Greetings from exhaustion. I was on a road trip up to the Yukon and Alaska this week, which is a lot of driving (of which I did none) and it involved a certain amount of sleeping in uncomfortable circumstances. Also a lot of breathtaking scenery. I came back to immediately do two morning shifts this weekend starting at 5:00 am. I’m not complaining. My job is pretty cool. But oh my god do I ever need to sleep.

10 reviews.

Zzzzzzz.

Movies

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World — It is not as good as the comics, but it’s still one of the best adaptations ever made. It could have been so bad. It could have been a generic action comedy. Instead, it’s a weird fun house of a movie where rooms expand and contract, minor villains do Bollywood dance numbers, and the whole thing can momentarily turn into Seinfeld with nobody remarking on it. Michael Cera as Scott is a slightly counterintuitive casting choice, considering that Scott in the comics is, well, a cartoon. Not that he lacks depth, but he’s drawn to be very over-the-top expressive, which Cera is emphatically not. But he never forces a joke, and it’s that tendency that bridges the gap between Scott Pilgrim’s manifest cartooniness and its humanity. I like the ending of the comics better, particularly because this ending hinges on Scott learning self-respect, which is clearly not the issue. Scott needs to learn not to be shitty to everybody who isn’t him. Evidently the comics’ perfect ending had not been written yet when the film was in production. So these two endings are independent and both viable. It comes down to preference. Love this. Pick of the week. 

Solo: A Star Wars Story — Admittedly, I was very tired when I watched this and fell asleep at some crucial moments. But I mostly thought this was really dumb. The tone is set early on, when we have to sit through an explanation of why Han’s last name is Solo. It reaches an apex at a point where two characters urgently discuss whether Han is a “good guy” or not. There is altogether too much of this sort of scene setting in Solo. But fanservice is to be expected in these movies. What disappoints me most is that I didn’t even enjoy the minor elements I had hopes for, like Donald Glover as Lando and Phoebe Waller-Bridge as L3. Glover’s performance is charming enough, but he’s channelling Billy Dee Williams so hard that he can’t put his own stamp on the performance. And Waller-Bridge’s role is just too short to make an impact. (Or maybe I was asleep.) I think I’m done with these intermission featurettes between the main films. I just don’t like Star Wars enough. I do love that weird, green singing alien head though.

Podcasts

In Our Time: “Margaret of Anjou” — All I knew about Margaret I had gleaned from bits of chatter about Shakespeare plays that I have neither read nor seen. And even that turned out to be wrong! This is great. It’s a fun alternate way into the story of the Wars of the Roses.

Love and Radio: “Choir Boy” — I heard this guy’s story on 99% Invisible first, but I think I prefer this version, which is classic Love and Radio. A man starts robbing banks for fun, and things deteriorate from there. Tell me you don’t want to hear that story.

This American Life: “Heretics” & “LaDonna” — Nothing beats This American Life for a road trip. These are two episodes that each feature a single story based around a single character, both of whom suffer infuriating indignities in very different ways. “Heretics” is about a different kind of radical preacher — one who doesn’t believe in Hell. Turns out, that’s a belief with consequences. And “LaDonna” is about a woman who finds it much harder than she expected to change the toxic work culture of Allied Universal. It’s a bravura piece of journalism by Chana Joffe-Walt, who is brilliant at accountability interviews. Hear these.

Ear Hustle: “The Row” — It’s been a while since I listened to this, but I clearly need to catch up. This episode features interviews with three inmates who are on death row, a part of San Quentin that the other inmates have essentially no contact with at all. It’s a really interesting look into the cultures and routines of a place where nobody wants to be, and also a penetrating exploration of what gives people’s lives meaning when they’re running out the clock.

The Kitchen Sisters Present: “Prince and the Technician” — Damn, I love the Kitchen Sisters. This is about Susan Rogers, one of the few women engineers to become prominent in the 80s. Specifically, it’s about her work with Prince. This is the behind-the-curtain look at Prince’s process that you’ve always wanted. His work ethic was off the chain, and so is Rogers’. Pick of the week.

The Allusionist: “Survival part 1: Second Home” — The story of how Welsh came to flourish in a small region of Argentina. It’s super interesting but I kind of wish there’d been more jokes. In any other context that would be an incredibly weird thing to say about an episode like this. But there you are.

Hardcore History: “The Wrath of Khans” parts 1-3 — I don’t subscribe to this show, but I was on a long, long road trip recently with a friend who does. That is the only context in which I’ve heard it before, and I am never quite as attentive to it as I think you need to be. But I really enjoyed this, in spite of it being a completely crazy thing that adheres to none of the podcasting  conventions I hold dear. The host, Dan Carlin, just talks into a microphone for up to five hours at a time (less, in this case) about a very specific period in history. There are no production elements save for the opening theme and the sting that ends each episode. It’s bonkers, and it shouldn’t work. But Carlin is compelling to listen to, and he’s really good at structuring his episodes in a way that balances the story itself with analysis. For instance, he begins this series on Genghis Khan and the Mongols by asking us to consider what it would be like to read a book about the net benefits of Nazi Germany on technology and global geopolitics. Sometimes one wishes he’d be a bit more sensitive — this would likely be different if it were made in 2018 rather than 2012. But he’s not being provocative for the sake of it. As he explains, this very practice of revisionist history has been going on with respect to Genghis Khan for generations. And the story he goes on to tell makes no bones about the fact that he was an absolute monster. Anyway, there are two more parts of this that I almost want to listen to, but I just can’t see this fitting into my life in any context other than long drives, which is not a thing I do.

Caliphate: “Mosul” — And with that, we’re abruptly following another story. This is good. The thing that was always going to make this series work was audio collected from within ISIS’s sphere of influence. That’s where the story happens, it’s where Rukmini Callimachi reports from, and it’s what we get here. This feels like it’s doing groundwork for the next episode, establishing the historical context of Mosul and explaining what life was like there under ISIS. But it’s revealing in its own way.