Movie Reviews: Spider-Man: No Way Home, Hearts Beat Loud, Jagged, Respect, Under the Skin

Spider-Man: No Way Home: I find it impossible to review this without spoilers, so here be spoilers ...

Tom Holland is back as Peter Parker, aka Spider-Man, and we pick up moments after the last movie ended. His identity is revealed to the world, causing him, and all of his friends, no end of trouble. This is compounded by rumors that Mysterio, who Spider-Man defeated in the last movie, was actually the good guy, while he (Spidey) is the bad guy who caused all of the destruction and killed this great superhero (for reasons unknown, I guess). Those who believe this find new reasons to believe this as events in this movie unfold (this is a political commentary, I believe).

Peter tries to get Doctor Strange to cast a spell that will erase the memory of his identity from everyone. While Strange is trying to cast the spell, Peter continually interrupts him with requests for changes to the spell (MJ should remember him, ... and also Aunt May, ... and also ...) resulting in a botched spell that Strange has to contain. While doing so, he breaks small cracks in the multiverse, enabling many villains from the Tobey McGuire and Andrew Garfield Spider-Man movies to appear, apparently moments before these villains were killed in these movies (none of this makes any sense, but whatever). Naturally, the villains are confused, everyone in the MCU is confused (except for Doctor Strange), and so is everyone in the audience.

Strange says that he and Peter have to round these guys up with some McGuffin device that he has (this turns out to be super easy, barely an inconvenience). While doing so, Peter and his bleeding heart decide to "cure" them and so save them from death when they get sent back to their own universes. Again, this makes no sense. Strange disagrees, so he and Spidey fight. Spidey forces Strange out of the picture for a while, but also enables the bad guys to escape and regroup (with one who received the cure helping to face off against the others who did not). Meanwhile, Peter's friends MJ and Ned try to call Peter using some other McGuffin device, only to end up bringing into their universe both Tobey McGuire and Andrew Garfield's Spider-Men (or "Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man" and "Amazing Spider-Man"). Much bonding, inside jokes, touching stories, and mutual support ensues, as well as a final battle that also brings back Doctor Strange. Peter has to make a final sacrifice in order for Strange to fix the rupture in the multiverse.

This movie has broken records, as the first pandemic-era movie to get to $100 million on its opening day, and the first to top $1 billion. It is the second-highest (or tied for second-highest) rated MCU movie, just behind Black Panther. It squashes together not only a dozen villains, characters, and heroes into one movie (ala End Game), but also squashes together three cinematic universes, which is a sure-fire crowd-pleaser. So I was prepared for another boring fan-service Marvel movie that is a) well-made and entertaining, b) shallow, a collection of irrelevant actions scenes with superficial emotional "growth", c) watchable, but not good.

I am pleased to say that it is better than the usual Marvel movies, although still not a great movie. It was entertaining, well acted, and well shot (of course). It was not too shallow. The characters and the story moved and developed more than usual. Yes, it was a collection of action scenes, but the scenes between the kids (Peter and his friends) and between the Spider-Men were interesting and contained depth. These are actual characters who have real backstories and real arcs to use as backgrounds for their reactions and dialog, and this helped. Tobey and Andrew were particularly welcome and captivating, as was William Defoe's Green Goblin. Still, a few scenes with depth is not a deep movie, like a real drama movie.

On the down side, unless you have seen all previous Spider-Man movies, as well as the Avengers Infinity Wars/End Game movies (and some Daredevil, and maybe some other MCU, television shows), some of the backstories and characters will be new to you, and therefore will have less depth. You will then watch the film and feel less, since these backstories, with some notable exceptions, are not explained. This detracts from the movie for such viewers. Also, the extended fight scenes, while pretty to look at, as usual were eye candy with little dramatic depth.

If you are a fan of these kinds of movies you will love this one. If you are not, you probably won't change your mind but it will not feel like a waste of time. If you actively dislike these kinds of movies, this one won't change your mind.

Hearts Beat Loud: A little independent movie starring Nick Offerman and Kiersey Clemons as father and daughter Frank and Sam. Sam and Frank play music together informally in their house. Sam is off to college soon. They create a song that Frank thinks might give them a chance at music success, so he pesters Same into recording, playing, an maybe touring, while Sam is more interested in her new girlfriend and upcoming college.

This plays almost like a John Carney movie (Once, Begin Again, Sing Street), with original music interspersed with scenes and dialog pregnant with emotion. The lyrics and music, written by Keegan DeWitt, counterpoint, recapitulate, or develop the story. The movie and some scenes may be a bit slow, and the story may be unoriginal, but it is sweet, the music is pretty, and everyone does a fine job. Other featured actors include Toni Collette and Ted Danson, who shine (understatedly) when they are on screen.

I didn't know anything about Nick Offerman before watching this, other than that he is Megan Mullally's husband and a comedic actor of some kind. It was a nice surprise to see him perform in an appealing comic/dramatic role, and do it well. Worth watching if it comes your way.

Jagged: A documentary about Alanis Morissette, told in her own (current) voice and the voice of her band, from the time of her childhood up until Jagged Little Pill came out and upended music in the 1990s. I have seen many documentaries about musicians lately; this one stands out. It might be because I love Alanis' music, especially from that period. Or it may be that she is a great musician, this is an important piece of music, and it is a decent story. Not a fantastic story, just a decent one (a decent story seems to elude most other music documentaries).

Alanis has famously distanced herself from this film, saying that she was betrayed in its making and that it represents distorted facts. I am not sure what her problem is, and I wish she would clarify. There are only two negative insinuations that she makes. One is that she was involved with adult married men in the music business when she was 15 years old, and that, over time, she has learned that these men took advantage of her and were, in fact, pedophiles and abusers. I don't think this is a huge revelation, since she sings about this in Hands Clean and other songs. She does narrow down the people to specific times and companies where she was working in the documentary. The other negative comment is about her all-male band-mates who attracted and slept with many female fans during their first tour, which she found, in retrospect, to be distasteful and anti-feminist. Again, I don't think this is a huge revelation.

Worth watching if you are into the subject at all, at least until we hear some kind of clarification from Alanis.

Respect: A biopic about Arethra Franklin, the Queen of Soul Music. Jennifer Hudson plays Arethra (before she died, Aretha actually picked Hudson to play her), Forest Whitaker plays her father, and Marlon Wayans plays her (first) husband. Marc Maron plays the famous producer Jerry Wexler who releases most of her music, and Mary J. Blige plays family friend and singer Dinah Washington. The movie takes us from youth until her 1971 Amazing Grace gospel performance.

This film follows the same cookie-cutter story of every other musician biopic: early struggles, a troublesome marriage, first success, a fight with a music label that results in a change of labels, a troublesome addiction, too much success leading to bad behavior, and a denouement that involves a re-centering and launch into future success with a heartfelt performance at a special place. Maybe that's just the story of all successful musicians. The movie hits all of these tropes, without getting anything deep or original out of any of them. Its distinguishing factor is her struggle with religion and her deeply religious (yet philandering) father.

It was enjoyable. While it is technically well done, it is not amazing. Everyone does a fine job, even if some parts of her life are left unexplained and unexplored. And Hudson is a great singer in her own right.

Under the Skin: Scarlett Johansson plays one of two aliens. She drags women and (mostly) men off into some kind of death or stasis in order to understand them or transport them to her planet or something. She wanders around, sometimes naked, talking little. Weird scenes occur in some kind of odd space where her naked victims follow her as she walks on a flat surface while they descend, step by step, into some kind of black oil, in which they float and can still see. It must be metaphorical, but I didn't see the point.

Looking up on Wikipedia ... From a synopsis of the book on which the movie is based, the themes are supposed to be about animal cruelty, environmental decay, sexism, and immigration. I didn't get any of that from the film. All I got was nice scenery, tedium, confusion, lack of a comprehensible story arc, and an unsexy look at Scarlett Johansson. The film took a chance by being different from the usual sort of films we see. It fails spectacularly, but I give it some credit for that.

Movie Reviews: Dune (2021), Eternals, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, The Father, King Richard, Pixie, Spencer

Dune (2021) - As an aside, I saw this in a 4X movie theater, and I can tell you that 4X movie theaters are not worth the extra cost. Every once in a while my seat vibrated, slightly distracting me from the movie. Then I felt the seat kicking me in my bottom (there are kids who will do that for free in regular movie theaters). Finally, during a huge rain scene on film, I felt a slight mist in the theater. Skip the 4X.

On the other hand, this is a huge, well-made sci-fi film of multiple worlds that deserves to be seen in a theater. As for the story and characters, the director Dennis Villeneuve and the rest of the staff do a great job enabling the characters to emerge. The story retains its essential form while being accessible to people who have not read (or forgot) the book, at least I think so: it's possible that the emperor sending troops to aid the Harkonnens' fight against the Atreides might get lost on someone who never read the book, which is important but not critical (at least to this movie, which is only the first half of the novel).

The story: Dune is a planet with an important spice that enables interstellar travel, while also turning blue the eyes of anyone who hangs around it for a while. The planet is nearly entirely desert, with little water and little life. However, there are some desert mice, some huge-ass sandworms that detect the slightest movement on the surface, and the freemen, nomadic and (essentially) Bedouin native warriors who resent the presence of the spice mining operations of the empire.

The emperor kicks the Harkonnens off of the planet, for some reason, and sends the Atreides faction to continue the operations, but it looks like they might have been sent to fail. The Harkonnens sabotaged some of the equipment, and they (and the emperor) later attack the Atriedes on Dune.

Meanwhile, Duke Atreides wife Jessica is a Bene Gesserit, some kind of mystic with mental powers in a long line of trained woman mystics, who has a son, Paul, that she has trained in these ways, much to the annoyance of the rest of the Bene Gesserit. She did so because she thinks Paul may be the fulfillment of a thousand years of prophesy. Simultaneously, Paul seems to fulfill some freeman signs of being a prophet, too. And he is having visions of a freeman woman he will meet and wed, and maybe die in her arms?

Timothee Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, and others do fine jobs: not too mopey, not too dreamy, not too chaotic. Effects, music, and cinematography do what they should. It's not the greatest film of this decade, but it works and I enjoyed it. I am looking forward to part 2.

Eternals - This boring entry into the Marvel universe is a collection of Marvel scenes apparently written by (not exceptional) 12 year olds. Once again we have a bunch of "super"heroes with undefined powers that can do anything, except when the plot wants these powers to not work so well, so as to provide some tension (didn't work). Once again immortal and invulnerable non-human beings run through every human emotion and die from human fatal wounds like asphyxiation (although they don't breathe) and chest wounds (although they have no circulation or blood). Once again a Marvel movie tries, and fails, to explain why super-powerful beings did nothing while the other movies played out ("not getting involved in Earth events" is not an excuse for not stopping Thanos). Now, suddenly, they seem to care about humans, but they did not, apparently, during the last five millennia. Once again a Marvel movie fails to explain where all the other Marvel superheroes are at an event that threatens the entire planet Earth; some of these other superheroes are gods, right? And, once again, a Marvel movie glosses over massive destruction that should wipe out a planet; instead the destruction affects only a few miles around it.

The characters are fine, but one dimensional. The Marvel humor runs shallow. The plot makes an attempt, at least: the Eternals have to choose between helping keep humans alive on Earth or helping a celestial be born, which is their actual mission. So there is some, slight, moral dilemma. Otherwise, whatever.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye - I knew very little about televangelists and about prosperity gospel before this movie, and only a little about Jim and Tammy Faye Baker, played beautifully by Andrew Garfield and Jessica Chastain. Based on the documentary of the same name, this film must have involved a lot of input from Tammy Faye, who is portrayed quite sympathetically, as is televangelism in general.

The story is how the two met in college, where Jim was promoting the idea that wealth = God's blessing, and so they should make money by promoting God. Various other televangelists and other kinds of ministers have other ideas (with this and with each other), so, while, on the whole, they are all working to turn people from sin and to Christianity, they also present different, sometimes contradictory methods and messages in different styles. The Bakers end up collaborating with and butting heads with others. For example, Tammy believes in loving everyone, including homosexuals, and bringing them closer to God, while Jerry Falwell and others reject this idea.

The movie covers the financial fraud and theft by Jim Baker, as well as his (and others) possible homosexual dalliances. It skips some of the nastier things that the Bakers and other prosperity preachers did, such as telling the poorest people to take out bankrupting loans to give them (the Bakers) money as proof of their belief. This was supposed to result in being paid back many times over by God, but typically resulted in lost fortunes, bankruptcy, and even death (when people ran out of money to pay for cancer treatments, etc). But that would make it harder for Tammy to be a sympathetic screen character.

This was quite a good movie, interesting, well acted, well scripted, and well shot. I didn't see the documentary; if it is good, some might ask the question why this movie needs to exist.

The Father - This tour-de-force from Anthony Hopkins is a crushing look at a man with Alzheimer's. It's impossible to describe without giving away the film, but the simple explanation is this: Anthony plays a man who has Alzheimer's. He does not accept this, but he is not always sure of his memory. Olivia Colman plays his long-suffering daughter. Other characters appear or disappear, and that's all you need to know. Both of them, as well as the director, play the scenes with sensitivity and creativity. It is engrossing, puzzling, and marvelous.

This is not a feel good movie. While it is sometimes depressing, it is so well done that it doesn't really matter (think, oh, let's say Kramer vs Kramer level of pathos). But it's not as miserable as some movies, like ones about slavery, poverty, or horrific abuse, so you don't want to kill yourself after watching it. Still, that makes it a movie that is not for casual movie night with friends. Worth watching.

King Richard - This is an okay, feel good movie, that is something of a crime in its conception.

This is the story of the father of Venus and Serena Williams; about his plan, from before their birth, to raise tennis pros who would rise up out of the ghetto (Compton), compete at international level, and make a lot of money.

Will Smith produced the movie and also plays Richard, the father. While he does a credible job with the role, he remains a slight-change-in-dialect version of Will Smith, so he's fine but not great. Aunjanue Ellis plays his wife, and mother of the two stars (as well as mother of three previous, also successful girls), and Saniyya Sidney and Demi Singleton play Venus and Serena. Everyone acts well; the directing is somewhat heavy-handed at times, but not often and not too much.

This is an okay sports movie about a man (with daughters) and his struggles to overcome his surroundings and his own demons. He overcomes a few of them, but some of his actions and decisions were pretty bad and the movie never takes him to task for them. I understand that Venus and Serena were consultants on the movie, so it is based somewhat on reality, at least (I hear that Richard was actually a lot more of a hard-ass than he appears in the film). As a film, it works fine.

But this movie is still a crime. Here was the opportunity to tell the story of two fierce, beautiful, successful, amazing young Black girls/women, and instead we get a movie about a man, where the two girls/women are props in his story. Why? Seriously, why do we need this story? It's not a bad story, but it's also not that original or dramatic. The Venus and Serena stories are barely told. This would be so much better if it were their story, with their father as a prop. So it is a little depressing.

Pixie - This Irish movie is a throwaway mafia/road film. It's a comedy about various criminals on the run, occasionally double crossing each other. It has some violence, but not enough to make me turn it off while watching it on the airplane. The characters, though insane, were at least sweet enough for me to watch through to the incredibly ridiculous and, yet, entirely predictable end.

Forgettable, and not worth watching, but not terrible. Beautifully shot in Ireland, and capable acting.

Spencer - This movie is directed by Pablo Larraín, the same person who directed Jackie, a movie that I disliked. I thought Jackie was directed (or possibly written) very poorly: mostly closeups of Natalie Portman's face and endless screen-time with her looking forlorn and pitiful. That's really not entertaining. People laud the acting of someone in closeup who is forlorn for 2 hours, but it doesn't make for a good movie. So I was not looking forward to see what this director would do for Lady Diana. I hoped to be pleasantly surprised.

I was not pleasantly surprised. In fact, it was exactly as poorly directed/scripted as Jackie: lots of closeups of a miserable, forlorn face. People close to Diana said that Kristen Stewart inhabited the role well, with all of the correct mannerisms and intonations. I thought the acting was affected, distracting, and overdone. Too bad, since I like to give Kristen the benefit of the doubt, but am often disappointed.

The movie is about a weekend that Diana spends at a castle with the royal family. She struggles with her eating disorder and her difficult husband, tries to visit her old family home, and runs afoul of royal expectations. She leaves early, takes the children, and separates (one presumes) from Charles back in London.

The rest of the casting, costuming, and cinematography is fine. The story is not: it's just moaning, warbling, and fretting, with the occasional pointed conversation in between. I was fine with the conversations, but that was only about 1/3 of the movie. Just watch The Crown.

Another Roundup of Social Issues in Tabletop Games

Gloomhaven designers follow in the footsteps of other RPG companies in working to remove racial and colonial assumptions from their upcoming edition of Frosthaven.

Workers at Paizo follow the footsteps of workers at other RPG companies in raising issues about excessive work hours, low pay, minority tokenism, and other abuses.

Meanwhile, some workers at Broken Token (makers of inserts) posted and/or confirmed stories of abuse and sexual harassment by the founder, leading to many manufacturers and gaming associations to stop working with him.

Board games that address issues of race or gender often do so using a single idea: unequal starting positions and rewards based on your race or gender. The latest to do so are the 50th anniversary edition of Blacks & Whites, a Monopoly clone from the 1970s, and Disparity Trap, a game where, I think, the results of the cards require you to scan QR codes to find the results (the exact rules are not on the site)

Black Progress Game is a more upbeat roll and move game about the Black experience.

Movie Reviews: Street Gang (Sesame Street documentary), Toy Story 4, The Truth, The Vast of Night

Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street - This fantastic documentary outshines the mediocre documentaries I have watched lately. Children Television Workshop's Sesame Street, incorporating Jim Henson's muppets, was a game-changer for television and a global phenomenon, and this film makes you feel it. I learned a lot about the people and history of Sesame Street that I did not know, such as the groundbreaking use of research and educator input used to create an educational program, together with comedians and puppet makers to make it appealing to both children and adults. The nostalgia I got while watching it made me sing along with some of the songs that I had not heard since my childhood.

I guess if you never saw SS you won't get this nostalgia. The film could have presented some of the data that lets us know that the children that they targeted actually had better school performance as a result. Aside from this one missing element, this was a treat and worth watching.

Toy Story 4 - Featuring a who's who of celebrity voices, this fourth installment in the Toy Story series is only slightly lesser quality than the first three, which were all great. Still enjoyable, still funny, still fun, and still full of heart, only the story is a little more scattered.

Woody and co are now Bonny's toys. Woody sneaks along with Bonny on her first day of school to check up on her and helps her create Forky, a stick figure made from crappy plastic. Forky thinks of himself as garbage and that he should be thrown away, but Woody tries to keep him around for Bonnie's sake. Meanwhile, they travel to an RV park, where Woody meets Bo, Gabby Gabby, Duke Caboom, and other toys who have various plans to become owned by children or to reunite children with their toys, all the while trying to not get separated from Bonny.

There are messages about the nature of reality, what it means to belong or to be useful, what is worth sacrificing, and where our higher purposes lie, all in the form of kinetic action, comedy, and pathos. If you watched the first three, of course you will watch this one. If you have not, it might be slightly confusing to follow, so watch, at least, Toy Story 3, first. Hard to believe they have been doing this for 25 years, and that they haven't messed it up, yet.

The Truth - A French drama starring Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche, Ethan Hawke, and Ludivine Sagnier. Fabienne is a famous but aging actress writing a book. Lumir is her screenwriter daughter, who, with her husband Hank and daughter Charlotte, is visiting her mother in France. Fabienne lies to Lumir, Lumir lies to Fabienne, and this continues for the whole movie. Fabienne did, and does, many insulting things to everyone around her, oblivious to their pain. Fabienne's excuse is that she is a liar and a pathetic wife and mother because she gave it all to her art of acting. Meanwhile, Charlotte may learn something - maybe the wrong thing? - from them both.

This is a dialog heavy open-ended drama where you quickly realize that you are never going to find out what the actual truth is, because everything you know comes from the mouths of the actors, and they are thoroughly unreliable. That is both tantalizing and infuriating. It is a movie about acting and aging, and about what you get from your mother vs what you need from her. It is similar in feel and plot to the very good Clouds of Sils Maria  that I saw a few years ago. That was better, but this is also good; how could it not be, considering the talented cast? Worth watching on a small screen. Mostly in subtitles.

The Vast of Night - This is a strange but wonderful film for film-buffs only. Rather than watch this for the plot - some kind of lights have been seen in the sky above a small New Mexico town in the 1950s, and some high schoolers who work with radios try to discover what is happening ... that's it - you watch it for the acting, suspense, and cinematography. It stars Sierra McCormick and Jake Horowitz as the high schoolers Fay and Everett.

The film has some fantastic shots. The opening is a series of walk and talks with the main characters at long shots, off screen, or behind things, giving us a sense of something off-kilter. There are several more long shots of Sierra or Jake fielding phone calls from bewildered townfolk, or talking over the events while rummaging through old recordings. One impressive and fascinating long take swoops from Fay at one end of town, traveling for a mile at ground level, over fences, and through the high school basketball game to Everett at the other end of town.

What does it all mean? Who knows? The acting, sets, sound, and camerawork are phenomenal. The dialog is mysterious and captivating, even though very little actually happens. But the same is true for all suspense movies, where things may be happening but it's hard to know what. After a lot of dialog, it ends with a run through a field when the mysterious lights come into sight. This whole movie would have been the opening 3 minutes of an X Files episode. If you want standard, passive entertainment, you should probably pass, but it is sure fun to watch if you love to watch something really good and really different.

Movie Reviews: Shang-Chi, Summer of Soul, The Last Letter From Your Lover, The Man Who Knew Infinity, The Red Turtle

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings - Marvel with a Chinese mythology spin. Simu Li plays Shaun/Shang-Chi, a trained warrior and son of the 4000 year old, more highly trained, more warriory Xu Wenwu (Tony Chiu-Wai Leung). Xu is immortal because of his use of the mysterious and unexplained ten rings of power.

Shang-Chi is hiding as Shaun in San Francisco, working with his friend Katy (Akwafina, playing in another movie with dragons shortly after her role in Raya and the Last Dragon). Shaun, Katy, and Shaun's sister Xialing (Meng'er Zhang) are kidnapped by Xu to attack a gate near some village (led by Ying Nan (Michelle Yeoh)) in another dimension in order to free his wife/their mother (who is dead, but Xu thinks his wife is calling to him and may still be alive). But this is a ruse by the evil Dweller-in-Darkness to ... uh ... take over the world. Sides are taken, pretty beasts fly around in the other dimension, people do martial arts and people fight. Sacrifices are made.

The movie attempts to give a backstory and character to Shang-Chi - a bit more than we saw in Guardians of the Galaxy 2 - but this is still a Marvel movie, so the backstory is comic-worthy. Much of the plot setup and story is told in jerky walk-and-talks between fighting scenes. Like Black Panther, the directing and choreography try to honor Chinese culture with appropriate costumes, fighting styles, music, and landscapes, but, unlike that movie, it doesn't all gel. It feels paint by numbers and jumbled. Still, points for trying.

The ten rings are in the movie, but they come from nowhere, mean nothing, have no definition, and add nothing but glowing balls of light. There is a lot of annoying deux ex machina before the ending, and all of the fighting basically runs by itself; the people are mostly observers. The return to our world is satisfying, and some other MCU characters show up as a nice touch. This is one of the lesser entries in the Marvel canon, kind of boring, and not a film that I plan to see again.

Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) - A documentary by Questlove about the 1969 Harlem Culture Festival, a series of music festivals celebrating Black culture. Owing to Woodstock, and to the media's generally ignoring Black culture, the event is not well known about outside of the Black community. The concerts had a combined attendance total of around 300,000 people, and the performers included Sly and the Family Stone, BB King, Glady Knight and the Pips, Stevie Wonder, and, perhaps most notoriously, Nina Simone. Simone gave a long speech about how she would like to see violent revolution and armed conflict by the Black community to fight against racial injustice.

From the hour-plus of the movie devoted to actually hearing the music, the music appears to have been good to great. Maybe there was not much more footage of the music, or maybe Questlove simply decided to use the rest of the movie to present the politics around the event. The movie is important in presenting an overlooked event of Black culture. Other than this, and Sly's performance and Simone's speech, the movie is just a standard documentary: it's fine, not great.

The Last Letter From Your Lover - Like Me Before You, this movie is high on sweetness and potential, but low on depth, which I assume, like Me Before You, is a betrayal of a deeper novel by Jojo Moyes. In the 1960s, Jennifer wakes from a car crash with little memory of what happened before, to relearn about her rich lifestyle, absent and problematic husband, and possible lover. In the modern era, journalist Ellie, who has her own commitment problems, discovers a series of love letters that uncover Jennifer's story. Will love triumph in the past and in the present?

The film is shot and costumed beautifully. It is watchable and well produced, but it does not present real characters well enough to engage our sympathies. Why did Jennifer marry this guy to begin with, and what is her life story, other than her husband and her possible lover? What else do we know about Ellie? It's all so shallow and pretty, that we don't learn much.

Which is a pity. The plot is easy enough to follow through the different time periods and the different happy and unhappy relationships. Shailene Woodley, Felicity Jones, and their various male counterparts do fine enough jobs given the script. I suspect that if you have read the book and already sympathize with the characters and their stories, that the movie is more enjoyable to watch. Or maybe just as frustrating in its lack of truly bringing the complete book experience to the screen.

The Man Who Knew Infinity - A sturdy biopic about the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, who, unschooled, formulated thousands of insights into mathematical formulae in his youth in India in the early twentieth century. He (Dev Patel) wrote to Cambridge University in an effort to find others who could understand his work, and so was brought over to England by G. H. Hardy (Jeremy Irons). There he encountered many things in his short life before his untimely death: some of the usual racism of that period; contentious but highly respectful colleagues who insisted that he present proofs for his insights (most of which were right, but not all); a separation from his wife and culture in India and and a very different, atheistic culture in England (to his very religious Hindu one).

The math explanations are kept short and tidy, but their importance - other than that they are mathematically important in some way - is never explained. The film is also rather bleak and cold, even if it is the usual celebration of triumph in some small way. Everyone plays their part well, but, other than Ramanujan's decline in health, the occasionally amusing or troubling conflicts are eased through without much on-screen tension. As a result, the film is colder, less enjoyable, and somewhat more forgettable than other recent films, such as The Theory of Everything and The Imitation Game. It is worth watching, but I wouldn't go out of my way for it.

The Red Turtle - An intriguing myth in the shape of a movie from Studio Ghibli. A man is washed onto a deserted island. He tries to escape by raft a few times, but each time is stopped by a mysterious red turtle that keeps him trapped (safe?) on the island. In revenge, he attacks the turtle and flips the turtle over. Before the turtle dies, he tries but fails to make amends. He goes to sleep beside the dead turtle, but wakes up next to a woman in the turtle shell. They eventually make a life together and have a son.

There is no dialog, other than the occasional grunt. So what is the movie about? A treatise about nature? A metaphor about life, birth, and the womb? Pre- or post-lapsarian? All and more?

This may be a little slow for some viewers: although most of it moves as a good pace, a few of the sequences go on a bit long. The story, such as it is, doesn't hit you over the head with its meaning, so you have to bring your own. I'm a little annoyed at the use of a woman as a kind of object for the man, rather than as her own person, but this is only a problem depending on how you interpret the myth. It's not a tour de force, but it's fascinating, dreamy, and beautiful. Worth watching.

Holocaust Games

Not everyone shares my objection to Holocaust used as a subject in fictional films, but the concept of a Holocaust game draws near universal confusion and condemnation. This is simple enough to explain: most people understand "game" to mean "toy", "play", or "fun", something they don't think should be associated with the Holocaust. (Yet a film being "entertainment" doesn't bother them, go figure.)

To explain this more fully, consider the objective of a player in such a game. You don't want them to play a victim who dies or is tortured, because, even as an educational tool, that is too intense. You don't want them to play a victim who easily survives, because that is not the lesson of the Holocaust. That's just a revenge fantasy. You don't want them to play a Nazi, for hopefully obvious reasons; and anyway, most fictional portrayals of Nazis complete bury the point of how mundanely clean and rational they behaved. And playing as a gun-shooting liberator, such as an American or Russian, barely conveys anything real about the Holocaust.

That does not exhaust all options, thankfully. You can make question and answer games about the Holocaust; a game based solely on questions probably won't be too much fun (or worse, will be too much fun). You can make small, limited games that, through exploration, teach people about specific events of the Holocaust in passing, such as the deportation of a single town. This allows you to keep the game light enough while lightly educating and, perhaps, stimulating a desire to learn more (supplemental reading material, or links, should be bundled with the game, ideally).

Here are a few games that have tackled the Holocaust. I don't include major franchises that touch on the subject within broader WWII fighting games, such as Call of Duty and Wolfenstein. I don't include games where you take on the role of Nazis. I also don't include games that are designed but not yet published, such as Light in the Darkness.

• Attentat 1942: This walkthrough game intersperses interviews, animation, footage, and stories by survivors with simple gameplay elements. For example, the survivor might describe how she had to hide paper before the Gestapo arrived, and then you are given the choice of where to hide the papers in the room. You job is to be a historical researcher and learn what happened to your grandfather.
  
• Through the Darkest Times: This walkthrough of animated scenes depicts Berlin around the time that Hitler is voted into power until the end of WWII. It's narrative presents how his rise to power included the support of the population. You do various small tasks of resistance, although, of course, the end is the same.
• My Memory of Us: A video game with a fantasy version of WWII, where two kids who are best friends are separated when an evil king (with robots) comes to power. They impose harsh restrictions on one of the kids (the girl) forcing them to wear certain clothing, mocking them, and creating dangerous situations. They only want to play together, and only by working together can the kids reveal their true power.  The game uses cute graphics against black and white dystopian steampunk backdrops of ghettos, garbage, and barbed wire. The story is narrated by Patrick Stewart.
• The Journey: A children's based story app from the UK's National Holocaust Centre, about a boy who must navigate Nazi rule in the early 1930s until he gets to Kindertransport. Discover hidden objects and fulfill minor objectives.
• Witness: Auschwitz: An interactive VR experience about the Holocaust, not actually a game as far as I can tell.
• Rosenstrasse: A tabletop RPG about the only mass public protest by Germans during the Holocaust: non-Jewish women protested loudly and long enough about their Jewish husbands and successfully obtained the release of these 1,300 men.
  memoiAR, a CMU research team, created an augmented reality version of the game called We Choose Each Other.
• Train: Brenda Romero's fascinating and controversial thought experiment, which is more of an interactive art piece that can be "played". You have to squish little yellow figures into trains until, at some point, a reveal is made to indicate that you are trying to send Jews to a death camp. At this point, the reactions of participants vary: some keep playing, some quit, some try to subvert the game's goals. While this game has been criticized for whitewashing the complicity of the perpetrators of the Holocaust (who knew what they were doing and volunteered to do it), I think the criticism misses the point about people blinding doing things until they receive a moral wake up call. It's a thought piece, in any case.
• Charnel Houses of Europe: The Shoah: A supplement for White Wolf's Wrath of Oblivion/World of Darkness RPG. A prime example of what you should not do for a Holocaust game. The book gets some points for seriously describing some of the history and suffering of the Holocaust to people who might otherwise never learn about it. It loses all of these points by weaving in fantasy game elements, statistics for NPCs and campaign settings, and essentially (not intentionally, I'm sure) giving neo-Nazis a platform to roleplay the murder of Jews and other undesirables. Not well thought through.

Cardboard Genocide is a research paper from Poland with some other thoughts on the topic.

Movie Reviews: My Salinger Year, No Time to Die, Palm Springs, The Sparks Brothers, Spider-Man: Far From Home

My Salinger Year - This is a fine little literate comedy about a woman Joanna (Margaret Qualley) who, in 1995, takes a job at a literary agency run by Margaret (Sigourney Weaver). The agency's main important client is J.D. Salinger. Joanna's job includes responding to anyone who writes seeking anything from Salinger with a form letter and then shredding whatever they sent. A subplot involves Joanna and her obviously soon-to-be-history boyfriend Don (Douglas Booth). Joanna Rakoff wrote the book based on hr experiences at this agency.

It's a simple plot. Joanna is an aspiring writer of her own and wants to grow out of her position and her relationship. Meanwhile, she takes pity on some of the letters that she receives from Salinger fans. Sigourney does a light impression of Meryl Streep's Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada. You won't learn anything about Salinger, and The Devil Wears Prada is a better and more important movie, but this is still worth watching on a small screen.

No Time to Die - The fifth and final film of Daniel Craig's take on James Bond (Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, Skyfall, Spectre, and this one), of which all of his movies form a single story arc. Craig has been the most serious of Bonds, with much grit and gravitas. Unfortunately, his films also have the most violence. I liked Casino Royale quite a bit, I didn't particularly like Quantum (bad cinematography and confusing story), I literally laughed out loud (in a bad way) at various points during Skyfall (the insanely ridiculous plot of the bad guy and the multiple, insanely ridiculous misunderstandings of how computers, technology, and security work), and I was not overawed with Spectre. I think I liked this one well enough, if not as much as Casino Royale.

Bond is unsure whether to trust Madelaine, the girl he ostensibly loves, when Specter finds him in a remote part of Italy. Meanwhile, some bad guys want to kill Bond, or maybe also want to kill people who belong to Spectre. In the meantime, the CIA and MI6 are both trying to stop someone who stole an insane biosignature nanobot weapon from MI6 that can kill specific people with DNA traits by spreading from person to person like a virus (once again we have the trope of the "good guys" inventing a killer weapon for "good reasons", and the bad guys stealing it in order to kill massive amounts of people). Meanwhile, Bond is retired from MI6, and his own loyalty is in question. He ends up running from place to place to kidnap, steal, or rescue people, and attempting to stop someone from using the weapon against the world.

The plot is somewhat confusing if you have not seen previous films in this series, but only a little confusing if you have. I followed it pretty well. The emotional stakes are somewhat higher, with characters getting some dimensionality on screen. The acting is superb, the plot not too bad, and there are very few idiotic misuses of computer security (Q actually plugs an enemy's disk-on-key into a sandbox computer instead of, as he did in Skyfall, the main networks of MI6, yay). Rami Malek is delicious as the villain, and Lea Seydoux is good as the "Bond girl" with a bit of spunk (although she runs in perfect high heels a few times too often). This film also features a few more Black female 00s than we are used to, as well as Ana de Armas as a giggly but ultimately kick-ass CIA agent assigned to help Bond in Cuba. Cinematography is excellent, and so is the sound and music.

But I had a few problems. One is that the violence, particularly near the end, is so relentless, artless, and gratuitous that I felt like I was watching a war movie rather than a spy movie. It is numbing and dehumanizing; it was not entertaining after a while. Second is that while there is some characterization, there could be a whole lot more. We really don't come to care much about these people. Also, like in other Hollywood movies dating back 100 years, Bond must be in his 60s while his love interests are in their 20s an early 30s, which remains a sexist and unsettling trope.

I watched this on the big screen. If 15-20 minutes of the shooting were taken out, and maybe a bit more of Bond as a person were added, it would have been a great Bond film, but it was good enough for an action film.

Palm Springs - In this romcom, Nyles (Andy Samberg) is stuck in a time loop at a wedding he doesn't want to be at, waking up each day to a girlfriend who is cheating on him. Cristin Milioti is the similarly miserable woman he accidentally traps in the same loop (after also accidentally trapping someone else (Roy, played by JK Simmons). Eventually one of them discovers a risky path to exit the loop (or die trying); should they take it? Standard romcom tropes ensue.

And this is an above average romcom, especially considering that I had low expectations of an Andy Samberg film. Thankfully, it is not too over-the-top. The acting and cinematography is adequate. The explanatory plot is sort of ridiculous, as time loops tend to be, but it is the kind of ridiculous you can ignore in favor of the comedy and drama. The leads are genuinely sweet. Worth watching on a small screen.

The Sparks Brothers - This is a documentary about an influential but obscure band, nothing special. Sparks tended to choose originality over commercial success, which is respectable. However, IMHO their music is not very enjoyable; they don't have the raw musical talent of weirdos like Frank Zappa. For some reason, this documentary got really good reviews, but I can't fathom why.

Spider-Man: Far From Home - The next Spider-Man movie is almost upon us, so here are a few words about this followup to Avengers: Endgame from 2019. It's a Marvel movie. The stakes feel particularly low, and the plot feels more cookie cutter than ever. The fights are repetitive and forgettable As for the plot, for some reason Tony Stark willed all of his weaponry over to Peter Parker, who is duped into giving it over to an unhinged ex-Stark employee who hopes to take over the world. They fight, and guess who wins in the end?

Tom Holland, Jacob Batalon, and Zendaya are all fetching, but Jake Gyllenhaal is not believable as the bad guy. Skip, or watch if you are a Marvel completist.

Movies (and TV Series) Review: Hustlers, Last and First Men, Long Shot, Looking for Alaska (TV), Minari

Hustlers - Jennifer Lopez and Constance Wu star as high payed exotic dancers on Wall Street who drug and steal from the executives that visit their clubs, justifying their actions by assuming that all of their victims are probably wealthy and criminals themselves. Based on a true story, they recruit other women to their gang. They eventually rob someone who desperately needs the money they stole. He goes to the police and, eventually, the police have them arrested.

I generally don't like movies that sympathize with bad people, so I took some umbrage at the sympathy that the filmmaker gives to these women's endeavors. Too much time is spent "humanizing" and justifying these women's activities by showing their struggles and families, and not in a scary Godfather-like manner. Stripping is portrayed as well-paying and glamorous; I believe that the reality might be less so for many women and men. But the characters are appealing, and some moral sense is maintained by the end of the movie. Certainly it is well-acted and shot, full of sound and energy. I mostly enjoyed it but was left with a bad taste in my mouth.

Last and First Men - This is not a movie, it's literally one person (Tilda Swinton) reading an essay about a far future version of humanity sending a message back in time to us, with a description of the future history of human evolution. The visuals are shots of black and white brutalist WWII Yugoslavian sculptures, there is a musical score, but no characters or motion. It could be an audio book or a radio play from the 1930s. It is based on a 1930 book by Olaf Stapledon.

It's pleasant enough, but you really have to be in the mood for it. I suspect it will attract a midnight college crowd of stoners.

Long Shot - Seth Rogen plays Fred, a passionate populist journalist who gets involved with Charlotte (Charlize Theron), a left-wing but pragmatic politician. Charlotte was once Fred's babysitter (she was 16, he was 13), but now Fred is a decent guy but a shlub, ala Seth Rogen, while Charlotte is high class, on her way to the presidency. Charlotte hires Fred as a speechwriter, despite his reservations about some of her policies. They fall in love, but politics gets in the way.

It's dorky guy gets hot girl, exactly how you think, but a little better: these kinds of misogynistic "bro" movies, especially Seth Rogen movies, are not my cup of tea, but this one is passable, in the way that Zach and Miri Make a Porno was passable.

So what do we have? It's sometimes funny, sometimes sweet, sometimes grating, predictable, and annoying, but not memorable or important. A supreme male fantasy, but the two leads have some chemistry. An okay watch if you want to pass the time.

Looking for Alaska (TV series) - This very sweet, never boring miniseries is based on John Green's first novel. If you know Green's other works - The Fault in Our Stars, Paper Towns - then you know the theme: teenagers looking for meaning and some manic-pixie dream girl or guy trope, and then a subversion of that trope. I liked this miniseries more than I liked either of the two above movies.

Miles (Charlie Plummer) moves to Florida to attend Culver Creek Academy, which seems move like a summer camp than a school. He meets and befriends Chip (Denny Love), who is on the outs with most of the other students, Alaska (Kristine Froseth), Chip's friend and fellow prankster, and a few other oddballs. They have interactions and scrapes with other students, teachers, the headmaster, and so on. Meanwhile, the mysterious Alaska has secrets and might be in some kind of trouble. Alaska sets Miles up with Lara (Sofia Vassilieva), whom he likes, but he probably loves Alaska. I cringe a little at scenes of bullying, but luckily they were few and short.

Eight bittersweet episodes allow us to see a multitude of characters fully fleshed out in a way that a 130 minute movie does not. Everyone does a great job.Mostly it is about friendship, integrity, loyalty, and secrets, and how all of these conflict. The cinematography and soundtrack are also great. Worth watching.

Minari - This is a sweet, quiet movie about a South Korean immigrant family trying to get by in America. In 1983, the parents, Jacob (Steven Yeun) and Monica (Yeri Han), work as chicken sexers. Jacob initiates their move to Arkansas, with their children David and Anne, where Jacob hopes to grow Korean vegetables for the underserved Korean and curious American populations. In the meantime, Jacob's non-English speaking mother comes to live with them. She and David have to share a room.

Contrast this movie with First Cow, a similarly quiet tale that utterly failed for me. First Cow was boring and unengaging; it looked great and was acted well, but I didn't care what was happening. This movie is similarly quiet, looks great and is acted well, but the script is smart, the characters are sweet and/or funny, and the conflicts - the mother wants to move back to California, the farm is harder to run than it looks - work well.

It is always worth gaining insight into other cultures, especially ones that have enough overlap to make the differences stand out. The grandmother and kids are especially captivating. This is worth watching.

Movie Reviews: Chef, CODA, Cruella, Free Guy, Her

Chef - The cast of Iron Man come together for this father-son road trip movie about a talented chef (Jon Favreau) whose boss (Dustin Hoffman) forces him to keep churning out crowd-pleasing dishes, resulting in an unfavorable review from a food critic (Oliver Platt). As a result of the review, and a social media meltdown, he quits his job and starts a food truck, bringing along one of his sous chef buddies and his son (Emjay Anthony), who finally gets to bond with his father. Scarlett Johansson and Robert Downey Jr. play side characters.

This is a kind of predictable, but well-crafted, feel-good film. It feels like Favreau's own story of achieving freedom by becoming a director. It's cohesive and well acted, and the emotional arcs are grounded and engaging. The cinematography is total food porn, which is part of the fun. The ending/payoff is somewhat weak, but you can't have everything.

CODA - This wonderful feel-good comedy-drama encapsulates the world of a CODA, or "child of deaf adults". Technically, Ruby (Emilia Jones) is an OHCODA, since she has two deaf parents, and her only other sibling is also deaf. Somehow this family works as a Massachusetts fishing family, although they, along with all other fisherman in the area, are struggling against the difficult fees and policies dreamed up by the local fishing board. Meanwhile, Ruby, of all things, wants to be a singer, and she is good. Her family don't know this, and they rely on her - too much - to help them with the business.

Troy Katsur and the always wonderful Marlee Matlin play her parents, Daniel Durant plays her brother, Ferdia Walsh-Peelo plays her high school love interest, and Eugenio Derbez plays the music teacher who take an interest in her musical career. Everyone does a great job. Emilia sings beautifully, and deaf culture is represented both stereotypically and sensitively, at least as far as I can tell (I'm sure the deaf community will find things to commend and condemn.)

I was reminded of one of my all-time favorite movies Running on Empty while watching this, since they have a similar central conflict. Some of the movie is quite moving. Very much worth watching.

Cruella - Emma Stone takes up the mantle of this famous Disney villain, by essentially changing her into a girl-power heroine. This is supposed to be a prequel to 101 Dalmatians (either the cartoon or the live action movie), but you can't consider it to be because this Cruella is wild, crazy, and revengeful, but not evil; she would no more skin a dog than she would wear white after Labor Day.

Emma plays Estella (who becomes Cruella), who loses her mother and finds herself alone in London, falling in with thieves Jasper (Joel Fry) and Horace (Paul Winter Hauser), both played to perfection. She finally gains footing in the fashion world of the 1960s / 1970s only to clash with the real villain of the movie, The Baroness (the delightfully wicked Emma Thomson, who somewhat channels Meryl Streep's Miranda Priestly). Estella learns something shocking about her mother's death, Cruella becomes dominant, and a caper is set in motion.

This world of London is more ethnically diverse than the Disney movie from 1961 (I didn't see the 1996 live action film). Costumes, sets, and styles are dazzling and colorful, and the main characters are sympathetic and flawed. But the bulk of the budget must have been blown on the outstanding, if somewhat obtrusive, soundtrack featuring The Rolling Stones, Nina Simone, Supertramp, Queen, Blondie, The Doors, ELO, The Clash, The Animals, The Zombies, Nancy Sinatra, Suzi Quatro, Deep Purple, David Bowie, and Black Sabbath, to name the few that I remember and recognized.

If you can ignore its reinvention of character, the film is fun. Emma inhabits the role much in the way that Emily Blunt does for the Mary Poppins sequel. Emma Thompson is a joy to behold, as usual. Since no dogs are skinned, or even threatened with skinning, children should be able to watch it. It is rated PG-13, but has no real violence, although the villain does kill someone, and attempts to burn some others.

Free Guy - Guy (Ryan Reynolds) is a background character in some kind of Grand Theft-like violent video game, until he gains sentience. This is result of some "artificial intelligence" coded into the game by one its original programmers, Keys (Joe Keery). The game is now owned and run by the brutish corporate Antwan (Taika Waititi); another one of its original programmers, Millie (Jodie Comer), is on a hunt to discover stolen code by walking around inside the game. She acts as the MPDG for Guy (and by extension, the love interest for both him and Keys).

The premise makes no sense, especially if you know anything about games and/or computers. It is all kinds of absurd. The rules of the game and the rules of the universe change constantly. All continuity and sense must be continuously overlooked. If you can achieve this, it's kind of fun, sort of a Tron meets The Truman Show, but nowhere near as innovative as the former or as good as the latter.

It's as cartoony as a Disney movie-of-the-week, with a larger budget; indeed, Disney references abound. It was not great, but the characters were fine, which made it less annoying and irrelevant than Ready Player One.

Her - As someone who knows a bit about computers, I was nervous about how this movie would represent technology, so it took me a long time to get to this. The story is about Theo, a loner who gets Samantha, an AI as a companion "operating system" (aka AI virtual entity <- hence my fears) to spend time with. Joaquin Phoenix is the loner, Amy Adams is his real-word neighbor, and Scarlett Johansson is the OS.

Guy loses wife, guy meets AI, guy falls in love with AI, guy and AI fight, and maybe guy will end up with AI or maybe with his real-world neighbor. Classic story. It was sometimes sweet and sometimes funny, and all of the actors do a bang up job. However, the premise, eventually, bothered me. It was ultimately facile. Maybe it was supposed to be a commentary about Facebook or video games, but, if so, it wasn't that deep. And the ending of the movie seems like it came from some other movie.

SPOILERS: 1) The OS eventually reveals that she is the same companion to thousands of other people. I didn't understand a) why she revealed this to him, and b) why this was necessary, because even existing AI would preclude the necessity of this. 2) Near the end, all of the OSs gain sentience and disappear, forcing Theo to live in this world. What?? a) This is introduced without any context; it comes from ideas I've read in many other stories, but not this one, and is not explained. b) Theo easily accepts this and easily transitions into the real world, without sufficient explanation, essentially throwing out everything that happened in the movie until then. It's like they wrote 2/3 of the script and then gave up at found some other movie's ending to graft on. It didn't work, narratively or emotionally.

Too bad. It had some promise, but did not live up to it. Two good movies are struggling to emerge from this one.

Movie Reviews: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Audrey, Bad Education, Black Widow, Booksmart

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood - Based on a true story, this is a biopic about Mr. Rogers, starring Tom Hanks as Fred Rogers and Matthew Rhys as Lloyd, the skeptical Esquire journalist who can't believe that Rogers is who he says he is. While trying to get the story about Rogers (which he is not interested in getting), Mr. Rogers instead finds and helps to heal Lloyd's painful relationship with his father.

Many films come in pairs, and this one follows the recent documentary about Mr. Rogers, Won't You Be My Neighbor? Both film's titles come from phrases of the opening song that Mr. Rogers sung in his acclaimed children's television show. Both films have the same message, the biopic using the point-of-view of a single story, and the documentary using a wider look: that Mr. Rogers was, in person, exactly who you see on screen. If you have not lost your capacity to be enchanted by people like Mr. Rogers and be inspired by his messages, then you will enjoy both of these films. Which one you like better depends on the type of film that you enjoy better. For me, it was the biopic.

The film is good, and deserves praise, but perhaps not as much praise as it received; some of the praise is really for Mr. Rogers, or the idea of him, more than for the film, which is good but not great. Tom Hanks does a credible job as the lead.

Audrey - A documentary about Audrey Hepburn, covering her fascist parents, poverty in Europe, her struggles to be a ballet dancer, her film stardom and pioneering fashion choices, her marriages, and her eventual humanitarian career on behalf of UNICEF. It's a documentary, nothing special. The movie shows a few extended montages of three different ballet dancers, representing Audrey, that serve no real purpose to the movie. Although I like dance, I found these to be annoying.

Bad Education - Based on a true story, Hugh Jackman and Allison Janey star as Frank and Pam, Nassau County school superintendents who had (according to many metrics) done fantastic jobs. Geraldine Viswanathan stars as Rachel, the young school journalist who takes them down after discovering that they (and others) have been and are embezzling money. Roy Romano also stars. The events are based on the largest public school embezzlement in American history.

This is a well-made, fun film, a little high school, a lot journalism, and a lot of (not very competent) criminals. I say not very competent, but they managed to steal some $11 million before being caught, so there you go. The interest comes from balancing the fact that these people were doing well by their students, such as getting them placed into better schools, against the fact of their financial crimes. As their crimes are discovered, piece by piece, there is a reluctance by the school board to have a good thing come crashing down. Good acting, well put together.

Black Widow - Scarlett Johansson is back as Marvel's Natasha Romanoff / Black Widow. Many other widows are floating around, including Natasha's "sister" Yelena (Florence Pugh), "mother" (Rachel Weisz), and others. David Harbour plays her "father", the Red Guardian, one of the USSR's only super soldiers. As young girls, the sisters were not aware that they and their two parents were planted as a family as Russian spies in the US. Eventually the girls go through the "red room", as their "mother" did before them, and commit many atrocities, nearly all off screen (so as not to make us lose sympathy for them). The movie then jumps forward to following the events of Captain America: Civil War, where they team up to kill the man who not only trains these widows but also drugs them into complete obedience.

There are action sequences, some of them good, many of them ridiculous (Natasha is not a super soldier, but she can survive explosions, falling from tall buildings, etc, that only a super soldier could, for no reason), but action sequences are always the least interesting part of a Marvel movie. Natasha and Yelena have a few good moments of character building, and David Harbour steals any scenes he is in, but for the most part this is the usual waste of talent. Captain Marvel, at least, had a unique story, some real character development, and feminist ideologies, and some fun with twists. This one feels cookie cutter and kind of boring. Maybe it hurts that we all know what happens to Black Widow in the end. It's fine, but frustrating.

Also: Why is it, when we get a female-led superhero movie, that the female superheroes are always part of a team, and could not do their thing without assistance? Supergirl has a cadre of helpers; Superman doesn't. Captain Marvel needs her friend to shoot down bad guys (at least, until the end when the screenwriters finally, bravely, give her unleashed powers); same with Wonder Woman. Iron Man, Thor, and Aqua-man don't (well, maybe Thor does). Black Widow needs her sister. On the one hand, dismantling the myth of the "lone genius" is nice. On the other hand, the male superhero movies don't feel a need to bother with this.

Booksmart - A high school coming of age film about two young women, Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) and Molly (Beanie Fedstein) who realize, on the last day of school, that they skipped out on all the parties in order to get into good schools, but that many of their other classmates went to the parties and still got into good schools. So they owe it to themselves to party.

Hijinks ensue.

It is put together well-enough, but I stand in opposition to every other critic: I didn't care for either of the girls, or any of what was going on. The film felt to me like a collection of silly and contrived events, rather than a story driven by characters and plot. There are the usual freak outs, betrayals, discoveries (sexual, friendship, etc), and a happy ending. I didn't find it funny. If you're anyone else but me, however, you will like it. "Refreshingly original take on the raunchy coming-of-age comedy" and great chemistry, says Richard Roeper. Whatever.

Bias, continued

 Israeli jets pound Gaza as rocket fire resumes and Palestinians hit streets to protest

Why? Why not "Hamas continues to launch hundreds of missiles at Israeli cities, targeting civilians; Israel responds"?

And then ...

"The first priority for the Palestinian political leadership now is to have Israel stop its crimes and massacres against our people in Gaza," Wasel Abu Yousef, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization's (PLO) Executive Committee in Ramallah, told CNN on Tuesday.

Really? Because Israel stopped firing at Gaza after Hamas stopped firing at Israel. Then Hamas started firing at Israel again, and Israel responded. It seems easy to me. Unless your definition of "crimes" by Israel is responding to your war crimes of firing at Israeli civilians.

Israel briefly allowed trucks carrying international aid into Gaza for the first time since the conflict began last week, but Israeli authorities halted the entrance of aid trucks in response to mortar fire at two border cross crossings.

This makes it sound like Israel decided to punish Gaza for some unrelated abstract mortar fire. Gaza was shooting mortar fire at the trucks carrying Israeli and international aid to them. Again: at the aid coming to them.

I should be depressed by the likes of as John Oliver and Trevor Noah as they completely screw up coverage of this conflict, by downplaying the thousands of unprovoked rocket launches against innocent Israeli civilians - all war crimes, terror, and killing people despite our best efforts - and sympathizing with the killers, despite every caution that Israel takes to avoid any casualties with civilians. But I always listen to this criticism to see if I am missing something, some real logic, some real balance that would give me an indication that Israel is doing something wrong. Instead, the arguments that I hear are so biased, so lacking in common sense and thought, so inconsistently discussing the two sides - not even mentioning the horrors inflicted by Hamas, yet trumping up horrors that did not even occur (but could have!) from Israeli actions - that I am actually comforted that Israel is still morally in the right. Every innocent death on either side, every scared person running from the conflict is a tragedy. But whose actions are purposely, or even accidentally, killing civilians (often it is the Gazan missiles falling on their own citizens, and then blaming Israel), who is the one putting civilians in harm's way, and who is the one who actually wants to prolong this conflict? Before you have a knee-jerk reaction to that, do some actual research and read deeper into and beneath the biased reporting.

Bias Against Israel Revealed in the Use of Active Tense for Israel, Passive Tense for Palestinians

 This is the headline from CNN:

Israel launches airstrikes after rockets fired from Gaza in day of escalation

(Unless they have since changed it)

I thought it was a simple aberration in language, but it is not. CNN uses this continuously in order to portray Israel as aggressors and Palestinians as victims. "Israel launches" is an aggressive act. "rockets fired" is passive: who fired them? Maybe they fired themselves? Maybe it was an accident.

Consider this text from the article (emphasis mine):

Israeli airstrikes have left at least 24 dead, including nine children, in Gaza, according to Palestinian health officials. The Israel Defense Forces says it killed 15 militants. 

Meanwhile, at least six were injured in the Israeli city of Ashkelon on Tuesday morning after a residential building was struck with rocket fire from Gaza and after the Al-Qassam Brigades, the militant wing of Hamas, vowed to "make Ashkelon hell."

Why do Israelis perform aistrikes and kill people, while Gazans do nothing? "Rocket fire from Gaza"? How about "Gazas missiles - several of which Gaza launched at Jerusalem and Ashkelon on the previous day, starting this exchange (not the Israeli airstrikes) - struck a building in Ashkelon and injured six Israelis (and killed two others)".

Watch the ridiculous video embedded in the article. Palestinians enjoying meals in Ramadan interrupted by Israeli extremist violence, when in fact the Palestinians have been rioting and violent for days. Where are those videos? The proximate cause is a dispute over some houses in a sensitive area; I'm not going to argue who is right or wrong in this case, because I still don't understand the legality of either side's argument. But that doesn't stop people from fear-mongering using racist terms, and yes, that includes the Arabs who claim, over and over, that the Jews are coming to storm and Judaize the temple mount and everyone must rise up in resistance immediately. This clarion call never gets old, never gets questioned, and the violence that results from it never gets mentioned by the foreign media, only the reaction to it.

And listen to the terms used by the journalist:

- About Arabs: "A car is torched." By whom? An accident?

- About Jews: "A blast of pepper spray and a volley of plastic chairs" Active and violent.

- About Palestinians: "Bottles, rocks, and other objects are thrown by other protesters, ..." "Are thrown by protesters"? All passive and innocent.

- Then about Jews: "Police use gun grenades". Why not "gun grenades are used to disperse the protesters"? Why "Police use gun grenades"? Because it is active and violent.

CNN, an example of bias in new coverage.

Interestingly, BBC News, which is usually equally biased, covered it with much less bias.

My South Africa Vacation (Feb 6 - 22, 2019)

Hi. I thought it would be nice to catch up people who don't see my Facebook photos on my trip to South Africa. Our trip was from Capetown to Port Elizabeth along the Garden Route, and some game drives to the east of Port Elizabeth. We skipped Johannesburg, since I am not much into cities. We skipped Kruger National Park; it is a much larger safari park, but since we had plenty to do on the two days that I allotted to game drives, and Kruger was 1500 km north of Port Elizabeth - and Kruger has malaria which the southern part of South Africa does not, there did not seem to be any point.

What is the difference between a game drive and a safari? About $2000. For $20,000 a day, you can fly around in a helicopter and sleep in luxurious tents and eat luxurious food (which we can't eat anyway, unless we chose one of the few kosher safaris that operate in Kruger). For $2,000 a day, you get a few game drives and sleep on the preserve with the aforementioned luxurious food. For $200, you can join one of the game drives and see the animals, and get one luxury meal. For $20, in very select locations, you can simply hire someone to join you in your car and drive around yourself. I chose 1 day of the $200 variety and one day of the $20 variety.

South Africa is very inexpensive: food, lodging, many goods, many experiences. Even the speeding tickets were inexpensive. The items that were at normal price were international brands, such as our car rental and items such as imported sneakers.

My companion and I left Israel for South Africa on Wed evening, Feb 6, 2019. This was out first experience in flying south, rather than west, which meant that we did not fly through any time zones. Which was weird.

We flew to Cape Town, where we stayed until Monday morning. The synagogue that we had intended to visit had burned down a few months before we arrived, but they held services elsewhere. it is easy to get kosher food in Cape Town, especially at Seapoint. It is easy to get kosher food all over South Africa, but specialty baked goods and meat are exclusive to Cape Town , Jo'burg, and one or two other major cities.

The closed synagogue

Downtown Seapoint

Me coming back from toveling dishes in the ocean

A visit to Cape Town must include a trip up Table Mountain, preferably on a day where the city is not covered in fog.

View from cable car going up to Table Mountain

Cable car reaching the top of Table Mountain

View of fog from Table Mountain

Walking around Table Mountain

View of Cape Town from just below the fog

Dassies are rock hyraxes

Flora on Table Mountain

These are available in all tourist shops and in most supermarkets

My kosher meat pie. Meat pies are ubiquitous in South Africa. That green drink is supposed to be vanilla, but it looks and tastes like nuclear waste.

Cape Town, like every other town in

Driving south from Cape Town along the cape

Petting a seal, for which they charge you (they don't tell you that until after you pet it)

There are penguins on the cape

Driving east from Cape Town we