For many years, my go-to travel method when visiting family for the holidays was the Peter Pan bus. I was never really a fan, but it was affordable. Since getting a day job, I have largely made the switch over to Amtrak. Which has been a general quality of life improvement on those trips.

But don’t let that fool you, because while that statement is definitive, it’s also relative as heck.

One of the worst mornings of my life for reasons not relevant to this review took place in Tokyo early last year. The bad part of it ended with me on the Nozomi Shinkansen, the fastest bullet train in Japan and thus anywhere. Looking out the window, even in my horrendously bad state, was a thrilling experience. Watching Japan zoom by like that was amazing, and the ride was as smooth as Alien Ant Farm’s criminals. Truly a travel experience unlike any I had had before. To then come back to America and jump on an Amtrak train was more than a little disheartening.

Here, I think of trains as The Least Bad Option rather than the actual Best. Cars don’t give you any freedom of movement but give you unlimited freedom to just pull over and stop being in them at any point. Buses typically have a little more space and you don’t have to drive them, but you’re limited by schedules. The smoothness of both rides is outside of their control, entirely at the whims of American infrastructure and other drivers. Are the roads alright? Is there hella traffic? Probably not and almost certainly yes, respectively; during holiday weekends, even moreso. Traveling in or out of New York City, inevitably. The seemingly endless stop and start of those wheeled vehicles is exhausting. And I hate it. Throw in their cramped nature, and it’s something I avoid whenever possible. Though, sometimes I really just can’t afford the nicer option.

This past weekend being Thanksgiving, I traveled. One way, I took Amtrak from the hellhole that is New York Penn Station, seen here at something resembling capacity. It was a pretty easy trip, all things considered, and I got to sit in my favorite spot – more on that in a bit.

The other way, I took a bus, having waited a little bit too long to buy the tickets.  That… wasn’t great. A supposedly three and a half hour trip was a full hour longer; and I hated it.

My real problem with wheeled vehicles is the bouncing. It’s something that you rarely do on a train, because if somehow you started bouncing, it would likely mean the train had left the track and you would die and the last thing you would be talking about was the fact that you felt a little up and down. Even when they’re a little rougher, as Amtrak trains are vs. those in European or Asian countries, the result is mostly swaying. Side to side is fine – certainly, Ariana Grande seems to have no problem with it. Up and down is less so.

Plus, train cars are a bit more open, especially in my preferred spot: the café car. I’m always a little surprised that more people don’t go for that – only three of the few dozen times I’ve taken Amtrak have I not been able to get a seat. There’s more room, since you can typically sit just one person per side of the booth, and the shorter seat backs and typical lack of overhead storage leave a lot more empty space. I can get up and walk without bumping into people. Without adjustable seats, I can write this review without worrying about some guy in front of me jacking the seat back and warping my laptop screen. I have written many reviews in the café car of Amtrak’s Northeast Regional. (I tried rewriting on the bus… but that didn’t work out super.)

The regional slower and therefore cheaper than the fancier Acela. But really, the Acela seems to be faster mostly as a consequence of taking fewer stops and not because the train itself is better. The regional is a little rougher, but neither that nor the better seats and slightly shorter trips really justify the added expense for someone who isn’t particularly wealthy and only takes the train every few months – i.e. me. If it was a frequent occurrence that I could expense to a business, I get it. But for a middle-class schmuck like myself, the regional is generally fine.

Timeliness in general is something of a concern. I have found that Amtrak trains are typically ten-to-fifteen minutes late over the course of a three-hour-thirty-ish trip. Sometimes, they’re entirely on time. Others… not so much. Once, we sat motionless for a full hour because some rando was on the tracks and refused to leave. I was in the café car watching Gravity Falls; so it was fine, except it meant I got home at 1 AM, which wasn’t my favorite. That one also wasn’t their fault. The other ones, well, they definitely were.

But I get less frustrated by long train rides than I do long bus rides or car rides. The fact that I could get up and walk a bit helps. Certainly there’s a lot more length to a train; even just a trip to the bathroom at the other end of a car is more than you could ever really do on a bus. And have you ever been in a bus bathroom? Or tried to use one in New York City traffic? Good golly.

But it can’t be divorced from the reality of Amtrak. It’s the best of bad options, but that doesn’t even make it “good,” let alone great. The prices are high, especially when compared to other countries that do it better, and the trains are… fine. But no one writes home about their experience on Amtrak, because it’s never anything special. I’m fortunate to live in an area that is serviced and reasonably well by it; in most parts of the country, that isn’t the case. The US just doesn’t put the money behind the rail system that it would need to to make it a truly competitive and compelling experience.

Which is sad, because trains are awesome.

Just not these trains.

Six-Point-Six out of Ten

So… this is, arguably, a conflict of interest, because I am credited with many, many things in Reel, from co-writer/director to editor and actor, but many years ago (literally, primary production took place in 2014), I decided that if it ever played in a film festival, I would review it. Somewhere, somehow.

And then it was accepted into the Urban Action Showcase International Action Film Festival. So, here we are.

Because it’s ridiculous that I should not be able to review my own movie. In fact, I don’t think there is anyone on Earth more qualified to do so than the guy who has seen it dozens and dozens times across its various iterations, as I edited it over the course of three and a half years.

It’s a much better movie now than it was in 2015. I had seen it on screens ranging from 5” to 8’, each making for a radically different experience. And now I’ve seen it proper big as part of a AUSIAFF shorts block. Which was exciting.  About three minutes into said block, I turned to JD, who plays and also was the main fight choreographer, and said, “Life Lesson: 90% of short films are terrible.” On this, that whiny baby commenter boy and I agree. In that block, one was infuriatingly bad, two were incomprehensible and also not good, one felt like a rough cut for something that could have been fine, and then there was Reel.

Gerard Chamberlain, with whom I share several credits, was somewhat frustrated by the lack of quality around Reel. “It made me feel less special.”

Me too.

So, it was nice when a couple of days ago, I received an email letting me know that Reel was selected as a Finalist in whatever category it was nominated in. We may not have won, but we’re a step up from the bottom.

Having seen it all those ways, I was disappointed by my reaction to seeing it big. I had gone into the festival expecting to love a short that I had always liked, but I came out feeling a little cool on the whole thing. I liked it… but not as much as I usually had.

Much of that, I think, comes down to the budget in context with the competition. Even if our film was the “best,” it was also clearly the cheapest. The others had larger casts, more locations, CGI, etc. Taken on its own, watched on a laptop or a 50something-inch television or even an 8-foot projection screen, you aren’t as aware of the limitations. I think Reel is a genuinely good looking movie, one that is shot well and certainly looks more expensive than it was, but it wasn’t expensive. And that shows too.

And it probably shows to me more than to most. I have a particular level of insight into the film and its somewhat unsteady production. I can see what was and what is right from the opening moment. Reel has an opening credits sequence. For forty-five seconds, you hear the voice of star/co-writer/co-director Gerard Chamberlain as he gets increasingly frustrated with having to set up both the premise and the stakes of the following fifteen minutes. This happens over black punctuated by White Text. This bothers me. Anything under 16 minutes shouldn’t have opening credits. And certainly not this credits sequence.

But at least you know what’s going on.

The first several cuts of Reel were intentionally opaque. There was this Grand Overarching Meta Narrative, and in fact this opening sequence replaces an entire scene shot at the Rocket to Venus bar in Baltimore. There were other characters and more story, including a couple of things that get called back later that are no longer call backs. None of that story actually ultimately mattered in the sense that the first time any character outright said what we were all fighting about was more than five minutes into a then twenty-minute movie; that part is still in there, but it’s no longer a weird dumb reveal that was a result of our refusal to have that exposited into unrelated dialogue. Now, it’s a reminder of the stakes, which is a good thing to have in narratives.

But even more than that, the fight in the scene was bad. For a movie that lives and dies by the quality of its action, that was unacceptable. No one would keep watching. They’d be right not to.

So it went.

And the movie is better for it. Even if I don’t like those opening credits.

Reel is effectively a series of fight scenes. There are three, the final of which takes up a full quarter of the run time. We had the goal of making the best Baltimore-based martial arts short film – with no clear sense of our competition – and may well win by default. For specific stylistic inspiration, we looked largely to The Raid, a film that is infinitely better than this one. The only action cinema I watched in the week leading up to our main production was the meth lab fight, which is just straight up perfect.

Like many non-Hollywood action movies, Reel lets the fights speak for themselves. Each fighter uses a different style of martial art, each based on one that the actor had experience with, and the camera steps back to let them do the thing they were trained to do. The camera is rarely closer than a medium, and few shots are under a few seconds in length – with the longer ones closer to a minute than not. At no point is there ever a cut on the strike. We shot with a constantly moving camera and exactly zero coverage. We moved from fight segment to fight segment, doing each at least a half dozen times until we had gotten it right. We had no choice. If the choreography and performances weren’t up to snuff, the whole thing would have fallen apart, and we would have had nowhere to hide.

So it’s good that the fights worked. Ya know, after that cut one.

I have found that most people share my opinion that the final fight is the best of the film; it is the longest, the most technically impressive, and just a really cool sequence to watch. It is about a third of the way into it that Reel still grabs me and doesn’t let go until the credits roll.

But there are certain people who don’t feel that way, who prefer the first fight, and it’s worth unpacking why.

Every fight has to tell a self-contained story. Each is about overcoming the odds, something that must be presented in actions before words. For the latter two fights, this is purely the case; the broader narrative, such that it is, essentially stops while people trade blows.

That first fight, with the producer (full disclosure, me), deemphasizes the action story. It more concerned with the characters than the moves they’re making.

Neither of these approaches is inherently better than the other, but Reel benefits from having both. Being the actual introduction to our protagonist, it is critical that this first fight establishes his character. Afterwards? Again, it’s under 16 minutes. At some point, you just need to worry about the punching in this movie whose logo is a fist going through a film reel.

The constant push forward, game-like in a sense, results in a short film that feels even shorter. There are a couple of minutes here and there to catch your breath, but it’s Go Go Go enough that you can just get swept up in it, helped greatly by an original soundtrack by Chase Hawley and Riley Smith that works brilliantly within the movie but is also just really good and something I enjoy listening to. (One of the songs is my ringtone.) It’s never boring, never giving you a reason to turn away or pull out your phone. By the time you really stop to think about it, it’s over. And you think, “Yeah, that was fun.”

And ultimately that is what matters in the end. That is what we learned in the final cut. We had all these ideas for what everything meant and would mean; we tried for literal years to make them work. But the movie that we actually shot was something different than we understood. Eventually, we accepted it. And we made something that I can be and am proud of.

Seven-Point-One out of Ten.

Look, Anthony Jeselnik is controversial. I mentioned to a friend what show I was going to, and he said, “Is he the one who tweeted, ‘Other than that, how was the movie?’ after Aurora?” And I said “Yep” and he said “I love that guy.” But he is a very different kind of controversial than the comedians who, say, whine about the PC police or whatever. Those people tend to toe the line, see what they can get away with. And look, I don’t think that there are topics that should be fundamentally out of bounds for comedians, but saying awful things and then calling them “comedy” doesn’t somehow inoculate you from criticism. Clearly felt racism under the veneer of a joke is still just racism.

Anthony Jeselnik’s comedy doesn’t work like that. He spends his entire hour so far past the line that the questions you ask are different. The over-the-topness of ALL of it is The Point, where casual-ish misogyny (more on that in a bit) is mixed with an extended riff promoting murder suicides. Putting them together, having the line always in the rearview mirror, means that the idea that you might hit your wife is seen as just as sick as intentionally dropping a baby. And they are just as sick as each other! All. Of. It. Is. Bad.

The clearest evidence of The Joke is in the moments where Jeselnik the character begins to brag about his brilliance and how good he is at writing and structuring jokes. In past specials, he has taken to explaining what makes so good. He didn’t do that here, but he definitely spoke down on people who didn’t put two and two together. But all of this braggadocio is played for laughs. Regardless of whether he believes the things he says about himself – he does and should, because he is very good at writing jokes – he welcomes you laughing at him for it. He’s laughing at himself too. Because that’s what it’s all about.

But some people don’t get the joke. Three years ago, I was staying in a Hostel in Prague. I had just found out about Anthony Jeselnik and was listening to his stuff on whatever music service I used back then. Another guy in the four-person room was from Canada. He was rich as heck and really kind of gross in the way he talked about women. But I needed some company being alone in a new country and… whatever, I hung out with a douchebag for a day. Sue me.

Anyways, I played him some Anthony Jeselnik, and that was when I realized that this kind of comedy really is a mirror. Because he was laughing at something he found relatable. I was laughing at something that was objectively terrible. His identifying with what is overtly lampooning humanity’s terrible impulses is unnerving at best. That reaction I found more disconcerting than his offer to show me nudes he had been requesting from women on Snapchat.

So, the experience of seeing (or even enjoying) him requires a little bit of introspection. First, you need to know why you’re laughing. Are you laughing because it’s ridiculous or because you’re awful? And then, you have to ask: When every single joke is too far, what does it say about You if you only laugh sometimes? Every joke is just as expertly written and performed as every other one, so to laugh at some and say “Oh gosh! How dare you!” at others speaks to an unfortunate cognitive dissonance. All. Of. It. Is. Bad.

And yet.

Fire in the Maternity Ward is probably the tamest special yet. One of the reasons I wanted to see this enough to buy a front-row-mezzanine ticket was because I wanted to know what 2018 had done to his comedy. Would he double down on the most problematic stuff, as some – again, wah wah wah PC police – or would he change his targets? And it is distinctly the latter. He doesn’t complain about political correctness. Only once does he talk about the fact that he’s now in a position where maybe he shouldn’t make racist jokes; lesser comedians might have used that to set up a series of racial jokes as a Screw You to The Man or whatever. Someone only vaguely familiar with Jeselnik’s work might expect the same of him. But that isn’t what he does. Because, quite honestly, he’s better than that.

And indeed, much (key word) of the overt and ridiculous misogyny, racism, etc. that was so prevalent in his earlier work is missing from this special. But it doesn’t feel neutered. The jokes remain transgressive as heck – and, as ever, much of the comedy is targeted at children – but some topics just aren’t as funny in 2018. At one point, he tells a story about a white supremacist sending him fan mail. The punch line is fake, but the setup is probably true. And even if it’s not, he’s certainly had the thought, and that thought has had an impact.

What makes seeing Jeselnik different from just hearing his words is watching him soak it all in. He is very deliberate in everything. The steps he takes on stage are as purposeful as the pauses before his punchlines. Seeing him revel in the discomfort of the audience and also enjoy the material that he has crafted – he actually broke into laughter twice before starting a joke, which I hadn’t seen before – gives you a very different impression of who he is than an audio album.

So I’m glad this will be coming to Netflix, that people will get to see his face even more clearly than I could in my excellent seats. His comedy isn’t for everyone. It may not even be for most people. Indeed, a handful of folks walked out during the show, I guess somehow unaware of what they were in for. But if it is your thing, and for the right reasons, then you can’t go wrong with a Fire in the Maternity Ward.

Eight Point Three out of Ten

In college, I had multiple wrist surgeries that didn’t quite heal the way they should have. This means that holding bulky things for extended periods is genuinely painful. The shift towards increasingly large and heavy phones might be great for some, but it’s not for me. (I maintain that there has never been a phone more perfect in the hand than the original Moto X.)
The Pixel 2 had a fairly small screen with ridiculous bezels. Put up against the engineering marvel that was the Samsung Galaxy S8, my previous daily driver, it looked downright ancient. The XL version, by contrast, was… fine. But it was too freaking big.

The Pixel 3 looks like a smaller Pixel 2 XL. It’s fine. It doesn’t have any kind of notch, and it particularly doesn’t have the ludicrous notch that plagues the XL version this generation. I like the clean look of the screen, with rounded corners that fit Google’s new bubbly OS aesthetic.

I remember being excited that my Droid X all the way back in 2010 would be getting Android 2.2 Froyo. I have used every single version of the operating system since; it’s amazing how far it’s come.

The Pixel 3 launched with Android Pie, version 9, which I like well enough but am not going to delve into it because it doesn’t really matter and other people have already done it better. What matters is that the Pixel 3 runs it beautifully. I’ve never had such a smooth Android experience. I replaced the stock launcher with Action Launcher, which makes much better use of gestures than Android itself, those required on Google’s latest hardware. That is dumb. Action Launcher is great. Five stars.

It’s a cliche that the best camera is the one you have with you, something that must be true because of how words work, but there are two radically different lessons you could take from it:

1) Don’t worry too much about what you’re shooting with

2) Make sure you’ve always got a good camera on you

Since we here on The Week I Review believe that authorial intent is irrelevant, I’m going to focus on the latter as it pertains to the Pixel 3.
But first, a brief digression: My XT-2 replaced a Fujifilm X100T rangefinder. I loved that camera, which came with me to three continents, for the photos it took and the colors it had in those sweet sweet jpegs. Its small body meant I could just throw it into my bag and not think too hard about it.

But the video was terrible. So I traded up. And while I’m very happy with most of the XT-2, I miss the smallness and the inconspicuousness of the X100T.

But even that has nothing on a phone, which is even more inconspicuous and also infinitely accessible.

And while the Pixel 3 certainly isn’t versatile or straight up fun to shoot with as those Fuji cameras, I finally feel like my phone can act as a more-than-capable backup for when the bulk of a bigger body just isn’t practical. For stills, anyway.

Unlike many of its contemporaries, the Pixel 3 flips the sensor count to two front and one rear. In lieu of a rear “telephoto” that’s so common, there’s an additional wider-angle selfie cam, undoubtedly great for all those group shots I would take if I, ya know, had groups of friends to take them with.
But software is the new hardware. The Pixel does not have a top-tier camera because it has the best sensor or optics; it has the best software. The processing capabilities on display with all of Google’s phones take images that any flagship phone could take and bring them to the next level. All of these really involve taking a number of photos and merging them together with algorithms that ??? until Profit. HDR+ is the typical tech that is on everything, and it gives very good dynamic range to image – though it can be a little too aggressive at times for my taste.

That missing second rear lens? Ostensibly obsolete in the face of Google’s SUPER RES ZOOM, which uses the motions in your hand to simulate an existing sensor technology called pixel shifting, merging multiple photos taken slightly apart from each other to increase overall image resolution before performing the zoom. It’s unequivocally better than a regular digital implementation, but whether it is a genuine replacement for a second camera is another matter and not one I feel compelled to litigate.

The most notable is Night Sight, a genuinely mind boggling technology that let you take photos in the dark that just… stop being dark. As I record this, it’s not officially released, but a downloadable version of it is accessible nonetheless, and I felt compelled to try it before doing this. It lives up to the hype. I assume it’s the opposite of SmartHDR+, taking a ton of slightly overexposed photos and cleaning them up, but I don’t know. It’s probably just magic.

Concerns that the images would become too much like the daytime and negatively impact desired composition can be put to rest; you have the same ability to alter the exposure that you always do, so Night Sight can result in better image quality in the darkness with the same apparent exposure. Full stop: It’s amazing.

Also of note, because there I have seen some confusion about this point: none of the cameras on the Pixel 3 have optical image stabilization. Instead, they have very good digital stabilization that, again, relates to the higher quality of their software relative to the competition. I’m shocked that I believe even think it, but the Pixel 3 just doesn’t need OIS. Even when using Night Shift, which requires at least a full second while the phone collects light, any little jitters your hands might do in that time don’t result in any apparent blurriness in the image.

Unfortunately, the video capabilities don’t support all of these wonderful features. Which makes sense. All of that processing of multiple shots just to get one good image? It takes time. Heck, a Night Sight photo can take another 30 seconds or so to finish processing after you’ve gone off to other things before it actually becomes that amazing incredible thing.

So… that won’t work at 24-plus frames per second. Instead, you’re left with the capabilities of the sensor, and the flaws in it are glaring.

What’s odd about it, and where I fell into a trap with the first go, is that on the screen of the Pixel 3, it honestly looks fine – pretty good, even. It’s only when I brought it into Premiere that my eyes basically started to bleed.
The problem is partially one of dynamic range and also of the limitations of camera apps on Android. If you want to take photos, you can do all kinds of specific controls; but if you want more control over your video, you’re pretty much out of luck. You can bring down the exposure, and that’s basically it. But it’s also harder to realize when the exposure is totally out of whack. If I press record and then turn the phone around to record me with the rear lens, I’ve got no indication until it’s too late that it didn’t work out properly. 

An unfortunate side effect of the Pixel 3’s smaller size is that it has a smaller battery to match. This is a problem plaguing the industry – if you want a battery, get a big screen. I would gladly take a thicker phone with a smaller screen, but that’s just not a thing that exists outside of, like, Sony’s Compact line. The battery life isn’t terrible – it’s better than my S8 was – but if I follow my typical, probably above average media consumption habits, then I don’t make it until the time I would otherwise plug it in for the night. This is a shame.

Speaking of the S8, one of the big draws for me last time I was in phone acquisition mode was that it had retained it’s headphone jack in the face of overwhelming, uh, courage, on the part of its competition. At the time, I used exclusively wired headphones, and the prospect of dongle life, particularly given my many consecutive hours of media that probably ultimately requires mid-day charging, was enough to keep me away. Now, I primarily use a pair of Bluetooth headphones, so the calculus is different. To Google’s credit, both USB Type-C headphones and a short 3.5mm dongle are included. I largely stopped wearing earbuds a couple years ago because a doctor told me to, but The Verge speaks highly of these, so their inclusion isn’t nothing.

Not of particular consequence but something I care about is the implementation of the digital well-being functionality intended to make us look at our phones less. Though it’s still in beta, it still offers some built in app timers and limiters as well as, most significantly for me, a grayscale button built right into the quick settings panel.

It’s been shown – evidence in the description – that the vibrant colors of a smartphone play a large factor in their “addictiveness,” so a way to make people stare at them less is to drain that color away. Then, when I’m not watching a video or taking a photo, I keep them off, and it really does make a difference. Turning them back on is kind of startling, actually; and sometimes I keep it off even when videos play. It’s not like this kind of thing wasn’t possible before, but the added convenience of it being built into the system right alongside the toggles for Wi-Fi, Airplane Mode, etc. is something I really appreciate.

And it really does make me want to stare at my phone less. And also go back to shooting photos in Black and White.

It’s this kind of thing that makes Google’s offering stand out in ways small and large. Some of this stuff will come to other phones, but they’ll always be on Google’s first. And some things Google is just going to keep to themselves, at least for the foreseeable future. Those sorts of little life conveniences go a long way towards justifying the thing’s cost.

To kind of little life convenience goes a long way towards justifying the thing’s cost.

The Pixel 3 starts at $800, a full $150 more than its predecessor, and the lack of expandable storage means that the 64GB version just isn’t going to cut it for most people. We’re now, sadly, in the era of the $1000 flagship, and while the Pixel 3 isn’t quite there, its more sizable sibling is; these phones are being put up against the new iPhones and Galaxy Ss and Notes and etc. And sure, they’re not as immediately impressive as any of those, but I don’t have any buyer’s remorse. I like the Pixel 3. It’s smooth as heck, has a pretty swell imaging system, and is the only Android phone released in 2018 guaranteed to be getting timely updates in 2020. And that counts for a lot.

Eight-Point-Two out of Ten