Yacht To Go

There's a certain brand of soft rock from the late 70s and early 80s that's become infamous. It kinda rocks... but certainly not too hard. It's music cool enough that other artists came around decades later to sample its grooves... even as many modern music listeners won't even admit to liking it. Today, it's called "Yacht Rock" -- though it wasn't known that way at the time.

The birth, growth, and decline of this subgenre, along with how its moniker came to stick, is the subject of Yacht Rock: A DOCKumentary, now streaming on Max. Whether you like the music ironically or genuinely, have laughed at the term or have never heard of it, were alive when the music was new or not even born until after the name "Yacht Rock" was coined -- I think you'd enjoy this short film. I watched it on a bit of a lark, and found it deeply fascinating.

The documentary begins with the creation of the 2005 web series Yacht Rock. Before the creation of YouTube, a bunch of comedians got together to dramatize (melodramatically) a fever dream soap opera explaining how so much "smooth music" of the 70s and 80s came to share the same sound: jazzy chords pushed through a pop Play-Doh Fun Factory.

As this new film interviews people involved with the making of the web series, what quickly becomes clear is that however pejorative the term Yacht Rock might sound, they actually had only reverence for the music. They explain in great detail how Steely Dan was the wellspring from which this type of music swallowed the entire L.A. music scene. As is often the case with influential pop music, superior musicians were mining traditionally black music history to bring something more sophisticated to the scene. In this case, they did it with such affection, authenticity, and success that soon black artists like George Benson and The Pointer Sisters were closing the loop.

As the documentary goes in deeper, from how "Yacht Rock" as a name was coined to a detailed analysis of the music itself, it begins interviewing the real titans of the genre. Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins, Christopher Cross, and members of Toto all appear -- and their interviews are actually fantastic. No doubt 40 years of distance from the peak of their fame has helped them find perspective, but they're all quite sanguine about their place in music history. Generally, the message is "we were making music we loved, we think it's still good music, and that's enough." Though it's also entertaining when, for example, Kenny Loggins admits that the song he expected to crap out for his sophomore slump also became a Grammy-winning mega-hit.

This truly engaging music history class covers a variety of topics, including a fun look at what isn't Yacht Rock. (Hall and Oates and Fleetwood Mac, for example.) But it's the end of the story that I found most compelling. It's no surprise that "Video Killed the Radio Star" -- the arrival of New Wave and Synth Pop, coupled with the rise of MTV, ended the dominance of what is now known as Yacht Rock. But the fatal blow from Michael Jackson's Thriller is an especially ironic conclusion to it all. As the documentary notes, most of the members of Toto actually sat in as session musicians on that mega-hit album. And one of its (many) hit singles, Human Nature, was actually written by a founding member of Toto. (And it sure sounds like Yacht Rock!) One of the biggest bands of the genre was pivotal in the genre's demise!

I was surprised at how thoroughly I enjoyed this random documentary I watched on a bit of a lark. I give Yacht Rock: A DOCKumentary a B+. It's a fun little retro escape set to fun, retro music.

The White Stuff

The White Lotus made a huge pop culture splash when it first arrived in 2021. One year later, the second season was even more talked-about. I wasn't watching it at the time; however, when word arrived that the strike-delayed third season was going to be arriving in early 2025, it seemed like it was time to catch up. If I liked the show at all, I'd best be there in real time as the internet gossiped about and memed a new season.

In the unlikely event you don't know: The White Lotus began as a one-off mini-series. Set at a fancy resort in Hawaii, six episodes tracked a much-put-upon resort staff catering to the whims of a variety of ill-behaved rich guests. While an "upstairs, downstairs" examination of class permeated every episode, the lines weren't always clearly drawn: some characters in the orbit of the rich guests deserved audience sympathy, and some of the hotel employees were as messed up and self-centered as the guests.

The show was such a hit that it grew from a one-off into more of an anthology series. Some tendrils of connection persist between the seasons, but essentially each new season moves to a new resort somewhere else in the world, with a new cast of characters and new morals and themes. This has allowed the show to attract a wide variety of actors who might otherwise not have the time or desire to tie themselves to a television series (or, in some cases, another one) -- but they're all in for a few months away in some paradise destination, filming something that's part scathing critique, part sugary confection.

The White Lotus is the brainchild of Mike White, who writes and directs every episode, exerting a degree of creative control rarely seen in television. This can have its advantages, particularly if you're into the vibe he's putting out. But the lack of other creative voices in the mix does occasionally poke through. In the writing, its clear White is more interested in some of his siloed storylines than others, and there are always a couple of characters whose stories get short shrift. And very recently, series composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer had a very public falling out with White, saying he would not be back for future seasons; yet his exceedingly odd score -- full of warbling vocals, weird gasping for breath, and other strange noises -- is absolutely integral to the show being what it is.

No matter what goes on behind the scenes, though, the most integral element of The White Lotus will always be the cast. Every season has featured at least one powerhouse performance. Jennifer Coolidge has deserved the two Emmys she's won for the show, and if there's any justice, Parker Posey will get one for the just-completed season. We've seen indelible characters -- some likeable, many detestable -- from the likes of Murray Bartlett, Molly Shannon, F. Murray Abraham, Aubrey Plaza, Walton Goggins, and Jason Isaacs. And that's just my short list; someone else could easily have another that might include Connie Britton, Michael Imperioli, Carrie Coon, Patrick Schwarzenegger, and others.

Hitting the reset button each season on story and setting means that characters and storylines don't play out past their prime. That in turn means there isn't really a "good" or "bad" season of The White Lotus. If pressed to rank them, I suppose I'd say season 2 was my favorite, followed by season 3, and finally season 1 -- this on the basis of how many of the numerous characters in each season have their storylines resolved most completely. But I'd also say that I'm probably just ranking seasons that are all a B+ in my mind, as ]I'd rate the show as a whole. (Obviously. Math.)

The hype may be a little over the top, but it is real. Watching a group of people mostly behaving badly might not be for everyone. But if the fact that many get a come-uppance means it might be for you, consider checking out The White Lotus.

Enterprise Flashback: Precious Cargo

There have been moments throughout the first two seasons of Enterprise that have made me question the taste of series creators Rick Berman and Brannon Braga. But it does seem that Braga at least was capable of knowing "bad" when he saw it. Because in an interview a decade after the episode "Precious Cargo" first aired, he called it one of the worst episodes of Star Trek ever.

Trip boards an alien freighter to assist in repairs, and there discovers a woman being held in stasis. When he revives her, the aliens react by running from Enterprise, leaving Trip and the woman, a monarch named Kaitaama, to fend for themselves. They flee in an escape pod, but bicker constantly as they struggle to survive and signal for rescue.

"Spoiled princess" butting heads with "crass rogue" is such an old trope of film and television that I don't think there's an unexplored way left to tell the story. All you can do is hope to catch lightning in a bottle with casting. But even that feels like a long shot when you're competing against the likes of Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher, Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, etc. etc.

Needless to say, it's unsurprising that Connor Trinneer would little chance of finding such chemistry with a random guest star in a one-off episode of Enterprise. But that little chance was destroyed with the casting of model-turned-actress Padma Lakshmi, whose performance here is so wooden that it doesn't even rise to the level of parody. Though it's not entirely her fault; the script isn't doing her any favors. "Precious Cargo" plays like Spaceballs, without the jokes.

Actually, it plays a lot like Spaceballs, with Kaitaama complaining constantly like Princess Vespa about the conditions of her rescue. Instead of losing her "matched luggage," Kaitaama must sacrifice her fancy dress when Trip tears it into a mini-skirt. (Of course he does.) Instead of complaining about escaping in a Winnebago, she and Trip share one cramped escape pod, crawling all over each other. Nothing is as fun as it should be. Once they crash on a planet together, it's every bit as stupid as it sounds when Kaitaama orders Trip out of his clothes, accidentally tumbles into a bog with him, and the two just decide "we might as well have sexy times while we're here."

As terrible as all this is, the episode manages not to be a complete loss thanks to a few fun scenes involving Archer and T'Pol. When the alien freighter escapes early on, one of the aliens is left behind as a prisoner aboard Enterprise. The efforts to coerce this guy into revealing information are the kind of fun the rest of the episode should be. They decide to position T'Pol up as a merciless judge, jury, and executioner in an invented Vulcan tribunal -- and if you overlook that T'Pol probably shouldn't go along so easily with such subterfuge, her cool menace (and Archer's staged fear of her) do generate the smiles this episode desperately needed -- in a few too-brief moments.

Other observations:

• When the alien freighter somehow escapes, even after allegedly being hit by a phase cannon shot, it's just the latest in a long string of incompetence by Malcolm Reed.

• The alien provisions found in the escape pod are obviously just a CamelBak and some beef jerky.

This episode is painfully dumb. I found it worse than the worst episodes of Deep Space Nine and Voyager. But since I'd have to admit that The Next Generation occasionally had even worse episodes than this, I suppose I'll give "Precious Cargo" a D+.

Spirits! Speak to Us!

One of the more crowded genres in board gaming is the "large group word game." Or perhaps it just seems like a crowded genre to me because there are a lot of great games in it -- games like Codenames, Decrypto, Just One, So Clover, and more. Now I've discovered another game to add to that list, Phantom Ink.

Players split into two teams, each team designating one person as their "Spirit." The other players on each team are the "Mediums." The two Spirits are given the same secret word, some object that each is trying to communicate "from the spirit world" to their Mediums before the other team can guess.

The Mediums on each team work with a hand of question cards -- each card an unusual way of getting information about the secret object. "What fictional character would be most likely to use it?" "What would happen to it if you buried it for a year?" "What is another object of similar size?" "In what room of the house would you most likely encounter it?" Each round, the Mediums of one team select two questions to pass to their Spirit. The Spirit discard one and then answers the other.

How the questions are answered is to me the most fun part of the game. The Spirit thinks of their answer -- a single word, or even a phrase -- and then begins writing out that answer one letter at a time. All players see the answer as the Spirit writes it out letter by letter... but only the Mediums on the one team knows exactly what the question was. To avoid giving away too much information to the other team, the Mediums can call "Silencio!" at any time to make the Spirit stop writing the rest of their answer. Perhaps they can stop the clue at a point where they know the rest of what will be written, but think the other team can't guess. Or perhaps they only think they know what the Spirit was trying to write.

When it's one team's turn to get an answer from their Spirit, they can instead try to guess the secret word. The Mediums seize the pencil and they begin writing out their guess one letter at a time. With each correct letter, the Spirit knocks the table in confirmation. If the Spirit falls silent, the guess is wrong, and the Mediums have forfeited their turn. Back and forth the teams alternate (with a few other small rules quirks I've omitted) until one team guesses the word.

I kicked off this post with a list of great word guessing games. I've played them all -- and thoroughly enjoyed them -- many times. But what Phantom Ink has that those other games don't is a wonderfully appropriate theme. Codenames is nominally about spies arranging covert meetings and passing messages to each other. Decrypto is nominally about slipping hidden spyware past rival programmers. So Clover has four-leaf-clover-shaped player boards, but nothing else thematic. And Just One doesn't bother with theme at all. To me, the experience of playing any of those games is essentially a "flavorless" one. You and your friends are just playing with words -- though you are having enough fun, in my experience, that no greater theme is necessary.

With Phantom Ink, designers Mary Flanagan and Max Seidman have demonstrated that flavor can matter in one of these games -- being inextricably linked to the gameplay, and adding to the fun of playing it. When I've explained the "seance" premise of the game to new players, I've more than once been met with knowing nods as players realize how "spirit writing" will play a role in the game -- and wide grins when they learn that the Spirits will knock in reply to their guesses. Phantom Ink simply cannot be a game where the theme was added after the fact; the idea of spirit communication clearly inspired the whole thing. And it led to gameplay that's distinct from those many other word games.

Is this a "killer" for any of those other games? Probably not. They all have their niche, after all. So Clover does a good job letting everyone give clues without any one person feeling "on the spot." Just One offers simultaneous play for every player. Decrypto is considerably more complicated than the rest -- a plus for some groups, and a minus for others. And Codenames is, simply, the granddaddy of them all that you'll find in more stores than any other.

Yet at the same time, I've played a ton of all those those other games -- so much that they've all lost their luster (just a little bit) over time. I'm still happy to play any of them. But I'm perhaps even happier to have something shiny and new in the mix too. I've enjoyed Phantom Ink, am interested in its standalone expansion (Phantom Ink: Arcana), and I look forward to overplaying it just like all those others. I give it a B+.

Enterprise Flashback: Vanishing Point

By the time Enterprise began, more than 600 episodes of Star Trek had already been made. So by that point, you could reasonably expect that some new episodes wouldn't feel wholly original; some would revisit ideas from earlier Star Treks, hopefully with a distinct twist. I don't mind this in theory... but it's harder to take in practice when an all-time great episode is being repackaged. That's what I felt was going on with Enterprise's "Vanishing Point."

Hoshi Sato and Trip Tucker are on an an away mission when a violent storm rolls in so suddenly that beaming back to Enterprise is the only escape. But once back aboard the ship, Hoshi is increasingly convinced that the transporter didn't put her back together correctly. What at first appears to be her own doubts suddenly becomes all too serious when Hoshi becomes incorporeal. She wanders the ship, desperate to find help -- but no one is able to see her.

It seems likely that when Rick Berman and Brannon Braga wrote this script, the past Star Trek episode they were thinking about was The Next Generation's "Realm of Fear." (In fact, Brannon Braga was the credited writer on that episode about Barclay's transporter phobia.) I do wish that for this new episode, phobia of some other technology might have been explored, just for variety's sake. Yet it's not like "Realm of Fear" invented transporter anxiety. (McCoy was complaining about it decades earlier.) Nor did "Realm of Fear" seem like a definitive take on the subject. (For one thing, plenty of people hated Barclay as a character.)

For a time, "Vanishing Point" does seem like it's doing something reasonably different. "I saw something in the transporter" isn't the same as "the transporter messed me up." Hoshi's fears are far more personal, and the episode does a decent job conveying them. And in the beginning, when it seems more like it might really all be in her head, it seems to me like enough for an interesting story. She just can't shake it. Her nerves are met with a cheeky ghost story and weird exchanges with people that seem to underscore her doubts. Even little things are unnerving -- has her birthmark moved?

But then it turns out that something really is happening to Hoshi. And that thing was already covered in "The Next Phase." That episode is one of The Next Generation's best, and already did everything that "Vanishing Point" tries to do. Someone has been rendered invisible by a transporter accident. They're presumed dead by a crew that's oblivious to a serious danger that only the transporter victim is aware of. "The Next Phase" covered all that, and even did a better job examining the existential crisis of it all, by involving two people in the accident, and having one of them -- Ensign Ro -- believe she's reached the afterlife.

The twist here that seems meant to differentiate this story from "The Next Phase" isn't exactly a good one: it turns out that "it's all a dream" in Hoshi's head. And sure, even that trope can be used with amazing results. But "Vanishing Point" shows its cards far too early, completely undermining the stakes. Something already seems off when Hoshi Sato misses her shift and T'Pol waits three hours to call and wake her up.  Travis and Trip's alleged capture by aliens would surely have been depicted on screen if it were real. Even as lurid as Enterprise can be, there's no way the show would cut away from an actual crisis to instead show Hoshi taking a shower.

And even by Enterprise standards, which often shows its characters fumbling because they're in a prequel and "learning how to do Star Trek," Archer seems especially awkward here. When he tries to inform Hoshi's dad of his daughter's "death," he doesn't even manage to actually get out the words to say what happened. In the same scene, he recognizes Morse code for SOS, but then decides to just dismiss it! I suppose this is Hoshi's hallucination; so maybe this is just what she thinks about her captain?

Although that doesn't explain why Malcolm Reed -- the tactical officer -- is actually operating the transporter when this whole thing happens to Hoshi in the first place. Given his track record, I think he'd be about the last person I'd want beaming me up.

Other observations:

• As always, John Billingsley nails his few moments on screen. When he tells Hoshi her secret is safe as though "he never saw her," he puts just the right spin on the joke.

• I'm not quite sure I believe in "giant gyroscope" as a piece of workout equipment, but Connor Trinneer tries his best to sell it.

• Of course, when you start to pick apart the "Next Phase" premise, you wind up asking how the phased-out characters don't fall through the floor. This episode really puts that in your face, though, when non-corporeal Hoshi sits on a table in Sickbay.

• Because it's Enterprise, right before Hoshi vanishes completely, she strips down to a tank top, so she can spend the rest of the episode showing her midriff.

"Vanishing Point" is trying to remix some Star Trek ingredients in a new recipe. But it's up against the signature dish from a three-star Michelin restaurant. I give it a B-.

Passing the Savings on to You

These days, when a movie is released in the theaters, you might have 2 weeks to get to it before it's unceremoniously yanked. Even blockbusters can get steamrolled when the next blockbuster comes out.

Movies released directly to a streaming service can have even less fanfare; you may not even hear about them, and they vanish from the service's splash screen in a matter of days. But I do try to make note of things that sound interesting, to circle back to at some later date. One such movie was the 2023 sci-fi horror No One Will Save You.

Brynn is the shunned outcast in a small town, keeping mostly to herself in her home. But one night, that home is invaded by gray aliens. She stands up for herself and survives the night... but soon finds that the aliens haven't just attacked her. And the attack was only the first.

It's not that I heard "alien horror movie" and was instantly sold. Interested, sure, but that alone wasn't enough to put No One Will Save You on my "to-watch list." My attention was hooked by one other thing I heard about the movie (at the time it was dropped on Hulu, back in late 2023): the movie has virtually no dialogue at all. The way that so many horror movies come down to a monster vs. a "final girl" in an all-action, no dialogue showdown? Someone had made that for an entire 93-minute movie. A Quiet Place, to the nth degree. Would it even work?

Sort of. It's a fascinating formal exercise to write a movie without dialogue. How do you convey backstory to the audience? How do you flesh out the characters? Or, for that matter, even provide the characters' names? In these aspects of the exercise, writer/director Brian Duffield has done an excellent job with this movie. "Show, don't tell" is the mantra of good storytelling, and Duffield does a masterful job of this with the main character of Brynn. Over the course of the film, we're filled in bit by bit about who she is, that the town hates her, and ultimately why the town hates her -- all without a single word of dialogue.

It's in the horror movie elements that I found No One Will Save You lacking. The various action sequences are just a grab bag of horror tropes -- in particular, the ones that would work in a movie without dialogue. You know how some action blockbusters feel like four or five preconceived set pieces with lazy spackle connecting them? I found this movie to be the opposite: a character story carefully doled out in four or five major moments, with horror scenes smeared in the cracks between.

The behavior of the aliens in this movie makes no sense. And while that's a critique easy to explain away ("they're aliens, so what they do won't necessarily make sense to humans"), it doesn't leave the narrative any less rocky. From one scene to the next, the capabilities of the aliens seem to shift: they're always exactly capable enough to seem menacing, while never doing everything they could. If they did, Brynn couldn't get away and keep the movie going. And if their capabilities confuse, don't even try to guess at their motives.

So overall, I found No One Will Save You to be a disappointment. I'd grade it a C- overall. Yet I wanted to blog about it anyway, because I was impressed with the way it told a complete story for one character -- with history, stakes, and growth -- without using dialogue. I feel like there are lessons in there for other writers... not even to try as a similar formal constraint, but as applicable to more conventional storytelling.

Upon Closer Inspection

I have a pile of "backlogged" television shows and movies I'd like to watch, longer than I'll ever get through. And yet still, somehow, I'll find myself with a couple of hours to watch something and find that nothing sounds quite good. So I'll let somebody's algorithm guide me to a suggestion. (One example: I've found that Movielens.org has me pegged rather accurately.) That was how I came to watch a movie I'd never even heard of before, An Inspector Calls.

In 1912, a wealthy British family is hosting a dinner party to celebrate the engagement of their daughter. The merriment is interrupted by police inspector Goole, who arrives to question them about the suicide of a young woman. Each member of the family, it's revealed, had some connection to the poor woman, and may have contributed to her decision to take her own life.

Since I hadn't heard of An Inspector Calls before sitting down to watch it, I was unaware of its considerable pedigree. Originally, it was a stage play written in 1945 by J. B. Priestley. The play's critique of the "haves versus the have-nots" has maintained currency for decades, with theater companies worldwide staging versions. Filmed adaptations have been fairly common too, from a 1954 film to a 1982 mini-series to versions in other languages (such as a 2015 Hong Kong film).

From the synopsis I've read of the play, this version of An Inspector Calls that I found changes little -- only opening up the flashback structure of the tale to make the story more cinematic than a one-act play set in a single room. It feels like the right choice, because while the specifics of the story may be dated (it's set now over 100 years in the past), the themes remain topical. Put simply, it probably just felt like time to tell this story again, time to assemble a new cast to tell it.

And they assembled a very good one. The version I happened upon was a BBC television adaptation mounted in 2015, starring David Thewlis as the titular inspector. In the way of so many British casts, there are faces you'll recognize from all sorts of other places. Miranda Richardson is the one you'd most likely know by name, though you've possibly seen Ken Stott as Balin in The Hobbit films, Kyle Soller in Andor (or Bodies), Sophie Rundle in Peaky Blinders or Bodyguard)... the list keeps going.

The story is quite heightened, to the point of seeming artificial at times. You might well expect this of a period piece, and certainly could expect it knowing that it's based on a stage play. Still, I mention it since the performative whims of the characters did occasionally take me out of the moment. Plus, there's a final twist in the story that I personally didn't feel added much to the well-articulated central themes: we're all connected, and you never know what other people are going through. Then again, it may well be this final twist that lifted up the original play among so many written decades ago to keep in people's minds and hearts to today. I did enjoy the message overall, and again, I found the acting to be top-notch.

I give An Inspector Calls -- this version of it, at least -- a B. If you like a proper British "upstairs/downstairs" story, or the cast seems intriguing to you (or both!), you might consider it.

Enterprise Flashback: Singularity

One of the staple story archetypes of Star Trek is the "everyone on the crew starts acting strangely" story. Enterprise took at run at this with "Singularity."

When Enterprise explores a black hole in a trinary star system, the crew begins exhibiting unusually obsessive behavior. And when everyone but T'Pol is rendered unconscious, it falls on her alone to save the ship from destruction.

Forgive me starting with a diversion, but I want to talk about writer Ronald D. Moore. After starting his career on Star Trek, he went on to create several other television series, including the revival of Battlestar Galactica. During the original run of that series, he hosted a weekly podcast about each new episode, which I always made a point of listening to it after the show. His commentary was always shockingly frank, and I will always remember a bit of behind-the-scenes info he revealed about a particularly disliked episode. ("Black Market," if you're a BSG fan.) He admitted that it was a bad episode with little suspense, and he copped to trying to help it in the edit by stealing a scene from the climax to place in the opening teaser, followed by a "48 hours earlier" on-screen cut. It was a cheap trick, he admitted, but they had to do something to improve the slow pace of the first half of the episode.

Since then, I've been especially aware of television episodes that use that trick. Perhaps they're written that way, or perhaps they're edited that way after the fact (like "Black Market"). But I always find myself asking: is the opening section of this story legitimately interesting? Or have they tried to trick me into overlooking a few dull acts?

That question nagged at me as this episode of Enterprise opened with T'Pol alone on Enterprise, recording a desperate log entry... before then flashing back for a truly slow Act One. Hoshi Sato is taking over in the kitchen for the oft-talked-about-but-never-seen Chef. Archer is writing a foreword for a biography about his father. Travis Mayweather has a headache. Trip is tasked with fixing the captain's chair. Reed is going to do his job for once, looking into improved protocols for ship emergencies. None of this seems particularly engaging.

By Act Two, it's becoming clear that everyone is obsessed with these trivial activities. And they kind of have to be trivial activities for the audience to begin to suspect anything is wrong; the characters have so often been depicted as being bad at their jobs that the behavior has to be extreme for anything to seem amiss! 

I find the origin and spread of this contagion to be quite murky. When Chef fell ill, was he patient zero for it all, or was that an unrelated plot contrivance to give Hoshi something to do? Is T'Pol actually immune to the obsession contagion? She says she is -- but frankly, I don't believe her. She seems more irritable than usual with her human shipmates, and withdraws to her quarters to analyze stellar scans, an apparent manifestation of her own obsession. And her own logic seems quite compromised, when she chooses to awaken Archer to help her escape the black hole -- rather than Travis, or any other ship's pilot.

Whatever all these shortcomings total up to, though, I have to admit that the episode is pretty fun. It's the rare episode where everyone in the cast gets something to do, and that "something" involves them all getting to behave out of the ordinary. Reed's story line may exist only to justify an admittedly funny joke about inventing a "Reed Alert," but blessedly, at long last, we get to see him succeed at something. Archer's obsession is bad for poor Porthos, who skips a meal and sulks cutely for the camera. And you can always count on John Billingsley to deliver; Phlox's mad scientist obsession with curing Mayweather's headache makes an effective turn from goofy to harrowing.

There may be a few muddy plot points, but the dialogue is notably sharp. Trip gets most of the best lines, from his characterization of Reed's alert noises as "a bag full of cats" to his wicked retort when Archer accuses him of not knowing anything about writing. ("I'm not the only one!")

Other observations:

• When Archer mentions that you have to perch on the edge of the captain's chair rather than properly sit in it, I thought to myself: "yeah, I see T'Pol sitting in it that way all the time!" And then I thought: "I'll bet this is the show making a story point out of a real world production complaint." I was expecting that they'd use all this as an excuse to actually remodel the captain's chair. But no, in the end, nothing changes; we're told Trip lowers the chair one centimeter, but obviously that's not a real thing. (The change, not the concept of a centimeter.)

• Back in season one, one of the maybe two things we learned about Malcolm Reed is that he'll eat pretty much anything. So it's inconsistent here to have him be the character complaining to Hoshi Sato that her meal is too salty.

I feel like this episode lacks clarity on several important plot points. But it is fun to see the entire cast cut loose with strange behavior. It reminds me a bit of an early Deep Space Nine episode, "Dramatis Personae" -- though in a rare occurrence (perhaps even a unique one), I actually think the Enterprise episode is a touch better. I give "Singularity" a B-.

Here There Be Dragons

I was getting ready to write a review of the new board game Finspan -- a fish-themed spin-off of the popular Wingspan -- when I realized that I'm actually one spin-off behind! I never posted my thoughts on Wyrmspan.

Wyrmspan tweaks the core gameplay of Wingspan, the engine-building game about birds. It adds a fantasy theme (ever a popular choice), making the game about dragons instead of birds. Mechanically, it brings in the concept of "guilds," a track where players advance to earn rewards and compete to score points at the end of the game. It does away with Wingspan's dice, giving players more control over the food they gather, and thus more ability to engineer card combos. Add in a handful of other minor changes -- some merely cosmetic, others subtly nudging the nature of the gameplay -- and you have something clearly meant to be a slightly more advanced take on Wingspan.

I've got no problem with board game spin-offs. Maybe that's motivated thinking, given the board game company I work for. Still, the most subtle changes in a game can cause real ripple effects throughout its ecosystem. So when a designer or publisher actually changes things up with a spin-off, rather than just re-themes them, I'm open to treating it as a new experience. (To those who claim this sort of thing is just a "cash grab," my answer is simple: you can just not let your cash be grabbed.)

To me, Wyrmspan retains enough of the core of Wingspan that I don't find it massively better or worse than the original game. The fun still comes from the hundreds of cards (bird or dragon) that combine in new ways every time you play. Building an engine, then exploiting it, is still the core loop -- and I find that fun in either form.

But Wyrmspan has highlighted at least two things about my own gaming tastes. The first, I already knew: with each passing year, my tastes are drifting toward less complex experiences. I was never the kind of gamer eager to dive into a 4-hour game preceded by a 1-hour rules teach. I've always been the sort of gamer that would rather experience two different 2-hour games in that time. Except... it seems more and more like I'd actually rather fit three 90-or-so minute games in that time. (Or four 1-hours!)

The original Wingspan, it's important to note, doesn't actually feel like a "crossover" game. The super-accessible bird theme helped it rocket to the top of the hobby, helping it land in Target stores and on plenty of tables that otherwise host only the occasional Monopoly game. But it's easy to forget all that when experienced gamers pick up Wingspan so quickly: it's already a gamers' game. Try teaching it to non-gamers, and this is what you'll get.

All that is to say that, for me at least, I didn't necessary need a "more complex Wingspan" -- even an only incrementally more complex one. I don't mind Wyrmspan, because it is only incrementally harder to wrap your head around if you've experienced Wingspan. But Wingspan was scratching a particular itch just fine. The reason it had become less frequently played in my group has nothing to do with its complexity (or a perceived lack thereof).

The second thing Wyrmspan taught me is something I've recently begun to notice about my gaming habits, and something that's definitely changed over the years: theme matters. It used to be that when a game was being explained to me, I'd gloss right by the flavor of it. We're spreading civilization in ancient Greece? Trading artifacts at high-class auctions? Building castles in the European countryside? Whatever, what are we -- the players -- actually doing when we play this game? But increasingly, I've come across games where I feel that the theme does vastly improve the experience for me.

Without checking the rulebook for Wingspan, I'm not sure exactly what it's supposed to represent. Simple birdwatching? Some sort of conservation effort? I'm not sure, but I do know that I find playing birds (and reading little factoids about them on each card) to be inherently more interesting than playing made-up dragons with goofy, made-up names. If all the gameplay about Wingspan and Wyrmspan were exactly the same, I'd still prefer the birds of Wingspan to the dragons of Wyrmspan.

But ultimately, I think the two games feel something like 80-90% similar when you play them. They're different enough to each "justify their existence," and different enough that I think most gamers would have a preference between them. But they're both enjoyable. Suggest either on game night, and I'm likely to say yes. If Wingspan has settled around a B+ or A- in my view, Wyrmspan slots in at a B or B+.

Enterprise Flashback: The Communicator

The classic Star Trek episode "A Piece of the Action" ended a comedic story with one last goofy slide whistle of a joke: Dr. McCoy accidentally left his communicator behind on a mission to an alien planet. The prequel series Enterprise took up this exact baton, with a more dramatic approach, in the episode "The Communicator."

Returning from an undercover mission to observe a pre-warp society, Malcolm Reed realizes he accidentally left his communicator behind. When a new mission to retrieve it goes wrong, cultural contamination is just one problem in the mix; Archer and Reed's lives are endangered when they're taken prisoner by one local government who suspects them of being spies for another.

To get this story going, someone needed to leave a communicator behind on an alien planet. But did it really have to be Malcolm Reed? Screwing up again?! I can only conclude that not only did the writers of Enterprise know that Malcolm Reed was their most unlikable and incapable character, but they actually delighted in pushing the boundaries of just how insufferable they could make him.

Even setting aside season one, the first third of season two has already shown Reed being bad at shooting, unable to circumvent alien security, pessimistic to the degree where you'd think maybe he has a death wish, and not someone you'd think to bring along in pursuit of a fugitive. And all this failure without us even getting what I'd call a "Reed episode." Now, with "The Communicator," he sucks even at basic "opsec." (Like, not "invite a reporter to the group chat" bad... but this is fiction and thus has to maintain some degree of plausibility.)

When Archer and Reed go back for the communicator, the time for innocent accidents is over, and the bad decision making begins. They go back to search the tavern where they think the communicator went missing without any advance discussion of a cover story. They explore a clearly "employees only" back hall without even trying so much as a "just looking for the bathroom" excuse. They go in with a bunch more advanced technology that is promptly confiscated.

Fearing the consequences of cultural contamination, Reed and Archer decide that revealing themselves as aliens would somehow be worse than escalating a cold war into a hot one. They claim to be genetically modified super soldiers working for the other side, an unthinkably threatening technological leap for the local population. Only the prospect of becoming an alien autopsy pushes either of the two anywhere close to thinking rationally. (Not that they actually change their minds.)

It would be one thing if Archer and Reed were standing up for some ideal they've strongly identified with before now. But if anything, this is a total reversal of Archer's ideals as we've come to know them. The closest thing to his north star has been "if the Vulcans are for it, I'm against it." So this steadfast commitment to non-interference with alien cultures feels quite out of character for him. Am I glad to see Archer open to actual learning and growth? You bet! But nothing about this situation feels like it's been a "teachable moment" for him -- nothing that would suggest a conversion to the point where he's willing to lay down his life. (Reed, on the other hand, has demonstrated a willingness to die for pretty much any reason, at any time.)

We do at least get an action-packed rescue sequence. Trip, Mayweather, and T'Pol swoop in on a cloaked Suliban ship (even more cultural contamination). We get fun cloaking effects (including a running gag about Trip basically spilling cloaking juice on his arm). There's a huge shootout. Running, dodging, going back to scoop up any traces that might leave behind. The ride was ridiculous getting to this point, but it delivers on all the roller coaster thrills you could ask for.

Other observations:

• Fans of Shameless may clock actor Dennis Cockrum, Mickey Milkovich's dad, as the barkeep at the alien tavern.

• For my money, the antics surrounding Trip's disappearing -- and slowly reappearing -- arm provide the best moments of the episode. But they certainly undermine trying to treat an idea from "A Piece of the Action" seriously.

• ...though not as much as the silly moment near the end where Archer thinks he's now left something behind, only for Reed to find it dropped inside the shuttlepod.

Enterprise can do action better than any Star Trek series that came before, and does so again here. Still, the continued incompetence of the Enterprise crew -- and Malcolm Reed in particular -- is really starting to wear me down. I give "The Communicator" a C+.

"Best" Picture

A few months ago, I wrote that The Substance was the movie that may have finally broken me of needing to see Oscar-nominated movies just because they're Oscar-nominated. Well... it turns out that was just the first blow of a one-two punch that might have cured me of needing to see Oscar-winning movies as well. The year's Best Picture winner, Anora, hit streaming recently. I decided to watch it and see what all the fuss was about. And I still have no idea.

Anora (who goes by Ani) is a young stripper who one night, because she speaks Russian, is tapped to entertain Vanya, the son of a Russian oligarch. Vanya begins hiring Anora outside of her club with increasing frequency -- and soon, the two get married in Las Vegas. But this rash action brings down the wrath of Vanya's parents, who send in goons to detain the couple and annul the marriage.

I've heard Anora described as Pretty Woman crossed with The Godfather -- though I struggle to see how a fan of either would like the combination here. If you're up for the light rags-to-riches story of a sex worker clawing out a new life for herself, I think you'll find neither enough "rom" or "com" in Anora. The movie has moments that seem to be intended as dark comedy -- but even if they make you laugh, they would seem like curdled milk next to the bubbly champagne of a typical feel-good romance.

The first 40 minutes of the film feel like borderline pornography, as Mikey Madison secures herself a Best Actress Oscar seemingly by a willingness to be even more naked, simulating even more sex, than when Emma Stone won for Poor Things in the previous year. And at no point does any genuine romance appear to blossom between Ani and Vanya. I don't think it's supposed to... and yet the rest of the movie seems to turn on Ani's investment in the relationship, not merely what she gets out of it.

If I'm dubious of what the rom-com audience would make of Anora, I'm even more skeptical about what fans of gangster films would find here. Bear in mind, please, that gangster stories in general usually leave me cold. (I'm one of the few heretics who dislikes all the Godfather films as much as most people seem to hate Part III.) I imagine much of the appeal stems from the intersection of violence and domestic life, the sense that criminal danger is a true threat at any moment. (At least, that's what I feel in the handful of stories that do work for me, like Breaking Bad.)

I felt an odd lack of danger in Anora. I grew too bored to keep close track, but I believe there's not a single gun anywhere in the film. Of course, violence can take other forms -- and in particular, brutish men don't need a gun to menace a vulnerable woman. But at no point does Anora ever really come off as a vulnerable woman. Maybe that should be seen as a credit to both the character and the movie. And yet once the "gangster" section of the story kicks in, it takes only minutes for it to become clear that even in situations where Anora isn't in control, she isn't in any danger. While I'd like to think I'm not looking for only the cheap thrills of danger in this movie, I would like some source of suspense or tension in the ensuing hour-and-a-half.

Instead, I found Anora to be deeply boring at best, actively off-putting at worse. (Seriously, what's with the repeated homophobic slurs that don't do anything to further plot or differentiate characters?) By the time the end credits mercifully arrived, I was sure I'd watched what had to be the worst Academy Award Best Picture winner I'd ever seen. Although a moment's reflection made me realize, "nope, I've seen The English Patient," the fact remains that it's close competition.

I don't usually make time these days to blog about entertainment I dislike. But I figure I have to make an exception for an Academy Award-winning Best Picture. And because I wish others had been blunt enough to have saved me the two hours and 20 minutes, I'll mince no more words. I give Anora an F.

The Gang's All Here (and All In?)

When someone first tells you about the game The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, you're likely to wonder how it would even work. A trick-taking game that's somehow cooperative? But it does work, brilliantly. And the innovation has spawned a sequel, many imitators, and a bunch of new games trying to apply player cooperation to inherently competitive gameplay.

The Gang is a cooperative game for 3 to 6 players, who try to pull off three successful bank heists before tripping three alarms. The mechanism for this is poker. The group plays a standard hand of Texas Hold 'Em, but at each moment where there would normally be a betting round, each player instead selects a chip with a number on it. This is the only way to pass information to the other players, who otherwise cannot discuss the contents or quality of their hands. After the final round of "betting" (chip taking), the players reveal their hands in order. The player who took the lowest-valued chip in that final round must have the worst hand, and so on up to the player who took the highest-valued chip, who must have the best hand. You succeed or fail completely as a group, playing a "best of five hands" format to win or lose the game.

Board gamers -- especially the ones trying to maintain a smaller, curated game collection -- will often talk about whether one game "kills" another, offering the same thrills and more in a new package that displaces some earlier release. I don't think that The Gang is a "Crew killer." But I think it does show that there's room for more games following in The Crew's footsteps.

For one thing, a lot more people are familiar with poker than, say, Hearts, or Bridge, or any of the trick-taking games commonly played with a standard deck of cards. If you're looking for a game that's easy to teach, and accommodates players with a wide range of gaming experience, The Gang feels like the far more approachable option to me over The Crew.

As a practical matter, the fact that The Gang takes up to six players is notable. The Crew caps out at five (and, realistically, is far better with four). Not only can The Gang take more, it's actually better (or at least, more of a challenge) the more players you have. And thanks to the simultaneous, cooperative play and people's likely familiarity with Texas Hold 'Em, it's still a fast game with six.

That said, if you're bound and determined to have only one game in your collection -- this, or a version of The Crew -- I'd say you're unlikely to choose The Gang. First, there's not as much variety here as there is in The Crew. The different goals you pursue in The Crew (especially in the Mission Deep Sea version) can make different hands feel wildly different in strategy. The Gang has less variety; you're always trying to rank the strength of your poker hand. Sure, the nature of Texas Hold' Em itself can make that trickier some times more than others, but you're always thinking about the same basic possibilities.

The specific thing you wind up doing in The Gang can feel quite similar too. When another player takes the lowest chip, and you're convinced you have a worse hand than they do, you're allowed to take the chip from them for yourself. They're allowed to take it back. You can "debate" through the passing of chips as much as you want -- so long as you don't actually say anything about the cards in your hand. And since you can't actually make any persuasive arguments -- as you could in, say, other cooperative games like Pandemic where players find disagreement -- you kind of just wind up having one player eventually say, "okaaaaaay" in a tone that clearly says they don't think it's okay.

In other words, the gameplay of The Gang can get a little repetitive over time. I think in recognition of this -- or at least to inject more variety generally into the system, the game includes a series of "temporary rules" cards you can optionally use. Whenever you fail at a hand, you reveal a condition for the next hand that helps out. Conversely, when you succeed at a hand, you reveal one that makes the next hand more challenging.

Regardless of whether you use those optional conditions or not, the game generally stays interesting throughout its quick play time -- especially if you're playing with a new player or even a new mix of experienced players. Each person has their own estimation of the strength of their own poker hand, which simply might not match how any other player might estimate the same hand. One player might use "betting" along the way to try to indicate potential (a "drawing hand," in poker parlance), while another player might always be trying to state simply how good the hand they have right now is. These quirks of communication make The Gang a different experience for each group that might play it.

I give The Gang a B+. There's a chance that playing it might just make you want to play Texas Hold 'Em or The Crew instead. But taken on its own terms, it's a fast-paced, fun enough experience.

Enterprise Flashback: The Seventh

The seventh episode of the second season of Enterprise was the cheekily titled "The Seventh."

T'Pol is tasked by the Vulcan High Command to capture an escaped fugitive: a surgically-altered Vulcan who refused to return home after the completion of his undercover mission. This is a mission she failed at once before, decades earlier. But it soon becomes clear that T'Pol has repressed certain memories about her earlier mission.

This episode is pushing hard on the door the writers tried just recently to open, the notion that Archer and T'Pol might become a romantic couple. For no reason more than "I trust you," T'Pol invites Archer along on her secret mission. As things unfold, it's suggested that the information T'Pol hides from Archer is really just information she's hiding from herself. Ultimately, Archer has to help her face emotions she's not used to grappling with. And, I guess we're supposed to believe, the two become closer for it.

Except that Archer is acting quite out of character throughout the episode. Sure, he gets pissy early on about being jerked around by the Vulcans. But once he and T'Pol are on the mission and it appears that the Vulcans have lied about the fugitive they're chasing, it's T'Pol who questions her superiors and not Archer. Where is Archer's ingrained distrust of Vulcans?

That's just one of several weird inconsistencies throughout the episode. Much is made of an acid-drenched landing platform that the characters can't cross, stranding them on the planet for a few hours. But when a fire destroys their shelter, they DO all somehow get across (though we aren't shown how). The final climax centers on a classic "you won't shoot me" standoff -- as though phasers don't have a stun setting that undercuts the tension.

And more importantly, there's a huge hole at the core that's never adequately addressed. There are no doubt countless intelligence agents who could have been tasked to bring in this Vulcan fugitive. Where's the logic in asking T'Pol to do it? She specifically had her past memories of this target tampered with, so it's not like she has reliable special knowledge she can draw on. Why risk having the buried memories resurface (which, predictably, is exactly what happens)?

Perhaps above all: why structure this whole episode as a mystery, only to give it a title like "The Seventh" that's a total giveaway? The first time you hear that T'Pol once chased down six fugitives, you pretty much know what the big secret is going to be.

The episode is slow to get going. A situation that would have been set up in a single briefing room scene on Star Trek: The Next Generation or Star Trek: Voyager takes an entire act to unfold here. First, T'Pol won't tell anyone anything about her secret mission. Then she confides small details to Archer. Then it's Trip's turn to complain about all the secrecy. Finally T'Pol provides her personal backstory. None of this feels like a slow revelation of context that's the hallmark of skilled writing. There's no actual suspense, and little new context as more information is revealed. It just feels like the episode is being stretched for time.

But the episode does have a couple of things going for it. One is guest star Bruce Davison, a real "that guy" of an actor who plays the Vulcan fugitive Menos. His career has included a wide enough variety of characters that you can never really be sure whether this one is telling the truth. He seems awfully convincing when he says he's being persecuted by the Vulcan High Command, and guilty of no actual crimes. But when he's ultimately revealed as a truly bad guy smuggling bioweapons, that feels equally as plausible.

Another strong element of the episode is the subplot following Trip taking command of Enterprise. While this would have been better to see in season one (after all, I'm pretty sure Trip's taken command before this), it's fun to watch him struggle. First, he's putting on airs, watching water polo and inviting crew to dinner because that's what the "cap'n" would do. Then he's overwhelmed by the demands of the job, wanting to put off every consequential decision until Archer is back to make it. Finally, he has to put an extra pip on his collar and actually pretend to be Archer on a call with the Vulcans.

Other observations:

• I really do like the way Vulcan writing looks. It's just a nice bit of design.

• At one point, we see a sulking Archer bouncing his water polo ball off the wall of his quarters. Whoever lives on the other side of the wall must hate being next to the captain's quarters.

• Star Trek has had its share of scenes in alien bars over the years, and often struggles to include music that feels appropriate to the setting. Here, they don't even try. The bar in this episode has no music at all.

I feel like putting Archer and T'Pol together overrode all other story considerations for this episode. I think a much better version of the story would have been just leaving the mission at T'Pol and Mayweather, as is suggested at the outset. Watching Travis struggle with helping the emotional breakdown of a superior officer could have been quite compelling. As it stands, though, I have to take the fun where I find it in the "Trip in command" subplot, and give "The Seventh" a C+.

It's in the Bag

Director Steven Soderbergh has served up a one-two punch at the movie theater to open 2025. I missed his first movie a few weeks ago, Presence. But this weekend, I did catch Black Bag.

A British spy is tasked with investigating five people who might be a traitor to his organization -- and one of them is his own wife. But when practiced liars are pitted against each other, it's nearly impossible to tell what's true.

Having recently finished the television adaptation of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, that (and the original movie) were certainly on my mind when watching Black Bag. There really aren't that many moment-to-moment similarities, but to distill things down, Black Bag is a more cerebral version of the "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" story. There are no chases, no epic shoot-outs, and very little of what most people would call "action." Still, I found Black Bag to be full of intriguing suspense and engaging cat-and-mouse games.

It also feels incredibly fast-paced. Black Bag clocks in at barely more than 90 minutes, and packs in a ton of story in that small package. The plot is a touch Macguffiny, with the actual "why" of it all not being hugely important. Yet it's still enough for the movie to lull you into an expectation, only to thwart it a few times along the way. (The script is the work of the incredibly successful David Koepp, so this should probably come as no surprise.)

Steven Soderbergh is no stranger to sleek and stylish scheming. This movie draws a lot on Out of Sight and his Ocean's trilogy, in the way it's about clever people being clever. But it's different too -- much more controlled in the use of long single takes and tight closeups. It's like a drawing room version of a James Bond movie.

And it even has a James Bond in the cast. The supporting players include Pierce Brosnan, along with Naomie Harris, Regé-Jean Page, and others. But the real draw, of course, is the two leads: Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender. Both excel at portraying people who keep their cards close to the vest. They don't feel like emotionless ciphers, but you can't tell exactly what's going on behind the eyes -- perfect for a twisty spy thriller.

It's perhaps nostalgia for the earlier Soderbergh films I've mentioned here that makes me think Black Bag is not quite as good. But I still thoroughly enjoyed it -- I'd give it at least a B+.

Enterprise Flashback: Marauders

Seven Samurai, by Akira Kurosawa, is a massively influential film. It famously inspired The Magnificent Seven, a high star-powered remake, and countless other stories. If you bother to click on that pile of links to my older posts, you'll learn that none of those versions of the story resonated particularly well with me. So it will likely come as no surprise that I didn't think much of Enterprise's take on it, the episode "Marauders."

The Enterprise stops to refuel at a small mining colony, but finds them unwilling and unable to help. They soon learn this is because of the regular visits from a group of Klingons who have left the colonists barely able to survive. Archer sets out to teach the colony to stand up for itself and repel these marauders.

Even assuming that you like the Seven Samurai story structure more than I do, this episode undermines the structure in several ways that I think compromise its effectiveness. First, the "samurai" in this story actually need something from the "villagers." While it's true that Kirosawa's samurai are paid to help in the original story, Enterprise's need for fuel gives them a more personal stake in this story that mutes the nobility of helping a group of helpless strangers.

In Seven Samurai (and The Magnificent Seven), not all of the saviors survive; some end up dying to protect the villagers. But the seven main cast members of a Star Trek series all have script immunity, of course, once again undercutting the nobility inherent in the original story's structure. And they don't kill any Klingons, either, simply trapping them all in a ring of fire and telling them to "go on, git!" What in the prior 36 years of Klingon behavior suggests to the audience that this will be a sufficient deterrent? (As usual, T'Pol is right: this time when she says that likely killing the marauders is the only way to end the unjust situation.)

Most critically, the mining colonists don't ask for help. Archer observes the colony leader caving to the Klingons, and decides that he needs to teach them all to defend themselves. And sure, by the time all is said and done, it seems to be the right decision. (Though crucially, we'll never be there to see if the Klingons return someday when Enterprise is not around, and how that goes.) These "samurai" are not answering a plea for help, they're forcing their help on a group who hasn't asked for it.

But as usual, Enterprise has excellent production values going for it. (Indeed -- my greatest discovery on this re-watch of the series has been just how much things improved between Voyager and Enterprise.) This episode is filmed largely on location. (In a quarry, from the look of it.) There's elaborate camera work including the use of a crane. There are huge set pieces brought in to create the environment of the colony. Up in orbit, we get a cool new tanker ship design -- clearly Klingon, but clearly meant for hauling.

The climax feels a bit more "Home Alone" than combat, but the action is captured very well by director Mike Vejar. T'Pol's defense-heavy martial arts is well-conceived, we get plenty of phaser blasts to satisfy (although Malcolm Reed displays the accuracy of an Imperial stormtrooper), and that outdoor environment is maximized in the visuals.

Other observations:

• T'Pol's desert outfit is pure white. Where's the logic in that?

• The Klingons have transporters, and aren't at all reluctant to use them as Starfleet is.

• Seriously, though, what is Reed good at? He can't shoot straight, and he can't teach others to shoot straight either: Hoshi is shown to a better shooting instructor.

• It's not that I want them to kill the cute kid that hits it off with Trip. But it feels emblematic of the "Nerf toy" approach of this episode that he never even feels in serious jeopardy.

Sky high production values really do go a long way to making up for a weak script. But I still find "Marauders" to be a low C+ of an episode.

It's a Good Performance, I'll Grant You That

Can a movie with a strong opening and one great performance still be worthwhile despite a jumbled mess of a middle and final act? That's the question I've been wrestling with after watching Heretic.

This horror movie from last year is about two Mormon missionaries, Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton. When they knock at the door of the reclusive and mysterious Mr. Reed, and accept his invitation to come inside for his wife's blueberry pie, they quickly come to regret their decision when they become trapped in the house. An uncomfortable conversation about religion soon gives way to an ominous test of faith... and then far worse.

I think it's important to classify Heretic as a horror movie and not a suspense movie or thriller. Otherwise, the audience may find itself trapped just like its Mormon characters, having gone too far too escape a situation they didn't set out to find. Heretic is ultimately a gory movie in which its protagonists are menaced by a violent man -- and you really ought to be prepared for that going in.

But I don't think the movie presents that way at all in its summary, nor does it seem to be unfolding that way for the first 30 to 45 minutes. At first the movie's villain, Mr. Reed, comes off as an intellectual "Jigsaw killer," a lightning-fast mind who has thought of everything and has the created the perfect cerebral trap from which his victims can't escape. And for my money, this is when the movie is at its best.

Before the blood starts flying, Heretic actually makes excellent points about religion -- and even allows one of its missionary protagonists to make excellent counterpoints. There's just the right amount of moral debate on display, and it's perfectly woven into an unsettling and tense situation where you feel like anything could happen next. Strangely, Mr. Reed seems to me to be at his most menacing before he actually does anything. His bark is so deliciously malign than his bite seems less interesting to me. Plus, Heretic's plot twists -- of which there are several -- grow increasingly far-fetched. If you like a movie willing to take big swings, you'll probably be with Heretic all the way. But I was missing the early cat-and-mouse tension long before the end credits rolled.

It's likely the reason I found Heretic's first half-or-so so compelling is because of the casting of Mr. Reed. Hugh Grant delivers an absolutely amazing performance. I'm hard-pressed to think of a more compelling "mannered villain" since Anthony Hopkins' indelible take on Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. He puts the perfect spin on Reed -- a mix of professorial elitism and bottled menace. You wouldn't need to know you were watching a horror movie, wouldn't need the dramatic music heightening the danger, to feel that this character was a looming threat. You just feel like he's a predator playing with his food.

Heretic is nearly a "three-hander" play, and so it's worth praising the other two performers in the mix. Sophie Thatcher is good as Sister Barnes, the more strong-willed of the missionaries whose answer to this terrible situation is "fight." Chloe East is also good as Sister Paxton, her timid partner whose initial answer is "flight." In any case, Hugh Grant's already-great performance is made better still by having two good scene partners to work with.

Ultimately, Heretic lost me. I'd only give it a C, and normally I wouldn't have even bothered to blog about it. But it starts so good, and Hugh Grant's villainous performance was so exciting to me, that I felt compelled to at least partially praise it. Perhaps fans of the right horror subgenre -- a wilder, weirder one -- will like it. Perhaps going into it with more properly calibrated expectations would help too. In short... perhaps this is for you?

Hit Movie?

Glen Powell is one of Hollywood's more recently-minted pretty boys. While he has popped up in the occasional popcorn movie I've watched, I never had the impression he was much of an actor until I streamed Hit Man on Netflix.

Hit Man is very loosely based on the true story of Gary Johnson, a mild-mannered college professor who works on the side for the police department. One day, he's made to step into a sting operation and pose as a contract killer. When he proves surprisingly adept at this, the one-off performance becomes a regular gig. Then one sting brings unexpected complications, as he becomes tangled up in the case, romantically involved with "the mark," and made to keep pretending to be someone he's not.

My route into Hit Man was knowing that it was a movie co-written and directed by Richard Linklater. He's made movies I've hated, but many more that I've truly loved. (And that's not even getting into Dazed and Confused, which many people seem to revere.) I feel I can rely on a Linklater movie to at least be worth a shot.

I didn't know that star Glen Powell was the other co-writer on this project, nor that he'd probably helped Linklater craft this as a vehicle to show what he can do as an actor that his other projects hadn't tapped. In that respect, Hit Man is a surprising success. The story essentially has him playing two characters -- the real Gary Johnson and his dangerous alter ego "Ron." And on top of that, we get tastes of a dozen other one-off hit man personas, each a fun little riff on a rapid-fire improv sketch premise. It turns out, Glen Powell can act!

But since he's purportedly half of the team responsible for this script, the bigger question might be: can he write? I think the answer is... mostly? Movies tend to have a three-act structure, but Hit Man is unusual in that each of those acts feels stylistically like a completely different movie. It starts as an undercover cop story, albeit one clearly striking a comedic tone. By act two, it has become a rom-com, the quirky and light tones lingering even as the real meat of the story arrives. But in the final act, Hit Man almost becomes a film noir -- a much more serious movie with many of the character and plot conventions of the "hard-boiled" genre.

It seems as though the movie's north star is to try to keep you guessing. Every time it changes modes, it settles in just long enough for you to think, "okay, I think I'm on this wavelength," before suddenly changing everything up again. And while it is refreshing to not feel like you know every twist a story is going to take, Hit Man takes some wild swings, especially in the last 30 minutes.

Still, I can make the case for each "segment" of this movie being worthy and entertaining. The cast helps a lot here. When Hit Man wants more than anything else to be amusing, Retta and Sanjay Rao are there, playing a pair of police officers with truly funny banter. When it wants to be a romance, Adria Arjona is there as Glen Powell's romantic foil, giving a solid performance and generating all kinds of chemistry with her screen partner. When then movie wants to be suspenseful, Austin Amelio and Evan Holtzman are two weaselly characters each posing a separate danger to the main character.

The result is that Hit Man is both an oddity you can't easy compare to one single movie. ("If you liked that, you'll love Hit Man!") But it's a movie with perhaps half a dozen different in-roads. ("If you liked that -- or that, or that, or that -- maybe you'll like Hit Man.") I give it a B.

Enterprise Flashback: A Night in Sickbay

Enterprise was created by Rick Berman and Brannon Braga, and the two wrote a large portion of the episodes during the first two seasons. I wonder if in fact they were writing so many of the scripts that they were starting to get bored of it. At least, I wonder what other explanation could account for "A Night in Sickbay," an episode where they seemingly just decided to just troll everyone.

When Porthos falls critically ill after tagging along on an away mission, Archer spends a long, fraught night at his side in Sickbay, as Phlox tries all sorts of methods to restore his health.

This episode trolls the audience by putting Porthos (the best character on Enterprise) in jeopardy for cheap theatrics. Either you never believe that Enterprise would actually kill the dog, in which case this is a true waste of an hour... or you actually believe these monsters would kill the dog for the sake of a one-off episode, in which case any trust you might have been extending the writers is lost. Meanwhile, all the dog lovers in the audience have to see Porthos forlorn and abandoned in the decon chamber, desperately hugging Archer's surgical glove for any bit of physical contact he can get, and ghoulishly submerged in water.

The episode trolls anyone who until this point has tried to defend Archer as a well-intentioned starship captain finding his way. Here, he's a clueless Karen of a dog owner who lets Porthos pee on a sacred tree and then can't understand how this has caused a problem. (What if some alien creature came aboard Enterprise and took a dump on the warp core?) Archer whines about how hard it is to be diplomatic, yells at everyone who points out this whole crisis is entirely of his own making... and Phlox tells us he's probably this way just because he needs to get laid.

The episode trolls the entire cast of the show. Dominic Keating and Anthony Montgomery are only brought in to stand around for a few seconds in Archer's dream sequence. John Billingsley has to dangle a giant origami crane on a stick as he makes weird screeching noises. Linda Park and Jolene Blalock once again endure the indignity of rubbing goo on each other in the decon chamber.

And poor Scott Bakula. He has to deliver the line that "Starfleet didn't send us out here to humiliate ourselves" as he stands in his underwear and smears goo on a dog. He has to manufacture sexual chemistry with one of his co-stars out of nowhere, after 30 episodes of the show have suggested nothing of the kind between the characters. He has to deliver Freudian slips like "breast" and "lips." And he has to go shirtless, drape beads on his head, and wield a chainsaw -- all intended to look as ridiculous as it sounds.

The episode trolls the entire production department. Props has to come up with fake beagles to perform surgery on. Set construction has to come up with a graveyard for a few seconds of screen time in a ridiculous dream sequence. Visual effects has to use CG to depict Phlox scraping his tongue and a bat swooping around Sickbay. Paul Baillargeon is made to compose some of the most over-the-top music yet heard on the show, just to make any of this seem interesting.

This episode feel like it trolls reality itself. Are we really now being expected to "ship" Archer and T'Pol as a romantic couple? To believe that Archer, a person with no medical experience at all, should assist in a major surgery on his own dog? And that he thinks it's a good idea to engage Phlox in distracting conversation while doing it?

There would be absolutely no redeeming qualities to this episode whatsoever, were it not for the Herculean efforts of John Billingsley. Phlox is very much the "Neelix" of this Star Trek series, but the writers have at least done Phlox the favor of writing a competent character with actual skills. That gives more room for the clowning around, which Billingsley is excellent at. This episode is written as though it's funny, when largely it's just silly without actually generating laughs. But Billingsley is the exception, who somehow makes entertaining Phlox's weird quirks from public toenail trimming to Frankenstein-like surgical ideas. He even nails the closest thing this episode gets to a "moral," a conversation near the end of the episode about cultural insensitivity. John Billingsley as Phlox doesn't make this episode good, but he does at least make it watchable.

Other observations:

• Nope. I'm tapped out. What were they thinking?

John Billingsley is so good that I'm actually going to give "A Night in Sickbay" a C-. But make no mistake, this is the worst episode of Enterprise to date, and I feel embarrassed for the people who made it.

Grade C-

No Pain, No Gain (for Kieran Culkin)

Kieran Culkin recently won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. The week before that happened, I watched the movie he would win for, A Real Pain.

Two cousins, David and Benji, have decided to travel together to Poland for a tour of their family heritage. The two are a classic "odd couple": one fastidious and the other messy, one reserved and the other outgoing... and also: one a fairly put-together family man and the other, we learn, troubled with mental health issues. As the cousins travel with a tour group, we gradually find out more about the circumstances that led them to this trip.

A Real Pain is the creation of actor Jesse Eisenberg, who not only stars in, but wrote and directed this film. It's the sort of movie you'd expect an actor to create as they try to expand their career to writing and directing -- a character-driven story built for a limited budget and an art house audience. There's barely a story here. David and Benji take their trip, have experiences, and are likely changed by it all... but it's hard to say what exactly the movie is about, how exactly the characters grow, or what exactly the message is.

There are plenty of movies like this, and they're generally not for me. But such movies live or die by the casting, and I endorse what the Academy has said by awarding Kieran Culkin an Oscar: the performances elevate this material. And if these sort of quiet character studies do align with your taste in movies? Then you might find A Real Pain to be really great.

Interestingly, the movie doesn't come off as a vanity project for its writer-director-star. The bestowing of the Oscar on Culkin is the big tip-off: the showier, meatier role in this movie is absolutely that of Benji. And Culkin plays the part wonderfully, infusing the character with all the obnoxious annoyances it requires without ever coming off as a caricature. Benji is recognizably infuriating, in a way that will be familiar to anyone who doesn't unreservedly love every single person in their family.

Eisenberg does give himself one great monologue at the heart of the movie... though even this moment is ultimately about Benji, the titular character who demands full attention at all times. But otherwise, Eisenberg was content to let Culkin take the spotlight and earn his awards, while also giving room for smaller, subtle performances from a cast including Will Sharpe, Jennifer Grey, and others.

One story choice I wrestled with was the backdrop of the Holocaust. The journey of David and Benji is absolutely centered on their Jewish heritage; they wouldn't be traveling to Poland otherwise. And the scene in which they visit the concentration camp Majdanek is one of the most powerful in the movie. But also, that sort of heaviness (in that scene and others) really overwhelms the overall tone of the movie. I feel like A Real Pain is meant to be at least equal parts funny and dramatic, perhaps even primarily a comedy. But I sensed hardly any lightness from it at all. I felt every minute of the movie's 90-minute run time -- not because pacing was off, but because the serious topics it engaged with so filled the space.

Ultimately, I'd give A Real Pain a B-. I absolutely get how it was an Oscar-winning movie for a performer while being nominated almost nowhere else. But I think it was a worthy performance, one you might want to check out.

Enterprise Flashback: Dead Stop

Enterprise was already dabbling in serialized storytelling with its Temporal Cold War storyline. But following an encounter with the Romulans that gutted the ship, the series explored another way of continuing story in "Dead Stop."

Hopelessly damaged after the impact of a Romulan mine, Enterprise is forced to seek help -- and finds it in a mysterious, uncrewed space station that will carry out extensive, automated repairs at a bargain price. But Archer suspects there's some hidden danger they can't see. And soon, one crew member in particular pays a very steep price indeed.

With this episode, I feel like Enterprise is playing with the model of serialized storytelling that Strange New Worlds would swoop in and perfect two decades later: stand-alone stories that nevertheless have connective tissue throughout a season. The "special sauce" that's missing here is that Strange New Worlds episodes always center one of the main characters in the drama. "Dead Stop" is built on an intriguing enough science fiction version of a devil's bargain. Yet there really isn't much growth for any of the characters.

Look hard, and maybe you'd find that growth for Archer? He's the one who first gets suspicious of this unusually benevolent space station. For once, T'Pol is not the "voice of reason" being ignored by the other characters. She's the one arguing that some species are just magnanimous, and there's no need to ascribe sinister purpose to the situation.

What's funny about that, though, is that it's basically an inversion of a Star Trek plot. Very often, our starship heroes are just out there exploring for its own sake. They encounter some alien species that can't imagine the Federation is just there out of the goodness of its heart. They want to know "the angle," and we the audience shake our heads at how backward these aliens are to not immediately sign on to this utopian future. Here, our Starfleet heroes are the "backward aliens" (as this prequel series often paints them), unwilling to believe that an unknown alien race could be benevolent.

Though of course, they're not, or this wouldn't be much of an episode. We learn (decades old spoiler!) that the station's computer core is a network of captured people, and Travis Mayweather is taken to join that "mainframe." And this isn't a "misunderstanding" where unknown builders of a 2001: A Space Odyssey style station simply don't understand how "lesser life forms" might value one person. They totally try to hide Mayweather's abduction by swapping him out for a faked dead body that Phlox cleverly identifies.

This leads to the one scene that comes closest to the character-driven drama I want more of from Enterprise. Hoshi Sato comes by during "Mayweather's" autopsy, and talks about a personal memory of him as she struggles to accept that he's gone. If there had ever been even the slightest inkling before this moment that the two characters had any friendship at all, I feel like this would have played beautifully. As it is, it's just a stark example of the thing Enterprise as a series ought to have been doing more of all along.

But the episode is really only interested in the sci-fi mystery of it all. Reed and Trip sneak around to try and find the truth. Later, they team with Archer and T'Pol to trick the station. A heist-like plan comes together, allowing them to free Mayweather and destroy the station. Action! Adventure! And a Twilight Zone-like ending that shows the debris of the station beginning to repair itself. It's all fun enough, in a sugary dessert kind of way that lacks narrative nourishment.

Other observations:

• I will never become numb to a cute Porthos bit. The scene of him seeking out the squeak in the ship is totally adorable.

• Its a fun callback to mention the scratch Trip put in the Enterprise back in the series premiere.

• Trip and Reed have a short exchange that's essentially about the potential of AI taking their jobs. It hits a lot differently today than it did when the episode was new.

• It used to be in season one that the decon chamber was the excuse to have the actors show some skin. Now in season two, no excuse is needed to just have Mayweather sitting around Sickbay in his underwear. But hey, if you've got an actor as ripped as Anthony Montgomery is here, I guess you'd better use that. Don't give him anything to really do, but have him sit there and look pretty.

• They make a point of saying that the other miscellaneous aliens captured by this station have been there for years. We're meant to understand that they're past saving, thus forgiving the fact that our heroes don't save them.

"Dead Stop" has some spooky moments. But with it having ultimately nothing to say beyond its premise, I feel it only deserves a B-.