18, 2022
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Drive My Car.

Drive My Car has become the critical favorite of awards season, winning the best film prize from the LA Film Critics Association, New York Film Critics Circle, and the National Society of Film Critics, a trifecta that has happened six times previously, with the last four films to do so going on to win Best Picture. It spurred one of the best pieces I’ve read on movies in this, a  cycle, Justin Chang’s piece from late January arguing for the Oscars to nominate the film – his favorite of 2021 – for Best Picture. He was right, and the film did get the Best Picture nod it deserved, as well as nominations for Best Director and Best International Film. After Jane Campion’s tone-deaf, ill-timed comments at the Critics Choice Awards, which came just four days before voting opened, it might even have a chance to win the big prize.

Based on a brief short story by Haruki Murakami, Drive My Car is a three-hour meditation on grief and recovering from loss, beautifully shot and acted, with a script that pulls great emotion from small moments and quiet interactions among its characters. Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) is a stage director and actor whose wife Oto (Reika Kirishima) narrates stories she creates for him during and after they have sex. Shortly after Yusuke discovers that she’s cheating on him, he returns home to find her dead on the floor of a cerebral hemorrhage. Two years later, he’s invited to stage his version of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, a multilingual production, in Hiroshima, where his contract requires him to stay an hour away and use a driver, Misaki (T?ko Miura), to get him back and forth. These drives, and the conversations that take place in the car, explore the two characters’ traumas and share difficulty coping with their grief and guilt over what they might have done differently to prevent the tragedies in their pasts.

Drive My Car immerses you in its world, the one facet it shares with Murakami’s writing – it’s akin to living inside of someone else’s dream for three hours, thanks to the gorgeous shots of Hiroshima and the unhurried plot, which reveals its secrets naturally, as the relationship between Yusuke and Misaki develops and the two begin to confide in each other. Yusuke and Oto lost a child earlier in their marriage, which we learn in oblique fashion near the start of the film but without any explanation, which only adds to Yusuke’s guilt and grief over losing his wife – especially since he never had a chance to confront her about her infidelity. He ends up hiring the actor with whom she cheated to play the title character in Uncle Vanya, with what seems like ill intent, but after an intense conversation between the two in the back of the car where the actor tells Yusuke the end of a story that Oto had never finished, his view softens and he realizes there were things about his wife he never knew.

There are some strange plot contrivances that never quite pay off. Yusuke develops glaucoma in one eye, which he discovers after the condition causes him to get into a car accident, which you’d think would be reason enough for him to end up with a driver. Instead, the glaucoma never comes up again in the film, and the screenwriters concoct this bizarre contract with the theater to force him to use a driver – which he’s reluctant to do because of the importance of his routine while driving, right down to the car itself, which we learn is closely associated in his mind with his wife. Getting Yusuke a driver is central to the unfolding of the story, but the glaucoma could have been the reason for it – or it didn’t need to be in the film at all.

I have never seen or heard any performance of Uncle Vanya, so I read the Wikipedia summary of the play to try to understand what was happening on the stage within the film, as well as its connection to the overall plot. (There’s a brief scene near the start of the film where Yusuke appears in a production of Waiting for Godot, a story about two people waiting for a third, unseen person who never comes, talking endlessly about it, which seems like a more obvious parallel to the story of Yusuke and Misaki.) The actors in the play speak different languages and often can’t understand each other without Yusuke or his local assistant translating, with actors who speak Mandarin, English, Korean, and Korean Sign Language in the production, but despite diffident direction from Yusuke, several of the actors experience breakthroughs while working with the material, forming bonds with each other and connecting more with the characters, an allegory for Yusuke’s own resistance to exploring his own grief or just his own emotions. Two of the main characters in Chekhov’s play are stuck, pining for the same woman, the wife of Vanya’s brother-in-law, whose first wife (Vanya’s sister) has died. Vanya has dedicated most of his life to managing his brother-in-law’s estate, but realizes that he’s wasted his time on a man of limited ability and even less sense of the value of other people, all while waiting for a woman who is unavailable to him.

Much commentary about Drive My Car has focused on how well it translates the dreamlike nature of Murakami’s writing to the screen. The comments get it half right. This film does replicate the all-consuming aspect of Murakami’s work, but that’s found in his novels, not in his short stories; the stores in Men Without Women, the collection where “Drive My Car” appears, are scant, like shadows of ideas, and lack the texture or altered realities of most of his novels. The comments also constitute Burning erasure, as that film, the best of 2018, followed the same formula, extrapolating a wispy Murakami short story into a film well over two hours long that developed its characters (its men, at least) and created layers of back story and scene. Drive My Car does so as well, with strong performances by both of its leads, and offers a thematic and visual complexity absent from the story on which it is loosely based. It’s the best movie I’ve seen from 2021 so far, with just two Best Picture nominees (CODA and Don’t Look Up) and at least two significant international films (Playground and Petite Maman), and while the odds are still against it winning Best Picture or Best Director, it absolutely deserves both honors.

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→ March 3, 2022
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Red Rocket.

The idea of the con man as amiable rascal goes back decades, at least, but the archetype has been overtaken by current events, not least from our four years with a con man in the White House. In Sean Baker’s latest film, the hilarious dark comedy Red Rocket, Baker plays with the format by giving us a charming, fast-talking con man as the lead character, making it clear in stages that he’s a self-aggrandizing loser who does not care whose lives he destroys as long as none of them is his own. (You can rent it on Amazon, iTunes, or Google Play.)

Baker’s previous film, The Florida Project was my favorite film of 2017, anchored by an incredible performance by a 6-year-old actress, Brooklynn Prince, with no previous acting credits. Red Rocket is almost as good, and once again he’s cast two unconventional actors as leads: former MTV VJ and unserious actor Simon Rex, and an unknown actor named Suzanna Son, who had just one minor movie credit before this one.

Rex plays “Mikey Saber,” a former porn star who has returned to Texas City after his career ended for unknown reasons, and tries to move back in with his estranged wife, Lexi (Bree Elrod), who at least for a time was in adult films with him. After a few futile attempts to find regular work, stymied by the long gap on his resume, Mikey begins selling weed for Leondria, who distributes with the help of her kids, especially her stoic daughter June. When Mikey has enough money to finally pay Lexi and her mom Lil something for rent, he takes them to the local donut shop, where he meets 17-year-old Strawberry (Son), and immediately sets his sights on seducing her, with an eye towards taking her to LA and using her as his way back into the porn industry.

As in The Florida Project, the majority of actors in Red Rocket are non-professionals; only Rex and Elrod had more than one acting credit before this film, with Elrod mostly working on the stage since she was in Shutter Island a decade ago. Baker’s skill for finding people who can fill these roles is remarkable, with Brittney Rodriguez (June) especially standing out once her character finally gets to talk, in the film’s funniest scene by far, a family squabble near the end of the movie that was, of course, provoked by Mikey.

But it’s Rex and especially Son who make this movie. Rex is perfectly annoying as the guy who never shuts up about himself, his plans, how greatness is just around the corner, how he would already have been rich and/or famous except that something happened. He has an external locus of control large enough to enclose his giant ego, and he never tires of telling everyone who’ll listen about it. Son is a revelation as Strawberry, a convincing teenager (she’s actually 26) who leans a little into the Lolita role Mikey sees for her, but who is also naïve enough not to realize how sinister Mikey’s motives are and to appear to fall for him and his schemes, even when some external factors should tip her off. She evinces the superficial worldliness of the teenager who thinks she’s an adult, especially since the world often treats her that way, but who’s also too trusting and sometimes misses obvious points about how the world works. She also gets to sing in one of the movie’s stranger moments – it comes after a sex scene, which is awkward like every single sex scene in the movie, almost always because of Mikey – and has a lovely voice that had me convinced I’d heard her before. (She sounds like one of the many indie singer/songwriters out there right now, although I haven’t been able to figure out which one yet.)

The film is dark, despite being incredibly funny, and never quite grapples with how awful Mikey is other than letting you see the person under the hood (quite literally, near the end of the film). He’s a 40-something creep who seduces a 17-year-old and sees absolutely nothing wrong with it, even when he tells her ex-boyfriend to leave her alone because she’s with Mikey now. He uses his closest friend, or the closest thing he has to a friend, for free transportation for weeks, only to land that friend in a world of trouble from which Mikey escapes. He weasels his way back into Lexi’s life, clearly giving her false hope that he’s sticking around and will allow her to put something back together – her mother is addicted to opioids, and Lexi might be as well – only to have him ditch her the moment he locks in on Strawberry as his mark. He’s irredeemable with no interest in redemption. I have known several people, all men, just like him, convinced that a huge success is just around the corner, that the world simultaneously owes them this success and is the only thing denying it to them. They’re insufferable even as friends or acquaintances, and that’s if you don’t get caught up in one of their schemes. It’s a testament to Baker’s script and Rex’s performance that Mikey is so familiar and recognizable, and that he can entertain us even as we want to throttle him.

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→ March 2, 2022
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C’mon C’mon.

C’mon C’mon was written and directed by Mike Mills (not the REM/Baseball Project bassist), and doesn’t include that song, just to answer the two most obvious questions up front. It is a beautiful, tiny, intimate film, sweeping you up into its leisurely rhythm, combining humor, grief, and a vision of parenthood from the outside into a near-perfect film. (You can rent it now on Amazon, Google Play, or iTunes.)

Joaquin Phoenix plays Johnny, a journalist working on a radio documentary where he and a small crew travel to large cities in the U.S. to interview kids about their views on the world today and what the future might be like. He calls his sister Viv (Gaby Hoffman), who asks him to come to Los Angeles to watch his nephew Jesse (Woody Norman) for a few days while she travels to Oakland to look after her estranged husband Paul, who is bipolar and not getting the proper help or taking care of himself. A few days turns into a few weeks, so Johnny takes Jesse on the road with him, and has to serve as a friend and a guardian and a temporary parent to a kid who misses both his mom and his dad.

It’s part buddy comedy, part road movie, but it’s always authentic – there is something very honest about every detail in this film, which gets a boost from the real interviews that Phoenix conducted during the filming. (One of the boys he interviews was shot and killed last summer on his stoop; the film is dedicated to his memory.) These vignettes, often Phoenix asking a question followed by several kids, who look like they’re maybe 8 to 16 years old, providing answers – thoughtful, funny, sad, honest answers that gives the outside look at childhood to contrast with the main narrative’s inside look.

Phoenix is perfectly understated as Johnny, but Norman steals the show here – he’s more than just the cute kid, and rises to the challenge of a script that asks him to show a wide range of emotions and behaviors. Jesse is a pretty typical 8-year-old kid, by turns sweet and rambunctious, not always aware of his surroundings but sometimes acutely aware that his person wasn’t nearby. He’s a social kid, and funny, but also has that habit of kids that age of assuming that whatever they find interesting will be just as interesting to everyone around them. He also loves conspiracy theories, with Johnny’s crewmates eating up his talk about them in one scene in a restaurant that helps establish how easily Jesse gets along with adults – something we learn from later scenes is an adaptive behavior.

The Viv material is the weakest part, not least because it’s not entirely clear why her presence is required in Oakland, especially once Paul gets into inpatient mental health treatment. The arc of Viv and Jesse’s relationship suffers a little from its scant screen time; we do see through flashbacks that it has had its vicissitudes, and learn from a poignant conversation between Jesse and Johnny that the latter may have had a role in his sister’s marriage breaking up. It’s not implausible, but it falls into the space in between useful background and underdeveloped subplot.

C’mon C’mon is entirely in black and white, which cuts two ways here; it’s always gimmicky when a modern film is shot that way, but it does add to the film’s sense of scale. Everything about this movie is so small, in the best possible sense. The black and white aspect only increases that intimacy, making the movie seem leaner and more spare, although I can also see an argument that it’s not necessary, and that doing so in 2021 is showy.

I admit to liking this movie more than my faux-critic side does – C’mon C’mon depicts a fundamental part of being human, and does so with compassion and humor. Many of my favorite movies do something like this, and the fact that this movie does so in such a simple, elegant way makes me love it even more. And I wish that Norman had gotten a Best Supporting Actor nod for his work, to go along with the BAFTA nomination he got in the same category. He’s just fantastic, and without him, the movie wouldn’t seem as real or pack the same punch.

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→ February 22, 2022
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Parallel Mothers.

Pedro Almodóvar earned his first Oscar nomination in 1988, as Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown made the final five for that year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film (now Best International Film). He won the same award eleven years later, for Todo Sobre Mi Madre, my introduction to his work, and was most recently nominated for the strong, introspective Pain and Glory, which earned a Best Actor nomination for Antonio Banderas two years ago.

Almodóvar’s most recent work, the outstanding Parallel Mothers, finds the director similarly pensive, but this time he’s looking outward, with a two-layered story about truth and reconciliation in Almodóvar’s native Spain, a country that is still grappling with the legacy of a dictatorship that ended nearly a half-century ago. Parallel Mothers starts with a story about a mass grave from the Spanish Civil War, then pivots abruptly into the two mothers of the title, both of whom give birth in the same hospital but find themselves intertwined by the events that come afterwards, before we return to the story of the grave in a sweeping conclusion. The middle story itself packs an emotional wallop, but it is also a grand metaphor for the challenges Spain – or really any country – faces in confronting the truth of its past.

Penelope Cruz, who got the film’s one Academy Award nomination this year (for Best Actress), plays the photographer Janis Martinez, who happens to be taking pictures of a forensic anthropologist named Arturo. The fascists killed her great-grandfather in the 1930s, forcing him first to dig the mass grave in which he’d be buried, and then tore him from his family a night later. Janis asks Arturo if he could help exhume and identify the bodies, with help from the government’s truth commission. They also sleep together, from which Janis gets pregnant, a development she welcomes, as she’s 40 and has always wanted children. She shares a room at the hospital with the teenaged Ana, who is unhappy at her condition, and they become friends for the moment, although they lose touch once they resume their lives outside the hospital. When they reconnect, Janis learns that Ana’s baby died of SIDS, and she asks Ana to move in and be her au pair, but she has an ulterior motive as well.

The Janis/Ana story itself contains multitudes; both characters are complex, with detailed backstories, reasons why they are who they are, yet no connection to each other beyond the coincidence of their simultaneous arrivals at the hospital. Janis knows a truth that she can’t bear to share with anyone, including Ana and Arturo, but without the truth – and even a chance for reconciliation – nobody can move forward with their lives. When that truth comes out, it sets off a bomb in their lives, threatening everything Janis has wanted, but that’s followed by a period of forgiveness and understanding that wouldn’t be possible without the truth, no matter how brutal. Only after that can we return to the story of the mass grave, as Arturo takes a team to the village where Janis’ great-grandfather died, and where her family still lives, and begins the process of searching for and disinterring the remains.

There’s enough metaphor and symbolism here to fill someone’s senior thesis. The parallels between the Janis/Ana story and Spain’s own uncomfortable grappling with the impacts of the Civil War and the fascist Franco’s tyrannical, forty-year reign give Parallel Mothers its narrative framework, but Almódovar has populated the film with smaller details that give depth to the story of the two women while also sharpening the connection between the nested stories. As for symbolism, there’s food everywhere here, such as when Janis teaches Ana to make a tortilla Española, a classic Spanish dish of thinly sliced potatoes poached in olive oil and finished with eggs to bind it. It’s a national dish (a big deal in a country with divers regional cuisines), and its history goes back at least 200 years; passing this knowledge from one generation to the next, as Janis does to Ana, may stand in for the idea of passing along all knowledge, presaging a later scene where the two argue in Janis’s kitchen, and the older women lectures Ana over her ignorance of her country’s history. (I don’t know if there’s any symbolism to this part, but I certainly noticed the gigantic wheel of Manchego sitting on Janis’s counter, under class, and you are fooling yourself if you think I’m not trying to figure out how to get my wife to sign off on that in our house.) The color red appears everywhere in the film, from Janis’s handbag to her phone case to various decorative objects in her home, which is an Almodóvar trademark; here it could stand in for the blood spilled in Spain’s 20th century, unmentioned and yet pervasive even if no one wishes to discuss it. There are substantial hairstyle changes, little language quirks, so many choices in the script that seem deliberate given what Almodóvar was trying to do with the concentric narratives.

This is one of my favorite films of 2021, although I wouldn’t put it at the very top. The film’s finale is moving, although it comes upon the viewer rather quickly; the script probably could have gone longer, both to resolve the Janis/Ana storyline and provide more time in the rural village where the exhumation takes place. There’s also a smaller twist in the relationship between the two women that seemed to come from nowhere, almost as a convenience, and it doesn’t contribute meaningfully enough to the plot for me to buy into it. Cruz is so good in this, with Milena Smit also superb as Ana, that combined with the literary, layered script, I still found myself lost in its depths long after I left the theater.

I’m not sure why Spain selected The Good Boss, which stars Javier Bardem (Cruz’s husband), over this as its submission to the Academy Awards this year, although the one-film-per-country thing has already outlived any usefulness it may have had, but the one nomination it got, for Cruz, is well deserved – she’s certainly better than Nicole Kidman, who may win. (Cruz also became just the fifth woman nominated twice for Best Actress for films in languages other than English, and the first to do so for two Spanish-language roles.) I have read, but have no way to verify, that the Spanish film group that chooses its submissions dislikes Almodóvar, having passed over his Volver and Bad Education, but the joke is on them, as The Good Boss made the shortlist but not the final five nominees for Best International Film.

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→ February 17, 2022
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Dune.

Dune could have gone wrong so many ways, but the biggest risk in converting Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classic to the big screen was always the plot. The novel’s setting is iconic, from the desert planet to the sandworms, yet the complexity of the story around the Christ-like Paul Atreides stood out as the greater challenge, the one aspect of the book that couldn’t be addressed with CG. Denis Villeneuve’s Dune does a remarkable job of distilling the first half of the book into a single, accessible story that simplifies the plot without overdoing it, while also providing the look and feel that have helped make the novel an enduring classic of its genre.

(Disclaimers: I love the original Dune novel, so much that I read all five of Herbert’s increasingly terrible sequels, but have still never seen the David Lynch film adaptation from 1984.)

Dune follows the familiar template of the ‘chosen one,’ a story arc that stretches back to the Bible and continues now in YA fiction, most notably the Harry Potter series. The messiah here is Paul Atreides, the teenaged son of the Duke Leto Atreides, who rules the planet Caladan, and his concubine Lady Jessica, a member of the cultish spiritual order the Bene Gesserit. Paul exhibits unusual mental abilities from an early age that indicate that he may be the savior foretold by the Bene Gesserit’s prophecy. The story opens when the Emperor orders the Duke to take stewardship of the desert planet Arrakis, the only source of the drug known as spice or mélange, which also happens to be an essential element in interstellar travel. The present rules of Arrakis, House Harkonnen, are not especially keen to lose their powers, leading to armed conflict that puts Paul on the run and in charge of his own destiny.

Villeneuve’s decision with his co-screenwriters to split the book into two films, hoping the first would fare well enough that the studio would greenlight the second, paid off twice – it did do well enough that we will get a sequel, and I would argue that it only did that well because it didn’t try to cram a densely plotted 500-page novel into a 150 minute movie. There’s so much room to breathe here that Timothée Chalamet gets far more screen time to give a little depth to Paul’s character, while Rebecca Ferguson, as Lady Jessica, may be an even bigger beneficiary, as some of that character’s most important scenes would almost certainly have been cut in a single-film adaptation. Paul’s character comes alive more in the second half of the book, once he’s on the run with the Fremen people, which leaves a modest void in a first-half movie for another central character to fill, and Ferguson does so with the film’s best performance.

The cast of Dune is incredible on paper, although the result is more “I can’t believe they got Charlotte Rampling!” than “I can’t believe how great Charlotte Rampling is!” Oscar Isaac is here. So is Javier Bardem. Stephen McKinley Henderson, who you know by sight even if you don’t know him by name. And there is some value in having these very famous people, any of whom can command a scene by themselves, in smaller roles. They don’t get quite enough to do – not even as much as Jason Momoa does in a memorable turn as Duncan Idaho.

The film does look amazing, though. Villeneuve is no amateur at worldbuilding on the screen, and this is the Arrakis of the page, whether in wide shots or close-ups, feeling vast and foreboding and terrifyingly dry. You’ll find yourself craving water watching this film. Many of the special effects are impressive, especially those showing the various flying vehicles on the surface of the planet, but there’s just as much wonder in the sword fights or the scenes showing troops massed in formation when the Atreides arrive on Arrakis to take control.

Dune ended up with ten Oscar nominations this year, including Best Picture, Best Cinematography, and Best Adapted Screenplay, but not Best Director, which surprised me given how much Villeneuve had to put together here even taking the script (which he co-wrote) as a given. I’m not surprised at the lack of acting nominations, given how many people and named characters in the film, and how little depth most of them get even in a film that’s a solid two and a half hours. Ferguson might have had an argument for a supporting nod, but that’s probably it. My guess is Dune wins a bunch of technical awards – ones it may very well deserve – without taking Best Picture or Adapted Screenplay. Of the four BP nominees I’ve seen so far, though, I think it’s my favorite.

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→ January 14, 2022
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Mass.

Mass marks the directorial and writing debut of actor Fran Kranz, an actor who hasn’t done anything so far that might have indicated he was capable of this. Mass feels in so many ways like a stage play, with just four characters in one room constituting the vast majority of the film, and it pulls off a discussion of a difficult subject in an engrossing and credible way. (You can rent it on amazon or iTunes.)

Mass takes place at an Episcopalian church, almost entirely in a meeting room, where two couples, played by Jason Isaacs, Martha Plimpton, Reed Birney, and Ann Dowd, will meet some unknown period of time after a school shooting where a son of one couple killed the son of the other couple, and other classmates, before killing himself. The parents whose son committed the murders are no longer together, and have taken different paths – mom is wracked with guilt, and wants compassion, or at least more of a kinship with the grieving couple, while dad is still trying to absolve himself somehow and is bottling up his grief. Meanwhile, the parents of the victim are still deep in their grief, and can barely contain their rage when the conversation first turns to the killings. The meeting is unmoderated, but has been arranged by a counselor who seems to have worked with both couples; the four are simply left to their own devices. (I’m not saying which couple is which by design; it’s better to avoid knowing until the dialogue reveals it.)

The dialogue is raw and doesn’t flinch from its subject, including, at one point, a detailed description of the sequence of the murders. The parents share how they found out about the massacre not long after they were sharing photos of their kids, which appears to have been their pre-arranged conversation starter. The script shines when it centers their shared grief, how both couples lost sons that day, and how this isn’t some sort of Grief Olympics between them. Kranz doesn’t try to explain the inexplicable, other than to have the shooter’s father run through the litany of possible explanations – which follows an abortive discussion of gun laws in America. The victim’s parents ask the questions you’d expect, including why the killer’s parents didn’t do something to stop this, but Kranz doesn’t give any easy answers. The end of that conversation in the meeting room might be the only time the script loses its intensity, because the quartet reaches that point abruptly given what came before. It’s relentless without ever becoming lurid or otherwise pandering to retain your attention. It’s a story about one small bit of the aftermath of a school shooting, and Kranz never loses sight of that.

Mass has received a slew of honors from local critics’ circles and independent film groups, including taking the Robert Altman Award from the Independent Spirit Awards, won in recent years by Moonlight, Spotlight, One Night in Miami…, and Marriage Story. Dowd and Isaacs have each won a supporting actor award, although I’m not sure what makes either of them ‘supporting’ in this film. All four are great, but Dowd stands out – the script gives her the most to do, and she’s incredibly affecting both in her grief and her need to be understood by the other parents. The idea that Being the Ricardos might get a Best Original Screenplay nomination over this is … well, especially aggravating because the nomination would ensure more people know that Mass exists. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, because it’s very talky, because it so resembles a play adapted to the screen, because it’s so unsparing of its topic. It is a tough watch, but it achieves everything Kranz could have wanted from his script.

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→ December 31, 2021
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Licorice Pizza.

Licorice Pizza, the latest film from Paul Thomas Anderson, feels like the work of an entirely different writer than PTA’s last film, Phantom Thread. Where that movie was tense, quiet, often creepy, Licorice Pizza never stops moving – in one sense, almost literally, as the two main characters spend a substantial portion of the film running, often in less-than-sensible shoes. It’s a beautiful, quirky, and funny coming-of-age story. I just wish so much of its greatness wasn’t undone by a pointless racist gag that PTA could have excised without losing anything.

Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman, son of Phillip Seymour Hoffman) is a precocious almost-16-year-old actor and would-be entrepreneur who spots Alana Kane (Alana Haim) when the photography company she works for comes to his school for picture day. He tries to flirt with her, despite the ten-year age gap, and somehow coaxes her into meeting him for a not-date date at the absurdly named but extremely ’70s restaurant Tail o’ the Cock, where he’s on a first-name basis with the staff and is treated like a VIP. Gary tries to get Alana some movie and TV work, while she tags along with his venture to sell waterbeds, and the two continue to move along as if they don’t actually have feelings for each other, even though we know by the time the movie ends, they have to get together somehow.

Hoffman and Haim carry this movie, Hoffman in particular, with his effortless charm and a self-aplomb way beyond his years. The age gap between them – which is larger than the one that had certain folks upset in Call Me By Your Name, although that criticism was probably about something other than their ages – is less evident on the screen, because Gary is developmentally advanced for his age, while Alana is still quite immature. The latter point especially shows up in scenes at Alana’s home, where she still lives with her parents and two older sisters, all played by Alana’s actual family (quite well, in fact – her father is a riot), and she’s very clearly the baby of the bunch, twenty-five but aimless. She hangs around with Gary and his friends, even though she knows it’s “weird,” in part because they give her a way to stave off adulthood. Because Hoffman plays Gary as this worldly teenager who understands more of adult ways than just about any teenager I know, which is built into the character’s story (and that of the real-life actor, Gary Goetzman, on whom PTA based Valentine), the love story between the two comes off as more innocent than it might otherwise.

The unsung hero of Licorice Pizza might be the costume department. Films set in the 1970s often shove that decade’s regrettable fashion choices in the viewer’s face, but Licorice Pizza instead leans into the better side of ’70s fashion. Haim is a fashion plate, wearing some gorgeous prints across a series of short dresses that wouldn’t be out of place today aside from the oversized collars. Valentine doesn’t have quite as much fun, but the white suit and fuchsia shirt he dons near the end of the film couldn’t come from any other decade.

PTA also populates the film with many real-life characters from Hollywood of the time, including Sean Penn as the legendary actor William Holden (thinly disguised as “Jack Holden”), and Bradley Cooper in an absolutely ridiculous (and very fun) turn as producer Jon Peters, with whom Cooper worked on the remake of A Star is Born. Benny Safdie appears as city councilman Joel Wachs, on whose campaign Alana works near the end of the film. If you listen carefully, you’ll catch the voice of John C. Reilly in an uncredited role as another real person. Most of this works to add color to the film, accentuating its sense of time and place, although the Holden segment goes on longer than it needs to.

That racist gag, though. John Michael Higgins plays a real person, Jerome Frick, who owned a Japanese restaurant in the LA area called Mikado. In the film, he appears once with his Japanese wife, and speaks to her in slow, exaggerated English with a mock-Asian accent. He appears again, later, with a different Japanese wife, and pulls the same shit. There is a punchline there, at Frick’s expense (turns out he’s just an ignorant asshole), but I’m not sure any punchline could justify that lead-up. It appears that Jerome Frick’s second wife, Hiroko, was a fluent English speaker, yet PTA only has the two women speak Japanese in the film. Perhaps this was some complicated way to mock the real-life Frick – and, for what it’s worth, the punchline itself is funny – but few if any viewers will be in on the joke, and the whole thread adds precisely nothing to the film. It’s a shame that either nobody called PTA out on it, or, more likely, that he just ignored them. The Hollywood Reporter just published a longer piece on the controversy this morning, which links to a November interview with PTA where he tries to defend it as true to the time period.

If that bit were cut from the movie, Licorice Pizza would be just about perfect; it’s still my favorite of the movies I’ve seen so far, even with the bitter taste of that failed gag. The chemistry between the leads is so strong – both should be in the running for Oscar nominations, and both scored Golden Globe nods already – that almost everything around the two of them melts away. Maybe there will be a director’s cut that spares us those objectionable scenes, because the rest of this movie is wonderful.

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→ December 17, 2021
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The Luminaries.

Eleanor Catton won the 2013 Booker Prize for her massive novel The Luminaries, becoming the youngest-ever winner of the prize, all the more remarkable for how much the novel sounds like the creation of a much older mind. It’s part mystery, part historical fiction, a dash of picaresque, and at times a bit of a mess, with one of the most untidy endings I can recall in a novel of this magnitude.

The Luminaries takes us to 1866, to New Zealand’s South Island, and walks us into a gold-rush town called Hokitika with the newly arrived prospector Walter Moody, who is there to pan for gold, and instead wanders headlong into a series of interconnected mysteries in the town involving a corrupt sea captain, a missing goldpanner, a dead hermit, an opium-addicted prostitute, a possibly-bogus will, a vendetta, Sinophobia, a M?ori miner, and more. The twelve men he meets are all caught up in the web of mysteries in some way, with their connections forming an elaborate tapestry that puts Moody (and the reader) well into the weeds before any resolution appears. The mysteries are gripping, but they’re far better because of the strength of all of the characters Catton has created; if anything, Moody is this novel’s Nick Jenkins, the observer character who is himself not all that interesting.

The central mystery revolves around that dead hermit, Crosbie Wells, and his unknown relationship to the conniving captain Francis Carver, and their shared connection to Anna Wetherell, the prostitute who was found unconscious, possibly as a result of a failed suicide attempt, on the side of a road the same night that Wells was found dead in his hovel. That question drives the plot, but the way Catton unfurls it, character by character, shows incredible plotting for such a young novelist, and allows her to give the reader a cornucopia of fascinating and often weird characters, most sympathetic, a few decidedly not so. You come for the mystery, but you stay for the weirdos.

Catton did make two significant structural choices in the novel that didn’t quite work for me. She used the signs of the western zodiac and other astrology tidbits to title the chapters, and the twelve men are supposed to correspond to those signs. Astrology is woo, and if there’s a real connection between the zodiac signs and anything in the book, I missed it, and I’m not terribly sorry about it. She also concludes the novel’s main narrative somewhat abruptly, and then jumps back in time to provide a mostly linear narrative of what actually happened before Moody arrived, an answer key of sorts at the back of the book. Doing so is not an inherently bad choice – every mystery needs its solution – but the switch was sudden, and after the climax of the main story, which has an unexpected event that triggers the end, we get very little resolution or explanation of what happened or how the main characters react to it.

I’ve read plenty of 800+ page novels, but few are actual page-turners. The Luminaries flew by, with prose that evokes the 19th century without sounding like it was written in the 19th century – there’s some formality, some nods to colloquial English of the time, but the majority of the prose reads like it was written more recently. That central narrative gripped me from fairly early on in the story, and Catton increases its complexity (and thus the reader’s confusion) quite well before the gradual revelations of different characters’ parts in the overall drama. The Booker Prize winners’ list is a real mixed bag, but this is one of the better ones I’ve read – and one of the most readable, too.

Next up: I’m partway through this year’s Booker Prize winner, The Promise, by Damon Galgut.

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→ December 1, 2021
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Furnace.

Furnace was one of the big hits of Gen Con in 2021, earning a big crowd around the two booths demoing it (Arcane Wonders is the U.S. distributor and had copies for sale, while the original publisher, Hobby World, offered demos). It’s a brilliant game that combines resource trading with engine-building over four rounds, with some simultaneous actions that can keep game play to 30-40 minutes once everyone knows the game. If you’ve played Century Spice Road, Furnace takes that game’s main feature and builds a way better game around it – and I like CSR quite a bit. Furnace is out of stock at amazon now but I believe another printing is coming.

In Furnace, players will bid on cards from a central market and add the ones they win to their own play areas, where they will create engines of card actions they’ll execute in order, one card at a time, to try to convert resources into other resources and eventually into money. Furnace’s most notable new mechanic is that there is value in losing the bid for a card: If you bid on a card but don’t win it, you get “compensation,” which is shown at the top of that card, separate from the card’s actions (shown on the bottom). Compensation can be straight resources, or the right to convert resources you already own into others. You get that compensation multiplied by the value of your losing bid, which can be up to 3 – so if you bid 3 and lost, you triple the resource gains, or get to do the conversion up to three times. Thus you will often bid on cards you intend to lose, or will bid on cards hoping someone else will outbid you.

The bidding is independent of your cash and your resources; each player has four tokens, numbered 1 through 4, that they bid on the cards in the display. Players go around the table, bidding one token per turn, until everyone has used all of their tokens. After the bidding is completed and players receive the cards they won or compensation they receive, they place those cards in their play area, next to the cards they already have – the basic game lets you reorder the cards every turn, but I prefer the advanced rule where you must keep them in a row and can’t re-order the ones you already have – executing the actions on those cards, top to bottom on each card, then left to right. You repeat these steps over four rounds, and the game ends.

The cards you acquire all have at least one action available now, and each has one action that is shown only in outline at the bottom. That action is available after you upgrade the card, which requires an upgrade token and an upgrade action, both of which are shown on every player’s start card; you can upgrade as many cards with that action as you have available tokens. The resource exchanges are always in your favor, as in CSR, so the only reason you might choose not to use one of those actions is later in the game when you won’t have a chance to cash out the second resource type. Early in the game, at least, it’s usually a good idea to convert everything you can, and then tailor your bids in the next round to whatever resources you seem to have and are able to generate.

The game also has five Capitalist cards that you can distribute randomly that give every player a special ability throughout the game, such as an extra value-2 token for bidding, or the ability to gain extra compensation when losing a bid. There’s a fair dispute among players about whether these cards are balanced enough, but they also aren’t necessary to play or enjoy the game.

Furnace is easily one of the best games of 2021, and has the advantage of being accessible, both in terms of rules and playing time, while also presenting players with sufficient challenge for even more experienced gamers. There’s some randomness in the card draws – when I taught my parents at Thanksgiving, we had an unfortunate first round where almost none of the eight cards in the market offered resources as compensation, so everyone got off to a slower start – but after that, it’s all up to you. It’ll certainly end up in my top 10 for the year, which is scheduled to run next week over at Paste.

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