avengers23 - 27/50 books | 39/50 movies
Books
25.
The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, by David Grann
A very entertaining and even occasionally enlightening collection of narrative essays by the author of
The Lost City of Z,
The Devil and Sherlock Holmes continues Grann's focus on individuals who are almost consumed by their obsessions. Most of these essays were originally published in the
New Yorker, and they display an almost melancholy or mournful style. Grann balances his unflinching eye for detail with a sense of compassion for his subjects; the words are precise, the style is selfless, and Grann leaves plenty of room for the reader to draw his or her own conclusions. Highly recommended.
26.
Gods of Risk, by James S.A. Corey
27.
The Churn, by James S.A. Corey
I hadn't intended to revisit the Expanse series so soon after finishing "The Butcher of Anderson Station" and
Caliban's War, but I needed something short to read while I waited for books I had requested to arrive at my public library, so these novellas set in the Expanse universe seemed like easy targets.
The novellas seemed promising, since they focused on characters other than James Holden, whom I had described as the least interesting character in the Expanse series. "Gods of Risk" gives us a glimpse of Bobbie Draper after the events of
Caliban's War, while "The Churn" provides an origin story to Amos Burton.
"Gods of Risk" is the better of the two; it gives us a taste of what life on Mars is like. However, it shares a problem with "The Churn" in how lifeless the depictions of low-level, everyday crime are in the Expanse series. "The Churn," by setting its story in Baltimore, consciously or not draws unflattering comparisons to
The Wire and Laura Lippman's works. As antagonists, the criminals barely have one dimension, which translates to almost no dramatic tension. We simply don't know enough about the antagonists to care about the two protagonists' respective troubles.
As in the other stories in the Expanse series, the most interesting aspects are about the cultures of the world around the characters. The Martian education system funnels students into developments based on their skills and performance; it reminded me of the Hong Kong education system. Baltimore doesn't make an economic recovery; it's a walled off city dominated by criminal syndicates, little fiefdoms that create an underground ecosystem and that get periodically wiped out and reset when government officials want to seem like they care. But that's the tragedy of the setting; why do the government officials care? Why do they hire private military companies like Star Helix to suppress these little criminal empires? We never get an answer; I don't think the authors care about the question.
Movies
37.
The84Draft
This was a little disappointing. The Oscar Schmidt section was revelatory, and the story of Dan Trant was the most human segment of the documentary. But a lot of it seemed cobbled together from existing material, and there didn't seem to be much new information or insight in the documentary. It also seemed to feature the same three talking heads (Michael Wilbon, Jackie McCallum, Bill Simmons); given the diversity of backgrounds and teams where the stars from that draft made their mark, some more voices would have been helpful.
I wanted something more recent from Sam Bowie. Maybe a segment with Bill Walton to drive the similarity home? Maybe something from Jordan about Bowie, if he's ever said anything publicly. Maybe catching a fan who booed the John Stockton selection 30 years later about Stockton's legacy (as one of the secretly dirtiest players in the game, but that's not here or there). And since NBA TV already did a documentary about the Dream Team,
It felt like a primer, and as someone who would seek this documentary out, it didn't give me enough that was new.
38.
Silly Little Game
I finally watched Silly Little Game, which was one of the documentaries from ESPN's 30 for 30's first run that I had missed. As a fantasy baseball player, this taught me something that I hadn't known and drew a connection through Daniel Okrent, one of the founders of the original Rotisserie Baseball league, who authored a book about Prohibition and was a featured (and possibly my favorite) commentator on Ken Burns's documentary about Prohibition.
Since no archival footage really exists of the beginning of Rotisserie Baseball, directors Lucas Jansen and Adam Kurland staged dramatic, almost absurd re-enactments of the meetings and negotiations that made up Rotisserie Baseball's history. These scenes worked because they were funny, and they fit the dumb (in the most affectionate way) and obsessive way we treat fantasy sports. It helped that Okrent, Lee Eisenberg, and others are self-aware, funny, and entertaining figures who have no delusions about their significance; they helped popularize what would become fantasy sports based on their personalities, but it took infrastructure (specifically, the Internet and commodification of computers) to make fantasy sports the $3 billion industry it is today. It's not an essential 30 for 30 documentary like
The U, Winning Time: Reggie Miller vs. The New York Knicks, No Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson, or
June 17, 1994, but it's worth seeking out and was definitely entertaining.
39.
Edge of Tomorrow
As I watched the wonderfully punctuated sequence of Tom Cruise's William Cage die and wake up to Tony Todd call him a maggot upon his rebirth, I was struck with the tactile memory of hitting the "accept" button in disgust every time I died in any video game. "
You Died," said the
Dark Souls death screen. "
Your ship has been destroyed, and all hands were lost," stated the
FTL game over screen, though not in so many words.
Spelunky even keeps track of how many times I've died in the pursuit of finishing the game; I'm up to 1163 deaths. Each time in each game, I have a choice: keep going, or turn the game off and move on to something, anything else. Each time in each game, I can feel the game think a little less of me for dying. "How could you forget to watch your footing and fall off that cliff," asked
Dark Souls. "How could you neglect to monitor your ship's oxygen levels," probed
FTL. "How could you think that you would make that jump," asked
Spelunky. (
Spelunky takes this indignity to the next level by showing my avatar's dead body in an inset. If there are still enemies alive, they'll keep attacking my avatar's corpse until I tell the game to move on.)
Cruise plays banality and venality perfectly; it combines the glee of seeing Tom Cruise die on screen (much like how people appreciated seeing Paris Hilton die on screen in
House of Wax) as he gets his comeuppance with the martial incompetence that he shows at the start of the film. It's an easy trick to get the viewer invested into William Cage's quest; the film has to because that tension won't come from the largely blank robot alien antagonists.
The film wouldn't work without Emily Blunt's Rita Vrataski. As we saw with
Oblivion, playing the woman opposite Cruise is fairly thankless. Unlike any of the female characters in
Oblivion, Blunt's Vrataski exudes power and agency. At her best, Vrataski is Cage's superior: higher rank, more combat experience, more combat skill, more knowledge about the plot device that lets Cage relive this day. She decides whether Cage lives or dies throughout the film. She is Joan of Arc in a combat exoskeleton, and she is unflinching when it comes to her commitment to the mission. The film's only misstep is the popular nickname assigned to her; though she punches someone who tries to call her "Full Metal Bitch," as the graffiti on bus posters of Vrataski have named her, that seems to be the popularly accepted nickname for Vrataski. At one point, a soldier calls her "The Angel of Verdun" with reverence, as if that's the film's counterpoint to showing us those bus posters over and over, but it doesn't work.
This was a confidently directed, energetic film. Director Doug Liman knows how to create a rhythm around the repetition of Cage's deaths and rebirths, Cage's impatience as he relives the day, his frustration with his inability to break through the cycle. It's not a deep film, and I wish the film hadn't given us the happy ending that the creators thought we needed, but it's an entertaining one.
