I just saw “Last Night in Soho,” Edgar Wright’s new movie about a young London girl who forms a psychic bond with her counterpart from 50 years ago and quickly gets in over her head. THIS WILL NOT BECOME A MOVIE-REVIEW BLOG, but lo and behold, I formulated some disjointed thoughts about this one too.
No big spoilers.
As a director, Edgar Wright has an idiosyncratic visual vocabulary that’s immediately recognizable, like Wes Anderson without all the twee. One of his favorite toys is the smash cut, which is a natural fit for horror movies; really it’s a surprise he’s never directed one before. (Oh, you want a jump-scare? Hell, Edgar’s been filming jump-pouring-pints-of-beer for almost 20 years.) And like Jordan Peele, he’s not so far removed from his comedy roots that he won’t sprinkle some jokes throughout the script.
This movie shows Wright’s advancing maturity, not least in that it centers on female characters with agency (new territory for him!) and thus easily passes the Bechdel Test (perhaps his first film to *ever* do that?). His so-called Cornetto Trilogy films are ageing much better than the other bro comedies of the mid-aughts, but are still fundamentally about guys being dudes. In contrast “Last Night in Soho” attempts to be really about something—the fearful lives of women navigating the patriarchy; the crippling effects of mental illness—though it all feels a bit unfocused, especially at the end (see below).
While all movie reviews are subjective, I will state one objective fact: this film is gorgeous. The director of photography is Chung-hoon Chung, whom I was surprised to learn was also DP for “Oldboy” way back in 2003.1 The screen is soaking in dreamy reds and blues that reminded me (both visually and thematically) of “Eyes Wide Shut,” and you could have a decent moviegoing experience watching the thing on mute. I mean just look at that poster! It’s a visual love story to the swinging 60s that doesn’t ignore what was awful about them. Heck, what was awful about them is the PLOT OF THE MOVIE.
Horror movies aren’t historically the place to extend your acting chops, but many recent actors haven’t gotten that memo—see Florence Pugh in “Midsommar” and Lupita Nyong’o in “Us.”2 Thomasin McKenzie and Anya Taylor-Joy didn’t punch the camera in the face quite that hard, but they do a great job portraying two sides of the same demented time-traveling coin.
It gets messy in the third act, as Edgar Wright movies often do.3 At one point the protagonist seems so deep in the horror-movie shit that you assume the film is at its climax, but… it keeps going. The actual climax, with its big reveal, follows the rhythm of the equivalent scene “Hot Fuzz” so closely that it’s hard not to think of it as comedic. And just like in “Baby Driver,” the final scene is so cheerfully tidy (including, literally, a giant bow!) that I wondered if we were meant to think it was a fantasy.
But it’s a good dang movie, stylish and scary and well worth overlooking a few lumps and bumps.
While writing down my long list of pros and cons for moving to The Netherlands, I never thought to include “Seeing movies early” in the pro column. In fact I don’t know when or why it became the norm for blockbusters to debut in other countries before the US. I can’t get HBO, but I was able to see both “Dune” and “No Time to Die” over a month before my American friends get the chance. I thought I’d flaunt my new-movie privilege by writing a tiny review for each.
(And yes, the theaters are open; at the door you display a QR code certifying your vaccination status, and in you go. Sorry for flaunting my functional-government privilege, too.)
No Time to Die
We saw the new James Bond at Theater Tuschinski, which at least one outlet has called the most beautiful cinema in the world. Half a dozen signs around the lobby included the iffy hashtag #NoTimeForSpoilers—for good reason!—and I won’t be squawking here. But I will be warning you about the goddamn runtime: TWO HOURS AND FORTY-THREE MINUTES, easily the longest of the Bond films. (What ever happened to 90-minute movies, huh?) Be sure to use the bathroom.
This review isn’t nearly so long, so I’ll cut to the chase and say I liked it. That was no guarantee; I’m convinced people like the idea of James Bond movies more than the movies themselves. Much like Star Trek, the concept is often more appealing than the execution. I didn’t even see the last one, “Spectre,” which put me at a mild disadvantage knowing what was going on in this one. Fortunately, Bond films are NOT subtle about identifying the bad guys.
And that’s perfectly fine. Nothing wrong with going to a Bond movie expecting a charmingly passé number of hallmarks: theme-song-music-video opening credits, world-spanning postcard locations, scarred villain with a secret lair and a truly bizarre number of machine-gun henchmen. “No Time to Die” hits em all. Its most subversive move is introducing Lashana Lynch as a Black female 00 agent, which is really only “subversive” to MAGA snowflakes.
Daniel Craig has said this is his last outing in the tuxedo. It’s no controversy to call Craig the most self-serious of the James Bonds—that’s certainly thanks to his acting, which would have a certain ruggedness even if he were bottle-feeding a baby raccoon1. But I’d say the larger issue is the steady slide of all blockbuster movies towards a detached stony-faced seriousness—no matter how silly the characters and locales onscreen—which was previously the exclusive domain of Batman. This doesn’t always work; when Bond finally gives us a quippy one-liner, darn near the end of the movie, it feels like a huge relief. But ever since the end of the Cold War (ever since Goldeneye, by the Bond calendar), the premise of a white man fucking and killing his way around the world in the name of “freedom” has felt increasingly icky. A pinch of gravitas seems appropriate, and Daniel Craig can summon a wheelbarrow’s worth.
Dune
Speaking of icky premises, how about a white messiah bringing spiritual leadership to the unwashed masses living in the untamed desert? Cause that’s the unexaggerated proposition of “Dune,” a 1965 sci-fi epic novel that is such a direct influence on “Star Wars” that you feel like George Lucas should have shared royalties. But whereas “Star Wars” is a svelte missile of storytelling, “Dune” and its sequels are famously sprawling and complex—think “Game of Thrones” in space—and, despite two previous adaptations and one infamous near-miss, have frequently been called “unfilmable.”
I was terrified for “Dune” precisely because it looked so good; I thought frequently of the 2005 “Hitchhiker’s Guide” adaptation, which ticked every box you could hope for in adapting the beloved book, yet turned out devastatingly mediocre. Likewise, everything about “Dune” looked just about perfect, from the cast and director on down the line. But, given Hollywood history, it was entirely possible that it just wouldn’t work.
Well, it works. By limiting itself to the first half of the book, “Dune” manages to be a tolerable length—at 2h35m, somehow SHORTER than “No Time to Die”—and less of a confusing rat’s nest of characters and plot lines. (No joke: for the 1984 David Lynch adaptation, they handed out a double-sided cheat sheet to help audiences follow along.) The production design is exquisite, particularly the costuming. You could still be completely mystified by the plot (you might yet be!) but still greatly enjoy the look of the movie. The cinematography demands to be seen in a proper movie theater, though your local COVID situation might demand otherwise.
And yet… I cringed visibly multiple times throughout.
Most or all of the cringing was thanks to the 56-year-old source material. There’s no such thing as a good white-messiah narrative, no matter how many times the white messiah (Timothée Chalamet) pouts about it. Similarly, the idea that the cishet patriarchy will be well in place over 8,000 years in the future is suuuuper depressing, no matter how much the cishet women are shown to be scheming behind the scenes. This adaptation does an okay job at granting some much-needed agency to the oppressed native people2, but like your awkward uncle at Thanksgiving dinner holding forth about “what the Arabs think,” I feel like this isn’t necessarily a white man’s story to tell. Or anyone’s story. The time to tell it might be past.
I really am trying to recommend the movie! What it’s good at, it’s VERY good at. I’ll be seeing it again. But the more I think about the asterisk on my recommendation, the bigger the asterisk gets. I’m very interested to hear what people of color think about the whole thing.
Yesterday we made the sudden, awful decision to let our cat Suitcase cross the rainbow bridge. As we speak, she and Lola are giving each other a single, friendly sniff and then napping on opposite ends of the great Ikea couch in the sky.
She showed up unannounced at my friend Ryan’s apartment complex back around the beginning of 2013. I declined multiple suggestions that I adopt her before agreeing to house her for a weekend while Ryan was out of town. Well, that did the trick.
She went without a proper name for a surprising amount of time. For a good long while her name was Cat, because when she had her 4am meowing concerts, only yelling “CAT!!!” would shut her up. Even when I adopted a second cat—only to discover after agreeing that the cat’s name was also Cat—they quickly became Cat 1 and Cat 2. Finally at the end of 2016, when Billy Kissa visited from Greece, she (the cat) slept on top of Billy’s suitcase the entire week. Billy flatly declared that Suitcase was her name; Billy was right. (Cat 2 was eventually named Sabado, which is a different story.)
She was extremely low-maintenance, even training herself to poop outside instead of needing a litter box. Her flop game was strong. She was approximately 70% fur with a possibly-illegal amount of floof between her toes. She successfully trained me to leave the faucet dripping while I brushed my teeth so she could drink from it. (I explained to her how wasteful this was and spent $50 on a pet fountain, but she was undeterred.)
Letting go of the cats was, no surprise, one of the hardest things about my move to Amsterdam. What made it a LOT easier was Cortney and Jonathan, who became amazing foster parents to Suitcase, and—at the last minute—Sabado as well. They fell madly in love, and when I made the call that it was best for the cats to remain in Texas, they were only too happy to drop the “foster” from their titles. I’m sad that they had to handle the hardest part themselves, and that Kiki and I could only say goodbye over the phone, standing outside Mike’s Theater in Amsterdam after a Coach Rookard show. But seeing her cuddled up against Jonathan in the Zoom window, feeling loved and comforted, was a great comfort to us, too.
Editor’s note: There are a lot of Star Trek references in this entry. I’m not gonna explain them all.
It’s a given that I’m a Star Trek fan1, although with a healthy ironic distance. I’ve long said that Star Trek is better in theory than in practice. For every “Measure of a Man” there’s a “Rascals.” For every even-numbered movie there’s an odd-numbered one. For all its idealistic futurism and exciting technobabble, Star Trek is often extremely… oh, what’s the word… silly.
I say all that not to present myself as “cooler than Star Trek”—that ship sailed on the day I got a fucking improv tattoo—but to acknowledge that the things we love, however unconditionally, have their flaws. And yet, from the debut of “The Next Generation” in 19872 to “Lower Decks” today, my love has persevered. I vividly remember my mom explaining to me what a “clifffhanger” was when Riker told Worf to fire and the chyron said “To be continued.” (I reliably get goosebumps any time I think about that episode, including just now.) Silly or not, Trek is in my blood… and, to come around to my subject matter, Trek has brought me to some truly, deeply weird places in life. Here are the greatest hits.
The USS Legoprise (2002)
My passion for Lego is equal or greater than for Star Trek, and worlds collided in 2002 when I embarked on a slightly quixotic goal to build the Enterprise-D out of Lego.3 Unlike 99% of such projects I undertake, I saw this one through to completion, ordering Lego from Bricklink (then an upstart little website; now a Lego-owned subsidiary) and tinkering on and off for the better part of a year. Then I made a rudimentary webpage with a gallery of images and emailed a link to a couple dozen friends whom I thought would be interested.
“Going viral” wasn’t yet a term, but that’s exactly what happened next.
My little webpage was featured on Slashdot and Fark, the closest things we had to social media in 2002. Tweets and comments didn’t exist, but emails poured in from around the world for months (at least one written in Klingon). I even got a message from Wil Wheaton, who told me the Legoprise was “the coolest version of the Enterprise I’ve ever seen.” By the time my 15 minutes of Internet fame were up my page counter (remember those?) topped 50,000, truly impressive for the time.
As Lego’s popularity has multiplied exponentially in the last 20 years, I’ve had to remind myself that I was far ahead of the curve with this whole project. Nowadays you can find many, many renditions of the Enterprise in Lego which (I say with no hurt feelings) are much better than mine. But, as far as I could tell in the days before Web 2.0, my Legoprise was darn near the first.
Star Trek Las Vegas (2004)
Right around the same time in my life I had discovered improv, which I somehow loved even more than Lego or Star Trek. (I was a straight white man in my 20s. Of course I discovered improv.) At the Hideout Theatre I was fortunate enough to be a part of Start Trekkin’, the Original Series-flavored show that was a sporadic production there for years afterward. My timing was lucky, because in 2004, Andy Crouch somehow snagged an invitation for the Start Trekkin’ cast to perform two shows at the official Star Trek convention in Las Vegas. A whole gang made the trip.
I don’t remember too much about the shows (besides the bad acoustics) but to this day it was the largest crowd for whom I’ve ever performed: perhaps 500 on the first day and maybe 1,000 on the second. I played the villain, Captain Kronkite, in the first show and was a nameless supporting player in the second. We earned enough fans to get us stuck in the convention hall for 20 minutes posing for pictures. One boy, perhaps confused, asked our “captain” Ben to autograph his 8×10” glossy of William Shatner.
On our last day in Vegas I was riding the elevator alone down from my room, and after a couple of floors a woman got on with me. We rode in silence for a few seconds, and then she respectfully nodded at me and said: “Captain Kronkite.” I blushed.
Mortified (2018)
Wrong franchise, but you get the idea.
When I was younger I wrote my diary entries like they were Star Trek-style captain’s logs. That’s not even a mild exaggeration.
It’s the sort of nerdery that nobody should ever find out about, that even I myself might only half-remember as an adult. Fortunately for us all, though, “Mortified” exists. That’s a live show where people read their actual childhood diaries onstage—it’s hilarious and cathartic, and as you’re realizing already, my Trek diary was “Mortified” gold.
I received multiple invitations to perform at “Mortified” shows in Austin. As if that weren’t enough, in 2014 they flew me to New York for a special performance at New York Comic-Con where I shared the stage with Amber Benson, Pete & Pete, and other nerdy luminaries. As if that weren’t enough, the performance was recorded and later became episode 3 of the now-popular “Mortified” podcast. (Listen now!) And as if THAT weren’t enough, two years later, I had a TV crew in my goddamn house to film the reality series “The Mortified Guide”. (Alas no longer on Netflix, but you can rent it on Amazon; I’m in episode 5.)
Decades after I’d put pen to paper, my nerdy love for Trek earned me another quick 15 minutes of fame. I was recognized twice by strangers on the street!
Star Trek Las Vegas II: The Wrath of Kevin (2021)
Just when I thought life might be done throwing me Star Trek curveballs, after 17 years, Vegas (or more literally, my friend Eric) came calling again. Improbably, it was the exact same gig as before—improvised Trek at the big Vegas convention. There were a few key differences though: the troupe was now “USS Improvise” out of Portland; the performing genre was TNG rather than TOS; it was musical improv, my first such show since the pandemic; and, most incredibly, I was going to play Captain Picard.
Don’t sleep on drag queen Lwaxanna Troi back there.
This silly one-hour show opportunity felt like the culmination of all my life’s Star Trek nerdery. I’M PLAYING CAPTAIN FUCKING PICARD AT A STAR TREK CONVENTION. Finally, I understand why I went bald.
Of course the pandemic made this a more muted affair than it’d otherwise be. (In fact, this was my second invitation to perform with USS Improvise; the first was in March 2020, and we all know how that went.) As the Delta variant and anti-vaxxers have tag-teamed their way across America, this show too balanced on a knife’s edge, with literal last-minute changes. But on Saturday night in front of a couple hundred enthusiastic Trekkies, it happened. My Portland castmates did a great job supporting their jet-lagged guest captain as we improvised a tale about the Enterprise crew dealing with a species of sentient furniture. Data decided he wanted to live in an armoire, Riker did a sexy tango with a chair, the chair’s husband got jealous, and so on.
And I can’t prove it, but I like to think there was at least one person in the audience who saw me onstage and thought to themselves: “Hey, that’s the Mortified guy!”
I smartly moved to Northern Europe at the worst possible time. If you’re going to transplant yourself to a different climate, dive into it head-first, I say. You’re already bewildered by your new surroundings, and the suboptimal weather can be part of the bewilderment. Then you put on a brave face, and many many layers, and wait for the temperature outside to sloooooooooowly increase.
And the daylight! I’m still not used to the daylight. These days the sun rises to the northeast around 5:30 AM, pinwheels *around* the sky, and sets to the northwest about 10 PM. And even then, it never gets much darker than twilight before brightening again. The situation has its downsides—the morning sun shining directly into the apartment does a number on my sleep pattern—but, for a sun-loving Texan, it’s generally fantastic. Besides the occasional shower, highs are in the 70s (Fahrenheit) and humidity is low. Perfecto.
And yet, my inner Ned Stark is gripping his sword and looking stonily into the middle distance. We’re past the summer solstice, and from here on out, the days are getting shorter and shorter. Six months from now—right around my one-year Amsterversary—the sun will be as fleeting as the stars are now, with temperatures to match. I’ll be enjoying the summer as hard as I possibly can, storing up as many gallons1 of vitamin D as my body can muster.
In other news, after 1,028 days without interruption2, I finished the entire Dutch Duolingo course. It’s good timing that our COVID restrictions have finally ended, giving me the chance to interact with a lot more Dutch people mask-free. Just like everyone learning a new language, my comprehension is moving a lot faster than my speaking ability. HOW ARE THERE SO MANY RANDOM TURNS OF PHRASE I GOTTA LEARN?
Next in the Dutch reading list: the tall stack of Donald Duck comic books that our niece Sophie keeps giving me. Like a Dutch Billy Madison, I’m hoping to rapidly progress through higher and higher reading levels. My friend Ash recommends Dan Brown novels for Dutch reading, because—to put it gently—he doesn’t use big words.
Robert Langdon’s got a case on his hands.
I got my second COVID shot on Friday (Kiki’s is coming soon) and like everybody, we’ve begun tallying up “firsts since the pandemic”: first staged improv show (Kiki’s medical drama: fantastic), first indoor dining (George Marina: overpriced), first movie in a theater (A Quiet Place Part II: really good). Kiki and I were also featured in Het Parool, Amsterdam’s largest daily newspaper3, as part of their food critic’s regular “food you miss from home” feature. Honestly the bomb-ass breakfast tacos were as good as or better than anything I’ve had in Texas. Having a professional photographer documenting the experience was a nice bonus.
Honderd procent authentiek.
And it’s just about time for my first birthday as a full-time Amsterdammer. My cruise director Kiki has a dozen different surprises planned, so I’d better post this entry quick before I need to add them to it.
Money, I’m glad to see you again. Funemployment, I miss you already.
This week I joined the Dutch workforce as an instructional designer for Mambu. Mambu sells cloud-based banking software, which admittedly doesn’t quite have the sexy cachet of “I work at Apple.” But after 17 years at the World’s Biggest Corporation, they’re just the sort of employer I’d been hoping for: a smallish company that’s growing fast and gives me the opportunity to contribute in a foundational way.
On Monday morning I biked, trammed, and walked my way through the spitting rain to the super-slick office building on the river where Mambu (normally) occupies the 14th floor. As you’d expect for pandemic times, I was ushered across an empty floor into a conference room with three other new hires, where an IT guy handed us MacBooks and helped us complete our onboarding process. It wasn’t the grand entrance one would hope for with a new career, but there *were* free snacks and a welcome box with Mambu-branded trinkets.
By Monday afternoon I was back home and seated at my new home office—that being the corner of our bedroom with a space just big enough for the smallest desk Ikea sells. I’m facing the window, so it’s not the worst WFH situation, but I’ll be more than ready to at least occasionally visit the HQ.
I neither expected nor got a riveting first week—it’s been a lot of app downloads, password setups, and hi-how-are-ya’s with my new coworkers1. I’ve also completed a bunch of required new-hire training courses, which is rather meta, since my team wrote the courses; I’m meant to understand the content but also to own it moving forward.
I’m excited about the job. It’s a warm fuzzy feeling to feel qualified for the work I’m doing, to have smart ideas about how I can help make the training better. I’ve got good first impressions about the company too, which has strong diversity and anti-harassment policies and just hired a Director of Sustainability (she was one of my three fellow new hires!).
Meanwhile, my residency in Nederland is past the five-month mark. I’m less than a week from reaching a 1,000-day streak in Duolingo, and coincidentally am almost done with the *entire* Dutch Duolingo course. Final verdict: while Duolingo will IN NO WAY make you conversational in a new language on its own—and is often frustratingly obtuse about how Dutch people *actually* speak2—it’s still a great way to soak up common words and phrases to the point that you can almost-but-not-quite interpret the latest De Speld headline.
Which reminds me: we are officially OVER the weather. I knew what I was in for, moving to northern Europe in the wintertime, but I’d at least hoped for a lovely spring as a reward. Instead—with a few gloriously sunny days excepted—Amsterdam had its coldest April in 35 years, and May isn’t doing much better. But it’s spring just the same: tulips and peonies are in abundance, and the days have reached an alarming length, with light lingering in the sky well past 10pm and starting up again around 5am. I’ve got to wear my eyemask to have any hope of sleeping until the alarm goes off. By midsummer it’ll almost never be completely dark outside.
(This might have been a bad idea. It works better on a laptop.)
I woke up at about 8am1 and got some work done2 before biking3 to the fysio4. On the way back home I bought some nuts5 per Kiki’s request. Back at the computer6, I read through some of my Safari tabs7 and shot some zombies8 before Nardje showed up9 in the afternoon.
On the advice of the fysio I took an hour-long walk10 around Amsterdam, getting feta cheese11 for dinner on the way home. Kiki made a delicious shakshouka12 while I built an Ikea cabinet for the bathoom13. We were in bed before 1114.
The (finally) finished product. No, that’s not a bidet in the background.
From the beginning of the Big Move planning process, I intended to spend a significant chunk of money on improvements to the Hoendiepstraat apartment. It started with a large Ikea closet to hold my clothes. In short order after my arrival came an “American-sized” TV1; a new dining table; and the most non-negotiable item, a clothes dryer.2
And then, in the middle of discussions about what should take priority next, the toilet started to leak.
Feel free to make the obvious joke about my American poops overwhelming European bathrooms. Given that the toilet was now being flushed more than twice as often as before, you wouldn’t be far off-track. But the toilet was old and in poor condition anyway, so it was time for a new one. And—all you homeowners will nod in agreement here—if we’re swapping the toilet, why not do the sink as well?
This would be the fateful twist in the story. As James Breakwell recently wrote, “The key to any small, reasonable renovation is to keep adding to it until both of those adjectives are a lie.” In this case, all it took was a sink.
Now, unlike those free-wheelin’ Americans, home-improvement stores are currently closed in Nederland, so your only option is to order online. Praxis.nl is no homedepot.com, but we were eventually able to pick a toilet, sink, and faucet from their online shop. I successfully booked a plumber (no small feat) who had a delightfully thick British accent for the following Tuesday.
Then on Thursday, the sink arrived. It sounded like this.
Now let’s not kid ourselves: that is hilarious. But it meant that I had to cancel the plumber, letting him know I’d let him know when I had an intact sink. It also meant that, when the toilet arrived the following day, it had nowhere to go besides our living room.
We found ourselves at a standstill as Praxis customer service remained consistently unhelpful and unresponsive about getting the sink replaced. (One customer service rep hung up the moment I asked if we could speak English. Another told me via email to call their shop in Heerhugowaard, 45 minutes north of Amsterdam; when I did, the shop was as confused as I was.) Days stretched to weeks, with the toilet and shattered sink going from comedic conversation pieces to unwanted freeloading roommates.
In desperation we ordered a second sink from Praxis, which arrived in one piece and allowed us to schedule the plumber once again. Finally on Wednesday, March 10th, five weeks after we’d started the process, a very nice, ridiculously good-looking plumber3 arrived. In four short hours, the toilet and sink were installed; by the end of the night, so were the cabinets. (Small bit of bragging: thanks to my double- and triple-measurements, the cabinets fit in with the new sink down to the centimeter.) Our new bathroom looks fantastic. So happy the ordeal is over.
I’m still trying to return that broken sink, though.
