Space!

The summer movie frontier?

Who doesn’t love summer movie space aliens?

(Spoilers ahead — I don’t really know how to proceed without a little bit of secret-spilling.)

It is perhaps a mild spoiler to say that Disclosure Day (PG-13, in theaters now), directed by Steven Spielberg, is about extraterrestrial beings. It is maybe a bigger spoiler to say the movie is specifically about what happens as the existence of those aliens goes from being a secret held by the government for some 80 years to being something that a wider group of people, perhaps even the whole world, knows.

As we see in trailers, TV weatherperson Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) is suddenly capable of speaking an unEarthly clicky language, which she breaks into during one of her live broadcasts. Margaret’s moment of on-air strangeness leads her to fear she’s had a medical issue. But we see the reaction that footage of the episode gets from a secretive quasi-government agency run by Noah (Colin Firth), who is already scrambling the troops after one of his tech guys, Daniel (Josh O’Connor), made off with some highly classified video footage. And we see the reaction of a group led by Hugo (Colman Domingo), who seems to be directing Daniel in his heist. As Noah’s people chase Margaret, who doesn’t understand why she’s suddenly a wanted woman any more than she understands why she can suddenly read everyone’s thoughts, and Daniel, the two seem drawn to each other. Fairly early, we learn about the big secret Daniel is so desperate to get out to the public when he shows his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) some of the stolen footage starting with, bestill Fox Mulder’s heart, the Roswell crash in 1947.

I think we’re supposed to be watching basically regular people being pulled into this big secret — how would they handle this information, how would they react to learning the part they are playing, do they think the world can handle knowledge of aliens? There are moments that exemplify this: Jane talks to a nun played by Elizabeth Marvel and they weigh the meaning of aliens, the reaction they’d expect the world to have.

My problem is that these conversations frequently can’t break off the page to feel like a real conversation, these people never quite feel like real people to me. Emily Blunt feels off-key here. It’s as though she was given too many notes about exactly what tone to strike and ends up feeling like two or three character ideas smooshed into one person. Josh O’Connor, meanwhile, feels like he’s just hitting the one character note, just a lump of doe-eyed Big Emotion. Colman Domingo is maybe doing something interesting — isn’t he always? — but it feels like it’s from a different movie. And Colin Firth is just serving up angry British authority, take it or leave it, no side of fries.

For every “that’s an interesting idea” the movie has many story elements that are unnecessary, don’t fully make sense or don’t feel like they were developed beyond the idea stage. A running subplot throughout this movie is that international tensions have the whole world on the brink of war. We see people hoarding gas and buying out supermarkets. This element is maybe meant to heighten tension or underline the destructive tendencies of humans or some other thing I just didn’t get. For me, though, it was one of the extra accessories that Coco Chanel wants you to take off before leaving the house.

There are elements of the chase that are fun and well-constructed, though the movie is never as energetic as its most John Williams-y of John Williams scores seems to want us to think it is. I feel like there are ideas here, things that could have gone in either a more popcorn fun direction or something that felt more like a stripped down gritty sci-fi adventure reminiscent of 1970s Spielberg. For me, though, the movie never pulled together into something that was either a thrilling ride or a compelling thought experiment.

A few days later I rewatched that 1977 grittier Spielberg sci-fi: Close Encounters of the Third Kind (available for rent or purchase and streaming on Peacock). In many ways, this is the spikier, low fi version of Disclosure Day. We get many of the same elements — strange occurrences, the “what’s happening to me,” a chase with officialdom — though there is more chase and a shorter timeline in Disclosure Day. Characters played by Richard Dreyfuss and Melinda Dillon see clearly not-from-here crafts flying in the sky and come away from the experience with thoughts of Devil’s Tower National Monument stuck in their heads. Desperate to figure out what they’ve seen and what they’re experiencing, the two unwind — first Dreyfuss’s character as he scares his family (including his wife played by Teri Garr) and then Dillon’s character when her young son, seeing brightly lit “toys,” runs after a UFO and is abducted. I highly recommend this double feature — I think I had more fun thinking about Disclosure Day after watching Close Encounters. The movies are, as your serious film academics might say, in conversation with each other and are both interesting reflections of their times.

I also used the outer space theme of Disclosure Day as an excuse to catch up with March release Project Hail Mary (PG-13, available for purchase). Based on the Andy Weir book, Project Hail Mary is directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the team who wrote and directed The Lego Movie and wrote the animated Spider-Verse films, with a screenplay by Drew Goddard, who also wrote Weir’s other book-to-film, The Martian. This movie is exactly as good as all those names promise.

Ryan Gosling here is, similar to Matt Damon in The Martian, the one person working alone for a good chunk of the movie. He plays Ryland Grace, a middle school teacher who is also a molecular biologist and has been kicked out of standard scientific work for some kooky ideas about the conditions required for life to develop. Luckily, Eva Stratt (an excellent performance from Sandra Hüller) is in the kooky ideas business. The head of an international scientific project, Eva is trying to figure out astrophage, a substance that is traveling from Venus to the sun and appears to be dimming the sun’s light. Scientists all over the world are working on the project and she calls Grace in to study a sample of the astrophage gathered on a recent space mission. We watch as Grace joins the project to try to figure out what astrophage is and how they could possibly reverse the potentially world-ending effects it’s having on the sun.

All of this is viewed in flashback as Grace, in the movie’s present, wakes up to find himself alone on a space craft with no memory of much of anything — who he is, where he is, why he’s there, why a robot is trying to shave off his extremely long beard.

Similar to The Martian, Project Hail Mary is a movie of questions and whiteboards and smart people tackling small problems with duct tape and plywood in order to get the information needed to tackle bigger problems. It is optimistic in its view of science and people doing science — this isn’t callous tech-dinguses trying to figure out how to monetize some crappy thing that nobody really needs anyway. It’s people, all curious and fallible, working together, across borders and language barriers, to figure things out with the ultimate aim of saving the world. This might be my favorite brand of save-the-world adventure movie? No magical stuff or superpowers, just middle-aged nerds who can mock things up with Home Depot supplies. This movie does everything right — Gosling’s performance, space visuals, showing people thinking through things and showing Gosling working out a puzzle by himself that includes a really solid vocal performance (by James Ortiz).

Featured photo: Disclosure Day.

Ruins, by Lily Brooks-Dalton

Grand Central Publishing, 389 pages

By her admission, Ember Agni was a weird kid. For fun, she liked to bury things in her backyard and then dig them up over time to analyze the stages of decomposition. Like other children, she had a “penchant for dirt,” but her play had a purpose: observing history in the process of being made.

So of course she became an archeologist, but a frustrated one. When we meet Ember in Lily Brooks-Dalton’s Ruins, she is sleepwalking through her life: stuck teaching faceless students at a university where she’d intended to work for only a few years before returning to the field; stuck in a marriage to a man whose interests and goals seem to grow more distant from hers every day.

But as Ember begins a new semester, a letter arrives from a former student. It informs Ember that the writer, named Ish, has found an artifact, and “It’s as we hoped. Intact. Good condition. A few thousand years? It’s hard to pinpoint. Two? Three?”

And with that, Ember’s world is upended, as the missive tantalizingly dangles a different life, one in which she might finally be able to get funding for an archaeological dig that frees her from the drudgework of the university and from her increasingly tense marriage.

The dig, she believes, has the potential to explode existing narratives about the origins of humanity, which is not a small thing. And yet, also not a small thing, I struggled mightily to care.

That’s because Ember is the worst kind of protagonist: the unlikeable one. We’re told early on that she is “not well liked at the university. By anyone: students or faculty or administrators.” She is hard on her assistant, hard on her husband, hard generally; in part because she’s miserable because of decisions she has made, in part because of her difficult single mother, now dead, “embittered, vain, endlessly critical Ola, who had never hesitated to remind her daughter how costly being a parent was.”

That parenting helped turn Ember into someone who was ambivalent about being a parent herself, which is a problem because her husband, Jerome, finds his joy on the homefront. The difference between the two of them is illustrated by the care he puts into a garden in their backyard; she hasn’t so much looked at it in months. Jerome wants children; Ember wants professional success. She’d made that clear when they met, but he’d thought she would change. To Ember, it is Jerome who is changing. He had, she observes, “become increasingly rigid over the years. Unimaginative. Boring, in fact. By association, she was becoming boring also, as if his desire for the banality of procreation and home improvements and a back garden was leaking into their union, and further, into her.”

The arrival of the artifact that Ish found, however, sends Ember charging down a new path of discovery, one that will reunite her with an important woman from her past and raise questions about her culture’s beliefs about what the societies that came before them. To her this dig is everything, andwe realize early on that the title of the books, Ruins, represents not just Ember’s professional focus but also other aspects of her life.There is nothing subtle about this.

More subtle is the gradual unpacking of mysteries — minor ones, such as the nature of Ember’s relationship with Ish, and major ones, such as the genesis of the “Pre-Crisis” civilization and a “Thermal Epoch” that has occurred. The novel is intentionally vague about where and when it is set; Ember lives in a “Commonwealth” that is most certainly not Massachusetts. And indeed, what we know about Ember’s society we are invited to doubt: An excerpt from her unpublished manuscript says, “The endurance of any given historical narrative is never a function of its factual accuracy but rather, of its utility to those who perpetuate it.”

As is noted in every podcast and article about Ruins, this is a novel that suffers from spoilers, making it difficult to talk about the plotting in detail. Suffice it to say that Brooks-Dalton, whose previous novels include The Light Pirate and Good Morning, Midnight (the basis for the film The Midnight Sky), has described Ember as a “polarizing” woman and the novel as “a rumination on how we uncover, interpret, and teach about ancient civilizations.” Those naturally interested in such things may find it fascinating. For those of us who aren’t, Ruins presents a challenge to remain engaged, even with a consciousness-altering plot twist. B- —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: Ruins, by Lily Brooks-Dalton

Album Reviews 26/06/18

Sublime, Until The Sun Explodes (Atlantic Records)

Said to be the last album from the ’90s ska-punk/reggae-rock juggernaut, this one has Sublime’s fan base more interested in debating whether or not this-or-that lyrical theme is focused on former lead singer Bradley Nowell, who died from a drug overdose in 1996 and left the band a hollowed-out husk of itself. As some have observed, this stuff does sound like it came from an AI bot programmed to make up a bunch of new Sublime songs, which is pretty low for a band that hasn’t produced any new material in 30 years. Indeed it does sound a lot more polished than the music that launched them into the happy-grunge stratosphere and portrayed them as an antidote to the doomer vibes of bands like Alice in Chains, Stone Temple Pilots and all those guys. Nowell’s son, Jakob, handles the vocals here, which adds to the disposability of tunes like the Red Hot Chili Peppers-inspired title track and “Can’t Miss You,” which reads like Andy Grammer trying dancehall on for size. Utterly useless, for completists only. C

Tori Kelly, God Must Really Love Me (Epic Records)

Sixth full-length from this R&B/hip-hop-diva Californian, who’s sort of becoming the Jeff Ross of random national talent reality shows. She started out on YouTube, after which she won the 2004 season of America’s Most Talented Kid with a rendition of Christina Aguilera’s “Keep on Singin’ My Song,” and then finally broke through in 2010 apparently because she failed to make the top 24 on American Idol (I can’t explain it either, don’t ask). Since then she’s been the titular Masked Singer on that show, mentored a group of American Idol contestants in 2024, etc., always showcasing her belt-it-from-the-mountaintop singing style for the benefit of the few people who still watch that kind of stuff. For this one, though, she’s all about the ’90s, or at least the asphalt-soul ’90s made famous by quasi-R&B street-pop groups like TLC and Salt n Pepa, which is, um, marketable thinking on her part, let’s just say. Whatever, she’s content in her skin here, warbling conversational lyrics in a style that went extinct when the new millennium arrived, but its comfort-food feel will appeal to cul-de-sac-dwelling suburbanites, etc. B

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• June 19 is the next “Here, Have Some Random Albums” Friday, and so random albums will be coming to your favorite streaming service, the one you pay for by allowing it to schlurp money out of your bank account every month only because for some reason you’re too paranoid to rip songs from those “YouTube To MP4” apps because some of them are obviously heavily infected by hackers, and yet you trust that Pandora or SoundCloud or whatever will never get hacked by the approximately 12,693,881 MIT undergrads who are at this very moment determined to hack your chosen “trusted music platform” so they can steal your credit card to buy disposable laptops for the darkweb, have you changed any of your passwords in the last nine years, I sure hope you have, you really should. But in positive news (a Constant Reader said my column of two weeks ago was full of positive energy and it made him smile, but I’d caution not to get used to this kind of nonsense), Canadian trio Rush played their first live shows in Inglewood, California, and my social media feeds would absolutely not shut up about it, so I looked at some of the video, and yes, replacement drummer Anika Nilles took one small step for womankind by adding a few of her own touches to the sadly departed Neil Peart’s professorial drumming tricks. That was expected, let’s just say, but what really tugged at people’s heartstrings was her wonderment; she looked like a kid who’d hit the winning homer in Game 7 of the Little League World Series. Now, as a lifelong cynic, of course, what I’d like to know is which fusion and prog-rock drummers refused the offer to join the band; I’m sure there were a few who laughed them off as a glorified version of Styx or a less-capable Yes (you may recall I’d suggested Will Kennedy of The Yellowjackets), but past that sort of rather grim fascination, yes, she “nailed the fills” and whatnot. But anyway, to business, let’s kick off this week with the final album from San Francisco-born folkie Tucker Zimmerman, who died in January at the age of 84. Dream Me A Dream is the new album; the title track is a mawkish bluegrass-tinted affair that saw Zimmerman’s voice reduced to an ineffectual croak, but some people do dig that stuff.

• Canadian producer/musician/idiotic-looking-hat-addict Daniel Lanois couldn’t just give his new sleepy instrumental album a title that would make it easy for me to find one of its songs on YouTube; no, instead he titled it Belladonna Nocturne because he already put out a sleepy instrumental album titled simply Belladonna in 2005, so it’s like, his thing, man, and he also knew it’d force me personally to use extra brain cells to fool the YouTube bot into finding something from this new album instead of the 2005 one. “Warp Sustain” is pretty cool, incorporating some dark, quite noisy elements into its wispy Enya-esque dramatics.

• Pond is a band from Australia that still makes albums, unlike the American band named Pond that was from Oregon and got signed to Sub Pop Records, which led to their getting signed to Sony Records, which of course led to their breaking up when Sony let them go broke so they could write off the loss on their taxes. The title track from new LP Terrestrials is OK for a (dated-sounding) college-rocker, a blend of Supertramp and, oh, I don’t know, Hives.

• And finally we have Hull, U.K.-based BBC darlings Life with their newest album Abstract/Natural. Advance single “The Dollywaggon” is worth checking out if you like ’80s art-rock and Sex Pistols, it’s the best thing I’d recommend this week.

Featured Photo: Sublime, Until The Sun Explodes and Tori Kelly, God Must Really Love Me

Father’s Day icebox cake

Several years ago, in an action that can only be described as evil and motivated by malice, the National Biscuit Co. (Nabisco) discontinued a classic product, its Famous Chocolate Wafers, which generations of grandmothers and Home-Ec teachers had depended on as the key ingredient in Icebox Cake.

This modified version of icebox cake uses store-bought chocolate chip cookies and is very good — especially for Father’s Day. It only has four ingredients and does not actually involve cooking or baking, so it can be a decent project for kids to make.

One suggestion: When preparing food with small children, measure all the ingredients out ahead of time, and have everything laid out before calling the kids into the kitchen. Just trust me on this.

  • 2 13-ounce packages of chocolate-chip cookies – the crisp kind, not the soft ones with the odd taste
  • 3 cups (1½ pints) heavy cream
  • 8-ounce package of cream cheese
  • 2 Tablespoons powdered sugar

Crush 13 cookies into a bowl or large measuring cup. You could definitely do this in a plastic bag with a rolling pin, but I find it very satisfying to hold a couple of them at a time in my hand and tell them, “Oh, you know what you did,” and crush them by hand. On the seventh go-around, there will be one cookie left. Imagine his level of freak-out as he waits for his fate.

(If your children take a message from this as well, so much the better.)

Pour the heavy cream over the traumatized cookies and stir to make sure they’ve all gotten soaked. Set aside for 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, line a loaf pan with plastic wrap. If you are like me, the wrap will flutter around and bond to everything in your kitchen, except the loaf pan, and this will easily take the 10 minutes you’ve set aside for the cookie crumbs to infuse into the cream. Your children will learn some colorful new language. After 10 minutes, strain the cookie/cream mixture. Give the leftover cookie sludge to your least whiny child.

With your electric stand mixer or hand mixer, whip the cream cheese until it is soft and fluffy, about four minutes. Use the mixer’s whisk attachment if you have one. Whisk in the powdered sugar, then drizzle in the cookie-infused cream. You will probably need to stop the mixer after a minute or so and scrape cream cheese from the bottom of the bowl, so it mixes well with the cream. Turn the mixer to its highest setting, and beat the cream cheese/cookie cream mixture, until it forms stiff peaks.

With a large spoon or a silicone spatula, spread two globs of the cream mixture across the bottom of the loaf pan, then lay down a layer of cookies on top of it. You will have to break a few in half or into four pieces to fill any large cookie-gaps. Spread down another layer of the cream mixture, then another layer of cookies. Continue doing this until you’ve used up all the cream mixture. Hopefully, you will have enough for a final creamy layer on the top of the loaf pan.

You will probably have some leftover cookies. Use your own best judgment, but they will go really well with freshly made iced coffee (see the cover story).

Cover the loaf pan with one more piece of plastic wrap, and refrigerate it for at least six hours, to let the cookies and the cream reach a state of détente. An hour before you want to serve this icebox cake, put it in the freezer, which will make it easier to slice into servings.

Featured photo: Icebox cake. Photo by John Fladd.

They’re all good cakes

Cake Fest expects up to 125 cakes

The idea for Cake Fest came to Susan Witts, the owner of Susie Q’s Cakery, last winter.

“It was a cold day in January,” Witts remembered. “Obviously, I have a cakery, so I love cake. I’ve loved cake for a long, long time. And I thought, let’s have a big party all about cake. And then I thought, how am I going to do this? And the rest is kind of history now. We have our event scheduled for the Deerfield Town Gazebo or Town Hall. If it rains, we’ve rented out the whole space. And we will have up to 125 cakes that will be coming.”

Witts stressed that Cake Fest will not be a competition, but a celebration for people like her, who just love cake.

“Some people are making their own and so there’s a little bit of swag involved,” she said. “We are going to have a Cake Fest photo-op balloon arch. So if you want to show your cake off, that’s fantastic. If you want to go to Whole Foods and get a lovely cake there to share, that’s fantastic too. This is really about however you interpret cake.”

Witts said she has been inspired by Cake Picnic, an event that started in San Francisco but has evolved into a traveling celebration to cities around the world with the motto “No Cake, No Entry.”

“I was as intrigued as could be,” Witts said. They do it in only larger cities, but I thought, ‘Well, dang! Let’s do it in New Hampshire!’”

“So this is just about bringing the cake community together to share in some sweetness,” Witts said. “Each person signs up — all tickets are pre-sale, so there will not be any tickets available the day of the event. So you buy a ticket. You decide what kind of cake you’d like to make or where you’d like to buy one. And then you come to the event. and everyone will have a ticket and it will be whoever arrives first gets in line first and groups of 10 will get to go through the cake walk with pink boxes the size of large pizza boxes and you fill your box with slices of everyone’s cake.”

So, in essence, Cake Fest is a chance for cakers to collect slices of cake. To eat. Because it’s cake.

Because Cake Fest is a party, Witts said, “we have a wonderful acoustic musician coming in. We have a bar service so we’ll have bubbly because you have to have bubbly with cake. There will be face painting. It’s just a really really wonderful community event and who doesn’t like cake? Only mean, bad people. So you can bet that most of the folks there will be just really kind, wonderful people.”

Witts has heard rumors that some Cake Fest cakers have been carefully planning their cakes in extreme detail.

“I teach classes,” she said, “and I have Russian decorating tips to pipe tulips, and a woman was attending the class and she showed me her concept cake and she’s doing the cat from Demon Hunter. And then another woman has her favorite spice cake from her grandma. So it doesn’t have to be elaborate. It really is a question of what cake do you love from your childhood? What cake do you want to aspire to try and decorate? Bring it. Everyone’s cake is welcome. We’re going to applaud everyone and they’ll all be delicious.”

Cake Fest
When: Saturday, June 27, from 1 to 3 p.m.
Where: Deerfield Town Gazebo on Church Street.
Entry is $25. All tickets will be sold before the event; no tickets will be sold on the day of CakeFest. Visit susieqscakery.com/cake-fest-2026.

Featured photo: One of Susan Witts’ cakes. Courtesy photo.

Lamb barbecue

St. Nicholas kicks off this summer’s Greek food festival season

There are three Greek churches in Manchester, and each opens its doors each year to share Greek culture — and especially Greek food — with the greater community.

St. Nicholas Orthodox Church, hosts the first Greek festival in Manchester of the season: its annual Lamb Barbecue, which will take place Saturday, June 20, and Sunday, June 21.

Emorfia Valkanos, who goes by the name Amy, is the president of St. Nicholas’ Parish Council. She said she is always excited when it comes time for her church to host the Barbecue.

“We are the first of the three,” she said, “and we’re celebrating our 78th year of having this event. It’s a lot of great Greek food that actually came from original recipes from Greece. So these are like direct recipes from yayas’ [Greek grandmothers’] kitchens in Greece and we’ve been keeping those recipes for 78 years. You feel like you’re stepping into Greece with the music and the smells of the food and the sounds. It’s just a very pleasant sensory experience that brings you back to Greece. It’s really a fun time.”

The event takes place over two days. The first day celebrates many different Greek foods, Valkanos said, while the second day is narrowly focused on one particular food: gyros. Given that the parish has called the event a Lamb Barbecue for more than seven decades, lamb takes center stage.

“The lamb is actually barbecued and it’s marinated in the old pappoús’ [Greek grandfathers’] marinade sauce. Then it is put on skewers and it is charcoal barbecued. And when that starts cooking, it will make you hungry even if you’re not actually hungry. We have a great chicken meal that we marinate in a special Greek marinade and then also barbecue that.”

According to Valkanos, other Greek dishes are prepared by teams of volunteers in advance.

“We have dolmades,” she said, “which are grape leaves, which are stuffed with hamburger and lamb and spices. We have the spinach pita [spanakopita] as a staple, of course. We have Greek meatballs that are homemade in a homemade sauce. We have, let’s see, pastitsio we serve, which is like a Greek lasagna topped with a bechamel sauce. And then we also have our sides, which are going to be homemade Greek green beans, and we have the rice and of course the bread is our side. It’s good food.”

For some people Greek festivals are all about pastries, and this is something Valkanos impatiently waits for each year, she said.

“We’ve been working on these as a team. There’s probably about 10 core members that do the full-on baking, but we’ve got people coming in and out to help us make baklava, the koulourakia, which are the butter twisted cookies. We’re going to have paximadia, which are a sort of Greek biscotti. They’re wonderful.” There will also be kataifi, she said, which are in the baklava family, and have received a lot of attention during the past few years as an ingredient in Dubai chocolate.

There is an ongoing debate at St. Nicholas, Valkanos said, about whether they should make loukoumades, the popular fried dough balls soaked in syrup. “We don’t have those,” she said, “at least not this year. There’s a machine that we would have to purchase that actually makes them. We’ve been talking about maybe bringing them back, but right now they’re not going to be on the menu this year. We are the smallest of the three churches. So this is a big event for us to put on. But with everything, there’s just so many other pastries that we’re doing. There’s a selection that anybody will be happy with.”

Lamb Barbecue and Food Festival
Where: St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, 1160 Bridge St. in Manchester
When: Saturday, June 20, from 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., and Gyro Day is Sunday, June 21, from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Featured photo: Greek pastry. Courtesy St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church

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