Remember when you’d walk into a local music, book, or video store and there’d be an adorable section where the employees would recommend what they were interested in that month?
Welcome to our little version of it, called Remap Recommends.
At the end of every month, we have an edition of Remap Recommends focused on video games. But in the middle of the month, we'll have an edition focused on...everything else. It's a chance for the staff at Remap to let you know what they've been reading, listening to, or watching.
Patrick Recommends...Here
My wife is not into sad movies. She'll tolerate them, but her bar is usually "is this going to be up for an Oscar?" Beyond that, I'm on my own to swirl around a glass of bourbon and weep as midnight approaches. But I like good cry; as I've argued in the past, it's a reminder of raw emotions that have become distant—tolerable, even—with time. Here, the latest from director Robert Zemeckis, has a lot going against it. Zemeckis is broadly a hack these days, enamored with technology over storytelling. (If you've never seen The Polar Express and its terrifying CGI, bless.)
Here, an adaptation of a graphic novel where the camera sits at a fixed point and has us watching a family (and a place) evolve over time, has all the trappings of modern Zemeckis' worst impulses. For the most part, the movie has us watching Tom Hanks and Robin Wright look slightly off. Just use make up, man, or let me imagine what a 16-year-old Tom Hanks looks like. It's fine. Here, it's grotesque.
But...Here knocked me off my rocker. I'm turning 40 next month, so I'm in a moment where I'm spending time thinking about what's come before, what's coming next. And icky visuals aside, Here lands enough sappy, sentimental punches about what it means to live a life, what it means to have regrets, what it means to imagine a life difference than the one you've experienced. I watched this while on holiday break, where my kids were around me all the time. It got me bad.
(The less we talk about the movie trying to comment on what it's like to be Black, however, the better. What the hell, Zemeckis?)
If you, like me, are a sap and enjoy working through a box of issues, check it out.
Rob Recommends… 30 for 30: Lance
Slowly but surely competitive cycling is moving up the rankings of my favorite sports. But as much as I watch, I always feel like there are tremendous amounts of context I am missing. I don’t fully understand the sport yet, and I always feel like I have just the smallest sense of its history.
So I decided to watch the documentary ESPN did on Lance Armstrong, who might be the Antichrist of the Tour de France and maybe all of modern cycling. It’s an utterly riveting film, in part because it turns out to be such a stark portrait of an unrepentantly corrupt and self-centered man. That might be the film’s great weakness as well: it’s so focused on Lance that it somehow fails to do justice to the extent of his cheating or the viciousness with which he defended his undeserved reputation. It becomes a psyschodrama about what was going on in the head of an audacious crime boss, and can’t quite stay on top of all the misdeeds or victims he left along the way.
On the other hand, Armstrong is an incredible figure. He appears to have stumbled into cycling because it was the one sport at which he truly excelled, and it fed his deep desire to dominate and humiliate people via competition. At no point does Armstrong or anyone else talk about his love for cycling, because it’s not clear he even liked it that much. He was from a young age a damaged and cruel person, he excelled at a sport where corruption and cheating were prerequisites for serious high-level competition, and then he improbably survived a metastatic cancer and this miserable person overnight became the inspiring feel-good sports figure of the decade.
At the outset we’re warned by a lot of the people interviewed as part of the documentary that Lance is a master manipulator, and they think he’ll turn any “tell-all” documentary about himself into an exercise in image rehabilitation. So take what I’m about to say with a grain of salt but I did come away feeling some sympathy for him in this one particular way: he was a corrupt liar, but he was the hero of a corrupt and mendacious age.
It seems like nobody who knew cycling was every fooled: everyone knew PEDs were widespread in the sport, and while Armstrong was marketing himself as a clean cyclist in a sport that was cleaning up its act, the riders were improving against the times they’d set in years when people had been caught taking drugs. But it was a good story that made a niche sport more popular, that gave American media a clean-cut underdog hero at a time when the United States was losing a pair of increasingly unpopular imperial wars, and that made a lot of brands and businesses a lot of money. Armstrong is justly reviled as a vicious and vindictive cheater, but the documentary raises questions about how much of the fraud he perpetrated on his own. He had lots of partners who were invested in selling his phony heroism, and when he was finally cornered, a lot of those same interested parties helped turn him into a symbol of everything that was rotten in sports.
You watch this documentary and you see clips of Matt Lauer talking about Armstrong on Today, or you hear about an FDA bureaucrat deciding to make it a mission to expose what Armstrong was up to, or you hear about how his commercial empire collapsed when Nike finally cut ties with him. In victory and disgrace, Armstrong seems to have been the perfect symbol for the comforting fictions Americans are so often fed. First, that a rich and ruthless competitor can have a clean conscience and a heart of gold, and then that in the end the truth will out and justice will be served.
Cado Recommends... Nobody Understands Playing Cards
Yeah yeah, I know, it's funny how predictable this is. Sometimes you have to live your truth though and my truth is that I love card games, so I was delighted when last weekend Polygon published this fun video on some of the things that make cards so compelling. Simone de Rochefort et al have done their research on how 52 pieces of thick paper can have such a lasting impact on culture, and take some time to get into some of the math around the probabilities that make a deck of cards such a great source of delicious randomized tension.