Paul Constant

Blog

  • Sue Me, I Liked The Bear

    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.

  • Here’s My June 2026 Playlist

    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!

  • Down to the Last Letter

    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.

  • One Man’s Trash! Is Another Man’s Trash

    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.

  • Furiouser and Furiouser

    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!

  • The Future Doesn’t Have to Suck

    The thing that drew me to M. Arusha Wehm’s novel The Department of What It (Really) Means to be Human was the promise on the dust jacket that the book was “a thoughtful, optimistic sci-fi novel set in a near-future Aotearoa New Zealand where an investigator navigates a newly post-capitalist world in their search for a missing artist.”

    It’s really that simple: All you have to do to get me to read your sci-fi novel is set it in a future that doesn’t suck. And I loved living in the world of this novel—Wehm has clearly thought about what a climate-friendly, post-capitalist society might look like, and they establish a very lived-in world for the characters to move around in. Even better, none of the ideas in the book are presented as outrageous or groundbreaking. The future just is the way it is. The casual, no-big-deal air around the setting is luxurious, like slipping into a warm bath.

    Unfortunately, the central mystery of the book didn’t really pull me through the story. Every time something happened to advance the plot, I found myself wanting to squint at something Wehm gestured toward in the background, instead. I’m glad I read it, but it’s very much a journey-not-the-destination kind of reading experience—and oh, what a journey! I wish I could live inside this novel.

  • Everyone Is Obsessed

    Last weekend I finally watched Obsession. The movie was enough of a cultural phenomenon that virtually every news site and film critic and podcaster has chimed in at least once, but probably multiple times, about What It Means For the Culture, so I don’t know if I have any original thoughts about it.

    If you’ve been tuned out on pop culture, just know that it’s a basic Monkey’s Paw setup in which a hapless loser wishes that his crush would love him more than anyone else in the whole world. It’s a well-directed movie, and it was made for very little money so the special effects are more stagecraft than CGI, which is fun to watch. But be warned that the movie is relentlessly dark in spirit. I don’t know if I would have the stomach to watch it again anytime soon.

    Everyone is correct to point out that the central character of Nikki is played to the absolute hilt by Inde Navarette. She gives a performance that is as unselfconscious and expressive as Nicolas Cage—which, if you know me, is about as big a compliment as I can give an actor. I hope she makes the most of the big opportunities that I’m sure are about to come her way.

    There’s a cultural conversation around the movie that’s been pretty disconcerting. It feels as though some critics are reviewing the movie they think they saw, but not the movie that writer-director Curry Barker actually made. For instance, on the Cannonball podcast, New York magazine pop culture critic Angelica Jade Bastién said Obsession was a movie “about the crazy girlfriend who’s going to destroy your life and how the cost of loving a woman is to have your life completely cratered.”

    Which is just categorically not true. That is not in any way what the movie is about! You could make plenty of feminist arguments against Obsession, but I don’t think anyone involved in the making of the film would say either of those messages were the messages they they were trying to send, and as a viewer it’s just not a good-faith description of the movie.

    Anyway, people have been chasing each other in circles over this movie for weeks, and nobody cares if another racer joins the demolition derby. But I do feel compelled to say that while other movies this year have made more of a mark on me—shout out to The Drama and I Love Boosters—I’m still excited to see a tiny movie make such a giant splash in the general cultural conversation.

  • Bicentennial Baby Blues

    I was born in 1976, so I obviously don’t recall America’s big bicentennial birthday bash. But the celebration of America’s 200th birthday was a big enough cultural event that artifacts from the bicentennial celebration were kicking around throughout my youth. I’d occasionally encounter the special 200th birthday quarters, which featured a minuteman playing a drum on the back, for instance. Jack Kirby wrote and drew a giant Captain America comic for the bicentennial that was one of my favorite comics growing up. And so on and so forth.

    When I was a kid, I did the math and determined that I’d be 50 years old when America celebrated its 250th birthday. Even though I couldn’t fathom being 50 years old at the time, I recall that I did wonder what America’s quarter-millennium celebrations might be like. I was envisioning a future full of robots and American flags on Mars and all the other sci-fi trappings we were promised back then.

    And now that I’m 50 and America’s 250th birthday is here, I imagine trying to explain to my four-year-old self that the celebration is shaping up to be a dud. The president, you see, is the worst person in the country, and he’s ancient and clearly losing his mind and he’s been making everything in the world about him for the last decade or so. The economy is so bad and America has been embarrassed so solidly on the global stage that even Republicans don’t seem to be in a mood to go full star-spangled bananas right now.

    All that is to say that the one and only thing I’ve done to acknowledge America’s big 2-5-0 is read Meg Elison’s brand-new sci-fi novel, Foundling Fathers. It’s a story about teenaged clones of America’s Founding Fathers figuring out that they’re not in the 18th century anymore.

    The book has a stellar first line:

    “It took Benjamin Franklin twenty-seven minutes and fourteen seconds to discover there was pornography on the internet.”

    That pretty much sets the tone: The clones of Adams and Washington and all the rest maintain their essential character traits, and they slowly begin to realize that the world around them isn’t as it seems. I don’t want to spoil anything, so that’s all the plot you’ll get out of me.

    Foundling Fathers is a short and funny book, and it doesn’t exhaustively explore its concept. Instead, it makes a point and then ends well before it wears out its welcome. It’s thoughtful enough and well-researched enough that it inspired me to consider the men who started the American experiment and what they might think of where we are now.

    I enjoyed it a great deal, and now I’m officially done thinking about America’s 250th birthday—except to hope that things might be better for kids born this year when, or if, the 300th birthday rolls around.

  • Programming Note

    As I mentioned in my last newsletter, I’m in the process of transforming this blog from a newsletter archive into more of an old-school blog—mostly book and movie reviews, but I reserve the right to write about whatever I want. So if you’ve subscribed to this blog as a newsletter through WordPress, you might want to unsubscribe here and subscribe to my Buttondown newsletter instead, which will continue to run at a twice-a-month cadence. I’m not going to promise new posts every day here, but I do think I’ll be posting multiple times a week.

    I currently have a backlog of movies and books to write about, and I’ll be posting those starting tomorrow. Not all of the posts are going to be long. Some might be a few sentences. But if you’re one of the few dozens of people who get these posts in your inbox, you might be annoyed by all the extra me in your life. You’ve been warned.

  • The Necessary Frustrations of Steven Spielberg

    The Necessary Frustrations of Steven Spielberg

    As I was taking my seat at the Tasveer Film Center for Disclosure Day last week, I recall thinking how lucky I was to have lived the entirety of my life in a time when I had the opportunity to catch a new Steven Spielberg movie on opening weekend in theaters.

    One day in the not-so-distant future, on whatever terrible website eventually replaces Reddit as the place where people go to wallow in their own worldview with like-minded wallowers, young film buffs will have serious conversations about how thrilling it must have been to be in the audience for Jurassic Park or Minority Report or E.T. before most people in the world had seen them, and before opinions about the movie became calcified into conventional wisdom. The experience must have been blissful, the future movie nerds will enthuse.

    So, yes: let me acknowledge that it is, in fact, pretty neat to live in a time when one can pop into a movie theater--an independent, nonprofit neighborhood movie house, if you're lucky!--and watch a Steven Spielberg flick in cool air conditioning on a hot summer day.

    But that's about the beginning and the end of pleasant statements I have to make about Disclosure Day.

    Actually, wait. Here's another pleasant thing I can say about the movie, and it's a statement I've never made before in my life: Emily Blunt is fantastic in this picture. She blows away her previous best film performance, in The Devil Wears Prada, in her role as a weatherperson for a middleweight TV news show who suddenly starts speaking fluent alienese.

    Blunt has never given a bad performance that I've seen, but she's never been a magnetic, charismatic performer. What she does in Disclosure Day is actually Oscar-worthy, a performance of depth, skill, and high-wire intensity.

    Too bad the rest of the movie isn't anywhere close to playing in the same league. All the other characters are shoddily constructed ciphers, the plot is laughable, and the climax is an embarrassment, an old man's idea of a technocratic fairy tale. 

    I mean, for real: How do you make Colman Domingo boring? How in the name of God is that even possible?

    Everybody is doing their job here, which means viewers will have artistry to admire. The camera work is deft. The cinematography is doing very interesting things with reflections on glass. John Williams's score is not his catchiest work, but it improves every scene. There are a couple of cool set pieces that would be absolute trash in the hands of virtually every other director.

    But in the end, Disclosure Day is bad. And it's the worst kind of bad, which is to say it's uninteresting. I'd put it near the bottom of Spielberg's efforts. And I have to wonder what would have happened had Tony Kushner, the screenwriting collaborator on four of Spielberg's best recent films, put his estimable talents toward the story that Spielberg wanted to tell instead of David Koepp, a screenwriter who has never once in his long career managed to make bad material good or good material bad.

    But to return to my initial thought: it really is a wonderful thing to be alive at the same time Spielberg is making movies. And that blessing applies equally to his bad movies, because frustration is a key component of the Spielberg movie-watching experiment. Any number of his best movies, including Catch Me If You Can, Lincoln, and even Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, are near-perfect theater experiences that come to a crashing halt, typically near the end, while Spielberg stops to again unnecessarily reemphasize the importance of the nuclear  family, or sentimentality, or nostalgia, or parental love. 

    There is no  universal truth that Spielberg hasn't reinforced, celebrated, and then underlined in red ink with aching sincerity. Even when he's making the best movies in the history of cinema, he has to stop and frustrate the viewer lest anyone in the back of the theater come close to missing the point. 

    Maybe that frustration is somehow an essential part of Spielberg's magic? 

    Every great director has their central flaw that keeps popping up in their work. Most of Hitchcock's best films feature a queasy lingering of the lens on his leading ladies, suggesting something subtly disgusting is happening on the other end of the camera. I've never watched a Kubrick movie without wondering at some point if the director would go five steps out of his way to save a child from being smashed to red paste by a runaway mail truck. Can we really begrudge Spielberg his pathological need to pause all the glittering spectacle for a minute or two in order to lecture us about how we should be nicer to each other? So far as directorial kinks go, it's a pretty tame one.