Isle Bet

Last night, I caught up with the most recent film from Wes Anderson, the animated Isle of Dogs. In an alternate version of Japan where all dogs have been exiled to a Trash Island for fear of disease, a young boy goes after his beloved four-legged friend by venturing into the forbidden zone. Anderson-ness ensues.

If you've ever seen a Wes Anderson movie, then you know what I mean by that last part. Very few filmmakers working today have as highly stylized a signature as this director -- in all the good and bad ways you can take that. On the good side, you're going to get something you couldn't get anywhere else when you watch a Wes Anderson film. It's going to be supremely artistic, with each image methodically composed as a feast for the eyes. On the other hand, style will routinely swamp substance. And you won't feel that you've "never seen anything like it before"; you did, the last time you watched a Wes Anderson movie.

I find it particularly hard to decide just what I think of Isle of Dogs. Animation does actually seem like the perfect medium for Wes Anderson -- particularly this style, as developed previously for Fantastic Mr. Fox. You can actually see how it's "fussed over," with individual hairs moving between frames of the stop motion photography. Huge landscapes are created for outrageously wide shots, filled with details you'd have to freeze frame to ever notice. Equally extreme close-ups allow you to scrutinize every last detail of the figures created for the animation. It really is gorgeous.

Still, it can also be so damn "look at me, I'm quirky!" at times. And not always in service of the story. Not incidentally, this movie does actually have an intriguing story. I'd go back and forth between thinking Wes Anderson was the perfect person to tell it and pining for the more conventional version of the same tale.

The central conceit really shines as an Anderson film. We hear dogs speak English, while all the Japanese characters speak their native language (which is not subtitled much of the time). It makes for easy access to the dogs as characters, making their matter-of-fact behavior particularly funny in contrast to the strange inscrutability of the human characters.

On the other hand, the conceit is often used as a substitute for anything approaching actual character development in the film. The main dog, Chief, goes through a totally unmotivated transformation just because three-act structure demands it. Other dogs get running jokes that pass for character traits. (Not that it isn't funny every time Duke says he's "heard a rumor," but that is literally the extent of his personality.) The movie trades on the deep bench of Wes Anderson's recurring group of actors to generate attachment.

It is, as ever, a great cast, used here in a sort of meta typecasting. Edward Norton is direct and all business. Bill Murray is lazy and laconic. Jeff Goldblum is hyper and operating at a different energy from the rest. Scarlett Johansson is the one female of any consequence in a male-dominated cast. Tilda Swinton flits briefly in and out in a bizarre contrasting role. They're all doing "the thing they're known to do in all their movies." Bryan Cranston is a newcomer to the Anderson fold, but he's humorously trading on his image to some extent too. His character is a sort of Walter White in reverse -- all prickly menace and anger, softening throughout the story.

I did waffle back and forth between finding the movie endearing and just plain weird, but I'd say it was in at least a two-to-one ratio in favor of being won over. I couldn't help but think the movie was getting in its own way some of the time, but most of the time it felt like exactly what it needed to be. I was certainly entertained. I'd grade it a tenuous B+. If you liked Fantastic Mr. Fox, this is even better. If you're not so sure on Wes Anderson, you might want to steer clear -- though I do think this is one of his best that I've seen.

DS9 Flashback: Whispers

Sometimes, when a story pulls off a really good twist, an audience is rewarded by going back to experience the tale again. The new context can make for a different, yet equally rewarding experience. This isn't always the case, though, as with the Deep Space Nine episode "Whispers."

O'Brien is fleeing in a runabout, reflecting on the circumstances that led him there. The last few days have been a slow descent into paranoia for him, with everyone aboard the station behaving oddly. Though he worries it has something to do with pending peace talks being prepared with an alien race, he can't explain how the change has come over every single person he knows -- even his own wife and daughter.

I remembered this episode of Deep Space Nine more clearly than most from the second season, because I remember it being one of the truly great episodes of the season -- a sign of the improvements to come in the series. I remember effective suspense. and a great twist I don't think anyone could have seen coming. Of course, I also specifically remembered that twist as I now watched the episode again, and that made all the difference.

I generally write these Star Trek reviews without regard to spoilers. The series are decades old, and I assume the readers who hang in with these longer-than-usual posts have watched them already. Still, it feels like I ought to throw up a warning here and say I'm totally going to spoil the twist here. It's worth noting because I did think the episode was really great the first time around, and really not the second time.

So, having honored the internet custom, let's get to it: O'Brien is a duplicate, created by aliens and sent back as a sleeper agent to sabotage the coming diplomacy. (He's actually called a "replicant," an homage to Blade Runner selected by episode writer Paul Robert Coyle because "android" felt too evocative of Data and "clone" was not accurate by his reckoning.) The episode is more or less what it appears: Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It's just that there's only one Body Snatcher. It's the main character, and he doesn't know it. The weird behavior he sees in everyone else is their reaction to his potential alienness.

This is a really fun premise that I think collapses under even the slightest scrutiny -- which is, of course, exactly what you give it when you watch it a second time. First, the replicant technology is overpowered and/or underused. If aliens have the ability to read the mind of O'Brien and transfer it into a replicant with such fidelity that even the copy thinks he's real, why do they even need to do that? Is O'Brien's knowledge itself somehow not enough to carry off the espionage they have in mind? What's the sleeper agent going to do that's so much more effective? Indeed, to make the audience believe everyone else is "possessed" and O'Brien is the hero, we don't see O'Brien do anything nefarious, making him basically the least effective sleeper agent ever.

The far bigger problem, though, is that the weird behavior of everyone else in the episode makes no more sense once you actually know the twist. While you can understand why our heroes might not take the word of "some strange aliens" at face value, the measures they take to contain a major security threat are just this shy of non-existent. Even short of throwing O'Brien in the brig (which, obviously, would be pretty terrible if there's any reasonable chance they're wrong about him), they could be more insistent and more exhaustive with Dr. Bashir's tests. They could relieve him of duty. There's some hand waving at the end about how they didn't know what the replicant would do if found out, but it's hard to believe those consequences could be worse than letting him roam the station.

In a way, the entire episode becomes a Keiko episode once you know the twist, and if anything, she's underreacting more than anyone. She could declare a sudden trip to Earth to see family, anything to avoid sleeping at night next to someone who might suddenly kill her and her daughter, for all she knows. Instead, she hangs in there (understandably shifty and weird) until... at some point I guess everyone gets confirmation that O'Brien is a replicant?

The atmosphere of the piece works even if the logistics don't, with several great scenes. The dinner where Miles wonders if maybe his own wife is poisoning him is wonderfully tense, framed in unusual, super-tight closeups. The behavior change of Odo is creepy, between when O'Brien first gets to him and later "everyone else" has. There are also fun little bits of character sprinkled throughout -- from learning about O'Brien (his mother died, his father remarried, his birthday is in September) to getting concentrated doses of quintesstial hothead Kira and science-mode Dax when O'Brien listens to their log entries.

Other moments don't work so great. The framing device of having O'Brien narrate his last few days in a log are dull -- and, as it turns out, originally unplanned. The first script reportedly came in short, and without the option to cut away from O'Brien to other characters (whose conversations would give the twist away), the writers came up with the flashback structure as a way of padding the page count. Unfortunately, it feels like a detective device, a film noir element, which is very much a different style than the "body snatchers" vibe the story is trying for. The action at the end is rather languidly paced too, between small sets (that don't really allow running) and generically dry music (as dictated by producer Rick Berman's sensibilities about how Star Trek music should sound).

Other observation:

• Well, not so much as observation as some research I did: another way of padding the episode -- but one more grounded in established character -- was to have O'Brien calm himself in the runabout by singing "Minstrel Boy" (a callback to the Next Generation episode "The Wounded"). What, you don't remember this in the episode? Apparently, an error in the script had him naming the wrong shuttle chasing him during the scene. They filmed the mistake, and couldn't cut around it or go back for a re-shoot, so the entire sequence was cut.

My memory from the first time around was that this was going to be an A- episode. I was shocked and dismayed to find it only a C+ on the rewatch. Maybe that should average out to a B or something, but the fact is it simply doesn't hold up like so many other Deep Space Nines.

How Mysterious

Board games often share mechanisms with one another. "It's just like [that], but with this little twist" is a common and easy way to explain many games. That's hardly a criticism; sometimes that little twist is the secret sauce that makes a truly great experience. Sometimes, though, it's truly remarkable what ingredients go into the blender of creativity.

For example: imagine Dixit crossed with Clue. As a co-op game. I couldn't have. But Oleksandr Nevskiy and Oleg Sidorenko did. And thus, we get Mysterium.

Mysterium casts one player as a "ghost" trying to help all the other players solve their murder by communicating with them from beyond the grave via cryptic visions. Three groups of illustrated cards are placed face-up in groupings before the players: suspects, locations, and weapons. (There's always at least one more than the number of "mentalists"; the difficulty ramps up -- a lot -- the more you use.) Behind a secret screen, the ghost has one card from each grouping assigned to each of the players, and must guide each player to their cards one by one.

The guidance is accomplished through another Dixit-style deck of strange, dream-like illustrations that nonsensically combine random imagery. The ghost can't give verbal clues. They just take hand out their cards to each player, giving everyone cards that are somehow meant to lead the players each to their own suspect, then location, then weapon. You have to be ready to make intuitive leaps and go on instinct, because the "perfect clue" is pretty much never there.

If all players successfully identify their three cards in seven rounds or less, then a final round ascertains which player's accumulated cluster is the actual solution to the mystery. The whole group wins if the players get that correct.

It's hard to imagine having playtested this game without the final components in hand. So much of what makes it tick is the random collages that are each of the ghost's clue cards. (Maybe they tested with a Dixit deck before commissioning the final artwork?) It's delightfully frustrating, in the most fun way, to try to derive the ghost's meaning from imprecise clues. Group discussion can be both an ally and an enemy. I've played as a mentalist and have had fun. I've played as the ghost and have had fun discovering that it's way harder than it looks.

The whole affair is intriguingly clever, the experience quite entertaining. Hell, it feels part "escape room" too, so long as I'm comparing it to other things. And the rulebook even offers up some suggestions for extra atmosphere, like playing spooky music or literally forbidding the ghost from speaking for the duration of the game.

I'm usually willing to play a game of Dixit with a group, even though it's hardly a personal favorite. But there's something in the extra elements, added challenge, and teamwork of Mysterium that I find much more compelling. I'd give it a B+. I hope it has some staying power in my gaming group.

Titanic

This weekend, I caught a lightweight bit of fun at my local theater, Teen Titans Go! To the Movies. It's a jump to the big screen for the Cartoon Network series about goof-off superheroes hanging around their fortress between their superheroics. (It's a series I've actually only caught on occasion, but has definitely made me laugh.)

Teen Titans Go! To the Movies is delightfully meta, as team leader Robin laments not having a superhero movie of his own and sets out to make one happen. DC allows the characters to be goofy and irreverent, much as with The LEGO Batman Movie, and with similar results. That is, the movie is both pretty funny, and actually manages to be better than all the "official" DC superhero fare of the last decade (outside of Wonder Woman).

On the one hand, it is very much a movie for kids (and adults who sometimes act like them). Early on, you get the longest fart joke I've seen since Blazing Saddles. Later on, there's an even longer poop joke that keeps getting one-upped. There's plenty in between aimed at the same demographic. (But don't pretend you aren't laughing at least a little.)

The big reward -- as has been the case with Warner Bros. animation for decades and decades -- comes in being an adult who pays attention between the slapstick. There's just as much humor in the movie (maybe more) that will sail right over the kids' heads. Plenty of it is referential. None of it is deferential or reverential; biting the hand that feeds you is this movie's brand. It mocks the tropes of superhero films with glee (all while actually being a decent one itself, of course).

The core voice cast of the show is there to voice their established characters (Greg Cipes, Scott Menville, Khary Payton, the omnipresent Tara Strong, and Hynden Walch). Joining them are two bigger names no stranger to animation -- Will Arnett (LEGO Batman himself) and Kristen Bell. There's also a raft of great cameos and casting of minor characters.

Is it one of the best things I've seen all year? No. But it delivers exactly the fun it promises. And, at a moment when even Marvel has mostly swerved into self-seriousness, it comes at just the right time. I give Teen Titans Go! To the Movies a B.

Invasive Reading

I've previously written about how I don't like Terry Brooks novels as much as I did when I discovered them as a teenager -- and how they made such an impact on me then that I keep reading them anyway. So, another year, another new book. His most recent release is The Skaar Invasion, the second of four books in The Fall of Shannara, a series meant to conclude the story of his long-running Shannara fantasy setting.

After this second book, it does certainly seem as though I'm going to get the closure I'm hoping for out of this series. Shannara has always been both serial and episodic, with Brooks releasing new connected trilogies all the time, but skipping decades and centuries in between. It didn't strike me as needing an overall "end point"; I figured that he could just eternally keep time jumping to new stories. But this new book (and this now halfway-complete set) has legitimately made it feel like a capital-E Ending is coming.

Plot moves are big this time around. Long-established elements of his fantasy world are being upended and destroyed. Callbacks to earlier books in the series abound -- and they feel quite deliberate this time, rather than the unintentional self-repetition of a long-time author. Yeah, okay, I'm onboard, the Shannara books could have an ultimate conclusion, and Brooks is doing a good job in constructing it.

That said, the story is big and largely satisfying, but the writing itself far less so. The characters all feel rather shallow, lacking enough to truly separate them from one another, and even less to separate them from similar archetypes Brooks creates in basically every new set of books he writes. There are, as ever in his work, tacked-on romances without any true sense of passion. Lengthy narrations masked as character introspection (from characters who don't seem like they should be so self-aware). Not enough personality revealed through action rather than thought.

This book was not a dense read, but it nevertheless took me a couple of weeks to get through it. The experience was a weird combination of not entirely enjoying it, while being engaged by the boldness of the some story moves and curious to see what would happen next. It's an experience I haven't really had with a book since years ago when I tore through a few Dan Brown novels and then just as quickly gave up reading any more.

That this novel, and Brooks, seem to be on a clear path to closure (and that there's enough promise in the plotting to suggest it's going to be worthwhile) tips the balance for me into calling this a B- book, rather than the some-level-of-C I'd give it if I were being more influenced by the writing itself. Still, I have a couple of friends who have also read lots of Terry Brooks -- and who have given him up -- and I'm not yet rushing to tell them they should give this series a try.

We'll see if he sticks the landing.

Block Party

The movie Blockers is a new spin on an old premise. On the surface, it's stamped from the same mold as countless other teen sex comedies, with a plot spurred in motion by three high school students who make a pact with one another to lose their virginities. From there, it takes two big departures. First, the teens are all female instead of male. Second, the real focus of the movie is on the parents who learn about the prom night pact and set out to stop it.

The changes count for a lot. It's not just a balancing of the scales, "girls can like sex too" move to have teen girls make the pact. It actually lets the movie mine some new comedic ground that's largely untouched by the movies that came before. And it's an even bigger twist to not have the parents be clueless figures at the periphery of the story. Putting them front and center actually makes for an entirely different movie.

Blockers is a bit slow getting started, which is a little odd as there really isn't that complicated a story to set up here. But it does pay off later, as the characters do matter here. Each of the three teens has her own unique character arc: one is looking to "go to the next level" with a long time boyfriend, one is just looking for a warm body to check off a box on the schedule of her life, and one is going along with the group to remain closeted as a lesbian.

Similarly, the three parents chasing their daughters each have their own angle. One is a life-long single mom afraid she's losing her connection to her baby girl, one is an overprotective father (whose wife actually doesn't agree with his attitude on the pact), and one is a father trying to be there in a way he hasn't since a bitter divorce. It's actually a rather carefully constructed narrative when you take a look at it. The characters aren't a simple framework for delivering jokes, they're actually a well-stocked toolbox for offering a range of perspectives.

But soon the movie does get up to speed, and it is primarily a comedy. There are hits and misses, of course, but more hits overall. The cast is led by Leslie Mann, John Cena, and Ike Barinholtz, and they make an effective comic trio. Some other reliable comic actors pop up throughout, including Hannibal Buress, June Diane Raphael, and (cast rather against his past comedic roles) Gary Cole.

I wasn't quite as taken with Blockers as I was recently with another comedy from earlier this year, Game Night. Still, it was enjoyable and fun. I give Blockers a B-. It's worth checking out if you're in the mood for something light and silly.

Cabin Pressure

Hello, readers! I have returned from GenCon (and have recovered enough to start getting back into a routine here). I figured I'd get started with the book that occupied my flight there and back, a new horror novel from Paul Tremblay called The Cabin at the End of the World.

This is possibly one of those books that's better experienced the less you know about it. It's also a very slim read, at just over 200 pages, so there's really not much hinting at the plot without digging well between the covers. Try this: a married couple, Andrew and Eric, rent a cabin far out of the way in New England, taking their adopted daughter Wen for a vacation. A group of four strangers arrive and proceed to torment the family. But it is not their wish to inflict physical harm; instead they bring an emotional torment, over what they say the family must do.

This is one of those books that seems tailor-made to become a movie. It's a compulsive page turner, and has a very tight unity of time, place, and action. Sure enough, I checked and it's already been optioned by a studio and is in development. (Getting strong reviews and endorsements from the likes of Stephen King will do that.) Tremblay's writing is strong in how it conveys a sense of space, and it's easy to roll a version of a film on the movie screen in your mind.

The scenario posed in the book will definitely strike fear into many readers. It goes right to the core of a parent's anxiety over protecting their child, and punches repeatedly. The opening pages in particular are a rather masterful unveiling of slow, creeping dread that definitely hooked me for the whole book.

The fact that the protagonists are a gay couple with an adopted daughter is definitely a plus. Though the character back stories do make this a salient point in the narrative, the simple fact is it didn't have to be this way. Tremblay could have chosen any couple with one child and written this book largely the same. It's representation done exactly right -- these characters are in their situation and also are gay; it doesn't define them or the story.

But there are some quirks to Tremblay's writing style that chipped away at my enthusiasm. Flashbacks and current action are interwoven tightly throughout the novel, but always with a shift between present tense and past tense verbage that always caused me a mental bump in the transition. He plays even more fast and loose with shifts in narrative perspective. Chapter headings identify a "perspective character," but the line is definitely blurred between how omniscient vs. subjective the writing gets. Things get very strange later in the book when two characters share perspective in a chapter; the actual sentence structure goes first person with strange "we"s and "us"s, implying odd, simultaneous thought. For me, at least, this does not work at all.

And one final word of warning. You need to be comfortable with ambiguity if you read this book. It is very much the nature of this story that you're never supposed to be sure what the the Real Truth is. Different characters have very different takes on it. There's a logical explanation that works, and a quite fanciful one. There are offshoots from the main narrative similarly steeped in uncertainty. And you will not get closure on all of it. I absolutely get what Tremblay is going for here. It fits the tone of the book, and in theory leaves readers to fill in the gaps. I'm also not certain I felt completely satisfied in the end.

But the story is, undeniably, suspenseful and chilling. I deliberately picked up the book without learning much about it, after simply hearing it was effectively horrific. On that promise, it delivers fully. I give The Cabin at the End of the World a B.

DS9 Flashback: Armageddon Game

The pairing of Chief O'Brien and Dr. Bashir got a sort of "trial run" in the first season episode "The Storyteller." But it was in the second season episode "Armageddon Game" that they were truly put on the path to friendship.

A pair of alien races have put aside a long history of war, and are now seeking Federation help in destroying their deadly biological weapons known as Harvesters. Julian Bashir and Miles O'Brien help with this, only to be hunted by the aliens themselves. Meanwhile, the crew back on Deep Space Nine is told that Bashir and O'Brien have been killed in an accident -- a claim that at first only Keiko O'Brien is inclined to doubt.

Writer Morgan Gendel (a semi-regular contributor, though not a member of the staff) pitched the germ of this episode. Aliens seeking to destroy a weapon would encode the specs as living DNA inside Miles O'Brien, then seek to kill him to destroy the weapon. Gendel says he was unaware of another episode from Deep Space Nine that had already played with the idea of living memory, so the pitch had to be changed. (He's talking about "Dramatis Personae." On the surface, I hardly see the similarities.)

Show runner Michael Piller shaped most of the finished episode. He asked for a "chase movie," and inspired Gendel to watch films like Midnight Run and North by Northwest before delivering the next draft. Unfortunately, that led to... well... a movie -- a script with too many locations, models, and more to be produced on a television budget. Staff writer Ira Steven Behr joked that that's how the episode then became "a chase movie on one set." In a very late weekend rewrite, Bashir and O'Brien's escape just took them directly to an abandoned building where they holed up for the entire episode.

The result isn't entirely memorable overall in terms of plot. The episode really does need some of that excitement and thrill that the chase would have offered. There are also elements that just don't make much sense. Bashir is able to cure the infected O'Brien from death's door when they're ultimately rescued. But if curing the Harvester disease is this easy, why not just give that cure to the aliens to solve their problems? Is it really plausible that these rivals who distrust each other this much could hatch a plan against the Federation together? (Hmmm... maybe it is? If you have a reputation for pacifism as much as the Federation, you'd had to believe you could do a lot to provoke them without actually risking reprisal.)

On the other hand, the episode does allow room for a lot of great character material between Bashir and O'Brien. We get a fun variation on the trope of the "doctor who has to explain how to doctor to the non-doctor" -- the infected and dying engineer must explain engineering to the non-engineer. Meanwhile, the two get into deeply personal discussions about their outlooks on life. Bashir reveals a story about a true love from his past that he lost in favor of pursuing his career. It helps to humanize him a great deal, suggesting that perhaps his constant hounddoggery isn't young male aggression, but a deliberate effort to hold any new real connection at arm's length. He and O'Brien debate whether marriage and a family are truly compatible with a Starfleet career. O'Brien cares so deeply about it that even as he thinks he's going to die, he spends his dying breaths on trying to change Julian's mind.

While the episode never for a minute tries to make the audience believe these two have been killed (probably wisely), it nevertheless plays the impact of that for everyone back on the station. It makes for several more great moments. Quark pays a heartfelt (if odd to "hew-mons") tribute to the two, giving out free drinks in honor of his "good customers." Sisko delivers the news of Miles' death to Keiko in person, and the scene has weight because of the loss we know Benjamin himself experienced with his wife.

It's a good episode for guest star Rosalind Chao as Keiko. After a numb reaction to the news, she digs in and won't believe her husband is dead. There are plenty of ways to read this, and only Chao could say for certain what she had in mind. But episode director Winrich Kolbe claims that he discussed options with her, and that she is ultimately playing guilt. Keiko thinks she didn't work hard enough at the marriage, and thus isn't willing to consider that it's over. That certainly has dramatic heft, if you choose to see it that way. In any case, I think it's a bit sad that they "womp, womp" Keiko at the end by having her be wrong about the detail she latched onto, that led her to think the video of the accident had been forged.

Other observations:

• Instead of wacky foreheads like most Star Trek aliens have, these aliens get wacky hairdos. So wacky, in fact, that writer Ira Steven Behr joked that the real conflict between the aliens must have originally started "because of the hairstyles." But the hair department had the last laugh, scoring an Emmy nomination for this episode in Outstanding Individual Achievement in Hairstyling for a Series.

• We get a fun callback to O'Brien's love of Starfleet military rations.

• Bashir mentions that he gave his medical school diaries to Dax to read. Given what the writers would decide (much later) to do with Bashir's character, it seems this was probably a pretty epic forgery.

• Runabouts are starting to drop like flies now.

The story is a bit lackluster, but the episode does extremely well by the characters. So, all told, I give "Armageddon Game" a B.