Green and Bear It

On Sunday, Green Book took Best Picture at the Academy Awards. I'd actually just watched it the night before, on Saturday evening. I wish that I'd immediately posted a review, because now, in the aftermath of the movie's win, you can't really just talk about the movie. (Especially if you're positive on it.) You have to discuss the backlash too.

First, the movie. Inspired by true events, Green Book is set in 1962. It's the story of Frank "Tony Lip" Vallelonga. When the New York club where he works as a bouncer closes down, he casts about for something to fill in. "Doc" Don Shirley is an accomplished Black pianist who has decided to go on a concert tour in the Deep South. He needs a driver (and brute) to get him safely to each performance, and hires Tony for the job. Along the way, the two forge a friendship that in real life would last the rest of their days.

To the degree this movie succeeds, it does so on the strength of its two lead performers, Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali. (And yes, I deliberately say "lead" performers, even though Ali was awarded the Oscar here for Best Supporting Actor.) Mortensen plays rather starkly against the type he's defined in his career -- especially if all you really know him from is the Lord of the Rings. Gaining 40 pounds (like Christian Bale for Vice, except no one as talking about it), adopting a Bronx accent, and stripping away any refinements, Mortensen staggers through this role perfectly devoid of class.

Mahershala Ali, in the classic tradition of buddy comedies and road movies, is the polar opposite. He's tremendously mannered and refined, polished and proper. There's a world of thought behind his eyes, and every statement he makes seems endlessly calculated and deployed with precision and care. It's a worthy performance to win an Oscar, because it feels like he's working twice as hard -- there's the outward performance, and the inner performance that he must first calibrate before every line he speaks.

Together, the two are a great team -- both as characters and actors. And they're quite funny. There's a lot of humor in the movie, and they deliver it with skill in the style of an Abbott and Costello, a Laurel and Hardy, an "Oscar" and "Felix." Linda Cardellini also has some good moments peppered throughout (including the last -- and best -- line of the film), though the movie doesn't afford her as much screen time. Bottom line, the cast makes this movie more enjoyable than I think it might have been on the page.

There are a handful of more profound and dramatic scenes as well. A car breakdown at the roadside leads to the movie's most powerful moment, one that unfolds with no dialogue at all. Elsewhere, strong monologues by Shirley articulate why he's built the mask he has, and what he sacrifices when it slips.

Yet despite a few powerful moments, the movie is actually quite lightweight overall. It's effervescent, likely to evaporate from the mind in a short span of time. Five years from now, I doubt I'll remember much clearly about Green Book.
Except, perhaps, for the controversy. Much of what I said above in support of the movie could just as easily form the basis of a screed against it. This is a 2018 movie "about racism," but it doesn't engage on that topic with 2018 sensibilities. It's a throwback of at least 10-20 years, a tale where one good friendship, one heart and mind changed, is enough to make everyone feel good and call it a day. Should a modern movie about this topic be this fun, this breezy?

More core to the controversy... well, I said it deliberately in my synopsis earlier: it's the story of Frank "Tony Lip" Vallelonga. Does the world need another movie about racism that's actually about a white person? You could mount at least a partial defense and say this at least isn't a "white savior" movie -- Tony does not reform or redeem Doc in the way Doc does Tony. But the movie is very much about Tony and his emotional journey. In fact, if anything, Doc seems diminished by his interactions with Tony by the end of this film, having given up something core to his identity. Maybe that's not how the actual friendship between the real men played out, but that's how you can plausibly read the narrative.

And that actual friendship between the real men is another issue that has been raised against the film. This script was written in consultation with the family of "Tony" Vallelonga, but they apparently made no effort at all to contact the family of "Doc" Shirley. And when interviewed about this, the writers generally seemed surprise that anyone would think that necessary.

All that's before you get into questions of separating artists from their art. Director Peter Farrelly has an alleged (but credible) history of exposing himself to people on the sets of his movies. Co-writer Nick Vallelonga spouted widely debunked ultra-conservative 9/11 conspiracy theories. Star Viggo Mortensen tried making a point in an interview by using the most vile of racial slurs, and had to learn that there's no way that goes over well regardless of intention.

As I saw a pithy commenter on Twitter observe: some day, they'll make a movie about the PR guy who somehow negotiated all those land mines and managed to secure a Best Picture Oscar for Green Book. And the movie about that guy will win an Oscar too.

While acknowledging all that criticism, I must still admit that I was mostly entertained by the movie. I'd probably give it a B+ overall, though the criticism is (on basically all points) totally valid and makes me wonder if that's too generous. In any case, I didn't think it was Best Picture worthy.... but it did just barely sneak on to my Top 10 of 2018 list, in the #9 slot. Part of me is hoping I find two other more worthy movies just to knock it off this list; it feels as though liking this movie even a little might become increasingly problematic.

The Sound of Thunder

In its latest episode, Star Trek: Discovery served up the story I wanted to see a week earlier, one revolving around Saru and his relationship to his people.

When one of the Red Angel's beacons appears at Saru's homeworld of Kaminar, the Discovery is quick on the scene. Though their primary mission is to investigate, Saru has another agenda in mind: reconnect with his people and reveal to them the truth about the Kelpian relationship with their predators, the Ba'ul.

This episode made required viewing of the Short Treks installment "The Brightest Star," going so far as to even include "flashback" footage culled from it. There were wonderful payoffs for that short story, with links so key that it feels like both must have been conceived by the writers at the same time.

Though no one is able to be quite as expressive in the Kelpian makeup as Doug Jones, the character of his sister Siranna (played by Hannah Spear) was nevertheless a great asset in the storytelling. What a whirlwind for her, having her brother returned to her one moment, and having the total annihilation of her species threatened the next. I might have liked to see Saru have to work harder to break through her doubt of the truth... but you can make the case that the extreme circumstances made that unnecessary.

One of the reasons I was eager for a fast follow-up on the Saru story line was that I wanted to see what a post-fear Saru was like. We got all I would have wanted this week, from physical changes to more intriguing behavioral ones. It was demonstrated just how much Saru's senses depend on awareness of fear, when he didn't even realize he was supposed to get out of the captain's chair for Pike. We saw that without fear as a limiter, Saru is essentially incapable of backing down from any confrontation, with anyone, over any issue -- he challenged everyone from Pike to Burnham to the Ba'ul themselves. Saru really is a different character now, and it's a fun transformation.

The episode did manage to focus on Saru without dropping altogether the story line of Culber's return last week. The portrayal of Stamets in this is quite interesting. Culber is sending every kind of signal that he is not feeling okay right now. Stamets is completely oblivious to it. On the one hand, Stamets should be more in tune to Culber's feelings and needs than anyone else. On the other hand, Stamets is certainly overwhelmed with his own joy to have his husband back, so much so that it's not unreasonable -- for now, at least -- for him not to notice anything is wrong. We'll see where this all leads.

But as enthusiastic as I was about parts of the episode, much of it didn't make such a strong impact. The scale and scope here was so inflated here that it felt vaguely ridiculous. (SPOILERS about the ending here.) Within the span of a single episode, we went from uncertainty whether a Starfleet ship could even contact the pre-warp Kelpians to triggering a metamorphosis in their entire race. Not one village, not a few people at random. All of them. Everywhere. It felt like the science fiction equivalent of a big, dumb action movie that has to blow up the biggest thing possible for thrills -- too big an idea to wrap your head around, in too short a span of time. And more than was necessary to serve the plot, I think.

The Ba'ul were quite cool in visual concept, a truly scary and alien species (and, frankly, what Armus would have looked like on The Next Generation if today's technology had existed in 1988). But the audio design on them was terrible. Their dialogue was so processed and modulated that half of it was completely unintelligible. It would have been preferable to haul out the awful looking font Discovery uses for subtitles and just give us a completely alien language of clicks and groans.

We learned more about the Red Angel.... and what we've learned isn't exactly promising to me. First, it's starting to feel rather like the "Temporal Cold War" plot of the less interesting seasons of Enterprise. A time-traveling humanoid is coming back to influence this time for mysterious reasons -- reasons I hope will actually be explained on this show. Another explanation I'm really going to need: why is the Angel bread-crumbing Discovery into doing work for it when its own capabilities in this time are so vast? (The Angel saved the Kelpians, not the Discovery.)

Overall, there was plenty to like in this episode. But it was also totally overstuffed, both in the amount of material and the scale of it. And if the breakneck speed didn't leave you feeling confused, the unintelligible alien dialogue would do the trick. I give "The Sound of Thunder" a B-. Not bad, but it felt to me like it could have been much better.

Identity

The Orville swung big last week, serving up not only the first half of its first two-part episode, but a big game-changing plot development.

When Isaac collapses, for all intents and purposes "dead," the Orville sets course for the Kaylon homeworld in the hopes they can revive him. Though notoriously closed off to outsiders, the Kaylons welcome the ship. But they're harboring a dark secret that completely upends the question of whether their planet will join the Union.

The nugget at the heart of the surprising "Identity, Part 1" isn't actually all that surprising. From the earliest episodes of the series, which told us Isaac was from a world entirely populated with artificial intelligence, the "inconsistency" was obvious. The planet can't be all AIs, right? Who built them? The surprise is that a show as generally lightweight and humorous (and, mostly, episodic) as The Orville would ever address these questions in this way -- not just telling us what happened to the builders of the Kaylons, but showing us in a truly dramatic fashion.

The episode served up a lot of character drama before its exciting conclusion, though. Penny Johnson Jerald had more challenging work this week, portraying Dr. Finn's emotions opposite the unresponsive Isaac. Her work with the two child actors playing her sons was also, as usual, quite strong. She was also a big part of drawing great performances from those two kids. (Though the plotting surrounding the kids? Ugh. But I'll get to that.)

Isaac's going-away party was a stand-out set piece. There was clever dialogue (with Isaac quoting Sally Field's Oscar acceptance), fun performances (Scott Grimes' all-out musical number), and great production values (with all the extras, it really did feel like everyone on the ship that could be spared from duty was there).

But things turned sour in the last 15 minutes -- both in good, intended ways, and bad, unintended ways. (And obviously, from here the spoilers get extra SPOILERY.) Everything surrounding Ty slipping off the Orville and discovering the Kaylons' secret was ridiculous. From the very notion that a child could just open the door of a spaceship and walk out, to the cheap toying with the audience by putting a child in easily-avoided jeopardy, to the Wesley Crusher-ness of it all in having the kid solve the mystery -- this part of the plot was an unmitigated disaster.

If the connection from A to B was annoying, though, B itself was a thrill ride. The sequence in which the Kaylons boarded the ship was great. Menacing, gun-headed robots! Dozens of stunt performers hurling themselves to the ground! So many lasers! It was a tight, well-executed action sequence, the likes of which we've never really seen before on The Orville.

Squint your eyes and tilt your head and you might see a Borg-like quality to this whole story line. But I do think The Orville carved out a trail all its own here. I've been quick to point out when I thought the series was riffing on an idea Star Trek has already tackled (even though they usually approach things differently). But unless you're going to distill things all the way down to "robot bad guys," I actually don't find much comparison here. (And at that point, you'd better start comparing to Doctor Who, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and any number of other sci-fi tales.)

I was quite entertained by this installment of The Orville... though the way Finn's son Ty was used to grease the plot gears this week was a big mark against it. Overall, I give the episode a B+. I'm looking forward to the resolution this week.

And the Oscars Snark Goes To...

And now, your annual dose of Oscar commentary, courtesy of me and my snarky friends:

Sam Rockwell looks like he’s prepping to play Daniel Day-Lewis in a biopic.

There's a real divide between the celebrities jamming along to “We Will Rock You” and the ones just standing there.

It looks like Jason Momoa’s high school prom tux still fits.

I can’t hear the name of documentary winner Free Solo without hearing it in Jabba the Hutt’s voice.

What’s with the giant blood-dipped LEGO Oscars in the background?

The theme of the night seems to be dresses you can’t actually stand or walk in.

Trains are so in tonight that Jennifer Hudson has one and she isn’t even wearing a dress.

The giant condom-wrapped Oscars behind James McAvoy and Danai Gurira are ribbed for your pleasure.

The umbrellas behind Bette Midler have a War of the Worlds eyeball spaceship quality.

James Cameron saying “humble” in a Rolex commercial is cute.

Laura Dern has gotta be like, “You’re still playing Jurassic Park when I walk in? I’ve made movies for 25 years since then. I’ve been in a Star Wars movie!”

Pharrell begins an introduction talking about being a child. And he dressed as one, in camouflage shorts.

When you say “and seen” in your Oscar speech, you’re lucky they don’t think you’re saying “...and, scene” and just play you off right away.

There’s a whole generation that doesn’t know who these guys doing an extended bit on vomit at the Oscars are. Honestly, I know who Mike Myers and Dana Carver are, and I don’t know why they’re being allowed to do an extended bit on vomit at the Oscars.

How much money would we have to give Bradley Cooper to sing “Shallow” in the voice of Rocket Raccoon? I'm sure you could crowdfund it.

The Live Action Short winners are so refreshingly excited, it’s like they didn’t even know they were nominated for an Oscar.

Black Panther composer Ludwig Göransson looks really young. Like when he talks about meeting with Ryan Coogler 12 years earlier, did he sit in a booster seat?

Ridley Scott knows he can’t win an Oscar for a Hennessy commercial, right?

Glenn Close came dressed AS an Oscar.

Watching Olivia Colman unravel in real time is delightful.

Charlize Theron obviously does NOT drink Budweiser. So, wisely, they make the whole commercial about her not drinking the beer.

There’s something weirdly sexy about Guillermo del Toro saying “passionate and personal.”

They’re prominently displaying the envelope: see? It’s Best Picture. There will be no mistakes this year.

Academy Award Winner Peter Farrelly. Huh. (More on Green Book later this week.)

Just in Case

My group of gaming friends is always looking for new party games to try. A large number of us get together once a month, and though we sometimes break into smaller groups, we're usually playing Codenames, Telestrations, Decrypto, and the like. We've recently found a game that caught on with us instantly, kicking all those older options to the curb (at least for now).

It's called Just One. (And I'm not sure why it's called that.) It's in the clue-giving genre, but it's a fully cooperative game. 13 cards are dealt into a pile at the center of the table. When it's your turn as a guesser, you draw the top card of that pile, show it to everyone else, and pick at random which of the five words printed on it you're going to guess. Everyone else has a wipeoff board where they write a one word clue for you. Most of the usual "clue game" restrictions apply -- no rhymes, no versions of the same word (in English or a foreign language), no abbreviations. You can write a proper name, but again -- just one word. (Oh, hey! "Just one." I figured it out!)

Before the words are revealed, the guesser closes their eyes. Everyone else checks what they've written, and if any players have written the same word, all instances of that word are erased/hidden. The guesser only gets to see the unique answers written by the group. They then try to guess. If they get it right, they score a point for the card. If they pass, they give up the card and its point. If they guess wrong, they miss that point and another -- the top card of the stack of 13 is also discarded. The group tries to get as close to 13 as they can. (This is an endeavor along the lines of "The Mind" that we hope someday to succeed in.)

Two things really make this game shine. First, it's hard to imagine anything easier to explain, and that's great for a big group game. In less than 30 seconds, you're playing, and no one is really confused about what's happening. Second, it scales brilliantly to the number of players involved. The fewer players you have, the easier it is to give a unique clue, but the less the guesser has to work with anyway. The more players, the more you step on each other, and run yourself in logical circles deciding whether you should write down the "obvious answer" in case no one else does.

A big strike against the game: proofreading. There are a fair number of typos on the cards. They range from leaving the "R" out of "Churchill" to a quixotic "Numan" -- we aren't sure if it was meant to be "Human" or "Newman" or actually the guy who sang that 80s song "Cars." It's also a bit bizarre that they provided components for 7 players. It's an odd number (more than literally so), and there's really no reasonable limit to how many people could play this; components for 10 would have been great and wouldn't have raised the price point to a scary amount.

Just One has become an instant hit in our group. It's impressively simple while being a lot of fun. I give it a A-. I think it'll show up during our larger game nights for a long time to come.

Saints of Imperfection

From the moment Star Trek: Discovery killed off Culber, the writers were making the rounds to say that his story wasn't over yet, and we should be patient and see what happens next. "Next" came in the most recent episode, "Saints of Imperfection."

When Stamets determines that Tilly is still alive inside the mycelial network, Pike agrees to attempt a rescue with a dangerous spore drive jump that will leave Discovery half-in and half-out of the network for a prolonged period of time. But when Statmets and Burnham enter the network, they find more than they expected. Tilly has promised the entities inside the network that she'll help them with a "monster" ravaging their realm... and she is not the only person trapped inside the network.

I really don't see away to be coy about this one, so... SPOILERS! Not for a sentence or two, but basically, this entire post is (more than usual) a giant spoiler.

So, with that warning out of the way... let's talk about the "resurrection" of Culber. I think the writers are misguided if they think this somehow "undoes" the damage of killing the character in the first place. I mean, when you watch The Wrath of Khan today, you know full well that Spock comes back to life in the next movie. That doesn't rob his death of any of its emotion and power as Leonard Nimoy brilliantly plays the death scene, William Shatner chokes over Kirk's eulogy, and the camera glides over the pastoral resting place of Spock's coffin. It happened. I've gone on at length before about how terrible it was to kill off one half of Star Trek's first significant (and actual) gay relationship, so I won't rehash that now; suffice it to say, the damage was still done, even if they "buy back" that death now.

Now don't get me wrong, I am happy to have Culber back. I look forward to future episodes with him. But there are a lot of flaws here with the episode that brought him back. For starters, there were issues of timing. Just last episode, Discovery served up a bait-and-switch death centered on another character. I'm not suggesting that they should have actually killed off Saru. Indeed, they actually made taking him to the brink of death and saving him work fairly well. But to then essentially pull the same trick with Culber in the very next episode cheapened the story. It's a one-two punch of similar beats that may well leave the audience wondering if death actually even means anything on Discovery.

What I find especially bad about stacking these two episodes together like this is that there were plenty of other reasons to separate them. Saru just had a life-altering experience last episode. This episode, not only did we not get into the question of what a "Saru without fear" is like, we barely got any Saru at all. And it seems to me that Tilly could have remained lost in the network for an episode or two, heightening suspense and/or giving her a sort of "side quest" of self-discovery. There easily could have been another episode inserted here.

If the pacing of the overall season felt questionable, the pacing within this episode itself was even worse. I understand the desire to put a ticking clock on the rescue of Tilly. Having to get her back in an hour heightens the drama and the stakes, yada-yada-yada. But with the entire ship being eaten "alive" as it simultaneously slipped deeper into the network, the danger level was too high. It was so high that it made any attempt to do anything other than "escape the danger right the hell now!" feel like stupidity on the part of the characters.

The writers wanted to have their cake and eat it too. They wanted the poignant reunion of Stamets and Culber, dwelling on all the emotions inherent there. But with the ship falling apart around them, it simply made no sense to be doing that. Why are we wasting six minutes explaining how Culber is alive? That's 1/10th of the time we have to work with. Rescue now, explanations later.

Discovery pursues action-adventure more than past Star Treks, but would it have killed them to slow down here and have a contemplative episode that really wrestles with life and death? They could have even started with the ticking clock that wanted so much and then stopped it -- they wrote the justification right into the episode, possibly without realizing it. May was able to exert control over her fellow creatures in the network, stopping them from attacking Tilly. Could she not have also stopped them from attacking the ship? How great would it have looked for Tilly (and/or Burnham) if they'd been able to use diplomacy to convince May to do that? Classic Star Trek contact with aliens.

We got to a good end point, I suppose. And there were even some moments of the journey that were fun -- the Section 31 material involving Georgiou was pretty cool at times (and Michelle Yeoh's performance was delicious). But the bottom line for me: the pacing of this episode was terrible -- so rushed that it wasn't able to spend time on the moments that really needed it. And the writers knew how important it was to have gotten this one right -- they've been telegraphing this one for a year.

I do expect some good down the road will come from this disappointment. But it was a disappointment. I give it a C-.

Deflectors

The latest episode of The Orville once again used its Moclan characters as a means of telling a story with LGBT themes.

A brilliant Moclan engineer named Locar comes aboard the Orville to upgrade its deflector shields. He's the ex-boyfriend of Bortus, but its not between those two that the sparks fly. Locar is attracted to females, and Keyali specifically. But a romantic relationship between them is a tremendous risk, given the attitudes of Moclan society.

The Orville and Star Trek: Discovery have gone two different routes with their handling of LGBT issues and characters. Discovery simply has gay characters in its crew; it's pure inclusion and representation. There's no couching anything in analogy or metaphor, and that's an approach I greatly appreciate. But there's still room for the good old-fashioned Star Trek take being served up by The Orville: let's transpose things into a sci-fi package so you can view something from the outside. And as with season one's "About a Girl," this episode of The Orville actually did that better than The Next Generation did.

Still, I'm not sure I love the Moclans always being the access point for these kinds of stories. The way they allow the script to be flipped is fun -- in "About a Girl," the evil was forcing gender confirmation surgery rather than shunning it; here it's the heterosexual relationship that's taboo rather than the homosexual one. But I'm not sure the situation makes much sense here when you scratch the surface. It has been established that females are exceedingly rare among Moclans. How many Moclan males could even possibly discover they're attracted to females? Wouldn't the only likely way be through contact with alien species? Locar seems to do that a lot in his work, so I suppose it all lines up. Nevertheless, there's another aspect of this story, of literally interracial relationships, that feels like something the story could have touched upon more.

This episode starts up seeming like it's going to be about more marital strife between Bortus and Klyden. Instead, it evolves into the first significant story line for the new character of Keyali. It was a good showcase for her, helping to differentiate her from now-gone Alara. Keyali is more self-assured, more direct and willing to speak her mind. We learned that she's very duty-bound, but she will voice her feelings when she has them:it was summed up in the episode's conclusion, when she helped exonerate someone she felt personal animosity toward.

Subtly, though, this was indeed a big episode for Bortus and Klyden -- at least in how it further took their relationship down a road that feels like it must end soon. As Mercer noted near the end of the episode, Moclan culture is crashing hard against Union ideas, and we're seeing that in Bortus and Klyden's relationship too. Put simply: Klyden is the worst. He's now forced a sex change on his daughter, tried to murder his husband, and destroyed a prominent life and career in the name of bigotry. He's probably beyond redemption at this point, but the series either needs to try soon, or cut ties with the character. My bet would be on the latter, using the Bortus/Klyden relationship as the "writ small" version of the larger souring relationship between Moclans and the Union.

Other aspects of the episode weren't quite as strong for me. The sudden breakup of Kelly and Cassius felt totally unearned and out of nowhere. Cassius was always a marginally developed presence, telegraphing that he was just the latest bump in the road for the larger "will they, won't they?" tale of Ed and Kelly. Still, I'd hoped for something less mechanical than this, some indication that Cassius was on the outs before now. This sort of came off as "well, we booked the actor for this many episodes, and his time is up, so.... bye."

The episode got a bit too clever in the confrontation where Klyden confronts Locar. ("I know what you are.") In most cases, it's not great to put the audience too far ahead of the characters. Showing us that the "mysterious figure" was Klyden was such an obviously bad move that it in turn made the intended bait-and-switch of his innocence obvious. It was an attempt to make the audience only think they were ahead of the characters, but it only served to put the audience even further ahead.

The comedy of the episode was a bit of a mixed bag this week too, something that's usually a strong suit of The Orville. Many moments played well, like Malloy's "good at this" speculation about Moclan traditions, Dann's reaction to cupcakes, and catching Keyali up on all the weird things that have happened on the ship. But then there was the giant distraction that was Groogen, the giant plant. If the idea itself wasn't weird enough, the stunt casting of Bruce Willis certainly took it over the top. Perhaps concern over this kind of distraction is why we don't see (or hear) actors of that prominence showing up on Star Trek: Discovery. But Seth MacFarlane seems to be opening up his Contact List every other week. (Rob Lowe, Jason Alexander, Bruce Willis... who next?)

I'd say "Deflectors" works out to a B grade. There was plenty here to like, and you didn't have to work hard to find it. Still, there were enough missteps to keep it from being a truly exceptional episode.

An Obol for Charon

The fourth episode of Star Trek: Discovery's second season was in many ways a throwback to Star Trek: The Next Generation, while still being distinctly Discovery.

During their search for Spock (heh), the Discovery crew encounters a mysterious sphere that threatens the ship. Even if they manage an escape, the encounter may be fatal for Saru; the strange sphere has triggered in him the vahar'ai, a sickness that immediately precedes the death of a Kelpian. Meanwhile, the alien entity that has bonded to Tilly continues to exert its influence upon her, even as Stamets and Jett Reno try to save her.

In its highly serialized format, Discovery hasn't often been able to present the episodic encounters with alien life that are the franchise's bread and butter. That's addressed here. The encounter with a dying lifeform/civilization feels a bit similar to several Next Generation episodes ("Tin Man," "Masks," "The Inner Light"), while not actually being too direct a copy of any of them. The difference lies largely in how Discovery's story unfolded in ways The Next Generation never would have.

The ship-wide malfunctions were an early point of differentiation, as Star Trek has rarely chosen to explicitly talk about the universal translator. The sequence in which everyone's speech fractured into sentences of a dozen languages (real and fictional) was fun, and afforded Saru a chance to save the day as he rarely has before. There was also a moment of almost Orville-like humor, as punchline alien Linus complained of how it "sucked" being sick with so many nasal cavities. There was a continuing willingness to acknowledge that Earth had culture after the Victorian area, this week with a mention of Prince, and a sung verse of David Bowie. There was also true horror in what happened to Tilly this episode -- possession, gross alien goo, and absorption. (And all of that more tense for the audience because it was happening to one of the most "regular, relatable human" characters Star Trek has ever had.)

Another character I love, love, love is Jett Reno. Tig Notaro's dry sarcasm and harsh edge is like a lance through the boil of pretentiousness that Star Trek can sometimes become. Her clash with Stamets, arguing over the best ways to do science, felt like the most realistic aspect of the episode. I'd love to have Reno around all the time.

But while Tig Notaro may have stolen my heart, the episode was, of course, all about Doug Jones. This episode gave him his best material on the show so far, and he rose to the occasion. The Saru storyline paid off every last detail introduced in his Short Treks episode, and that background added tremendous pathos to what he went through here. I really hope that Discovery's breakneck plotting allows room soon to explore what life is like for Saru now that he's fundamentally changed as a character and is living without fear. I'd like to see if a growing desire to help his people brings him into conflict with Starfleet.

Playing brilliantly off Jones, Sonequa Martin-Green was also outstanding in this episode. Her breakdown in the scene where Saru asks Burnham to kill him was a real milestone in the series. Burnham's Vulcan mask has slipped a bit before, but this was the first time it completely fell away and revealed the human beneath. Saru's plea that she reconcile with her sibling (as he never could with his) was one of the most intensely personal moments Discovery has brought us so far.

But there were some less effective moments for me too. The episode was a bit overstuffed, and the "search for Spock" Macguffin felt like unnecessary stakes to keep mentioning on top of "two people are in personal danger AND the whole ship might explode." I also was left cold by everything trying to connect with the original Star Trek pilot "The Cage." The character of Number One was nearly personality-free in her 1960s incarnation, memorable only because she was played by "Star Trek royalty" (Majel Barrett). She didn't make much of an impression on me here either. Plus, making Pike into a technology-fearing Luddite, in an attempt to explain why the original series had inferior technology to Discovery, seems to me like a misguided waste of time. (It doesn't explain the inferior tech of any other ship in any other Star Trek series anyway.)

The pacing was also a bit off in moments. I felt the audience was way ahead of the characters in figuring out the attempt at communication by the sphere. And more time could have been spent on Saru's revelation. How is he so sure that all Kelpian belief is a lie, as opposed to the possibility that the sphere-triggered onset of his condition might also have caused that condition to unfold differently?

Still, this was a fairly strong episode overall, and the best so far of season two. I'd give "An Obol for Charon" a B+.

A Full Head of Steamboat

I've just returned from a week-long vacation to Steamboat Springs, a now annual tradition of skiing and board gaming with friends. This is actually my second ski trip this winter; my husband and I went to Aspen just before Christmas.

I often return from a vacation with several days of posts about the things I did. My last ski trip didn't get a mention not because it wasn't special, but because I found myself without much to share. It's the same with this recent trip too -- future posts will cover some of the board games I got to try out, but I don't have much to say about the rest.

Skiing is no longer the comedy of errors for me that produced several days of posts about how hard a time I had learning. I'm still no master... though this year, I was willing to try a tree run labeled for experts that I looked at the year before and said "no thanks" to. And though I fell a few times, the fun was worth the effort.

In four years of going to Steamboat, this was actually the first year where we got any significant snow -- over a foot, mostly near the end of the week we were there. I have little experience skiing in fresh powder, but now that I got a big taste of it (on our last day on the mountain), I have to say: I don't get what the fuss is about. Sure, there's a "marking your territory" sort of thrill in leaving fresh tracks. But you have to work twice as hard to ski half as fast. Nothing gets groomed, your goggles get streaked with water, and your knees get quite aggravated with you. Give me a sunny day on a nice, groomed blue run, thank you very much.

Another noteworthy event this trip was our third trip to the escape room in Steamboat Springs, the Crooked Key. The only room they had left that we hadn't tried was "Escape from the Old West," an 1800s jailbreak. It was their easiest room, yet nearly as fun as the others, and put together with the same high production values that keeps The Crooked Key our favorite even as we try other escape rooms in Denver.

I'm back home now, and the blog will be getting back to business as usual. Like I said, you can expect some board game talk in the weeks ahead. I've also got to catch up with two Star Trek: Discovery episodes I've fallen behind on. The Oscars are a week away. (I'm not sure I'll get to any more movies, but I'll hope for some snarky quips from my friends about the ceremony.)

And for those who kept right on without noticing my blog had been off? You can pretend you missed me; I probably won't know the difference.

Block Party

I've sometimes wondered if "cult hit" movies can happen as much in this day and age as they used to. The old model for it was a movie that didn't do well in theaters, but then ran endlessly on some cable channel, allowing more people to see it. There's just not a lot of cable channel surfing these days.

Perhaps the most likely scenario for a cult hit today would be a movie unknown at the time that later becomes famous after many of its stars do. That might be the model for Attack the Block, a little-known (at the time) British action-horror-comedy about an alien invasion in a London tower block. Pretty much the only star an American audience could have known when it was released in 2011 was Nick Frost -- and he's in a small role here. But stocks have soared for the two lead performers in the movie.

John Boyega stars as Moses, a teenage gang leader. You know him now from the current Star Wars trilogy. He was just 18 when he made this (and his character is even younger), but he's oozing star charisma all over this movie. This is a far more demanding role than Finn the reformed stormtrooper, calling for pathos, swagger, vulnerability, and menace. And Boyega is excellent.

The other lead character is Samantha, a woman who, after being mugged by a gang, must then ally with them once the aliens invade. She's played by Jodie Whitaker, who went on to Black Mirror and Broadchurch before becoming the 13th Doctor on Doctor Who. This movie is like an audition for all her later work; Whitaker skillfully navigates being snippy and tender, strong and soft, sarcastic and earnest.

Despite these two excellent performances (and some solid supporting ones), this is fairly standard alien invasion material. The setting does help refresh the tropes a bit; "unlikely allies" don't come much unlikelier than this. But all the beats are familiar, right down to the "figure out what the aliens really want" revelation near the end. And the laughs are a bit thinner than I would have hoped for in a comedy action film. Maybe it's just that I expected more from Nick Frost, and instead found the supporting kids to be serving up the better jokes.

It's not an expensive movie, but it does have its share of effective visuals. The design of the creatures is especially neat. Taking to heart the idea that seeing a creature renders it less scary, these aliens are a light-swallowing mass of black fur, highlighted with a glow-in-the-dark set of sharpened fangs. You can't see much of them, but what you do see is scary.

Attack the Block isn't going to become a beloved cult classic for me. But it's a fun enough movie (and quick, at under 90 minutes) to be worth checking out if you haven't seen it. I give it a B.

The Escape Artist

The final installment of Short Treks (for now, at least) was "The Escape Artist," a mini-episode centered around the roguish Harry Mudd.

Harry Mudd has been captured and delivered to a Tellarite looking to collect on the Federation's bounty. As Mudd tries different angles to persuade the Tellarite to be merciful, we flash back to moments from his past where he's been in similarly hot water.

This episode may not have been truly exceptional, but I do feel it was the best example of the four Short Treks as to what a Short Trek can be. Harry Mudd isn't a main character of Star Trek: Discovery, so an episode never could or should be centered on him. But he is an established element of the Trek universe, and a mini-episode -- especially one that doesn't require the presence of any main characters -- is a perfect venue to give us another story about him.

A Harry Mudd mini-episode is also a great chance for Star Trek to lighten up a bit. I don't mind that Discovery as a series has opted for a darker tone than other Trek series, but it is almost unrelentingly dark. Humor comes rarely, and the idea of a purely comedic episode -- a "The Trouble With Tribbles," "Take Me Out to the Holosuite," or a "Bride of Chaotica" -- is unthinkable. Short Treks to the rescue, to give us an installment that aspires simply for laughs.

This agenda was declared from the opening title, as the orchestra gave way to a jaunty disco tune. (Get it? Disco?) Each flashback was sillier than the last, populated with characters both playfully fun and delightfully stupid. Some of the scenarios were almost too fleshed out, teasing stories I'd want to see more fully, in addition to the framing Tellarite story. But they always played light, and Rainn Wilson seemed to be having tons of fun playing Mudd again (which he's now done as much as the original actor, Roger C. Carmel).

There was tons of uncommented-upon fan service. We got to see a Tellarite and some Orions, plus a bounty hunter that may have been a Breen (from Deep Space Nine). The ultimate revelation of Mudd's scheme here has fun parallels with his original series episode "I, Mudd" (set later in the timeline than this story). They even included a blink-and-you-miss-it appearance of Mudd's costume from that episode to drive the connection home.

We'll see if Short Treks continue to be a thing after the current season of Discovery. Perhaps they'll expand to include tales from the other Star Trek series coming to CBS All Access. But if the experiment ends here, it ends with one of the better efforts. I give "The Escape Artist" a B.

Vice's Loose Grip

At the pace I'm keeping now, I won't be fitting in all of this year's Best Picture nominees before the Oscar ceremony on February 24th. Still, I'm chipping away. Most recently, that brought me to Vice, the combination biopic/hit piece on former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Vice comes from writer director Adam McKay, and in many ways feels like a sequel (well... prequel, chronologically speaking) to his acclaimed film The Big Short. It comes similarly charged with righteous anger over people in power screwing people over. It uses similar fourth-wall-breaking narrative gimmicks to leaven a serious subject with humor. It even features some of the same actors. But Vice is a far less skillful effort than The Big Short.

It feels like Adam McKay might lack the strength of his convictions this time around. It feels like he wants to make a movie that completely demonizes Dick Cheney. Count me among the audience that has no problem with that whatsoever. But as though fearing criticism from those that don't share that view (criticism from people who could never be mollified in this instance), McKay spends a fair amount of screen time trying to humanize Cheney. This might be a worthwhile allocation of time if the film was planning to go full biopic. But McKay doesn't truly want you to understand where Cheney comes from, and certainly doesn't want you to sympathize with him. Like I said, I'm fine with that... but then why waste the time at all in a decidedly half-hearted effort at "balance?"

There are some laughs peppered throughout the movie, but most are generated in the same way as the laughs from The Big Short. The few that aren't are more in the style of Family Guy, odd "cutaway gags" spliced into the narrative for a quick jolt. They're fun at times, but not as clever overall as (sorry to keep making this comparison) The Big Short.

If you trust the betting markets, Vice has virtually no chance of actually winning the Best Picture Oscar. But its getting more attention in the acting categories, where it has several other nominations. Sam Rockwell is up for Best Supporting Actor for his impersonation of George Bush. Actually, it's more of an impersonation of Will Ferrell impersonating George Bush, and is of such marginal screen time that I find myself scratching my head over that nomination. (I like Rockwell, but in his category, I'd sooner pick Steve Carell from this film, for his role as a callously wicked Donald Rumsfeld.)

Amy Adams is up for Best Supporting Actress as Lynne Cheney. Again, I don't get it. I see the love for Amy Adams generally, of course, and it's a shame she hasn't won for some of her previous deserving work. This movie and this role simply doesn't ask much of her -- the script offers a simplistic character with little emotional variety.

In any case, the real talk revolves around the extreme method acting of Christian Bale, who this time gained 40 pounds to play Dick Cheney. Bale does transform completely, and it is a matter of performance skill and not just makeup. But again, the script itself really doesn't make many demands  beyond an impersonation. This version of Cheney is not nuanced. We're kept at emotional distance from the few reckonings he experiences in the film. If it's okay for the Oscars to sometimes reward a skillful impersonation, then I guess Bale is deserving. But this is among the least of his performances in terms of taking the audience with him on a profound journey.

If you hated the Bush administration as much as I did, you may find some cleansing value in watching Vice. But it's a rather scattershot piece of entertainment. I give it a C.

Point of Light

The latest installment of season two of Star Trek: Discovery was a rather disjointed episode comprised of multiple plot threads. The whole didn't feel very connected thematically or narratively.

Michael's mother Amanda comes aboard to explore Spock's strange connection to the mysterious red lights and the Red Angel. At the same time, Tilly is questioning her own sanity as her visions of a dead former classmate grow more intense. Meanwhile, on the Klingon homeworld, L'Rell struggles to remain in the role of High Chancellor. Rivals challenge her insistence to keep the human Ash Tyler as her Torchbearer, and she's harboring a secret that could give them even more leverage against her.

There might be a case here that the sum of these storylines is more than the value of the parts, particularly in a season long arc we have yet to see. But I found each of the parts flawed in its own way. Each felt like a long, slow walk to a destination that I didn't find especially compelling.

The Klingon story had the most complex agenda. It needed to introduce enough concerns surrounding Ash Tyler and L'Rell (and, to an extent, Georgiou) to justify bringing them back to the show. Perhaps, for people more generally into Klingon subplots than I tend to be, it accomplished that. But I felt like it did it rather poor job at depicting how L'Rell has stayed in power as long as she has. She didn't come across as having much political savvy. Voq/Ash Tyler's advice never seemed especially brilliant. She kicked some ass (in an especially video game-style fight), but not as much ass as Goergious would swoop in and kick to close the scene. There were a few visceral thrills, but overall the story was kind of a shrug.

Speaking of Georgiou, I'm all about this new spinoff show they've announced that will feature her nefarious scheming. But I'm not sure how much Discovery really needs to set that up any more than it already has. And I'm pretty sure it doesn't need to spend so much of its time weaving elaborate continuity fixes for its most critical "fans" -- why Klingons had hair then didn't now do again, and how L'Rell could be a female chancellor when other Treks told us there had never been one.

Still more "continuity-splaining" was going on in the Michael Burnham plot this week, which seemed less concerned with telling a story than with telling us why Spock has never mentioned his sister before. I found the rapport between Michael and Amanda to be a bit lacking, in large part I think because the age difference between Mia Kirshner and Sonequa Martin-Green makes it hard to buy them as mother and daughter. All of it was just stretching time for another episode before we'll eventually see Spock himself.

The Tilly storyline did the best job of generating emotion, particularly between her and Burnham. Yet it all relied on typical sitcom plot construction. Star Trek is generally above "one person keeps a secret because we wouldn't have an episode if they just came out and told the truth." Beverly Crusher announces that people are disappearing and that everyone else in the universe is crazy, and it's "well, let's drop everything and investigate that." But in contrast, Star Trek: Discovery evinces a curiously retrograde attitude on mental health, and accordingly makes Tilly act ashamed to facilitate a story. It's especially unfortunate that it's two episodes in a row now for this sort of behavior (though at least last week, Burnham revealed a partial truth and then came out with the rest of it in short order).

As if to compensate for less effective story beats, episode director Olatunde Osunsanmi piled on conspicuous camera work. The split-set conversation between Burnham and Tyler I found intriguing, but the repeated technique of opening scenes with a camera slowly spinning off its side was just distracting and didn't seem to have a point.

I didn't feel the episode was "bad" as such while I was watching it. Yet thinking it over and collecting these thoughts, I find it very easy to point to things I didn't like and very hard to point to things I did. So I'm going to give "Point of Light" a C. I thought it was a low point for Star Trek: Discovery so far. I hope the things it sets up for the season will be worth it.

A Happy Refrain

It seems like my thoughts on new episodes of The Orville always revolve around how it differed from when Star Trek: The Next Generation did a similar thing. But it's really hard to avoid that with the latest installment, "A Happy Refrain." The Orville was both working very close to a particular Trek episode, and doing it with some fairly significant departures.

Dr. Finn is realizing that she's come to develop romantic feelings for Isaac. Though the robot is incapable of returning the feelings, she still wants to give the relationship a shot. And Isaac is interested in the endeavor for the data on humans in will provide.

This story is essentially The Next Generation's episode "In Theory," where Data pursued a romantic relationship. But when dealing with a character-driven story like this, any differences in the characters (even minor ones) can make for a big difference in the story. And in fact, that was The Orville's first departure from its likely inspiration -- this episode was entirely character-driven. "In Theory" diluted the plot (as pretty much all Next Gen episodes did) with a "science jeopardy of the week" story that played alongside Data's exploration of romance. The Orville kept focus the entire time on the budding relationship.

The Orville also did not pursue this story as a one-and-done installment of episodic television. For starters, we're dealing with two main characters on the series here. When Data decided to give love a go, it was with a lieutenant we never saw before and would never see again. It still made for a great episode of the series (one of better ones of that season), but it wasn't an episode with lasting consequences or prior context.

But on The Orville, they've been building to this for sometime, peppering many earlier episodes with material that set this up. Claire has been spending more time with Isaac, and the show has been depicting this. There have even been moments where it seemed like her children might start to express jealousy over the divided focus from their mother. This development was, simply, "earned." And furthermore (SPOILERS here), it's a development they did not discard at the end of the hour; Isaac and Claire are positioned to be a continuing thing in future episodes.

Yet the biggest differences, and the ones that made this story worth (re)telling, have to do with who these characters are. The Orville has made a genuine effort at depicting Claire as a single working parent. There are more stakes than just her feelings when she embarks on a relationship. She's also a fun mix of responsibility/thoughtfulness (as Grayson pointed out in the episode) with laid back/fun loving -- Star Trek characters take many seasons to become as relaxed as someone like Claire.

Then there's Isaac. For all he's used as the series' proxy for Data, he's a good deal less "human" than Data. He's more callous, unaware, and cold -- even dismissive without meaning to be. He's like Data would have been several years before the start of Next Gen (or, at least, in the more clunkily written moments of season one). And he's all wrapped in a decidedly less human package; we don't see Isaac's face, his voice is processed, his movements are deliberately stiff. (All of which made the -- more SPOILERS -- fun reveal of actor Mark Jackson an especially effective moment in this story.)

And though it wasn't as central to things, there's one other difference about The Orville I felt compelled to mention: the sequence in which a full orchestra came to perform for the crew. I've often noted how The Orville really puts its money on the screen. Both it and Star Trek: Discovery are, of course, decades beyond what earlier Star Treks could depict on television. But this moment with the orchestra was an especially "only The Orville would do this" moment. Sure, we saw classical concerts on The Next Generation -- usually 10 or 12 people in a room watching a string quartet. This was a hundred uniformed extras watching a full orchestra -- many of both groups in alien makeup. This was not a cheap scene, and it seemed an explicit and defiant declaration: just remember, we're just about the only show on television that still uses real musicians instead of synthesizers to provide our soundtrack. And we're gonna show you. It was a vanity moment for Seth MacFarlane that wasn't actually about his personal vanity. It made a big impact.

I thought this was one of the better episodes of The Orville. It was risky in many ways, and the risks paid off. I still didn't like it quite as much as "In Theory," but maybe if The Orville runs seven seasons and I look back on it in two decades, I'll have more attachment. For now, anyway, I give it a B+.

Reform Put in Place

In the run-up to the Oscar nominations, one movie that was showing up on a lot of critics' "best of the year" lists was First Reformed. None of the prognosticators expected it to make the Best Picture cut, but it was widely assumed that star Ethan Hawke was a shoo-in for a Best Actor nod. I've always enjoyed Hawke (and the movies he chooses to be in), so this was a film I put in my queue, and watched the weekend just before the nominations were released.

First Reformed is the story of Reverend Toller, a priest at a small, old New England church. It's a "tourist" church, kept open for its history and the visitors who come to see it more than for its meager congregation. It's the perfect assignment for Toller, as his troubled past has shaken his faith and left him a half-hearted minister at best. But now one of his few parishioners is in crisis. The rising threat of climate change has driven Michael Mensana into deep despair. His wife Mary is pregnant, and it seems unconscionable to him to bring a child into a doomed world. Mary hopes that Toller can counsel him. But despair, it turns out, is infectious...

Ethan Hawke did not, in fact, receive an Oscar nomination for this role -- an omission many critics have said was the biggest "snub" of this year's Awards. But the screenplay did pick up the first career nomination for writer-director Paul Schrader, whose work with Martin Scorsese (on Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and The Last Temptation of Christ) had somehow not managed to do so. (After Spike Lee's directing nomination for BlacKkKlansman, this was the other big "Finally!" nomination of the year.)

It's a shame Hawke was overlooked, though, because this movie either sinks or swims by the efforts of the actor playing Reverend Toller. This story is a real trial for this character, a repeated beating down of his faith to see how long he can maintain a veneer of spiritual strength. It makes for an unexpectedly tense story in places; you wouldn't necessarily expect a quiet internal struggle to be the stuff of suspense, but the final act is one long, drawn out tease: "What's he going to do?"

If only either the performance or the script was going to get Oscar recognition, then I'd say they got it backwards. Hawke does plenty to let you see inside the mind of his character, more than Schrader's script seemed to expect an actor could reveal without "help." I found the script a bit on the nose at times, overly explicit. It seems to underline, highlight, and circle every key moment just in case we might not track where Toller is at in his gradual descent. We get it.

I'm also not too enamored of the ending. The final act is really building to a binary decision, then tries to get clever with a third option. It's far less provocative than at least one of the two obvious choices would have been -- obvious in this case would not have been bad. The third way is an artsy ending, an ending that seems like it might be "open to interpretation" -- but a moment's consideration is all you need to realize that there's really only one interpretation that makes any sense.

I wasn't the biggest fan of Schrader's directing either -- or, at least, his decision to film the movie in a 4:3 aspect ratio. This is the size of television "back in the day," and feels like exactly the wrong choice for the subject matter here. This is a story in which climate change and the impending global disaster it threatens is a key element. This formatting of the image makes the movie look decades old, like an old relic to be regarded at an intellectual distance.

But the movie did carry me along for most of the journey. It kept me engaged despite the constant visual remove and the ending I questioned. So overall, I did enjoy it and would recommend it. I give First Reformed a B. If you're the sort of person who likes catching up on Oscar movies, you should put this one on your list, even though it did miss the race for the top prize.