And that's how we take it underground

So earlier tonight I went to my fifth Burns Supper with the Serious Burns Unit and my fourth with derspatchel. There was whisky and singing and haggis. It was a nice way to spend an evening. Afterward I visited my cats, whom I miss constantly; then I came home and found my contributor's copy of Go Now, the latest annual not-Not One of Us publication, containing my poem "Anybody That Looked Like That." This is the poem inspired by Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) and some of the ways that film looks at outsiderness. The table of contents includes work by Patricia Russo, Mat Joiner, Erik Amundsen, Russell Hemmell, and Alexandra Seidel, among others. The cover art is fantastic. The epigraph is from the Moody Blues.

nineweaving gave me a cup in a style I am calling Kaiju Delft—blue and white pottery with the usual assortment of bridges, pavilions, and gracefully trailing willows, plus atomic robots, pterodactyls, sea monsters, flying saucers, mysterious tentacles, a gigantic toad . . . It makes me very happy.

I feel very much as though the week since Arisia went by in a single sleepless slur. On Thursday I took Rob to Loyal Nine for his birthday, where we enjoyed sea urchin with bone marrow crostini and blowtorched scallop with fennel and pulled pork shoulder with handmade triticale macaroni and I was reminded that I can never take triticale quite seriously as a real grain instead of a science fiction MacGuffin. Adding mezcal to a Corpse Reviver #2 produces a cocktail I would drink on a regular basis if I could afford it. The sourdough chocolate brewis was so decadent we could not actually finish it, although to be fair that was also because it is huge. I made a much plainer cake for Rob on Saturday, when the rest of my family was available to celebrate his birthday observed: it was a waffle cake, because it turns out that you can stack four freshly made waffles with strawberry purée and whipped cream in between each layer and frost the whole thing with more whipped cream and stick some candles on top and it will hold together just long enough to make an attractive cross-section when sliced, after which everyone is on their own. My niece left most of hers on the scenery, but this is the same kid who celebrated her first birthday by headbutting the first slice of cake with which she was ever presented. Rob and I watched Playhouse 90's The Comedian (1957), a devastating triple threat of a live television drama directed by John Frankenheimer from a script by Rod Serling and Ernest Lehman with Mickey Rooney in the title role. A barrel of laughs, it is not, but it's riveting. I have to take Mel Tormé seriously as an actor now. Sunday was shoveling and I've already mentioned how that turned out.

I can't believe I have already read Herman Wouk's The Winds of War (1971) and the majority of War and Remembrance (1978) when I care about exactly one plot thread in the entire impressively researched, two-thousand-page megillah. It's an ambitious experiment, to write a family novel that tries to have an angle on every facet of the mainstream American experience of World War II, but I keep looking at individual episodes and thinking that they would have made perfectly fine novels on their own if the author could have been persuaded to extricate them from the surrounding matrix of historical significance. I've had exactly the same reaction to the miniseries, too, which at least confirms that I am consistent in my interests.¹ The acting helps with the prose, but nothing helps with the amount of narrative convenience required to get the various characters into the different theaters of war in order to provide the necessary first-hand views on historic events. I think it was the point where a central character was sent to Moscow just to get Stalin into the narrative that I stopped being able to take it seriously. I mean, I don't need a member of the Henry family to talk to Stalin in order to believe he exists! He left a considerable historical footprint! (Like this joke.) He can make decisions offscreen and they can affect the war in Europe and I'll take the author's word for it! But, no. We go to Moscow and there's face time with Stalin and at least I got some scenes with the character I cared about. I am finding this whole experience fascinating, but I'm not sure I can recommend it to anyone who isn't making a survey of historical novels about World War II.² It's a Holocaust novel, too, of course. It is very strange for me to read a Jewish author writing about Jewish characters as if from the outside, for the presumed identification of non-Jewish readers. I'm fairly certain that's the reason I don't care as much as I should about the primary female protagonist. Maybe Wouk's just not great with women.

I need to review some movies.

1. For those who keep track of such things: the thread I care about centers on the diplomat Leslie Slote, played in both series by David Dukes. His character arc went sadly where I had been half afraid it would, but I really enjoyed him until then. I don't know why I'm talking vaguely about a pair of forty-year-old novels and thirty-year-old miniseries, Wikipedia and TV Tropes will tell you what happened to everyone if you care, but I find it interesting to watch people who are wrong about the sort of people they believe they are.

2. Not, I suspect, in the way its author intended, it has been reminding me of my sole experience of War and Peace (1869), which occurred when I was in seventh grade and had just burned through the last of Mikhail Sholokhov's Don books and for some reason looked at the Russian literature on my mother's shelves and decided the obvious next step was Tolstoy. I don't know which translation it was. I don't think it mattered. I can't remember a thing about the novel itself; my total memory of the book is a seemingly endless alternation between battle scenes where I understood none of the tactics and ballroom scenes where I understood none of the etiquette and every now and then someone would say something that made sense to me and I could go, "Yes, I don't want to get shot in a cavalry charge, either!" Fortunately I got to college and discovered Gogol, Bulgakov, and Akhmatova and was not scared off Russian literature for life, but man, don't read War and Peace when you're twelve.

When we got adopted by a bald guy, I thought this would be more like "Annie"

So my niece has a T-shirt with a Minion on it. This was a meaningless piece of pop culture to me until this weekend, when it turns out that Despicable Me (2010) is a startlingly charming children's movie of the kind that can be enjoyed by adults without excess of either irony or fart jokes.¹

The title refers to the protagonist Gru, voiced by Steve Carrell with an outrageous Eurosmash accent that is mostly pseudo-Russian but honestly reminds me of nothing so much as the accent Peter Jurasik invented for Londo Mollari on Babylon 5 (1994–1998), in which case there's a healthy dose of the Borscht Belt in its DNA. His character design is equally fantastic: he looks like a cross between Alastair Sim and Uncle Fester, tall and bulky-shouldered with a piercing nose, stalky legs, and caterpillar brows with a toggle setting between glowering and plaintive. On a normal human body, his black drainpipe jeans and matching zip-up jacket would give him a middle-aged geek-chic look, his no-neck delineated by a charcoal-striped scarf; he will freeze-ray any customer who gets between him and his morning coffee. His house cranes over its neighbors like the Addams mansion; the basement is a cavernous space-age hangar occupied by the lab-coated Dr. Nefario (Russell Brand) and a nearly infinite number of knee-high, lemon-yellow Minions (mostly Pierre Coffin, occasionally Chris Renaud and Jermaine Clement) in their little boiler suits and welding goggles. I am not at all surprised that these creatures got their own spin-off. They are not exactly what would happen if you dropped Beaker and the Doozers in a blender, but they possess some of the same mad engineering charm. They chatter away at one another in their own dialect, out of which a recognizable non-English word will occasionally emerge, like a breezy "Da, da, da" after being given instructions; they look almost identical and about half a dozen differentiate themselves by personality over the course of the story, which genuinely impresses me in a digitally animated film. They have boundless enthusiasm and a problematic attention span. They'll build whatever nefarious invention Gru can design, but as the story opens, he's got a problem pure labor can't solve: unlike Goldfinger or Lex Luthor, Gru is not an independently wealthy supervillain. He was formerly responsible for some bold acts of theft and mayhem—and he's got the newspaper clippings to prove it—but these days he's in danger of being outcompeted by younger, flashier, meaner villains with sleeker tech and better PR. Some unknown baddie just replaced the Great Pyramid of Giza with an inflatable replica and it's making "all other villains look lame." Gru wants to prove he's still in the game, but he's taken out so many loans from the Bank of Evil that he can't even get funding for his world-defying plan to steal the moon unless he can convince the bank's pointy-haired president that he's a real threat to international security, not just another minor megalomaniac with a mortgage.

Toward this end, for reasons that play logically in context, he adopts three small orphan girls so that he can steal a shrink ray.

The plot from here on is obvious: unless it's going to play against audience expectation to the point of cruelty, Gru's phony family will have to become the real thing; his reluctant acts of caretaking² will become heartfelt and the three orphans—who are not exactly pushovers themselves—will find themselves bonding with this awkward, slippery, inadvertently endearing man. This is indeed the arc we get. But it's not saccharine. And just as importantly, neither is it winkingly ironic. The subversive approach works with Edith (Dana Gaier), a gap-toothed, blond-shocked hellion whose pink-striped sweater and pink woolly knit hat do not remotely disguise the fact that she's hit adolescent cynicism about five years ahead of schedule without losing an ounce of childhood bloodthirstiness. When Gru incinerates a rigged carnival game that was about to cheat five-year-old, unicorn-obsessed Agnes (Elsie Fisher) out of a fair and square win, Edith's eyes widen with hero worship. She was already impressed with the number of medieval torture devices and futuristic weapons left casually lying around her new home. But he earns Agnes' trust by finding her a new toy unicorn after her beloved scruffy original is accidentally disintegrated in his kitchen, which is the kind of gesture that can win a child for life even if meant mostly as an expedient remedy for her heartbroken crying, and cusp-of-puberty Margo (Miranda Cosgrove) with her glasses, her sensible plaid skirt, and her hand-me-down tweed jacket is too old and too used to fending for herself and her sisters³ to fall for anything other than real parental commitment. Dolls and explosions are nice, but they're not proof of safety or love or stability. She's the one who could get really hurt by Gru's thoughtless subterfuge; intelligent and defensively sarcastic, she's the one who's most like him. But they are all believable children, which means they are three young girls who aren't adorable tot plot counters—they can be, from moment to moment, any selection or combination of sweet, smart, suspicious, vulnerable, manipulative, imaginative, ungovernable, not constantly in agreement, not necessarily well-behaved, and always lovable. Gru can't figure out how he fetched up on the sidelines of ballet practice surrounded by beaming soccer moms with smartphones who really approve of a father who takes his daughters to dance class, but the viewer could see it coming for miles. They're fantastic kids and he's a supervillain, not an idiot. He has reasons to resist emotional attachment and reasons these particular children get tangled in his heartstrings. The story assumes sincerity when it comes to sentiment and it's stronger for it.

It's also a nice goofy romp through the tropes of supervillainy coupled with some contemporary critique—it doesn't lose time spelling out emotional issues whose implications the audience can already understand because it has to get on with staging a sky chase with a shrink ray or a heist scene with full props to Topkapi (1964) or a pulp sci-fi rocket launch which is also oddly and appropriately earnest. The real villain of the piece is self-monikered up-and-comer Vector (Jason Segal), a track-suited whiz kid with all the smarm and ego of Silicon Valley bro culture; all his inventions have the bland seamlessness of Apple products except where his Bondian fixations show through, like the giant shark circling under the glass floor of his TV room and his insistence on inventing a working piranha gun.⁴ He is magnetically charmless. He has catchphrases. He probably studies how to be a pick-up artist when he's not designing his own logo. Unfortunately, he's not stupid, just self-centered, entitled, and petty enough to be a real threat: "Now maybe you'll think twice before you freeze someone's head!" Gru can be flamboyantly callous and macabre, but he knows, even if he has to be reminded of it, that people can be hurt. He also knows about gravitation and ballistic trajectories and why it is never a good idea to wear smiley face boxers on a day on which you might plausibly find yourself hanging upside down, with or without a giant shark underneath you. Most scenes in the film are running on more than one level, but when the top layer is the stunts and the gags and the mad science, it is really, reliably funny.

I'd had no idea. Based on casual exposure to trailers and posters at the time, I'd expected Despicable Me to be extruded Pixar-lite product. As it is, I think it would appeal to fans of Noel Streatfeild as much as fans of Brad Bird. Julie Andrews has a small part, but I think she was cast on her ability to sound fantastically unimpressed and she delivers. There is a sequence in an amusement park that is basically an on-ride video for a fictitious roller coaster that I hope somebody had a lot of fun designing, because it starts with a more-than-ninety-degree drop and I would ride it. Also, I recognize that it was designed for 3-D, but I am charmed by the ending gag where two Minions compete to break the fourth wall, refereed by an increasingly exasperated third; when they finally succeed, the "film" smashes, catches, stutters, and melts, leaving a white screen with an immense projected shadow of a Minion who looks awkward for a minute and then starts doing shadow impressions. It's cute at home, but in a theater it would kill. I don't want a Minion T-shirt, but I am seriously considering taking my brother's advice and watching the prequel. This delightful surprise brought to you by my only slightly villainous backers at Patreon.

1. There is one fart joke in the script and it is hilarious. It is immediately lampshaded by an embarrassed mad scientist, trailing off in resignation: "I said dart gun, not . . ." His stalwart but hard-of-hearing research assistant, having just made one of the ubiquitous Muppet-like Minions pass out with a well-aimed shot of artificial intestinal gas, is visibly relieved: "I was wondering under what circumstances we would use this."

2. His first attempt at providing the girls with a nurturing environment is to furnish a corner of the kitchen with a bowl full of candy and some newspapers on the floor. In his defense, it probably worked with the bug-eyed, shark-toothed, bluish-hair-sprouting abomination of science he refers to as his dog. Alternately, it may be why the thing goes for his throat half the time they're alone.

3. I can't actually tell if the girls are meant to be related by blood—Agnes' character design looks East Asian, while Edith and Margo appear to be white. They function as a trio, however, and it is never suggested even by the orphanage's indifferent manager (Kristen Wiig, not quite in Miss Hannigan mode) that they be separated.

4. Later upgraded to a squid gun, with considerably more success.