Blog

In another universe, Olivia Wilde’s latest movie, The Invite, could have been a standard Seth Rogen comedy. The premise, about a weary middle-aged married couple (Rogen and Wilde) inviting a more sexually adventurous couple (Edward Norton and Penelope Cruz) over for dinner, seems custom-made for Obama-era Apatovian nonsense.

But I’m glad to live in the universe where The Invite desperately upends any attempts to turn into a Seth Rogen comedy. Rogen is just as funny as he always is, and he plays a familiar kind of washed-up schlub. But the rhythms of the movie resist the kind of easy comedy where Rogen seems like the hero. Instead, people are horrified by his comedic barbs. They’re annoyed by his eagerness to always have a snappy comeback. It’s like he wandered into a horror movie by accident and he’s too far into the character to notice that his usual charm isn’t working. For much of The Invite, he’s kind of the villain.

This isn’t a one-man show. In fact, it’s a pretty evenly distributed four-hander. Cruz is doing exceptional, careful work with a character who could easily be a stereotype. Norton gives dignity to his buffoonish character, and Wilde is as good as she’s ever been, both in front of and behind the camera. Because it all takes place in one apartment, the script, from Rashida Jones and Will McCormack based on a 2020 Spanish film, could practically be a Broadway sex farce.

The Invite has a lot to say about marriage and sacrifice and friendship, and there’s a good chance that if you’re in a shaky marriage you might find yourself relating closely to one of the four characters. (I’ve learned way too much about the troubled relationships of some of my favorite film critics from reviews of this movie.) But none of those themes were nearly as interesting to me as the acting. The pleasure of watching four veterans from four very different backgrounds come together, with all their histories and expectations, and making something completely unlike anything they’ve ever done before is unparalleled. I was all in on this one.

(If you live in Seattle, you should go see The Invite at Tasveer Film Center because it’s becoming a great place to see movies!)

For my monthly Neighborhood Reads piece in the Seattle Times, I interviewed Ash Hoffman, the owner of Lost the Plot, a mobile bookstore that sells books all the way from Everett to Tacoma. It’s a gorgeous little bookstore, and Hoffman is building a devoted following of book-lovers across the Puget Sound region. Hoffman can adjust her store’s inventory to better match her audience’s tastes, and you’ll have to read the piece to find out which genres sell best in Tacoma, Edmonds, and Ballard. (And I love that she named the van Plotsy.)

Before Michael Crichton was Michael Crichton, he wrote an entire shelf’s worth of thrillers under the pseudonym John Lange. Over a dozen years ago, the folks at Hard Case Crime resurrected the Lange library and republished it for the first time under Crichton’s own name.

For the weekend of July 4th, I brought one of those Lange thrillers, Binary, with me to an undisclosed quiet location where my dogs would not be terrified by nonstop fireworks. (The book is now published by Blackstone, though I prefer the sleazy Hard Case cover on the edition I read a lot more than the generic cover of the latest edition.)

I had hoped the book would be trashy fun to distract me on a noisy holiday weekend. Instead, Binary is maybe the most generic thriller I’ve ever read. It’s about a boring good guy trying to catch a boring criminal before he kills thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of people. Aside from a compelling first chapter featuring a clever idea for a heist, it’s all so rote that it might as well have come in a black and white cover under the title Generic Crime Thriller.

Nothing was upsetting about this book, and I never felt compelled to abandon it. It’s a fast read and never boring. But I can’t really recommend it, unless you’re interested in writing thrillers and you want a very early and very flawed example of a thriller written by a master of the form before he knew what he was doing.

One of my all-time favorite audiobook experiences was the fall when I was listening to Jane Jacobs’s urbanist classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities while walking around Seattle. Very often, the audiobook would describe something I was looking directly at on my walk, and it began to feel like an audio tour of Seattle’s best and worst urban planning.

In his book 20 Minutes in Manhattan, Michael Sorkin brings up Jacobs’s book very often—to the point that it feels a little bit like meeting someone who also took a class taught by your favorite teacher. Sorkin is deeply informed by Jacobs and he applies her thoughts on urban planning and public spaces throughout this book.

I borrowed 20 Minutes in Manhattan from the Seattle Public Library as soon as I heard the premise: The book supposedly examines New York City’s urban design through the lens of Sorkin’s 20-minute walking commute through Manhattan from his home to his office. The premise of a blend of Jane Jacobs and Nicholson Baker’s miniaturist masterpiece The Mezzanine was instantly compelling to me.

Unfortunately, the book doesn’t adhere to the premise as strictly as I would like. There are plenty of Baker-like digressions on elevator codes and other forces that shape city life, but the book is instead just organized in a series of essays, using the titular commute as a way to collect and shape the argument.

Sorkin has a lot to say, and he’s a fount of knowledge about the way cities are put together, but there was no narrative thread that pulled me through this one—instead, by the end, I was ready to be done with the book. Still, my biggest regret about 20 Minutes in Manhattan is that there doesn’t seem to be an audiobook version. I would have loved to take this book with me on my commute and engage with it in conversation about the similarities and differences we find in our two very different cities.

Rarely has a television show fallen in the public’s estimation over the course of five seasons like The Bear. Like everyone else, I enjoyed the first season a lot and was blown away by the second season, which I’m pretty sure stands as one of my all-time favorite TV seasons. And like everyone else, I was annoyed by the drawn-out third season and underwhelmed by the wheel-spinning fourth season.

I’m not someone with abundant patience for TV. If I get bored, I jump off pretty quickly. I left Stranger Things after the start of the second season and never looked back, for instance. But no matter how self-referential and thinly paced The Bear got, I never stopped loving those characters—particularly Cousin Richie, played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach. These are characters, and actors, I would follow anywhere.

So I was thrilled to discover that the fifth and final season of The Bear is good. Seven episodes track the restaurant staff over the course of a single night, and this is the rare case where I’d encourage viewers to binge as many of those first seven episodes as is possible in a single evening. I almost wish the fifth season came in the form of a movie, because the gravity of that one night is so powerful that it weakens a bit when it comes time to end one episode and start another. The eighth and final episode is a different tone entirely and can be watched separately, maybe the night after a binge.

Folks online have their gripes about season five, but I think the creators landed the plane. Every one of the characters changed in a meaningful way, the themes of the series were wrapped up neatly, and there was enough ambiguity baked into some of the ending to give fans room to impose their own hopes and dreams onto the story.

Do I have quibbles? Yes, definitely. But was I swooning over watching a group of charming, competent people solve problems in a fast-paced, stressful environment? Absolutely. After a couple of seasons in the wilderness, I think The Bear came home to achieve exactly what it needed to do.

When it comes to my taste in music, novelty is important. I can’t listen to the same 500 classic rock songs every single day. I like to hear new sounds, track new trends, find new artists.

Every month, I start a new playlist. Then, every time I hear a new song that I like, I add it to the playlist. They usually wind up being a couple of albums long. I thought I would start sharing those playlists here with you.

But first, a couple of caveats: These songs are dumped into the playlist in strict chronological order in terms of when I discover them. That is to say, I have not arranged them into a mix and the transitions are not maximized for pleasant listening. In fact, the song-to-song shifts are often a little jarring. And I only add songs that are new to me, which means they’re not all brand-new music.

I don’t claim to be a musical expert. I like short, catchy, poppy songs and I’ve learned that I’m more likely to love a song if it features swearing, so don’t play the playlist with the kids in the car, okay?

I prefer Apple Music, so that’s what I’ve got to share. If you use another streaming service and you use Apple devices, I can’t recommend the app Playlisty enough. For a one-time fee, you can easily transport playlists from one streaming service to another. I use it all the time.

Anyway, this June’s music wasn’t as summer-y as I’d hoped it would be. The playlist starts pretty soft and contemplative (deBasement aside) before things get a little more lively and poppy. I’d say my favorite barbecue bangers are “This Feeling” by The Allergies, the delightful “Pop Pop” by Channel Tres, and especially “Yip Yip Yow” by Caroline Rose. There’s a nice little danceable stretch in the middle, too, if you’re into that kind of thing.

It doesn’t seem like WordPress plays nicely with Apple Music, so here’s a link to the playlist, instead. Let me know what you think!

I was at a bar with booksellers a couple of months ago when someone used me as an experiment: “Have you read The Correspondent?,” she asked me. I said I hadn’t. She asked the bookseller next to me the same question and she quickly and enthusiastically replied that she had.

Our interrogator turned to her friend as though she had just settled a bet. “You see?,” she huffed. “Every woman in this room has read The Correspondent, and every man in the room hasn’t even heard of it.”

Reader, I took that personally. That night, I fired up my Libby app and queued up the audiobook version of The Correspondent. A couple months later, it finally arrived in my inbox and then I spent two days squeezing in as much listening time as is humanly possible.

Virginia Evans’s runaway bestseller of an epistolary novel is literary fiction in the style of Richard Russo and Ann Patchett, big-hearted and broad and accessible. It tells the story of Sybil Van Antwerp, a fiercely independent elderly woman who maintains correspondence with a number of people while also writing too-friendly letters to authors of books she admires. It’s got a lot to say about aging and forgiveness and regrets.

If you prefer your literary fiction to be ambiguous and subtle, this isn’t for you. This is a book of BIG SWINGS, the kind of on-the-nose sweeping storytelling that used to reliably win the Pulitzer Prize in the early 2000s. I’m a sucker for that kind of storytelling, especially in the summer, and so it spoke right to me—despite its somewhat fat-fingered handling of race and gender and class. (If your main character is a rich old straight white lady and you spend most of the book inside her perspective, you’re not gonna get the most enlightened observations about the world.)

And I definitely want to recommend the audiobook, if you’re into that kind of thing. It’s read by a full cast, and the collage of those voices working together to fill out Sybil’s life lend a nice resonance to the epistolary format. I can’t recommend this enough if you’re the sort of person who likes to bring a populist literary novel with you on vacation—especially if you’re one of the millions of men who, according to at least one Seattle bookseller, has never heard of the damn book.

I’ll admit it: I was suckered into reading Simon Pare-Poupart’s memoir about life as a garbage man, Trash!, because Dwight Garner compared the book to Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. I love well-written books about workers who provide services that most people don’t ever think about.

But Trash! is bad. It’s a macho, cliched, annoying (but mercifully short) book written by an incurious know-it-all. I don’t know what Dwight Garner was thinking when he reviewed this book, but I can tell you that if you do want to read a great tell-all about life on a garbage truck, you should skip Trash! and read Derf Backderf’s excellent graphic memoir Trashed, instead.

Seattle is lucky enough to be home to the best film critic on the topic of action movies in the business. His name is Vern and his blog is a must-visit for me every time I watch a movie. So let me tell you that if you only read one review of the martial-arts action film The Furious, it should absolutely be Vern’s.

I basically want to high-five Vern for his review, because he put so much into words about The Furious that left me speechless. I love that the five main characters of the film each have their own individual fighting styles—one is a dancer, one throws his body around like a pissed-off bull, the lead is small but indomitable. I love that through sheer kinetic filmmaking, The Furious made me believe that a tiny man in flip flops can realistically chase down a giant truck roaring at full speed through the streets of a generic southeast Asian city.

The Furious isn’t the best martial-arts movie of all time. I think the movie kinda flags around the penultimate fight before coming back in a big way for the grand finale. And I hate the current action-movie trend of making the bad guys human traffickers—the reality of human trafficking is so disgusting that it adds a queasy-making jolt of reality into a story that’s ultimately meant to entertain.

But if you like big dumb fights between unbelievably graceful men that have been choreographed down to the most minute detail, this could be the best example of the form you’ll see all year—hell, maybe in five years. Watch it in the theaters, read Vern’s review,and spend the next two weeks wondering how the hell they managed to do all that stuff without accidentally killing someone on set. It’s movie magic, baby!