For the last four days, the 2025 Whatever Gift Guide has been about helping you find the perfect gifts for friends and loved ones. But today I’d like to remind folks that the season is also about helping those in need. So this final day is for charities. If you’re looking for a place to make a donation — or know of a charitable organization that would gladly accept a donation — this is the place for it.
How to contribute to this thread:
1. Anyone can contribute. If you are associated with or work for a charity, tell us about the charity. If there’s a charity you regularly contribute to or like for philosophical reasons, share with the crowd. This is open to everyone.
2. Focus on non-political charities, please. Which is to say, charities whose primary mission is not political — so, for example, an advocacy group whose primary thrust is education but who also lobbies lawmakers would be fine, but a candidate or political party or political action committee is not. The idea here is charities that exist to help people and/or make the world a better place for all of us.
3. It’s okay to note personal fundraising (Indiegogo and GoFundMe campaigns, etc) for people in need. Also, other informal charities and fundraisers are fine, but please do your part to make sure you’re pointing people to a legitimate fundraiser and not a scam. I would suggest only suggesting campaigns that you can vouch for personally.
3. One post per person. In that post, you can list whatever charities you like, and more than one charity. Note also that the majority of Whatever’s readership is in the US/Canada, so I suggest focusing on charities available in North America.
4. Keep your description of the charity brief (there will be a lot of posts, I’m guessing) and entertaining. Imagine the person is in front of you as you tell them about the charity and is interested but easily distracted.
5. You may include a link to a charity site if you like via URL. Be warned that if you include too many links (typically three or more) your post may get sent to the moderating queue. If this happens, don’t panic: I’ll be going in through the day to release moderated posts. Note that posts will occasionally go into the moderation queue semi-randomly; Don’t panic about that either.
6. Comment posts that are not about people promoting charities they like will be deleted, in order to keep the comment thread useful for people looking to find charities to contribute to.
All right, then: It’s the season of giving. Tell us where to give to make this a better place.
Which, good for her, but she's not going to make the big bucks in social work, which is what she's getting her BS in. Well, best of luck to her anyway. (She does have her eyes wide open, because everybody has told her that. Unsurprising.)
There are many ways to die in this world, roughly as many ways as there are to live, but there is one thing I know for sure: I do not wish to die the way Daniel Miller (Albert Brooks) dies in Defending Your Life. One, he dies on his birthday, which, while it makes for a tidy headstone, is a terrible way to spend the one day of the year that is all about you. Two, he’s just bought a car, and he’s not going to get to enjoy it. Three, he dies listening to Barbra Streisand, and, no disrespect to Ms. Streisand, but there’s nothing in her oeuvre that I wish to slip the surly bonds of Earth to. The last song Daniel hears is “Something’s Coming”; the title, at least, turns out to be prophetic.
And then Daniel is dead, and where he goes is neither heaven nor hell, and not even purgatory or limbo. He has arrived in Judgment City, which looks rather a bit like Orange County, and which processes all the dead of the Western United States. Judgment City has some nice perks, like the fact that humans who arrive there can eat all the food they want and never gain weight, and also it’s the best food they’ve ever had. But there are drawbacks, too, like the fact that everyone has to wear bulky white caftans, and also that one has to make a good argument for how they’ve lived their life on Earth. If it goes well, they move on. If it goes poorly, they go back to Earth. If it goes really poorly, the universe throws them out.
You’re on trial for your life, in other words, and because this way station is both bureaucratic and strangely Calvinistic, there are subtle hints about how your trial is going to go before you even step into the courtroom. To begin, how is your hotel? If you’re at the afterlife equivalent of the Four Seasons, you’re probably fine. If you’re at something like a bog-standard Marriott, it could go either way. If you’re at the equivalent of a Motel 6, get ready to go back. Likewise, the number of days of your life that the trial will examine is a good hint how things will go; the fewer the better.
Daniel, who is a sharp study, immediately wants to know where he falls on the “go on or go back” spectrum, which amuses Bob Diamond (Rip Torn), his appointed counselor. Mind you, everything about the humans coming through Judgment City amuses the staff there; they are ascended beings who use forty to fifty percent of their brains, unlike the humans, who use five percent at most. The staff of Judgment City look at humans like humans look at clever pets or precocious toddlers. They want good things for them! But they’re not going to socialize after hours or anything.
What Daniel mostly gets from all of this is that some people are shoo-ins to move on, and some people are, to put it nicely, going to have to work for it, and Daniel is in the latter category. Daniel was not a bad person on Earth; he was nice enough and well-liked by co-workers, even if he didn’t have a lot of what you would actually call friends. But in Judgment City, there’s the belief that when you use as little of your brain as humans do, you are ruled by your fears, and Daniel… well. He’s very human.
There’s more going on in this movie, including a budding romance between Daniel and Julia, a woman who may be too good for him, the first clue of that being that she is played by Meryl Streep. But what makes Defending Your Life work for me is both the teleology and the philosophy of Judgment City, as laid out by Brooks, who in addition to starring in the film, also wrote and directed it. Brooks has posited possibly the most practical afterlife ever, a fact that I think is easy to overlook as the story chugs along.
I don’t personally believe in an afterlife, but if I were going to believe in one, this is very close to the one I would believe in — not a place of perfect peace or eternal damnation, but basically a performance review to see how you did in the place that best suited your personal development. If you go on, great — the next place has a new set of problems and challenges for you to experience, solve and learn from. If you need more time back on Earth, that’s fine too — like the California Bar, not everyone passes the first time, and there’s no shame (at least at first) going back and trying again until you get it right. Is there a God? Who knows? Judgment City is not here to answer that. What it’s here to answer is: Are you ready for what comes next?
Well, that’s nothing new, I hear you say, that’s just Buddhism with extra steps. And, well, maybe it is, and if it is, then it makes sense that fear would be the thing that reattaches you to Earth, the thing you have to eventually let go of in order to move on. We are at this moment living in an era where large numbers of people are motivated by their fears, and others derive their power by making people afraid of other people, including their neighbors. I think if the afterlife is anything like it’s depicted here, there are going to be a fair number of people who currently live well who, in the afterlife, are going to be surprised to be staying at a seedy roadside motel, looking at a month’s worth of days of their life. At least the snacks will be great.
Brooks may or may not just be giving the eternal wheel of suffering a new spin, but whatever he’s doing, he’s being smart and funny about it. Brooks’ Daniel is a slightly depressed everyman who is more clever than he is good, someone who is willing to settle even when, in his heart, it’s not what he wants. It gives Daniel a sort of melancholy that’s both approachable (you can see why his co-workers like him) and also a lot to deal with (which is why he doesn’t have a lot of friends).
He’s relatable, and I think a lot of us can see at least a little of ourselves in him. As director, writer and star, Brooks only rarely goes for the laugh-out-loud moment in this film. But over and over again, there are rueful chuckles. You’ll laugh with this film, and you might wince in self-recognition as well. Ultimately, Daniel will have to work for his happy ending, and it’s never obvious whether or not he will get it. And that, too, is like life.
Defending Your Life makes me laugh, but it’s also made me think about my own choices and my own fears in this life. I can say that there have been a few times where I thought about this film when I was on the verge of having to make choices about where my own life was heading. There is a scene in the film where Daniel is up for a job, and he wants a specific salary. He has his (then) wife pretend to be the job interviewer, and they spar over the salary he will accept. Then he goes to meet the actual guy, and takes the first number thrown out at him, even though it’s far below what he actually wanted. We see his face when he realizes what he’s done. He let his fear get in the way of what he wanted, and he knows it.
I thought about that scene a few years later, when I was working as a film critic at the Fresno Bee newspaper. At one point, I was up for a film critic job at the St. Paul Pioneer-Press, and it came down to me and one other writer. I had informed the Bee that I was up for the job, and they were waiting to find out whether I would take the job or not. If it was offered to me, it would come with a largeish bump in pay, which was something I kind of needed; the Bee was a lovely place to work, but they didn’t pay me a lot and weren’t inclined to give me more.
Spoiler: I did not get the job. When I didn’t, I could have just gone back to work like nothing ever happened, without the raise I wanted and needed. Or, I could raise on a busted flush — after all, the Bee didn’t know (yet) that I didn’t get the job. I went into my Managing Editor’s office to tell him what happened with the St. Paul offer, and the first thing I said to him as I came through the door was “give me a twenty-five percent raise and a weekly column, and I’ll stay.” If he said no, I was screwed, because I had implied I had gotten the other job. But I chose to stuff that fear down, and ask for what I needed and wanted.
Second spoiler: He said yes to my proposal and told me he was glad I was going to stay. I thanked him, went to the men’s room in the hall, slipped into one of the toilet stalls, sat down and had a nice five-minute nervous breakdown before going back to my desk and back to work. I had faced my fear, and I had got what I wanted. And it’s made a difference in how I’ve lived my life since then.
I owe Daniel, and Albert Brooks, and Defending Your Life for that. We’ll see what sort of hotel upgrade that gets me in the afterlife. I’d still rather not be listening to Streisand when I go, however.
I went to the dentist yesterday to get my teeth cleaned, and on my way out made a follow-up appointment. When I got home, I realized that they'd given me an earlier appointment than I thought, or wanted, so I had to call them today.
I also got halfway through filing a claim for insurance reimbursement last night, before realizing that I didn't have the right paperwork. In the process, I found out how to file a claim for the glasses I had made a couple of months ago, which I'd thought would be complicated.
Those forms require a National Provider Identification number, which can be found online. Praise wikipedia! Googling didn't find me the relevant website, but the Wikipedia article has a link to it. The website is searchable by anyone, if you have the provider's name and location, and "Arlington, MA" was sufficient, without the street address.
Having talked to the dentist's office, I now have a 3:00 appointment for my next cleaning, and have submitted the insurance claim.
For the first three days of the Whatever Gift Guide this year, We’ve had authors and creators tell you about their work. Today is different: Today is Fan Favorites day, in which fans, admirers and satisfied customers share with you a few of their favorite things — and you can share some of your favorite things as well. This is a way to discover some cool stuff from folks like you, and to spread the word about some of the things you love.
Fans: Here’s how to post in this thread. Please follow these directions!
1. Fans only: That means that authors and creators may not post about their own work in this thread (they may post about other people’s work, if they are fans). There are already existing threads for traditionally-published authors, non-traditionally published authors, and for other creators. Those are the places to post about your own work, not here.
2. Individually created and completed works only, please. Which is to say, don’t promote things like a piece of hardware you can find at Home Depot, shoes from Foot Locker, or a TV you got at Wal-Mart. Focus on things created by one person or a small group: Music, books, crafts and such. Things that you’ve discovered and think other people should know about, basically. Do not post about works in progress, even if they’re posted publicly elsewhere. Remember that this is supposed to be a gift guide, and that these are things meant to be given to other people. So focus on things that are completed and able to be sold or shared.
3. One post per fan. In that post, you can list whatever creations you like, from more than one person if you like, but allow me to suggest you focus on newer stuff. Note also that the majority of Whatever’s readership is in the US/Canada, so I suggest focusing on things available in North America. If they are from or available in other countries, please note that!
4. Keep your description of the work brief (there will be a lot of posts, I’m guessing) and entertaining. Imagine the person is in front of you as you tell them about the work and is interested but easily distracted.
5. You may include a link to a sales site if you like by using standard HTML link scripting. Be warned that if you include too many links (typically three or more) your post may get sent to the moderating queue. If this happens, don’t panic: I’ll be going in through the day to release moderated posts. Note that posts will occasionally go into the moderation queue semi-randomly; Don’t panic about that either.
6. Comment posts that are not about fans promoting work they like will be deleted, in order to keep the comment thread useful for people looking to find interesting gifts.
Got it? Excellent. Now: Geek out and tell us about cool stuff you love — and where we can get it too.
Have a hankering for homemade egg rolls, but can’t find store-bought egg roll wrappers? Many of our readers have found themselves in this exact situation and asked us to come up with an egg roll wrapper recipe. Well, FINALLY, here it is! Getting the Correct Moisture Level in the Dough The key to this recipe […]
I never quite got Brian De Palma. An unquestionably talented director, he knew how to make a hit — see Carrie and the first Mission Impossible film — and if he was going to fail, he was going to do it on a scale so grand that people would write books about it (The Bonfire of the Vanities). He was brash, steeped in film lore, and more than happy to make sure you knew when he was showing off, which was often; what were Body Double and Blow Out other than him paying homage to, and then trying to one up, Hitchcock and Antonioni? The chutzpah! The actual brass balls on this guy!
Some people loved it (Pauline Kael, for one, seemed to eat it up, and who was going to argue with her), but I was, and, I have to say, still am, largely unimpressed. Scratch a De Palma film and you’ll very often find there’s no there there — it’s mostly just surface flash and thrill and some very intentional shock and subversion, all very mannered and very little with any resonance. Outside of Carrie — which made household names out of De Palma, Stephen King and Sissy Spacek all in one go — it’s debatable that De Palma ever made a truly classic movie, a world-beating piece of celluloid that is studied for its quality over its kitsch.
(And yes, my dudes, I see you standing up on a table full of cocaine, beating your chest over Scarface and telling me to say hello your little friend. Grand Guignol as it is, what it has going for it is excess. It’s a lot, and I found it tiring, and when Tony Montana finally ended up face down in the water, what I remember thinking was good, now I get to go home.)
So: Brian De Palma. Mostly, not for me! Maybe for you, fine, okay, you do you! But not for me!
Ahhhh, but then there’s The Untouchables. And suddenly, for length of this one single film, Brian De Palma is indeed very much for me.
Come with me now to 1930 Chicago, smack dab in the middle of prohibition, and Treasury Officer Elliot Ness (Kevin Costner, stalwart) has come into town to take on the bootleggers and gangsters, two groups with, shall we say, a rather substantial overlap. Ness has little success at it until he comes across beat cop Jimmy Malone (Sean Connery, the most Scottish Irish cop ever), who knows where all the bodies are buried around town, and where the rum is being run. Together with their small and select team (Andy Garcia, in one of his first big roles, and Charles Martin Smith as comedy relief, until he isn’t), they take on Al Capone (Robert De Niro) the celebrated gangster who is loved by the press, despite the fact that he’ll happily blow up a kid or two if that’s what it takes to keep his grip on the town.
It’s a rich setting, and of course this film is not the first time the prohibition era had been essayed — heck, The Untouchables itself was an update of a late 50s TV series starring Robert Stack. The film was treading a path that had been trod upon many times before. This reappraisal and reinvention of film and television tropes was nothing new to De Palma, who had by this time had homaged directors and source material, including Scarface (originally a 1932 movie starring Paul Muni), and he would go on to retread Mission Impossible. The Untouchables, as a property and as a mode of storytelling, was old hat, both for De Palma or for the culture at large. So what is it that sets this movie apart?
Weirdly — no really, weirdly, because this is a film where one character bashes in the head of another character with a baseball bat — I think what makes this film work is restraint. Brian De Palma is Brain De Palma-ing himself all over this film, with all his stylistic tics and touches and his oh-look-do-you-see-how-I’m-referencing-Eisenstein-aren’t-I-so-very-clever-ness, but he’s doing it at about an 8, rather than an 11. Yes, there is that (rather famous) scene involving a baseball bat, but here’s the thing: what makes it shocking isn’t the assault, it’s the context. De Palma shows us enough of the assault (and the aftermath) to make the point, but, unlike, say, Scarface, there’s no lingering. De Palma gets in, gets what the scene needs, and gets out.
Now, I am going to accept there is skepticism for this thesis of mine. The Untouchables does not exactly skimp on the blood or the occasional shot of someone’s brains all over a window pane. This is a movie that rather handily earns it “R” rating. But my argument is that in these cases it’s not about quantity, it is about quality. Those brains on the window pane are actually in service to the story. They are just enough to fill in the scene, and then we’re moving on. For De Palma, for whom so much of his directorial style is basically more, of whatever it is, not just blood although certainly blood too, this sort of restraint in the service of story feels a little revolutionary. Turns out you can do a whole lot, if you’re not trying to bludgeon your audience into sensory overload.
De Palma didn’t have to drive his audience into sensory overload in no small part because the whole affair is just so incredibly handsomely mounted. The script, by David Mamet before his metaphorical cheese starting slipping off his metaphorical cracker, is sharp and pithy and melodramatic as hell. The set design offers up a version of Chicago that is a beautiful fable — 1930 Chicago didn’t look like this but how wonderful it would have been if it had. The wardrobe — the wardrobe! — is done by Georgio fucking Armani, and by God you can tell, everyone looks so ridiculously good. You can pause the movie at just about any point where there’s not blood being sprayed about, and it will look like a fashion shoot. It’s all so good that the terrific Ennio Morricone score is almost an afterthought. Almost.
And then there’s the cast. Sean Connery won an Oscar for his portrayal of a cop past his prime who decides to do the right thing, even if he knows how little good it will do, and as it’s the film’s only Oscar, it’s not unreasonable that this performance is what the film is remembered for. With that given, I will yet argue that this is Kevin Costner’s movie. It’s hard to remember on this side of Field of Dreams and Dances With Wolves and even Yellowstone, but this is the film that made Kevin Costner an actual star; before this he was playing corpses (The Big Chill, out of which he was mostly cut) and second bananas (Silverado).
In Elliot Ness, Costner found the character he’d carry forward: The compelling square, the do-right stiff you can’t actually take your eyes off of. He’d occasionally tilt off this character, mostly when Ron Shelton needed him to play a gone-to-seed sportsman, but it’s pretty clear that with The Untouchables, Costner learned how his bread would be buttered going forward. He went with it for a good long while.
As for De Niro as Al Capone; well, scenery is chewed, and the chewing is delicious.
The Untouchables is the one Brian De Palma movie I unreservedly love, and enjoy, and rewatch, but this is not to say it is a great film. Even Pauline Kael, famously a De Palma champion, understood this; she wrote that The Untouchables was “not a great movie; it’s too banal, too morally comfortable… But it’s a great audience movie — a wonderful potboiler.” This is exactly right. Not every film has to be great, sometimes “just really goddamned good” is good enough. It just needs every good thing in proportion, and for the director to understand when enough is enough.
For this one film, Brian De Palma seemed be content with just “enough.” It wouldn’t last, and that’s fine. It didn’t have to.
so now I'm spending some part of my evening with another coworker instead of by myself, which means I can't just summarily turn off the TV. Other people are weird when they want the TV on even if they aren't watching it, but since they think I'm weird for preferring blissful silence I guess sometimes I have to compromise.
Which means that the other day my entertainment choices were either a long and frankly tedious piece on the JFK conspiracy theories, or HP1. Welp, JFK won't get any deader, and practically speaking, JKR won't get any richer. The choice wasn't really very agonizing, is what I'm saying. I feel like maybe it ought to have been, but no. (That place does not have enough channels. If I'm going to be stuck watching TV for even part of the night I really need to figure out how to get my phone on the screen.)
All this led me to realize something that I somehow don't think I ever thought about before, which is that the plot of book 2 doesn't make any fucking sense, like, right from the start. How exactly did Lucius set it up so that he'd happen to bump into the Weasley family? What if they hadn't gone shopping that day? There clearly was a lot of planning that went into this, so what was his backup? Really, none of those plots hold together if you look at them too hard. And that's not too unusual for fiction, but I'm not particularly inclined to be charitable about it.
Sofia Samatar, The Winged Histories:. This is odd and somewhat disjointed, set in the same secondary world as A Stranger in Olondria (which I read ages ago and remember very little about). The threads all come together at the end. I’d been displeased earlier because I thought we’d lost both the first narrative voice, which I liked, and the continuity of the narrator's story. The book does get back to her story, or at least her sister and cousin’s stories.
James Thurber, The Thirteen Clocks: read aloud, because Adrian had never read it. Still delightful, a fairy tale set in a world where people have at least heard of fairy tales.
Lorraine Baston, Rules: A Short History of What We Live By. Baston talks about rules as measuring devices, as sets of instructions, and as models, and various shifts in meaning over time. She talks about thick and thin rules, thick rules being ones with (more) examples and details, and which anticipate more exceptions. A about the change in how people learn/are taught all sorts of things, including math. I enjoyed this, and if that description sounds interesting you probably will too.
Edward Eager, The Time Garden: Children's magical adventures while spending the summer with a relative because their parents are in London, working on the premiere of a play. Another read-aloud, this one was new to me, and fun.
Helen Scales, What the Wild Sea Can Be: The state, as of 2023, and possible futures of the ocean and ocean life in the Anthropocene, according to an oceanographer. I asked the library for this because I liked the author's book about mollusks.
See this plot of land, or more accurately in this picture, this plot of snow? It’s the plot that lies directly east of our church property. There had been a house here for many years but a couple of years ago there was a fire, and the house had to be demolished. For some time after that the plot was undeveloped and then, a few weeks ago, it went up for sale.
We bought it.
Why? Because it’s adjacent to our church property, it was within our budget and it potentially gives us room to do some cool stuff. It’s the third expansion of our property since we first made an offer on the church in 2021; we added the parsonage before we closed on the church, then the house directly north, which we tore down because it was in disrepair, making the land a side yard and parking lot for the church, and now this plot to the east. I’m pretty sure this is it for land acquisition near the church, and our land acquisition in general. I don’t want to keep buying up land like I’ve been buying guitars.
So what will we be doing with this plot of land? For the moment, not much. It’s winter now and it’s covered in several inches of snow, and there’s a reasonable chance, given the fact we’re not even in the cold part of the season yet, that the snow will stay (or be added to) for the next couple of months at least. That’s fine. After that, the short term plan will be to seed for ground cover and local pollinating plants and let the bees and birds at it for a while. Beyond that, we’ll see. Now that we own it we have time to think on the best use for it, for us and for the community. We have some ideas, but they’re all very preliminary (i.e., we haven’t actually considered how much work they would require and how much they might cost). In the meantime all we have to do with it is keep it maintained and not an eyesore. We can manage that for sure.
So, merry Christmas to us, we got land this holiday season. Again. Next year, I think we will just get each other socks.
Honestly, if you ban somebody it ought to warn you before you comment on their posts so that if you forget or don't realize you don't end up in an awkward situation.
3/5. Sequel, do not start here. Further wholesomely necromantic (it’s a vibe) adventures. Rough road trip when you have to chase down your great grandfather’s psychopathic ghost.
This book continues in the footsteps of the first by being cheerfully morbid, with great character work and complicated relationships. Weird thing though: I thought the first book was messy and oddly paced and overlong. This sequel is about 9 hours of audio shorter (so about 90,000 words, give or take) and so straightforward, I was baffled. Then the author said in the afterword that her editor made her cut 90,000 words, and ah. I see. I think I actually would like a little more mess in this book, believe it or not. Maybe the third book can get it just right.
Anyway, my point is: read if you would like a sort of T. Kingfisher plus Tamsyn Muir vibe plus normalized polyamory and queerness. And a reanimated tiger rug as the noble steed. And an undead wolf who is a very good boy.
Content notes: Death, violence, possession, mind control.
The Whatever Holiday Gift Guide 2025 continues, and today we move away from books and focus on other gifts and crafts — which you can take to mean just about any other sort of thing a creative person might make: Music, art, knitting, jewelry, artisan foodstuffs and so on. These can be great, unique gifts for special folks in your life, and things you can’t just get down at the mall. I hope you see some cool stuff here.
Please note that the comment thread today is only for creators to post about their gifts for sale; please do not leave other comments, as they will be snipped out to keep the thread from getting cluttered. Thanks!
Creators: Here’s how to post in this thread. Please follow these directions!
1. Creators (of things other than books) only. This is an intentionally expansive category, so if you’ve made something and have it available for the public to try or buy, you can probably post about in this thread. The exception to this is books (including comics and graphic novels), which have two previously existing threads, one for traditionally-published works and one for non-traditionally published works (Note: if you are an author and also create other stuff, you may promote that other stuff today). Don’t post if you are not the creator of the thing you want to promote, please.
2. Personally-created and completed works only. This thread is specifically for artists and creators who are making their own unique works. Mass-producible things like CDs, buttons or T-shirts are acceptable if you’ve personally created what’s on it. But please don’t use this thread for things that were created by others, which you happen to sell. Likewise, do not post about works in progress, even if you’re posting them publicly elsewhere. Remember that this is supposed to be a gift guide, and that these are things meant to be given to other people. Also, don’t just promote yourself unless you have something to sell or provide, that others may give as a gift.
3. One post per creator. In that post, you can list whatever creations of yours you like, but allow me to suggest you focus on your most recent creation. Note also that the majority of Whatever’s readership is in the US/Canada, so I suggest focusing on things available in North America. If you are elsewhere and your work is available there, please note it.
4. Keep your description of your work brief (there will be a lot of posts, I’m guessing) and entertaining. Imagine the person is in front of you as you tell them about your work and is interested but easily distracted.
5. You may include a link to a sales site if you like by using dropping in a URL. Be warned that if you include too many links (typically three or more) your post may get sent to the moderating queue. If this happens, don’t panic: I’ll be going in through the day to release moderated posts. Note that posts will occasionally go into the moderation queue semi-randomly; Don’t panic about that either.
6. As noted above, comment posts that are not from creators promoting their work as specified above will be deleted, in order to keep the comment thread useful for people looking to find interesting work.
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World wastes no time in getting the viewer acquainted with the HMS Surprise; in a few brief moments we’re given a sailor’s-eye view of the cramped below decks, home to the crew in their hammocks and livestock in tiny pens, a series of 12-pound guns and some very low ceilings. Then we’re on deck for the dawn and the change of crew, and as this is 1805, this involves sailors climbing up and down rigging and officers in stiff suits and tall hats. It’s all very peaceful, until the French privateer Acheron comes out of the fog and starts taking the Surprise apart with its cannons.
And those scenes, too, waste no time at all: In impressively quick fashion the Surprise is blasted near into splinters, some of which impale themselves into the bodies of the crew; the Captain, “Lucky Jack” Aubrey, is concussed near to death; the ship’s surgeon Stephen Maturin is so quickly drenched in the crew’s blood that he calls for sand to be thrown on the floor to keep him from slipping as he operates; and despite the courage of the ship’s crew and the pounding of their own cannon, it is only a lucky fogbank, and the backs of rowers, that keep the Surprise alive to live another day.
It’s all beautifully shot and nothing about it is in the least bit romantic. One or two lucky cannonballs more and this movie would have been an Oscar-nominated short film, not an Oscar-nominated feature. In its way, this opening was a risk for the story: Very few movies this century would open with their dashing hero (and attendant film star) so comprehensively being handed his ass as Aubrey and Russell Crowe, who embodies him, are here.
But then, this is one of the things that makes Master and Commander so watchable; it’s unflinching, in a strikingly cinematic way. Unlike its nautical contemporary Pirates of the Caribbean (both released in 2003), this movie isn’t about pretending the past is full of dashing adventures where everyone is beautiful and nothing really hurts. Lots of things hurt in this version of the early 19th century. Everything is crowded and cramped, the joys of the day are limited to an extra ration of rum, you may find yourself whipped for disrespecting an officer, and you might be given an order by your captain that sends your best mate to his death. Oh, and there’s still the Acheron out there somewhere, waiting to stuff you full of grapeshot and death.
One of the things that sells all of this is Crowe, who in 2003 was in the imperial phase of his career, and on a streak of indelible performances that started with LA Confidential, continued through Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind and ended up here. Crowe’s Aubrey is an interesting study of contradictions: both a proponent of order and a little bit feral, a man who can inspire nearly mythical levels of loyalty, and then turn around and offer some of the worst puns recorded to celluloid. He can slap down his best friend Maturin when the two of them are at philosophical odds, and then go to heroic lengths for Maturin’s well-being. Crowe at his height was a movie star of the first water, and he was pretty close to his height here.
(To be clear, he’s helped by having a counterweight in Paul Bettany’s Maturin — the two men had worked together very effectively in A Beautiful Mind, and their chemistry continues here. Bettany is not here nor ever was the movie star Crowe is, but he’s as good an actor for certain, and his angularity and sardonicism complement Crowe’s ruddiness and bluster. You can believe these two could fight so explosively and still be friends afterward. A shame they have not worked together since this.)
Master and Commander was a passion project for Tom Rothman, then head of 20th Century Fox, which explains how it was made at all. The Pirates of the Caribbean notwithstanding, no one in the early years of the 21st century was screaming for a naval adventure, particularly a realistic one set in the days of the struggle between Britain and Napoleonic France. Certainly the movie’s box office reflected this: it brought in $82.6 million at the domestic box office, below Freddy Vs. Jason and Daddy Day Care.
But then, what’s the point of being boss if you can’t occasionally make what you want to make? Fox and Rothman certainly spared no expense; the film had a $150 million budget and an A-list director in Peter Weir, whose career had an interesting range to it, from Witness to The Truman Show. The film was nominated for 10 Oscars, including Best Picture and Director, and deservingly won for cinematography (Russell Boyd) and sound editing (Richard King, the first of five, so far, for him). This film was a classic prestige play and Oscar bait, and in that respect it paid off pretty well. In a different year it might have even won Best Picture, but in this year it was up against The Return of the King, so.
Are there flaws to note in this film? Well, it’s a nautical sausage fest, for one, which one hand isn’t terribly surprising given almost all of the movie takes place on a 19th century British naval vessel, where women mostly weren’t. The Patrick O’Brien novels on which the film was based do have notable women characters, so it’s possible that if the movie had been more financially successful, at least a couple of them might have appeared in the sequels. But here there’s exactly one, glimpsed briefly by Aubrey as his crew is buying oranges and monkeys for their journey. A Bechdel Test passer, this film is not.
Speaking of the novels, fans of the Aubrey-Maturin novels might grumble that the movie doesn’t especially closely follow any one of them, and made significant alterations to ones it did borrow from. I can acknowledge their potential dissatisfaction while at the same time saying that for someone who is not a devotee of the series (raises hand), what is here seems to work well enough, and it was a shame, if not a surprise, that we didn’t get any more films out of these books. Nor do I think we will be getting any more films out of these books; if I were pitching these books in Hollywood now, I’d be pitching them as a prestige streaming series, a medium and mode where I think there would be more appetite for such a thing, and where the story might make more economic sense.
Still, I’m glad that Rothman decided to spend a little bit (or actually a lot) of the money Fox was getting out of the X-Men and Ice Age series to make this extremely handsome, extremely rewatchable ballad to the high seas. I’m glad I didn’t live in an age where I might find myself on one of these ships, and Master and Commander really confirms that if I did live then, I would best be left on dry land. But given appropriate distance in time and nautical miles, I’m happy to get this glimpse into a life on the sea, and wave as it sails by.
This shortcut Mongolian Ground Beef has all the delicious flavor and heartiness of our classic Mongolian Beef recipe, but it’s made with ground beef instead of flank steak. It’s our new favorite hack for one of our most-loved dishes! Check out our recipe and VIDEO to see how we make it! (Jump to the recipe […]
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