Gripping

Seven samurai, a Venice man-child, and a white supremacy infiltrator walk into a bar...

A few weeks ago, my sister Andrea brought me to her weekly pickleball game, which features dozens of players rotating on and off the court for two hours of pickup matches.

We teamed up and did pretty well, winning three times against two losses.

One particular moment stuck out for me. We were in the middle of a tight match, and I missed a shot, taking a big swing that resulted in the ball finding the net.

“Try not to grip so hard,” Andrea said, noting the tightness of my hand around the paddle.

“Sounds like advice for my life,” I responded, only half-joking.

I do grip too hard sometimes. And not just in pickleball.

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The Best…

…Movie I Watched This Week

Seven Samurai (1954) — Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Available to stream with subscription on Max and Criterion Channel; also available for rent on other streaming services

I started the week by watching 13 Assassins, a terrific samurai movie from 2010, directed by Takashi Miike. I recommend the film, which follows a familiar storyline: an aging and forgotten badass is brought out of retirement to assemble a team of fellow misfits and outcasts to take down the bad guys against impossible odds.

It’s a stylish and enjoyable film, but after I finished it, all I wanted to do was go back to the granddaddy of them all. Yes, before The Magnificent Seven, The Dirty Dozen, The Guns of Navarone, Saving Private Ryan, the Oceans series, 13 Assassins, and the many movies like them, there was Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai.

Set in 16th century Japan, the film tells the story of a team of assorted samurai that’s assembled to help defend a farming village against a group of bandits. Their only compensation is a little rice — along with the satisfaction of simply doing what samurai do.

I can’t add much to the many words that have been written and said about this epic masterpiece, which stars frequent Kurosawa collaborators Takashi Shimura and Toshiro Mifune.

It’s widely considered one of the greatest movies ever made. It created an entirely new genre and has never been topped by any of its successors in terms of story, scale, characterization, and impact on film.

I’ve seen Seven Samurai many times, and every viewing reveals new layers of depth and meaning. But please don’t think this is a boring, black and white, “foreign” film that should only be seen in film studies classes — it’s also very entertaining.

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…Series I Watched This Week

Flaked (2016-17) — Created by Will Arnett and Mark Chappell
Streaming on Netflix

I love when shows and movies are set in Venice, that formerly funky Los Angeles beach town that’s now one of the country’s most expensive places to live.

What I love most about seeing Venice on screen is the light. It has this dreamy, ethereal quality that comes through beautifully on film and video. The best representation I’ve seen is probably the FX show Wilfred, one of the great oddball series of the 2010s.

Wilfred started airing in 2011, and I watched it while living in Venice, in an apartment on Brooks Ave. I left town the following year, just as the area’s tech-fueled gentrification boom was getting started with the arrival of Google (soon to be followed by Snapchat and others).

By the time of the series Flaked, which ran on Netflix for two seasons in 2016 and 2017, Venice had undergone significant changes — particularly on Abbot Kinney Boulevard, where the show is largely set. Old stores and restaurants were out, high-end shops and impossibly expensive rents were in. But a small community of artists, weirdos, and hippies remained, trying to keep the spirit of the place alive.

That’s the melancholic backdrop for Flaked, which stars Will Arnett (who also served as producer, co-creator, and co-writer) as Chip, a 40-year-old man-child grappling with alcoholism, narcissism, and a very tenuous relationship with the truth.

We follow Chip as he rides his bike around Venice — never going east of Lincoln Boulevard, god forbid — falling in and out of love, getting into arguments with friends, and attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

The show can be a hard watch and takes a while to get going. There are long stretches when Chip seems to have no redeeming qualities other than his charm. He and the supporting characters are full of shame, lies, and secrets, and you really have to stick with them for their small moments of personal growth (though it purports to be a comedy!).

Arnett has acknowledged that while making the show’s first season, the experience was so autobiographical and dark that he broke his sobriety and started drinking for the first time in 15 years.

This heaviness permeates the story, and I’m not sure I would have made it all the way through had it not been for the magical light of Venice. But perhaps that’s what drew Chip — and Arnett — there in the first place.

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…One-Man Show I Saw This Week

Just For Us — By Alex Edelman
Running at Broadway’s Hudson Theater through August 19

A Jewish standup comedian walks into a white supremacist meeting…

That’s essentially the setup for Alex Edelman’s joke-filled one-man show, Just for Us, currently running at the Hudson Theater on Broadway.

To be clear, none of the white supremacists at this 2017 meeting in Queens knew that Edelman was raised an Orthodox Jew or was a standup comedian when he walked through the door. He had seen a tweet about the meeting and, full of curiosity (and maybe sensing the makings of a good story), he went, posing as one of them.

His experience that night leads him down a variety of narrative paths and digressions, and he takes the audience with him as he explores topics that Jews in America have pondered forever, like antisemitism, assimilation, and whiteness.

He also tells jokes. Lots and lots of jokes.

Several things have stayed with me since seeing the performance, including his suggestion for how to respond when someone assumes you agree with the premise of an abhorrent question they just asked (“Can you believe it?”); his optimistic explanation for why he decided to chat up a cute young woman at the white supremacist meeting (“You never know!”); and his description of his Orthodox family hosting Christmas to comfort a bereaved gentile friend (“We even had Christmas stockings above the fireplace with our names written in Hebrew”).

Of course, there are deeper points to digest as well, particularly about racism, empathy, and what it means to be a Jew.

The show has earned rave reviews on its journey from London to Edinburgh to Melbourne to Boston to Washington D.C. to Off-Broadway and now to Broadway. It’s only around for a few more weeks, so if you’re in New York and want to see a tight, 75-minute performance that’s fun and thoughtful for Jews and non-Jews alike (not so much for white supremacists), check it out.