Space Opera and Military SF

Bad Shabbos

Jews do not dance in this movie.

But it was nonetheless an incredible movie and I loved it so much and I laughed all the way through.

The film is a farce in the vein of a Neil Simon play- a modern Orthodox Upper West Side family prepares for a Shabbos dinner made fraught by the fact that the Catholic parents of the son's fiancee (who is in the process of converting) are visiting from Wisconsin. This process becomes a lot more complicated when a dead body, that the family has to conceal, turns up.

I love a precise farce and this is an incredibly well composed one that manages to squeeze multiple jokes out of every setpiece through callbacks and reaction shots and brilliant use of the limited set. The whole audience was constantly laughing for the entire movie.

I especially loved the incredible Talmud jokes, which testified to a writing team that not only is familiar with the text of the Talmud but also its vibes. I still laugh every time I think of the challah.

And I loved that it is a movie about a family sticking together through thick and thin. I remember complaining about This Is Where I Leave You that for all the funny moments the inescapable truth at the end is that this family doesn't like each other very much, and I found that deflated my enjoyment a lot. In this movie, for all the family dysfunction and disagreement, when things go down they team up to be dysfunctional together.

Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

There has to be a word for the literary technique where you have a section of the book that doesn't work- it's boring, or unsatisfying, or implausible, or mis-paced- but its presence makes a later part of the book land harder. Part IV of Some Desperate Glory doesn't work for me- it asks you to suddenly find empathy for characters it hasn't invested time in developing, it rushes to the action scene and then works through the action scene in a way that is inconsistent with the rest of the book. But then you get back to the characters you care about in Part V and everything is amplified and hits so fucking hard, because of Part IV. It's an incredible ending and a really neat structural achievement.