Wizards of the Coast had a lot going on at this year’s Gen Con — in addition to the regular hubbub of being the biggest name in tabletop role-playing games at the biggest tabletop convention whose namesake is literally Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. You know, the place where D&D was born. But this year’s D&D Live presentation was also an opportunity for Wizards to show off its new project: a virtual tabletop that goes by the codename Project Sigil.
Framed as an actual play performance, the event was originally slated to last only two hours, but unsurprisingly ran long thanks to excellent showmanship by the star-studded cast. Participants included Aabria Iyengar as Dungeon Master, Brennan Lee Mulligan as a Dwarven cleric, Samantha Béart reprising her role as Karlach in Baldur’s Gate 3, Neil Newbon as Astarion from BG3, and Anjali Bhimani as a human wizard.
Polygon senior editor Charlie Hall attended the event in person and said the actors “chewed through the scenery in the first half,” leaving slightly less time for the team to switch to play around with Project Sigil. Hall said the Project Sigil showing was “halting” but ultimately well-received — and any snafus aren’t too much of a surprise given the platform hasn’t even entered closed beta yet. (Wizards is still accepting requests to join the closed beta, which is expected in fall 2024.)
Lucky for us, Gen Con filmed the whole game, lovingly titled “An Astarion and Karlach Adventure: Love is a Legendary Action,” and you can now watch on YouTube in all its silly glory. According to Hall, the entire playthrough is worth a watch.
“Let’s just say,” said Hall, “there’s an epic reveal in the second half that gives your favorite actual play performers plenty of room to explore… the source material.”
It’s not like celebrated international chef Richard Sandoval planned to open two Chicago restaurants back-to-back. But when the opportunity to launch Toro Chicago inside Streeterville’s Fairmont Chicago, Millennium Park came about, he couldn’t refuse.
In May, Sandoval opened Casa Chi in the InterContinental Chicago Magnificent Mile. It replaced Eno Wine Bar with a focus on Nikkei cuisine that interprets Peruvian ingredients through a Japanese lens — a reflection of the Japanese immigrants who moved to the South American country.
Set to open this fall, Toro Chicago will take a pan-Latin approach to its food and beverage, drawing inspiration from Central and South American countries including Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, and Venezuela.
“You take off running and you never know what’s going to happen,” says Sandoval of the dual restaurant timelines.
There are some 60 restaurants, including several Toro locations, under the Richard Sandoval Hospitality umbrella around the world. While there is plenty of overlap between the menus there are differences too.
“With this brand, we always leave about 30 percent of the menu to localize it,” says Sandoval, adding that everybody looks at Latin American cuisine differently depending on their location. “For example, Mexican food in New York is different than Mexican food in LA It’s understanding these things and creating menu items that reflect that.” At Toro Chicago, that will involve a strong meat component, he says.
Toro Chicago will draw on the cuisines of countries like Colombia, Argentina, Peru, and Venezuela. KTGY/Toro Chicago
Signature Toro dishes that will be on the Chicago menu include Nikkei-inspired angry scorpion Toro roll (crab, cucumber, avocado, and spicy tuna topped with eel sauce), corn- and ají amarillo-filled empanadas garnished with a chimichurri sauce, and lomo saltado, a Peruvian-style dish of beef tenderloin served on a bed of creamy rice topped with crispy potato and spicy rocoto pepper aioli.
Cocktails at Toro Chicago will follow a similar Latin approach. “It’s a lot of playing with South and Central American ingredients,” says Sandoval. “Our mixologists are very creative, so you can expect a cocktail program that is very engaging and visual.” Toro’s Mercado Margarita includes jalapeño-infused El Jimador Blanco tequila topped with a pink hibiscus rosemary foam that slowly melts into the yellow passion fruit in the cocktail.
Like other Toro locations, the Chicago restaurant’s interior design will be colorful with a mix of bold Latin American textiles. The space will seat about 260 guests with two private rooms for 14 and 50.
“I really enjoyed being in Chicago, so when I got the opportunity to come back, I jumped at it,” he says. “I like big cities, but Chicago, to me, is a little calmer. Plus, I think there’s a great food scene here that over the last 15 years or so has really come around.”
Earlier in July, a vague Instagram post from Fares “Freddy” Zeideia brought joy to Chicagoans familiar with Zeideia’s famous New York restaurant, King of Falafel & Shawarma. Zeideia announced he was opening his first restaurant outside of the Empire State. He’s picked the suburban locale of Chicago Ridge and hopes to open in mid-September.
Zeideia’s legend has grown since he opened his first food cart in 2002 in Astoria, New York. While Chicagoans may be familiar with halal street food carts — Halal Guys arrived in Chicago in 2018) — Zeideia says he declined expansion overtures. He objected to greedy investors taking control of what he built. “The Falafel King of Astoria,” as the New York Times called him in 2016, has built a kingdom of two food trucks and one restaurant.
The Palestinian immigrant has family in the Chicago area, and Zeideia’s business partner lives there, too. Zeideia spoke about how Chicago is the Palestinian capital of America with the largest community in the country — it’s mostly focused in the Southwest Suburbs along Harlem Avenue through Bridgeview. That’s why he’s opening the first King of Falafel outside of New York in the suburbs, about 35 minutes from Downtown Chicago near that Palestinian enclave. The location will be for takeout and drive-thru only. Any upcoming locations would have dining rooms. Zeideia says he wants to open three or four in the Chicago area, including in the city proper.
“Everyone over the years has been telling me to come to Chicago, come to Chicago,” Zeideia says during a mid-July interview. He apologizes for not immediately returning a message. He underwent open-heart surgery the week before.
Blissfully unaware of Chicago’s restrictive food truck and mobile food cart laws, Zeideia says he also wants to open a food truck in town. After that, he’ll turn his attention to opening restaurants in Dallas. The New York operation has nothing to do with a similarly named San Francisco restaurant that closed in 2015. Zeideia also wants folks who have visited the New York restaurant to experience the same feel.
“I’m not going to change anything,” he says. “It’s going to be the same, old Freddy; the same attitude, same personality.”
That includes the restaurant’s branding, which now includes the phrase “Free Palestine.” Zeideia has celebrated his Palestinian pride more overtly in recent months as the war in Gaza continues. He’s plastered a cast of politicians — from President Joe Biden to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — on the floor for customers to step on; Zeideia calls them war criminals and blames them for the death toll overseas. He’s encountered backlash. Those disagreeing with his views have led a campaign to have Google erroneously list his restaurants as closed.
However, Zeideia has found more supporters thanks to how social media spreads his exploits. He says random folks will approach him and ask, “Aren’t you the guy with the things on the floor?”
Chicagoans know the type of restaurant owner Zeideia represents. He’s someone who connects with customers and shows up daily to build strong rapport with his customers. He was back at the restaurant a day after heart surgery. Zeideia says he didn’t want to be bored away from the restaurant. While he is excited to be in Chicago to see his six grandchildren more, he’s still a New Yorker to the core. Zeideia says he craves the city’s manic pace which other cities can’t match: “In Chicago, you can sit on a light and nobody honks their horn,” he says.
King of Falafel and Shawarma, 6085 W. 111th Street in suburban Chicago Ridge, planned for a mid-September opening.
Sometimes, turning a linear game into an open world just makes sense. Whether it’s Elden Ring or Breath of the Wild, plenty of franchises have found that their core gameplay loops map well to an open world iteration. With Elden Ring, you can disperse the intense FromSoft difficulty across a map that invites players to “git gud” at their own pace. With Breath of the Wild, the entire world is now a dungeon, every hill and valley a puzzle. Playing both, it almost feels as though each franchise and its mechanics were just waiting to be spread across a sprawling map. They just feel right.
By contrast, Isles of Sea and Sky, an open-world Sokoban game, isn’t quite as obvious a fit. But just because something isn’t immediately obvious doesn’t mean it won’t work.
Released in late May, Cicada Games’s Isles of Sea and Sky employs Game Boy Color-era Zelda aesthetics in pursuit of a genre mashup that produces harmony and dissonance in equal parts. The game makes a great first impression. It evokes that feeling of playing Link’s Awakening DX (pre-remake), to the point where you’d be forgiven for mistaking one of Isles’ beaches for Awakening’s. Moving from screen to screen is a nostalgic joy, with a Vocaloid-infused soundtrack that imbues the game with even more personality, which is good, because at its core, open world or no, this is a Sokoban-ass Sokoban game.
You will push blocks in Isles of Sea and Sky. You will push many, many standard-issue blocks into standard-issue holes, allowing you to cross over those holes in order to push more blocks. You will also push things that aren’t blocks, like little boulder dudes (definitely not Gorons) who roll as far as they can in the direction you push them, crushing any boxes they encounter. Or little water guys, who can extend riverways if you push them downstream. The puzzles start simply, easing you into the game’s increasing difficulty one screen at a time, until eventually you find yourself stumped. And, in being stumped, you will find yourself pushing up against the contradictions inherent to Isles’ mixture of freedom and linearity.
Image: Cicada Games
One of the pleasures of Sokoban games is the underlying conceit that, though you may feel frustrated by an individual puzzle, you always have the necessary abilities to get through the level. Each stage is then simply a matter of thinking and working through what things you have tried and not yet tried. You’re stuck, sure, but you’re not lacking anything you need to achieve the solution.
Not so in Isles of Sea and Sky. Early on, you will be presented with puzzles you are not yet able to complete until you unlock a new ability. While plenty of games include this kind of lock-and-key design, where you must first unlock an ability before you can access certain areas, this runs contrary to genre expectations for Sokoban titles. Going into Isles, the player might reasonably expect that, if they’re stuck, they just need to keep trying different solutions. Such a mentality will get you through similar games like Baba Is You or A Monster’s Expedition. The solution is there. You just need to keep at it. By contrast, in Isles, you are often meant to move on, to travel elsewhere in the game’s map and overworld. In short, you are meant to give up when you get frustrated.
At first, I found myself stymied by this dynamic. How am I meant to know when I am failing to understand a puzzle versus lacking the ability to solve it? When is my frustration an intended element of the solution and when is it futile? To its immense credit, Isles goes out of its way to reduce some of this frustration by allowing the player, at any point, to rewind their actions step-by-step, or to reset the entire puzzle, each with the press of a button. But you cannot rewind the real-life time you are putting into the game. You cannot undo the minutes spent bashing your head against the wall, stubbornly trying to solve something you are simply unable to solve. Encountering this, I found myself asking why anyone would design a game in this way, when they must know that players will get stuck like this.
That’s when it hit me. They know players will get stuck like this.
Full disclosure: I can be a bit stubborn. I like to think of myself as a creative problem-solver, but my general approach is to stick to something until it’s done. This can be a good trait (sticktoitiveness and all that), but it can also be a problem (see: my description above of bashing my head against the wall). Traditional Sokoban titles are designed with this kind of player in mind — someone like myself, who will spend hours trying out different things until finally they figure something out. The folks at Cicada Games clearly love this genre, as is evident by the sheer number and variety of puzzles they’ve crammed into Isles, but what they clearly don’t love is that feeling of being stuck without any recourse, of being unable to move on.
Not to quote a meme, but to quote a meme: Isles of Sea and Sky is here to say “Just Walk Out. You Can Leave!!!” What began for me as a frustration with the game turned into a bit of self-reflection when I stopped to consider why, exactly, I felt the need to stay frustrated, when, at any point, I could simply leave, or, to quote our generation’s preeminent philosopher dasharez0ne, “hit da bricks!!!” Sure, there are some areas you cannot access before completing at least a certain number of puzzles, but in general, you can well and truly leave behind most anything that’s too frustrating in Isles and find something you’d rather be doing. The challenge, at least in my case, was in allowing myself to do so.
As I’ve argued, Sokoban games are not an obvious fit for an open world iteration. Their inherent linearity rubs up against a style of game best known for its variety and, well, openness. The focus required of the player feels categorically different than the desirable distraction of asking, “What’s over that hill?” With Isles of Sea and Sky, specifically, there’s an immediate dissonance between how you expect to play a block-pushing puzzle game and how you’re meant to play this block-pushing puzzle game. But dissonance can resolve into consonance, to harmony and stability, and in Isles’ case, you’re pushed not only toward accepting limitation, but toward the inclination to free yourself.
For me, it was difficult, at first, to see moving on as a valid strategy, having become so accustomed to the habit of pushing through mental blocks, both in Sokoban titles and in life. But once I did, I found that mentality extending beyond the game. Is stubbornness helping or hurting here? Do I have to sit in this feeling? Why do I think of moving on as giving up?
In the end, I was happy to play a game that inspired this kind of self-reflection. Isles of Sea and Sky challenged me to take a step back, to reassess, and to move on. Maybe it’ll do the same for you.
Isles of Sea and Sky was released May 22 on Windows PC. The game was reviewed with code provided by Cicada Games. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel) should be the kind of man who has songs written in his honor. A low-born knight, elevated to the Kingsguard, then made Lord Commander, before finally rising to the position of Hand of the King. Our handsome knight has some … anger issues, yes (who doesn’t in this world?), but he appears to be an honorable and gallant knight — and really that’s all that matters as far as the histories are concerned. He does have one fatal flaw though, something entirely outside of his control: he was born in the age of dragons.
Episode 4 saw Criston rise to his highest yet. His successive military victories earn him the acclaim of the masses. For a low-born knight to be named “kingmaker” is the stuff of legend, but here we saw just how far he can fall. As dragons clash in the sky over Rook’s Rest, Criston is thrown from his horse and spends most of the battle unconscious. While there is no shortage of sweeping dragon-on-dragon action, the focus of this sequence is remarkably human. This climactic battle represents one of the most important days of Criston’s career, the moment this entire campaign has been leading to, but he spends it face down in the mud. It doesn’t matter what someone’s status is, when faced with a dragon they are little more than a sack of meat and bone.
But this is just one setback in what has been a long line. He was elevated to the Kingsguard, only to discover the limits of his station. He is constantly beneath royalty (and you can take that in any way you will), which means he rarely has leave to act of his own accord. He has had two royal flings so far, and neither have gone particularly well. Even when things go his way, he is uncomfortably aware of his own fragility. No matter what he does, how hard he tries, he just isn’t enough. His military is larger and better equipped than that of team Black, but they are little more than specks when viewed from dragonback. He has seen men tossed aside like dolls, and burned in dragonfire. He knows that his little battle of men and land is a farce — there are greater powers in the sky. But Criston rails against these limits. Faced with his own powerlessness, we see him declare this a war of dragons, not men. He is restless in his position, and it’s easy to see why.
Criston is entirely convinced of his own self-importance. To be fair, he has a good deal of evidence to support that perspective, even beyond what’s outlined above. He unseated Daemon at the tourney and quickly won his position on the Kingsguard, and his military victories are all his own. Aegon looks pathetic when placed next to Criston (though this is true of most people, to be fair), but even the more formidablePrince Aemond was his pupil. He has done the impossible already, so it is no wonder that he is so confident in his own abilities; he can already hear the songs that will be sung in his honor.
Photo: Theo Whiteman/HBO
But that honor is fragile. He tries to bury any and all evidence that suggests he is not suited to his position, first by murdering Joffrey back in season 1, and more recently by deflecting blame for Jaehaerys’ murder onto Ser Arryk and sending him to his death. Criston is skilled, yes, but he is also recklessly prideful. He is locked in a constant battle to prove to himself and others that he deserves his position, but he constantly falls short. Episode by episode we can see his frustration mounting, Frankel deftly portraying the rising anger of a man who can’t quite get it right. We can all sense the danger here: We have a man who wants to prove his own greatness, who blinds himself to his shortcomings, yet is cursed to spend his life in the shadow of dragons.
In most cases, this kind of self belief would serve one well. Criston is ruthless and bold, and while that aids him on the battlefield, it presents a problem when the conflict begins to escalate. The battle at Rook’s Rest has clearly shaken him, but where some would reconsider, he doubles down. He endorses Aemond as regent, knowing that he will escalate the war. Criston has seen a fight between dragons firsthand, he knows the chaos it will bring to the Seven Kingdoms, yet he still leads team Green down the path of war. He’s not pure evil, but he is delightfully hateable in this moment. Alicent pushes for him to side with her, but he knows he can’t. It’s the dilemma at the core of the series, and Criston would rather see the Seven Kingdoms fall to ruin than be on the losing side. He’s just as doomed as anyone else in King’s Landing, no matter how high he climbs.
Criston’s attempts to rise above the dragons ultimately ensure that he will always be under them. Desperate to prove himself, he will lead this war of dragons to its bloody end. His legacy is set in stone, at least as far as his brief mention in A Feast for Crows is concerned. Of all the tragic and thoughtless mistakes characters in House of the Dragon have made so far, pitting the dragons against one another might just be the most significant.
Burned the **** out, girl is stressing me the **** out and blaming me for everything, unable to take personal accountability unsurprisingly. So I’m taking off for the middle of nowhere without cell service to sleep in my hammock and float in the river and get **** faced for a while. Might just not come back and become one with the trees.
QXY, one of Chicago’s most popular restaurants for Chinese dumplings, is opening a location inside Time Out Market. It is one of three additions to the Fulton Market food hall. 2d Restaurant, known for its mochi doughnuts and comic book-style interior design in Lakeview, will soon arrive. So will Libanais, a Lebanese restaurant in suburban Lincolnwood.
The dumplings will arrive first, according to a news release. QXY, which stands for Qing Xiang Yuan, will open on Wednesday, July 17. It replaces Avli, the Greek restaurant that plans to open a standalone location in the area. The menu at QXY includes steamed or fried dumplings stuffed with a choice of kurobuta pork and cabbage; shrimp, kurobuta, and pork leek; wagyu beef and black truffle; or chicken and mushroom. Soup dumplings will also be available, as will sides and salads.
Libanais will follow at the end of the month. Beef and lamb or chicken shawarma with fries; rotisserie beef and lamb with sumac onion wrapped in pita are some of the menu options. It replaces Evette’s.
2d, which also has a location at the vegan XMarket food hall — off DuSable Lake Shore Drive’s Montrose exit in Uptown‚ will bring its doughnuts, Vietnamese coffee, ube milk, and more to Fulton Market. It replaces Firecakes.
Food halls have been volatile in recent years since the pandemic. Revival Food Hall recently announced a “closure” — 16” on Center, the company that opened and operated the space, will soon be replaced by an Atlanta company, STHRN Hospitality. The new operators will seemingly retain most of the current vendors and rename the food hall. Urbanspace, near Daley Plaza, has been renamed Washington Hall as the New York company that founded that venue has left the business.
Time Out Market, which falls under the same umbrella as the publication that covers restaurants in Chicago, opened in 2019. They run food halls all over the world, including in Lisbon, Cape Town, and Montreal. The U.S. cities consist of Boston, New York, and Chicago.
A trio of childhood friends with deep roots in Chicago hospitality have turned their teenage dreams of co-owning a restaurant into reality with Mensch’s Deli, their new Ashkenazi-style Jewish diner and delicatessen in suburban Evanston.
Look for Eastern European Jewish staples including house-made pastrami, corned beef, smoked fish, and blintzes, Mensch’s opened Wednesday, July 3 at 1608 Chicago Avenue in the former home of diner stalwart Golden Olympic, which closed in 2021 after more than half a century in business.
Founders Jack DeMar, Eric Kogan, and Kiki Eliopoulos, who grew up together in suburban Wilmette, launched Mensch’s last year as a pop-up out of Picnic, DeMar’s carryout and delivery-only salad spot near Northwestern University. They were pleased to discover that locals were positively ravenous for Mensch’s, buying as many as 300 bagels in a single day.
Mensch’s design emphasizes a diner feel.Mensch’s Deli
“Excitement and demand were so great that we realized there’s a hole in the market,” says DeMar, also behind fast-casual suburban spot Pono Ono Poke. The trio began to shift their vision toward a permanent location, one that’s “not just a Jewish deli in terms of matzo ball soup or smoked fish by the pound — [it’s] more about the diner side of it. There’s no place like that in Evanston anymore.”
While Jewish delis that serve items like that are scarce in Evanston, nearby Skokie is a quick drive away with contenders like Kaufman’s and New York Bagel and Bialy. Still, Mensch’s also celebrates diners with eggy breakfast dishes like corned beef scrambles and fried matzo (or matzo brei, for those in the know), as well as delicate blintzes stuffed with farmers cheese and berry jam. Open-faced bagel sandwich options include the Boychick (lox cream cheese, seasoned tomato, caraway, chives) and the Purist (nova lox from New York’s Acme Smoked Fish, onions, scallion cream cheese). On the sweet side, Eliopoulos, a pastry chef, spent a year honing baked treats like rugelach, black and white cookies, and babka. “She comes from a Greek background but that hasn’t stopped her from making Jewish cookies,” jokes DeMar, who’s also engaged to Eliopoulos.
The team is especially proud of its smoked meats and fish, the vast majority of which are brined, braised, and smoked on-site aside from salami brought in from local favorite Romanian Kosher Sausage Co. and nova lox from New York’s Acme Smoked Fish. A smoker was the founders’ biggest investment by far, says DeMar, but ultimately the proof was in the pastrami. “It tasted so different and much better than anything we’d tried — we hugged when we got it.”
Blintzes. Mensch’s Deli
The overlapping phenomena of American diners and Jewish delis have a rich history, one that is embedded in DeMar’s lineage. His great-grandfather, also named Jack DeMar, fled what is now Ukraine in the 1930s and would go on to establish a chain of DeMar’s Restaurants, which he called “chili parlors.” His strategy was to open new restaurants alongside the expanding El tracks and partner with other Jewish immigrants to grow the business and spread economic benefits.
DeMar, who estimates more than a dozen locations at its peak, likens the restaurants to Edward Hopper’s famed paintingNighthawks — an open kitchen and long counter with sandwiches, soups, and coffee. Mensch’s unites these components with three sections: a deli case, a small quick-serve dining area, and a full dining room, that seats 75 at booths and tables. It’s decorated with old family photos that Eliopoulos “meticulously” printed and framed for display on the walls, and classic deli elements like tile and vintage light fixtures.
Between the legacy of DeMar’s Restaurants and the ineffable romance of diner culture, the founders set out imbue Mench’s with more than a menu of lox and bagels (sourced from New York Bagel & Bialy). They wanted to channel menschlikhkeit, a Yiddish word with no English equivalent that describes traits associated with being a mensch, or person of fundamental honor and decency.
Mench’s founder Jack DaMar comes from a line of Chicago restaurant owners.Mench’s Deli
To capture this intangible atmosphere, Kogan, Eliopoulos, and DeMar visited New York and hit 14 Jewish delis and restaurants in just two and a half days. The fast-paced yet comforting energy of institutions Barney Greengrass, 2nd Avenue Deli, and Katz’s Delicatessen furnished ample inspiration, says Kogan, and the founders are training their staff to emulate that homey bustle.
In the weeks ahead of the deli’s debut, Evanston residents made it clear that the team needn’t worry about a lack of local interest. “People have been stopping me on the street,” says DeMar. “They’re angry we haven’t been open!”
I expected to emerge from “The Red Dragon and the Gold,” the fourth episode of House of the Dragon’s second season, feeling exhilarated. Based on the episode’s title, last week’s preview, and book-reader knowledge of what transpires at Rook’s Rest, I anticipated thrills, adrenaline, and Loot Train Attack–level spectacle from the first mass dragon battle of this show.
But an hour later, after the credits had rolled, the battle had ended, and at least one main character had died, I instead felt despondent. Not because the episode failed, to be clear—but because it succeeded in its effort to depict a different kind of warfare: chaotic, uncontrollable, and, above all, tragic for everyone involved. It’s as if Dragon were trying its best to prove Francois Truffaut’s “There’s no such thing as an anti-war film” sentiment wrong.
For numerous episodes, characters have promised that war was coming; now, in the wake of Rhaenyra’s failed peace talks with Alicent in Episode 3, it’s finally, irrevocably here. Even the usurped queen knows it, stating, “Only one choice remains to me: Either I win my claim or die.”
As was the case with many of Game of Thrones’ most spectacular battle episodes, “The Red Dragon and the Gold” devotes time to characters talking in rooms before climaxing with fire and blood. This episode’s early scenes flesh out sundry plot points and character arcs: Daemon has a delightfully strange conversation with Alys Rivers in Harrenhal; Jace learns the secret “Song of Ice and Fire” prophecy; Alicent drinks moon tea to stave off a potential pregnancy with Criston Cole. But in the end, the shortest episode of Season 2 thus far is all about the battle.
Last week, Dragon didn’t show the actual Battle of the Burning Mill, just the corpse-filled aftermath. That effective choice left Rook’s Rest as the site of Dragon’s first large-scale depiction of war—and a battle between dragons, at that, which hadn’t dueled in Westeros in more than 80 years. (Vhagar versus little Arrax in the Season 1 finale was less a pitched battle than a quick snack for the former.)
A set of seemingly curious decisions by Criston Cole sets the stage for this clash. The lord commander of the Kingsguard and hand of the king chooses to march his army to Rook’s Rest—a “pathetic prize,” scoffs Aegon—instead of the more obvious target of Harrenhal, then attacks in broad daylight rather than waiting to lay siege at night. “Fucking madness!” Gwayne Hightower exclaims.
But the hand hasn’t lost his wits; it’s a trap! By attacking Rook’s Rest, the mainland’s closest castle to Dragonstone, Cole can draw out one of the blacks’ dragons—and then Aemond and Vhagar, lying in wait in a nearby forest, can rise to meet the challenge.
The first part of this design goes according to plan, as Rhaenys straps on her armor, hops aboard Meleys, and flies into the fray. But to Aemond and Criston’s surprise, so too does Aegon, still sulking after a dressing-down from his mother, who sneers at the king to “do simply what is needed of you: nothing.”
Before flying off to war, both Rhaenys and Aegon partake in incredibly sweet reunions—or bittersweet ones, in retrospect, after seeing what becomes of the dragons and riders. Rhaenys greets Meleys and Aegon greets Sunfyre with affection, and both take a second to nuzzle their mounts, emphasizing the bond between dragon and rider. Aegon even grins as he sees his gorgeous golden steed, the only creature able to draw a smile from the king since the death of his son.
But by doing something instead of nothing, Aegon disrupts the greens’ trap. Instead of a one-on-one battle between Meleys and Vhagar, it’s a three-way aerial brawl. Aemond first hangs back instead of going to his brother’s aid, and then, after joining the fray, orders a dracarys blast without compunction or fear for Aegon’s health. Hit full-on by the fire blast, Sunfyre drops like a stone to crash in the forest below.
This betrayal—which notably does not occur in Fire & Blood, where Aegon and Aemond appear to intentionally team up against Rhaenys—receives the proper setup to slot into the story. Aegon rushes to battle because he resents his brother for “plotting without my authority,” while Aemond smarts from the king’s mockery at the brothel, and from the broader belief that he would serve as a superior leader. (When Aemond taunts Aegon with an impressive High Valyrian vocabulary, the king can only splutter “I can have to … make a … war” in response. Later, Aegon speaks to his dragon in the common tongue, while every other rider uses High Valyrian to give commands.)
With Sunfyre out of commission, Rhaenys and Meleys pivot to take on Aemond and Vhagar. As the two dragons approach one another, the camera captures Vhagar and Meleys in silhouette from below, hauntingly beautiful as they dance.
(The one major quibble I have with this episode is the inscrutability of Rhaenys’s decision to turn around to fight Vhagar, rather than fleeing on Meleys, whom Fire & Blood calls “as swift a dragon as Westeros had ever seen.” Did she go back to fight because of her roiling personal life, after she confronts Corlys over his indiscretions and bastard children? Did she believe her dragon had a chance against Vhagar? Did she want to salvage the battle, even facing long odds? This choice is especially confounding because Rhaenys did not take the opportunity to attack with Meleys during Aegon’s crowning in Season 1, when she could have ended the war before it began. “You should’ve burned them when you had the chance,” one of team black’s advisors tells Baela in this episode, referring to her chase of Criston and Gwayne. But that sentiment applies even more to Rhaenys at the dragonpit.)
The resulting dragon duel is depicted like a tragedy for everyone on the battlefield. Earlier in the episode, Aemond notes, “This war will not be won with dragons alone, but with dragons flying behind armies of men.” That’s true in the context of a long war, but in the (literal) heat of battle, it’s difficult to imagine the men mattering all that much. The soldiers look like helpless little playthings the size of dolls, compared to the behemoths breathing fire above them. Vhagar is so massive that when she goes to the ground, the shockwave knocks Criston from his horse. Then the episode uses slow motion to emphasize the immense damage she casually wreaks, as she crushes two men with the single stomp of a claw.
The soundscape contributes to this sense of overwhelming violence, from the panicked cries of anonymous foot soldiers to the dragons’ shrieks and squeals of pain. At various points in the battle, music and background sounds fade out to emphasize the central characters’ beleaguered breaths.
Smoke fills the screen. Screams fill the air. And Meleys’s blood ultimately fills Vhagar’s belly, as Aemond’s mighty mount, the oldest living dragon in the known world, claims another scalp for her collection.
This climactic death looks shocking in the moment, but how could a clash this intense not result in the death of at least one prominent character? Face clouded by soot, eyes rimmed red, Rhaenys looks out at the field of blood and fire she so wished to avoid—and that’s nearly the last thing she ever sees, because Vhagar rises up to capture Meleys’s neck in her jaws. The smaller dragon is unable to break free, and as the light leaves her eyes, she looks back at her rider—who’d ridden the Red Queen for half a century; who’d arrived at her wedding to Corlys on Meleys’s back—one final time. Then the head breaks free, and the headless dragon and her human plummet to the earth below.
After Meleys and Rhaenys die, the camera finds Criston, who for a while is the only living person on screen; everyone else is a corpse or a pile of ash. At one point, he attempts to recruit a comrade to help him find Aegon, only for the armor he touches to fall to the ground as the body inside crumples to dust. Eventually, Criston staggers into view of the crater formed when Sunfyre smashed into the forest, but as the episode ends, it remains to be seen whether Aegon is still alive.
From a plot perspective, it’s unclear—as was the case with the Battle of the Burning Mill—whether either side can claim victory at Rook’s Rest, given the untold carnage on both sides. The dragon is both the symbol of and reason for Targaryen rule in Westeros, so every dragon death serves as a strike against unified Targaryen hegemony. As Rhaenyra said in the show’s pilot episode, without the dragons, the royal family would be “just like everyone else.”
Fire & Blood describes Viserys’s reign as “the apex of Targaryen power in Westeros,” with “more dragons than ever before.” But in the short span since Viserys’s death, that number has now dwindled by at least two (Arrax and Meleys), maybe three (Sunfyre). Vhagar and Aemond are the culprits in every death—proving their own dominance, surely, but simultaneously weakening the broader power that Aemond’s family wields. It’s no coincidence that, earlier in the episode, Alicent drops and breaks the dragon figurine she’d once repaired for Viserys.
And from a storytelling perspective, that Dragon would stage its first full-scale (pun intended) battle like such a hopeless disaster story sets the tone for the rest of the series to come. This portrayal is unlike any previous dragon battle in the Thrones universe. During most dragon attacks in the original series, Daenerys and her children were the heroes, so audiences cheered on their rampages against the slave masters in Astapor, the Lannister troops on the Goldroad, and the wights beyond the Wall. Even as people burned alive, those scenes weren’t depicted as horrors; they were triumphs.
But the Battle of Rook’s Rest brings only devastation, destruction, and death—the fulfillment of Rhaenys’s prediction that there is “no war so bloody as a war between dragons.” Other than Aemond and perhaps Vhagar, nobody escapes unscathed. Even Criston, an architect of the successful battle plan, is knocked out, injured, and witness to the potential demise of his king.
“Now I’ve barely had the hours to grieve one tragedy before suffering the next,” Alicent laments in this episode, before one of her sons potentially kills another. That challenge might translate to viewers as well—because Dragon is positioning itself as a cinematic commentary on the horrors of war, and the war in question is just getting started.
Have HotD questions? To appear in Zach’s weekly mailbag, message him @zachkram on Twitter/X or email him at zach.kram@theringer.com.
The characters in Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba distinguish themselves through their extraordinary bravery. Tanjiro Kamado, for example, consistently pushes himself to the brink of death just so that he can save the people around him. Then there’s Murata.
The first time the show introduces him, Murata runs away from the battle only to get caught by a demon. This side character is so forgettable he doesn’t get fun-colored hair or even a second name. He has no special powers, and his superiors chastise him often. He’s just your run-of-the-mill guy who happens to be caught up in the ruckus of several major battles.
But none of that matters, because fans of the Demon Slayer anime have unofficially anointed Murata as the series’ favorite and unofficial strongest character.
Let’s be clear: Murata is not all that powerful in the world of Demon Slayer. He is a standard grunt in the Demon Slayer corps and doesn’t practice any special breathing techniques. But that hasn’t hindered his reputation.
If anything, the idea that he’s the only regular dude among loads of seasoned fighters helps bring out the inherent irony of the bit.
In one video, which has more than 1.9 million views on TikTok, the creator layers text over a clip where Murata falls into the Infinity Castle — a vast domain and home to the most powerful demon, Muzan. The text says, “muzan’s worst mistake was putting murata within the same radius as him.” In the comments, people voice support for the joke and a person replies, “Muzan only goes outside at night because Murata is sleeping.” It’s been liked more than 22,000 times.
TikTok is filled with videos making jokes more or less like the one above, but the gag has only snowballed. Another video, which has more than 3.6 million views, makes a crack about how the entire fandom agrees that Murata is the strongest.
Now, fans are building on the original joke, inventing a fake but super-powerful fighting technique that only Murata knows, called “galaxy breathing.” The idea has become so popular that it’s a suggested search term in the comments.
Give Ti West this: He’s completed the quickest trilogy in contemporary horror movie history. Barely two years after X introduced us to its gore-soaked version of the MCU—that’d be the Maxine Cinematic Universe, named for the ornery and resourceful would-be-porn-star-cum-Final-Girl embodied by Mia Goth—West has jerry-rigged a triptych whose conceptual sturdiness and artistic merit are, if far from certain, at least worthy of debate. With the release of MaXXXine,the question is whether West has truly succeeded in carving out a niche of his own or whether his series is just a (figuratively) bloodless exercise in received themes and aesthetics.
To return to the initial film: There was plenty to like about X,which took a lurid, high-concept premise—i.e., what if Boogie Nights were drenched in more crimson bodily fluids?—and used it to limn the practical and spiritual overlap between two kindred and disreputable forms of cinema (that’d be horror and porn). Nostalgia and sleaze are a potent combination, and the spectacle of nubile, solipsistic exhibitionists being systematically eviscerated by the wizened, married homesteaders whose farm they’d commandeered for a skin-flick shoot nodded to vintage traditions. (For extra ’70s resonance, there was even a cover of “Landslide.”) The ace up West’s sleeve, meanwhile, was hidden in plain view: By casting Goth in a dual role as both a hard-edged starlet and a catatonic, knife-wielding crone—the latter of whom seems to envy her younger doppelgänger’s ripe flesh even as she’s stabbing at it—West tapped into a rich vein of grotesquerie that was also dripping with melancholy.
The same ratio of sadism and anguish carried over to Pearl,which flashed back to the 1910s to document the eponymous villain’s formative years—as well as the roots of the adult film industry in an era of one-reel stag films. (Pearl, it seems, was born ready for her close-up.) Like its predecessor, West’s prequel was designed primarily as a showcase for Goth, whose elongated physicality and unsettling expressivity have made her a kind of It Girl for directors on (or near) the cutting edge of cinematic provocation. (In addition to West, she’s collaborated with Lars von Trier, Claire Denis, Luca Guadagnino, and Brandon Cronenberg.) None of these variously gifted filmmakers have given the actor as much to work with as West, who clearly loves putting his leading lady in outrageous situations—including molesting her own mirror image, cosplaying Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz,and making out with a scarecrow—and watching her squirm, snarl, or slash her way out of them.To this end, Pearl also gifts its star with a late, barn-burning monologue that unfolds in a single take, a bravura piece of writing that could be used in the future by aspiring genre ingenues, even if it’s unlikely they could equal Goth’s rubber-faced aplomb.
With this in mind, MaXXXine begins with an audition piece—one that recalls Pearl’scenterpiece scene and that sutures its themes into an increasingly intricate franchise timeline. The setting is Los Angeles circa 1985, a half decade after the events of X,which, as we’re shown, have become mythological tabloid fodder. After fleeing the scene of the crime—and eluding both the authorities and her Bible-thumping father, glimpsed in X via a series of fire-and-brimstone PSAs—Maxine has dyed her hair blond, boned up on her VHS collection, and become the toast of the local porno circuit. What she really wants to do, though, is act with her clothes on: After scoring a reading for an upcoming religious horror movie, our heroine channels her trauma into the dialogue, Mulholland Drive style, impressing the self-consciously ball-breaking, would-be-artiste director (a deadpan Elizabeth Debicki) enough that she’s willing to take a chance on an unknown. No sooner has Maxine processed her triumph, however, than a mysterious figure with knowledge of her true identity emerges, wielding threats of blackmail (or worse).
The mid-’80s backdrop gives West and his production designers a whole new set of textures to play with, and their re-creation of Los Angeles teems with vivid, eye-catching details. (The neon-drenched streets deliberately evoke Brian De Palma’s seminal Body Double from 1984.) The setting also coincides with the grisly crimes of “the Night Stalker”—the Bay Area and SoCal serial killer whose media-appointed nickname made him the perfect bogeyman for an era known colloquially as “Morning in America.” In a scene-setting montage comprising archival footage, West juxtaposes Richard Ramirez and Ronald Reagan, hinting not so subtly that, on some level, the president and the predator represented two sides of the same ideological coin, converging their energies in the so-called satanic panic that saw the Gipper’s evangelical base lashing out in reactionary furor against what they perceived as the demonic influence of popular culture.
West has already made a movie set during this period: 2009’s skillful and scary The House of the Devil,which similarly luxuriated in period decor without sacrificing shock and intensity (including one of the greatest kills of all time, featuring a pre-superstardom Greta Gerwig). By contrast, the biggest problem with MaXXXine is that it’s completely punch-drunk on pastiche; by putting everything in scare quotes, West ensures that nothing is actually scary—a miscalculation that neuters the movie’s impact. The fake red-carpet protests organized for the movie’s premiere underline this problem; when a movie has to import its own scandalized, pearl-clutching detractors—as opposed to actually giving pious or censorious types something to scream about—it doesn’t bode well for any sort of real cult status.
Speaking of which: It’s clear that one of West’s structural and tonal models is Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,which isn’t a horror movie but still bristles with a sense of dread—think of the slow-burning Spahn Ranch sequence, which scrambles genre archetypes (it’s a menagerie of hippies, cowboys, and serial killers) but never telegraphs where it’s going. MaXXXine’sstalk-and-slash set pieces hit all the right marks—deep-red giallo lighting; close-ups of black-gloved hands; murky camcorder textures à la Lost Highway—but rarely transcend them. (One exception: a close encounter with a knife-wielding Buster Keaton impersonator who ends up getting his balls stomped on; I don’t know what West has against Keaton, but I didn’t see that coming.)
If there’s a scene that emblematizes MaXXXine’s spoiled promise, it comes about halfway through: After injuring the private investigator (Kevin Bacon) hired by the unseen big bad to harass her, Maxine is shocked to see him on set, nose bandaged like Jake Gittes in Chinatown. He chases her through a series of faux period backdrops all the way to the front door of the Bates Motel, at which point … nothing happens. All that rich Hollywood iconography never coalesces into anything: It’s a hall of mirrors that reflects nothing except its maker’s frame of reference. (Although it is nice to see West’s mentor Larry Fessenden on hand as a benign security guard—probably the first time that the indie stalwart has ever been on a big studio lot.) Some horror movies thrive in incoherence, but if anything, MaXXXine is too lucid for its own good: It’s an almost entirely plot-based movie, and it doesn’t help that the central mystery—specifically the identity of the silent, faceless figure pursuing Maxine at every turn—is so thin. If the best horror movies make their climactic revelations feel simultaneously shocking and inevitable, MaXXXine’sresolution is merely predictable—and disappointing given the larger intimations of some grand narrative design.
In light of these flaws, it almost doesn’t matter that Goth holds the screen as fully as she does—almost. MaXXXine is framed by a quote by Bette Davis that explains in show business, women have to be perceived as monsters before they can be held up as stars, and Goth—who’s closer to having Bette Davis eyes than most members of her generational cohort—conveys the right mix of righteous self-possession and sinister ambition to give the film’s coda a little bit of friction. The closing tableau, which calls back to Pearl’sboldly confrontational finale, is clever and ambivalent—enough so to make us wish that the movie attached was more worthy of it. At the same time, the final shots clarify something about the ultimate artificiality of West’s project, which amounts in the end to nothing more than a series of exquisite corpses—shapely but ersatz body doubles ready-made for dissection and then filed away in the crowded necropolis of genre cinema.
Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” ―Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
Ti West’s Maxxxine, the third movie in the horror trilogy West started with 2022’s X and Pearl, features an early scene where a man’s naked scrotum is graphically popped under a stiletto heel, then crushed underfoot. It’s a close-up shot, handled with presumably practical effects and squirm-inducing anatomical specificity. There is, obviously, a lot of screaming. It’s the kind of shot designed to make audiences squirm, flinch, cross their legs protectively — and possibly also laugh, because it’s so grotesquely over the top. And it’s the kind of moment that makes thoughtful genre fans wonder exactly where the line is between exploitation-film homage and just plain exploitation.
Maxxxine is a reference-packed movie, like X and Pearl before it. All three movies pay homage to previous eras of cinema: X, set in 1979, is a visual and narrative throwback to ’70s slashers, particularly The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Pearl, set in 1918, is patterned after classic ’50s musicals and Disney movies. And Maxxxine, set in 1985, takes a lot of its visual and narrative cues from ’80s horror-thrillers — particularly Brian De Palma’s Body Double, though sex-soaked revenge dramas like Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45 get their nods, too.
Photo: Justin Lubin/A24
But where X is more interested in characters and the philosophies of fame, sex, and pornography than movies like Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Pearl isn’t a musical or family-friendly movie, there’s no significant distance between Maxxxine and the kind of sleazy, slobbery, violence-savoring films it’s referencing. (Though there’s a world of difference between it and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which West repeatedly quotes in his shots and sets throughout the whole trilogy.) The film doesn’t come across as ironic, satirical, or like a thoughtful analysis or commentary. It’s the first of the three that could actually be considered a new entry in the genre it’s referencing.
That shift isn’t a positive step. Maxxxine is sharper, slicker, faster-paced, and more direct than the other two films in the series, and it’s certainly entertaining, for those who can stomach its purposefully challenging, envelope-pushing gore. But this time around, it feels like West has, as Kurt Vonnegut would put it, become what he was formerly just pretending to be. That isn’t just a matter of taxonomy, irrelevant to everyone but nitpickers and librarians trying to figure out which shelf Maxxxine goes on. It winds up affecting the story in some frustrating ways.
This chapter of the story finds X survivor Maxine Minx (Mia Goth, the trilogy’s anchor) living in Hollywood, working in adult films and at a strip club while auditioning for studio movies and trying to break into the mainstream. She gets that break from director Elizabeth Bender (Elizabeth Debicki, looking more like a Robert Palmer Girl than ever), an iconoclastic director whose horror movie The Puritan has earned her a breakout shot at a bigger-budgeted Puritan II. Maxine gets cast as the lead, but her big moment is threatened by a series of distractions, some of which could end her life as well as her career.
Photo: Dons Lens/A24
There’s a local serial killer at work, dubbed the Night Stalker, who’s targeting young, attractive women like Maxine. Avuncular, slimy detective John Labat (Kevin Bacon, devouring all scenery within reach, and making it look delicious) is trying to blackmail her on behalf of a hidden client, threatening to out her to Texas law enforcement as the one person who knows what happened during the events of X. As cold and self-possessed as Maxine seems, she has PTSD in the wake of those events, and she’s having shattering flashbacks. And a couple of L.A. cops (Bobby Cannavale and Michelle Monaghan) are also chasing her, suspecting she knows something about how two of her co-workers ended up tortured, branded with pentacles, murdered, and dumped in a local pond.
The Night Stalker plot thread was inspired by a real-life notorious rapist and murderer, and the torture-victims-dumped-in-public detail similarly echoes one of Los Angeles’ most horrifying and memorable crimes, the Black Dahlia murder. But the visual and narrative treatment of all of these threads is pure exploitation movie. The story certainly features a fair bit of violence enacted on men, from that rape-revenge-movie moment with the punctured scrotum to a couple of memorably ghastly deaths. But Maxxxine spends much more time on women being threatened, victimized, and commoditized, stalked and leered over and judged by male predators, tied up and tortured and dropped naked in public.
It’s all familiar enough material that it runs together, no matter how abruptly and aggressively West cuts between his close-ups of agonized female corpses. What makes it a story is Maxine’s response to living in this kind of oversexed, raw environment — and Maxxxine frequently lets her down. West writes her as a ruthless, ferocious survivor willing to do anything for fame, then repeatedly takes her fate out of her hands and gives it to other people instead. He gives her a touch of vulnerability with those flashbacks to her past traumas, but he casually drops that part of the narrative once it’s been useful for injecting a few sudden shocks into the film.
Photo: Justin Lubin/A24
Above all, Maxxxine never really fills in the blanks that would make Maxine more than a focal point for different kinds of lurid violence. She doesn’t escape her problems via particularly clever or surprising choices. She confronts the film’s ultimate predator, but in a way that only brings out more information about him, not about her. The film’s climax sidelines her. And the buildup to that climax is full of sequences meant to feel cool, edgy, horrifying, or thrilling on their own, but without a sense that they’re part of an evolution or progression. Stuff happens to and around Maxine — horrifying, gross, exploitative things — but the screenplay seems more interested in those in those things than it is in her.
X and Pearl both have their flaws, but they also both let Goth’s characters (Maxine in the first case, earlier obsessive fame-seeker Pearl in the second) speak at length about who they are and what they want. In both cases, those sequences are queasy, fascinating, and memorable. And they’re part of what sells this trilogy, besides the memorable splashes of graphic violence and the weird, dark humor that permeates all three movies. Maxxxine literally gags Goth at a crucial moment so West can focus more on bloody mayhem than on anything she has to say for herself.
And that leaves Maxxxine feeling unbalanced compared to the other two films, like it isn’t really about the central character so much as it is about how much sordid grotesquerie West can pile up on the screen. It’s more tuned into fulfilling its audience’s presumed hunger for sex, blood, and violation than fulfilling any particular plot arc for Maxine herself. That kind of focus on transgression and titillation defined the films West is channeling this time out. But until now, this series has just felt like West is nodding to his influences, while still fulfilling his own discrete goals. With Maxxxine, it’s more like he’s trying to supplant them, without putting anything new on the table except better effects and a bigger budget.
For the past seven years, Filipina baker Jenni Vee has proven that she understands celebrations need a cake, it’s the centerpiece for parties, birthdays, weddings, and everyday revelries. So when Vee decided to celebrate trans communities, she thought deeply about representing herself and fellow trans women with an immaculate confection swirling with the pink, white, and blue colors of the trans pride flag.
Vee has a lot to celebrate with the debut of her second location, Jennivee’s Bakery & Cafe, which opened Friday, June 28 at 2925 N. Halsted Street. Peachy, peppy, and polished, the roomy space reflects the effervescent style and energy of its owner, also clad in a pink ensemble, with nods to classic Parisian charm with a black-and-white checkerboard floor and crystal chandeliers also seen at the original bakery.
“Trans Girl Magic cake is near and dear to my heart,” Vee says of the buttercream-frosted lemon poundcake with strawberry filling. “It’s bright, it’s fruity, it’s vibrant — kind of like how I would describe the trans community as a whole!”
When all the tables arrive (supply chain delays continue to plague the hospitality industry), it will seat up to 50 alongside long, glowing pastry cases packed with signature hits like ube-chiffon purple velvet cake and bright green buko pandan cupcakes. There’s a selection of gelatos and an espresso bar, where the team serves Sparrow coffee and caffeinated interpretations of Vee’s creations — think banana Biscoff lattes and tiramisu affogato.
Peachy pink tones lend a warm and friendly atmosphere.
Luca Del Sol affogato (pistachio gelato, lemon cake, espresso).
Once staff have settled in and operations are running smoothly, Vee says she’d like to add sweet and savory Filipino breakfast and brunch staples. It was an option she hadn’t considered in 2017 when she opened her original bakery in a tiny space at Sheffield and Aldine in Lakeview. At the time, Vee and her mother were the only employees and she “didn’t know the first thing about running a business,” she says. “All I knew is I wanted to create cakes that people would love and a safe space that’s very inclusive and welcoming to everyone.”
That was five years before fine dining juggernaut Kasama became the world’s first Michelin-starred Filipino restaurant, sparking a “boom” of interest in upscale Pinoy cuisine, Vee says. She is eager to leverage the opportunity to extend that excitement to pastry and baked goods by highlighting the country’s significant pantheon of sweet and savory delights.
“We have a rich culture and history of pastry [influenced by] 400 years of Spanish colonization,” she says. “The beauty of Filipino cusine is that it’s so diverse and regional. I’m from an island called Cebu where we have our own traditional pastries and breakfast items that I want to showcase. And now we have the space to do it!”
Venture inside Jennivee’s Bakery & Cafe and peek at its menu items in the photographs below.
Actor Craig Robinson is known for playing Darryl Philbin on America’s version of The Office. He’s also appeared as a spokesperson for Pizza Hut, starring in commercials and telling everyone “no one out-pizzas the Hut.”
Robinson is from Chicago, a city steeped in pizza culture. From deep dish to thin-crust (popularly marketed as tavern-style), there are plenty of pizza options besides chains. It’s unclear if Robinson is playing a version of himself in the commercials, a version who should know better. Whenever I see Robinson’s friendly mug on screen, I search for signs asking for help. Regardless of the paycheck, surely someone is forcing him to say these words. I can’t accept that Robinson, in the words of former Bulls star, Joakim Noah, has become “Hollywood as Hell,” and that he has forgotten about his pizza heritage.
When a colleague forwarded me an early June announcement that Robinson’s former brand partner Pizza Hut was releasing a new style of pizza — the Pizza Hut Tavern, “with roots from the taverns of Chicago” — I wasn’t surprised. Pizza Hut’s Big New Yorker has been around for a minute. Civic appropriation is the Hut’s signature. And when the New York Times discovered tavern-style in 2023, I’m sure that catalyzed Yum! Brands’ pizza scientists. This was inevitable.
A Pizza Hut TV ad for tavern pizza features actors in what looks to be a green screen walking through recognizable parts of Chicago. A little kid, who’s probably from Crystal Lake or another suburb, screams, “Deep dish is for tourists!” It sets up Pizza Hut as the savior that will let Americans in on Chicago’s secret (without our consent), that tavern style is what we enjoy the most: “Sorry, Chicago, no one out-pizzas the Hut.”
I took the challenge earlier this week as I binged through all 10 episodes for The Bear ordering off DoorDash late at night without the guilt of Yum! Brands being assessed a service charge by the third-party courier. A double pepperoni, (a mix of traditional and cupped) plus mushroom. The medium costs about $26. I didn’t want to be bothered with a large for $4 more.
The pizza wasn’t the prettiest, but we ate it while watching Carmy spiral. It reminded me of grade school, and not in the way that some revere school pizza. It certainly possessed a cracker crust, one of tavern pizza’s defining traits. It took me a while, but I figured it out: The crust reminded me of the saltines served with milk and juice for snack — an unseasoned, bland cracker that stuck to the roof of my mouth. It was cut like a tavern pizza, into triangles and squares, but so are pizzas from St. Louis. It’s a good thing I didn’t order a large because we didn’t need more leftovers.
Tavern-style pizza is supposed to sport a cracker crust, and Pizza Hut picked a saltine to represent this trait.Ashok Selvam/Eater Chicago
The Hut’s effort was disappointing, but not unprecedented. Circa 1997, Domino’s introduced its Crunchy Thin Pizza, which is tavern-style in disguise. As a junior college student in Upstate New York, I ordered a pizza for dinner one night, excited to sample the new style. But my standards for pizza were already established as a youngster in Chicago. It’s hard to deviate from the “pizza you grew up eating” — PIGUE, a term Chicago food personality Steve Dolinsky coined. This is the pizza you know, this is the crust that brings you comfort.
I was so disappointed that I morphed into a pizza Karen and called Domino’s, empowered by their customer guarantee: “This pizza was neither crispy nor thin,” I embarrassingly recall telling a manager over the phone.
Bless that manager. She sent another pizza over. But the taste was no different. It was the recipe, not the execution. I was dejected. But I had learned a lesson that I would never learned inside a university classroom. The Domino’s pizza wasn’t designed to compete with Vito and Nick’s, Pat’s, Italian Fiesta, and Phil’s. These are great Chicago pizzerias with few peers. Robinson isn’t featured in the tavern pizza TV spot. I’m glad he was spared. Too bad my tastebuds weren’t.
Cebu blazed a path for Filipino cuisine in Chicago when the family-owned restaurant debuted five years ago in Bucktown. Michelin had yet to recognize a Filipino restaurant with a star. Ube had yet to enter the mainstream. Now it’s impossible to avoid the purple hue while scrolling through Instagram and TikTok food pages.
The Tans closed their Bucktown restaurant in December and a suburban bakery. But they’re back with a new restaurant in Lakeview, a consolidation of their previous operations. The new Cebu opened on Thursday, June 27 at 3120 N. Lincoln Avenue with a display case full of cookies, pan de sal stuffed with corned beef, or ube and cheesecake. Ownership wants to give customers plenty of to-go options — a breakfast burrito with tocino and garlic rice is a compact example.
Marlon Tan (red shirt) and brother, chef Martin Tan (arms folded), lead the Cebu team.
They’re open for breakfast and lunch to start and see themselves as a great place for folks who want brunch on weekdays and don’t want to wait for Saturday and Sunday. Silog, pandan pancakes, ube waffles with friend chicken, and a tres leches French toast stand out. An Iberico pork steak with a tocino marinade might make the brunch menu.
Marlon Tan describes the menu as modern Filipino, which allows for various influences including Mexican. Adobo chicken chiliquiles are a highlight. Brother Malvin Tan is in charge of the dinner menu, and he and another sibling — Martin — are in charge of the pastry.
The Tans have experience in fine dining, but the future of the restaurant will depend on the neighborhood and demand. Dinner service should start in about a month. The Tans won’t rule out putting out Filipino spaghetti in the future.
There are various morning options that can be taken to-go.
The Tans would also like to expand cocktail service. They’re not permitted to set up a traditional bar with stools due to neighborhood zoning restrictions. The new Cebu is brighter, there’s a full espresso bar. Tan says he hopes to collaborate with Mano Modern Cafe, a Flipino restaurant in West Town, on coffee.
There are more Filipino restaurants in Chicago than ever before, but it’s important to understand that people and food existed before any alleged boom. Having more peers is nice, but beyond customers knowing of the cuisine beyond lumpia, not much has changed.
“We’ve always been like looking at other restaurants and seeing what they’re doing and seeing — ‘oh, maybe we could try that,” Malvin Tan explains.
Cebu will be open all seven days next week over the Independence Day holiday before regular business hours will start.
Cebu, 3120 N. Lincoln Avenue, open 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Starting Sunday, July 6, Cebu will be open five days a week and closed Tuesday and Wednesday.
The space light and breezy.
This French toast features marshmallows and corn flakes.
The pastry counter is filed with cookies and pan de sal.
Tequila is the top-selling liquor at Virtue, the Hyde Park restaurant from award winners Erick Williams and Damarr Brown, says General Manager Jesus Garcia. The fact that the agave-based spirit beat out rum and bourbon surprised the team, as Virtue celebrates Black American culture.
The data reiterated the thirst for cocktails in Hyde Park, and Garcia says staff regularly turns away customers who just want to come in and have a drink. Virtue is food-focused, showcasing a gamut of southern culinary traditions. But the demand for tequila reveals an opportunity that Williams and Garcia hope to capitalize on when they open their new bar this fall, just around the corner from Virtue.
The newly named Cantina Rosa will focus on the beverage side, taking Virtue’s approach to Black culture, “leading with kindness and hospitality” and applying that to Mexican culture. Garcia grew up in Rogers Park but was born in Mexico. He arrived in America when he was 3, his family is from Puebla, Mexico. They returned to Mexico after about a decade before once more settling in Chicago. While Garcia lacks memories of Mexico as a young child, he vividly remembers his second stint in Mexico as a teen. The bar won’t focus on a particular region or spirit. Garcia is happy to show that Mexico is about more than agave and he wants to showcase bourbon and Charanda — a rum from Michoacan, Mexico.
Garcia sees a chance to fill a niche in Hyde Park, and while he doesn’t mind expanding customers’ tastes, introducing them to Mexican flavors they haven’t experienced, he doesn’t want to be heavy-handed.
“We are mindful that before it’s a Mexican bar, it’s going to a bar,” Garcia says. “If somebody comes in and orders an Old Fashioned, we’re going to be able to make that.”
This philosophy also tracks with the bar’s name. Williams and Garcia wanted to pick something English speakers could gravitate toward, something personal, yet easy to pronounce. It’s not exactly the “Martha” moment from Batman v Superman, but Garcia’s mother is named Rosa, and Williams’s grandmother is Rose.
They’re still orchestrating the bar bites menu, offering tacos and more. The drink menu is already finalized. They worked with celebrated barman Paul McGee on the beverage list and the bar’s layout. While Williams and Garcia are confident in operating a restaurant — they met while working at Mk The Restaurant — they brought in McGee, seeing how he helped make Lost Lake in Logan Square a successful tropical drink destination.
Garcia began his restaurant career at 15 as a busser at Chef’s Station, a since-shuttered restaurant in Evanston. He held several positions at Mk before delving into wine and serving as the restaurant’s general manager. He remembers meeting Williams and noting that he “came across as very genuine and intense.” The two bonded over strong work ethics and Williams credits Garcia’s leadership at Virtue in making the restaurant successful.
The space, a former laundromat, will be redecorated with local art, pottery, and seating options for big and small groups. Stay tuned for more information about Cantina Rosa as fall approaches.
Cantina Rosa, 5230 S. Harper Avenue, planned for a fall opening.
Lucasfilm’s new Star Wars series The Acolyte has earned praise for simply existing outside of the Skywalker Saga — after 47 years of stories set in the same stretch of timeline, a jump back “100 years before the rise of the Empire” to the shinier High Republic era is enough for aching Star Wars fans. But even with a prohibitively old setting and a cast of characters divorced from Anakin and Luke, The Acolyte creator Leslye Headland is still finding ways to pepper the drama with Easter eggs. Episode 4 gave those in the know a whopper: Plo Koon.
Plo Koon, the Kel Dor Jedi known for his chic oxygen mask, first appeared in scenes of the Jedi council in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace and grew into a fan favorite when he took on an action role in Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Plo’s biggest fan might be The Clone Wars creator Dave Filoni, who has made his passion for the B-tier Jedi extremely clear to the Star Wars fandom over the last 20 years, having cosplayed at conventions as the Jedi, snapped photos with fellow cosplayers, and showed off his Plo Koon toy collection on social media. His “personal life” section on Wookieepedia is entirely facts about his Plo Koon collectibles. Despite him being one or two levels removed from a Glup Shitto, Dave Filoni is all in on Plo Koon.
I believe Filoni when he says he has talked extensively about Plo Koon with George Lucas. Reportedly, when the animator was pushing to beef up Plo’s part in the The Clone Wars, there were plans to cast an actor who sounded like Toshiro Mifune in Seven Samurai to give the Jedi a samurai feel. But Lucas thought the character was goofier than that and wanted a Jim Carrey type. Filoni landed on actor James Arnold Taylor because of his Gandalf vibes. The Lucas-versus-Filoni Plo-off doesn’t end there; at Star Wars Celebration 2023, Filoni admitted that he made the case to his boss that Plo Koon, due to #skillz, obviously would have survived Order 66. Lucas shot down the canon alteration request, but Filoni stands by his defense.
None of this was relevant to The Acolyte… until now. For a split second, standing in a drop shop with Osha on their way to meet the Wookiee Jedi Kelnacca, is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him appearance by Plo Koon, who has not actually appeared in live action since Revenge of the Sith. How could Plo be alive during the High Republic era? That’s very human of you to ask, but just like Yoda, he is technically old enough to be around kicking; nerd number-crunching based on decanonized Legends materials puts him around 382 years old during the time of The Clone Wars, which should make him already a seasoned veteran of the Jedi in The Acolyte.
For a hot second, it sounded like Filoni may have snuck his guy into The Mandalorian. Leaks hinted at a potential reveal in the season 2 finale, but as it turned out, early storyboards and VFX footage were all an elaborate scheme to hide the return of a de-aged Luke Skywalker. “All it takes is one person treating the film in color correction, one person who goes on social media and says, ‘Guess what I saw today?’” Mark Hamill said in the Disney Gallery making-of doc centered on the episode. What no one seemed to care about at the time was how mad Filoni’s fellow Plo Koonheads must have felt!
Technically, The Acolyte is one of the few Star Wars projects that Dave Filoni does not seem directly involved with; he doesn’t share any writing or directing credits on the series, nor does he hold a general producer credit. (By all accounts, his attention is fully on Ahsoka season 2.) And maybe it’s THE Plo Koon. In theory this unnamed Jedi is just another Force-sensitive Kel Dor.
But c’mon, it’s Plo Koon. And it makes sense why Headland would want the cameo. As the showrunner has said, she purposefully set up her writers room to represent a broad spectrum of Star Wars fandoms and surrounded herself with people who could bring their own Easter egg wishlists to the table. So while longtime fans may have prayed at the altar of George Lucas, others involved were weaned on The Clone Wars — and Filoni’s pro-Plo brand of fandom. So it’s no surprise that The Acolyte would find ways to nod to the OT, the prequels, and even the cartoons that have little in common with its world: If you are on the right side of Star Wars history, you make room for Plo Koon.
Correction: A previous version of this story stated that Plo Koon last appeared in live-action in The Phantom Menace, but his final live-action appearance was in Revenge of the Sith. We’ve edited the article to reflect this.
Midway through the fifth season of Game of Thrones, Aemon Targaryen, the centenarian maester at Castle Black, advises Jon Snow to mature in his new role as Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch.
“Kill the boy, Jon Snow,” Maester Aemon says. “Winter is almost upon us. Kill the boy and let the man be born.” This speech gives the episode its title and sets in motion the series of events that will lead Jon to Hardhome, the site of Thrones’ most spectacular fight scene.
Sunday’s Season 2 premiere of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon twists that stirring sentiment and, in so doing, transforms both its message and the entire story of which it is a part. Queen Helaena Targaryen’s shocked “They killed the boy” is a scarring statement of fact rather than a confident command, the aftermath of trauma rather than the prelude to a glorious battle. It serves as the last line of the episode, fittingly named “A Son for a Son”—leaving viewers to marinate in the nauseating horror they just witnessed for a full week before House of the Dragon’s next episode airs.
Dragon’s Season 2 premiere functions much like Thrones’ pilot episode all the way back in 2011, which mostly introduced viewers to this fictional world and set the scene for further action—only to end with stunning, appalling violence against a child. The difference is that in Thrones, Bran Stark survived his fall out a window and ultimately became king; in Dragon, little Jaehaerys Targaryen, disputed heir to the Iron Throne, most certainly did not survive his beheading at the hands of two hired assassins, which makes this moment—the sort of showstopping scene for which Thrones was revered—even more grotesque.
But first, before the child carnage, Dragon invites viewers back to Westeros with a new intro decked out with Targaryen-themed tapestries and an opening scene set in the familiar, snowy clime of Winterfell and the Wall. As is typical of a season premiere in this franchise, “A Son for a Son” surveys the important players in the realm after the dramatic conclusion of Season 1, when King Viserys died, Aegon II and Rhaenyra received dueling crowns, and the mighty dragon Vhagar, ridden by Aemond One-Eye, killed Lucerys Velaryon and his dragon.
The new season opens with Rhaenyra’s son Jace at the Wall, recruiting military aid—in the form of 2,000 grizzled Northerners—from the Starks. It then zooms through the other key members of Team Black: Rhaenys with her dragon, Meleys the Red Queen; vengeful, fiery Daemon; Corlys with his ships; and Rhaenyra, who’s searching for her dead son’s corpse. The opposing greens are all in King’s Landing, for now: Aegon has taken to sitting the Iron Throne, while Alicent and sworn-to-celibacy Criston Cole have taken to, well, a different sort of sitting.
Civil war is imminent but ostensibly has not yet begun, even though first blood has been drawn. Rhaenyra “needs an army. War is coming,” Jace tells Cregan Stark in the opening scene. Meanwhile, in King’s Landing, Otto Hightower forecasts “eventual fighting,” and Alicent still speaks in conditionals: “If we loose the dragons to war, there will be no calling them back.”
That “if” will surely change to a “when” once all the characters learn what transpired in the darkness of the Red Keep at the end of the episode. Earlier, Rhaenys notes approvingly that Rhaenyra has “not acted on the vengeful impulse that others might have.” But finding Luke’s mangled body on the beach removes that caution; when Rhaenyra returns to Dragonstone, vengeance is the only motive on her mind.
“I want Aemond Targaryen,” Rhaenyra declares, and the episode emphasizes this singular focus by making these her only words across the hour. The rest of Emma D’Arcy’s performance as a grieving mother is delivered through facial expressions and tears, most poignantly in Rhaenyra’s reunion with her eldest son, Jace, who breaks down while imparting news of his successful alliances in the Vale and North.
The ensuing sequence is the most beautiful one of the episode, as director Alan Taylor cuts between Luke’s wordless, emotional funeral and Alicent’s prayers at a sept in King’s Landing. (Not that sept; this prequel takes place before the construction of Cersei Lannister’s future wildfire target.) Alicent lights a candle for her dead mother (presumably; she’s gone unnamed until now), for Viserys, and then—after a contemplative pause—for Luke. Alicent even names him “Lucerys Velaryon,” despite her prominent Season 1 role in fostering doubts about Laenor Velaryon’s legitimacy as Luke’s father.
Alicent still hopes to avoid “wanton” violence, she says. But what comes next, as Aegon carouses with friends in the throne room and Alicent and Criston continue their tryst in her chambers, can’t help but plunge the realm into full-blown war. It’s the manifestation of Rhaenyra’s desire for vengeance—and the on-screen depiction of the most heinous event George R.R. Martin has devised in the whole A Song of Ice and Fire corpus.
Daemon sneaks into King’s Landing, where he enlists a City Watchman and a Red Keep ratcatcher—called Blood and Cheese in the source text—to sneak into the castle to fulfill Rhaenyra’s command. When Cheese asks, “What if we can’t find him?” Daemon grins, and the camera cuts away, but his next instructions seem clear. Once the duo enters the castle, Blood reminds his assassin partner, “‘A son for a son,’ he said.”
Their search for a green son is shot like a horror film, with flickering candlelight; shadowy, abandoned rooms; and the clangor of a thunderstorm echoing from the stones outside. Eventually, Blood and Cheese stumble upon Helaena and her two royal children. The last the camera shows of the assassins is a large hand descending over the tiny face of 6-year-old Jaehaerys Targaryen—“He’ll be king one day,” a proud Aegon declares earlier in the episode—before it pivots to Helaena as she scoops up her daughter, flees the murder scene, and runs downstairs to find Alicent.
“They killed the boy,” Helaena says, and the episode ends, dangling over a cliff.
Thrones never shied away from depravity and in fact often took steps to amplify Martin’s most violent scenes on the screen. The first victim of the show’s Red Wedding is Robb Stark’s pregnant wife, who’s stabbed in the belly, whereas in the book, Robb’s wife doesn’t attend the wedding trap at the Twins. (In fact, Martin said a decade ago that book Robb’s wife would appear, still alive, in the Winds of Winter prologue.)
But Dragon actually tones down the horror of this vengeful murder. In Fire & Blood, the source text for Dragon, Blood and Cheese sneak into the castle and kill a maid and a guard; tie up Alicent, who witnesses the atrocity; and corner Helaena and the queen’s children. Crucially, in the book, Aegon II and Helaena have a third child, 2-year-old Maelor, in addition to the twins who appear in the show. Then Cheese asks Helaena which son—Jaehaerys or Maelor—she wants to lose:
“Pick,” [Cheese] said, “or we kill them all.” On her knees, weeping, Helaena named her youngest, Maelor. Perhaps she thought the boy was too young to understand, or perhaps it was because the older boy, Jaehaerys, was King Aegon’s firstborn son and heir, next in line to the Iron Throne. “You hear that, little boy?” Cheese whispered to Maelor. “Your momma wants you dead.” Then he gave Blood a grin, and the hulking swordsman slew Prince Jaehaerys, striking off the boy’s head with a single blow. The queen began to scream.
Dragon didn’t show the killing blow (though the sawing sound and motion were gruesome enough). It also excised the second son and the haunting “Your momma wants you dead” line, replacing it with a confusing aside in which Blood and Cheese can’t determine which of the two sleeping children is the “son” and which is the royal daughter, and they ask Helaena to point out the boy. (Why can’t they check themselves? One even says they could inspect the children’s anatomy before trusting Helaena instead.)
But the sequence is still supremely sickening, even in this tamer form. The meta-storytelling result is a prime example of how Dragon, in its second season, will more closely imitate Thrones at its monocultural peak. And the in-universe narrative result will likely be a stronger push toward war, as the greens seek vengeance for Jaehaerys, just as the blacks sought vengeance for Luke. The wheel of violence spins on, crushing ever more victims.
After Jaehaerys’s death, it’s clearer than ever that Dragon’s showrunners are trying to emphasize how avoidable the disastrous Dance of the Dragons was. This civil war stems from mistakes and misunderstandings, from Alicent’s “too many Aegons” interpretation of Viserys’s dying words to Vhagar’s unsanctioned chomping of Luke—with Aemond shouting in vain, “No, Vhagar, no!”—to, now, the murder of a son that Rhaenyra didn’t want killed.
“If we loose the dragons to war, there will be no calling them back,” Alicent says, hours before learning from her traumatized daughter that her grandson has been killed. But as the Targaryens’ feuding factions commit increasingly abhorrent acts of violence against each other, that warning can encompass more than just the dragons. Once the massive machinery of war starts rumbling, it will be all but impossible to shut down.
Have HotD questions? To appear in Zach’s weekly mailbag, message him @zachkram on Twitter/X or email him at zach.kram@theringer.com.
For two decades, the words “cinematic” and “blockbuster” have been, for most game directors, synonymous. During this window, which stretches back to the original God of War and Halo, we’ve enjoyed (or, for others, endured) big-budget video game creators aspiring to emulate their blockbuster film counterparts.
If — somehow — you’ve never seen the films of Steven Spielberg or Michael Mann, you’ve nonetheless experienced them via contact highs from Uncharted, Grand Theft Auto, and practically every other Big Game released this millennium.
But Indika, a game that sounds like a weed strain and plays like being stoned and scrolling through the Criterion Channel, has me hopeful that we’re approaching, with narrative video games, a turning point for what it means for a game to be “cinematic.”
What fuels that hope is Indika’s creative similarities to a micro-budget indie horror film from the ’90s.
The Blair Witch effect
Is it possible for one game to change the look of an entire medium? And why would it be Indika, a game most readers haven’t played, or even heard of?
25 years ago, The Blair Witch Project inspired countless parodies with a single shot. You know the one. You can see it in the trailer, the poster, or at the top of this story. The lead actress-slash-camera operator holds a cheap camcorder inches from her face. Tears well in her eyes, and a flashlight casts hard shadows across her dry skin.
She’s terrified. She’s a mess. She’s barely in focus or even in frame.
At that time, few commercial directors would film a shot so crudely, nor would a celebrity offer the audience such an intimate look inside their nostrils. Filmgoers expected movies to conform to a certain look, sound, and feel. But The Blair Witch Project didn’t resemble anything in theaters; it looked like a cheap documentary you’d find on the local PBS station. It looked real.
Photo: Haxan Films
With that emphasis on “realism” above all else, the amateur camerawork accomplished its goal — scare the shit out of people — better than any expensive shot on an industry-grade camera could.
The filmmakers had taken the empathic visual language of the documentary form and weaponized it. Look again at the shot. You don’t see an actress staring into the camcorder; you see a person. And so, as happens when you look someone in the eyes, a connection forms. This person, you think, could be you. Alone. In the woods. Something unknown stalking through the branches.
The camerawork of The Blair Witch Project wasn’t cinematic, not in the classical sense. But in time, what audiences expected film and TV to look like would change to meet that image. Do we have the sprawling found-footage horror genre without it? Or the mega-popular docu-sitcoms like The Office and Modern Family?
The creators of The Blair Witch Project, because of their limitations (no money! No sets! No actors!) looked for inspiration where others didn’t have to, and wouldn’t choose to. The film’s success then gave future creators big and small permission to follow its lead, forever changing what a Hollywood movie could look and feel like.
Indika and the film school games
Indika, the fantastic new adventure game from Odd Meter, tells the story of a young nun who loses her grip on reality in an alternate-history version of 19th-century Russia. Tortured by a voice in her head that may or may not be a demon, Indika partners with a sickly man who may or may not be divinely chosen by God. Together, they embark on a perilous road trip through beautiful forests, abandoned towns, and literalizations of biblical allegory.
Indika is the latest — and one of the most impressive — examples of a sea change in the look and feel of cinematic games.
You don’t have to play Indika to see what I mean (though, hey, you really should). In the announcement trailer, the game’s creators borrow liberally from filmmakers rarely associated with games. These directors, who can’t afford the spectacle and scale of big-budget filmmaking, rely on more audacious (and affordable) craft to distinguish their work.
“We tried to use a standard limited set of [virtual camera] lenses to depict the limitations of inexpensive auteur cinema,” Indika game director Dmitry Svetlow told Polygon over email. He cited Poor Things director Yorgos Lanthimos, Russian filmmaker and slow cinema pioneer Andrei Tarkovsky, and former Monty Python member and infamous weirdo auteur Terry Gilliam as inspiration.
Emma Stone as Bella Baxter in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things.Image: Searchlight Pictures
In Indika, the stark exterior landscapes and cold architecture resemble the striking but antiseptic sets of Lanthimos. In the game’s nunnery, a SnorriCam shot — in which the camera is strapped onto the actor and aimed at their face — recalls Blair Witch, of course, but also the works of ’90s music video director turned ’00s filmmaker Spike Jonze and Robert Webb’s comedy sketch series Sir Digby Chicken Caesar.
Where Blair Witch borrowed the documentary aesthetic to force audiences to straighten their backs and pay attention, Svetlow and company are reaching into the toolbox of low-budget filmmaking to do something similar with games.
Or, to put it crassly, Indika doesn’t just look like art films but feels like them. The story opens with the player inhabiting the habit of the titular young nun and fetching a pail of water from a well, then doing it again. And again. And again and again. Her steps up and down a grimy, snow-crunched slope in the abbey echo Tarkosvky’s long shots (like this one of a man carrying a candle for seven minutes) that were intentionally tedious, forcing us to feel time passing not just in a movie or a game, but in our life as we experience them.
To make the game more cinematic, Svetlow wrote the team needed a “greater focus on dramaturgy, on the quality and depth of characters, as well as the necessary level of presentation of events.”
In Indika, you don’t save the world or nail sick headshots. You accumulate poorly hidden collectibles and earn points, though they’re worth nothing and, by the standards of other games, a waste of time — something the game’s loading screens emphasize any chance they get. (“Don’t waste time collecting points, they are pointless.”) Sometimes Indika comes across a bench, and if you direct her to sit down on it, the game hands over the “film editing” to the player, allowing them to swap between different camera angles, some of which Indika doesn’t even appear in.
You could move on, directing Indika to stand back up and continue about her business. Or you could let the camera rest, your mind wandering as your eyes lock onto a field of mud and snow. In a medium full of realistic 3D worlds rife with kinetic empowerment, Indika encourages you to indulge in a moment of peace and ceding of control.
Change happens slowly and then all at once
Can we be certain games like Indika will influence their big-budget peers? They already have.
Here’s just one example: In 2009, Naughty Dog released Uncharted 2, a game rife with some of the most iconic blockbuster moments in the history of video games. Its opening, in which the hero climbs up a train that dangles off a cliff, may have inspired the latest Mission: Impossible, which ends with Tom Cruise doing something very, very similar.
But tucked into Uncharted 2 is a sequence meant to contrast with these sorts of set-pieces. Around the midpoint, Nathan Drake hikes through a Tibetan village. He doesn’t climb any deadly cliffs. Nothing blows up. Nobody gets shot. This was, in its time, unusual — a moment in which the player could exist in a beautiful 3D environment without being required to destroy the village or its population.
The Tibetan village sequence (and I swear this was acknowledged publicly, though now I struggle to find any quote) was cribbed from 2008’s The Graveyard, a short art game from the now-defunct micro studio Tale of Tales. In the game, an elderly woman walks the path of a graveyard, sits on a bench, reflects, and then returns from where she came. To younger readers, this will sound tedious. But to game critics at the time, this scene dropped into our minds like a new drug — a total shock to the system.
Nathan Drake in Uncharted 2.Image: Naughty Dog/Sony Computer Entertainment America
With The Graveyard and Uncharted 2 and many other (mostly indie) games of that time period, the video game industry witnessed a surge in what would be dubbed “walking simulators,” a somewhat derisive term for a powerful idea: You make a beautiful, rich virtual space, then afford your players some time to exist within them.
If The Graveyard could reshape the assumptions of cinematic video games, then why shouldn’t Indika help to bring the style of low-budget and arthouse filmmaking to Indika’s many peers?
That’s the magic of this moment in video games: Indika isn’t alone in its ambitions to challenge our assumptions of what makes a game cinematic. Indie developers have been steadily pushing against the confines of what games look and feel like for over a decade. To the Moon. El Paso, Elsewhere. Disco Elysium. I could double my word count with nothing more than titles.
But what’s different now, and what Indika reflects, is the independent games scene accelerating up an exponential hockey stick of creative output.
Image: Odd Meter/11 bit studios
Much like The Blair Witch Project (and countless other indie films since its release) was made possible by the first boom of consumer-level cameras and filmmaking tools, Indika and its ilk reflect a new era of game production where a small team — thanks to cost-effective and ultra-powerful dev tools — can take a risk on a personal project. In fact, with modern game engines, indie game developers can accomplish visual feats indie filmmakers could only imagine.
“We recreated a non-existent fairy-tale world; to do this for cinema would have cost an order of magnitude more,” Svetlow told Polygon.
Since I finished Indika, I’ve played three more oddly “cinematic” games — Arctic Eggs, 1000xResist, and Crow Country — and it feels like every week another new game appears, its creators taking a bat to the expectations of what a game should look and feel like. Now and then the bat is bound to connect and pop open this medium, releasing an entirely new style that artists will pounce on, like kids grabbing candy from a smashed piñata.
Perhaps Indika, in time, will reveal itself to be one of these special games. The Blair Witch of video games, launching a thousand projects that build on the arthouse aesthetic. Or perhaps this abundance of creativity will — not with one bold release or one inspirational aesthetic — radically change the idea of what makes a game “cinematic” to the point that we’re less worried about how a game can look like a film, and these interactive narrative experiences that we’d previously compare to great films can have a look that’s recognizably and thrillingly their own.
I hope we get there. In the meantime, I’ll be grateful to play games that aspire to match ambitious and inventive directors, rather than playing yet another video game that could be mistaken for Free Guy.
This review of Godzilla Minus One was originally posted in conjunction with the movie’s theatrical release. It has been updated and reposted now that the film is available on digital platforms.
Godzilla Minus One is the throwback movie that longtime Godzilla fans have been waiting for. This is an age of abundance for Godzilla media: Over the past seven years, as part of a partnership between Toho and Hollywood studios, the giant lizard received three animated films on Netflix, two U.S. movies, and an Apple TV series that premieres Nov. 17. Godzilla fans like me haven’t been left wanting. And yet something crucial has been missing from most of this media, something fundamental to the earliest films in the Godzilla franchise: terror.
We nearly had a decade of terrifying Godzilla. In 2016, Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi releasedthe horrifying Shin Godzilla, widely regarded as one of the best entries in the franchise. It promised a return to the petrifying, humanity-destroying Godzilla of the past. But Shin Godzilla marked a lengthy hiatus in the production of Japanese live-action Godzilla films, and signaled the beginning of a colossally successful American era for the big lizard. The American Godzilla media of the past seven years, including Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Godzilla vs. Kong, and those Netflix anime movies, ranges from serviceable to pretty damn good, though its creators borrowed far more from the Marvel Cinematic Universe than from classic kaiju matinees.
Instead, Godzilla Minus One sticks to the original recipe. The movie that kicked it all off, 1954’s Godzilla, mixes horror, classic melodrama, and a feverish anti-war message to mine the anxieties of ’50s Japan. Minus One goes even further into the past, with a story set in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Writer-director Takashi Yamazaki (who took another beloved franchise back to basics with Lupin III: The First)imagines how a Japan with no military, no economy, and no international support would respond to Godzilla’s first attack.
So is this a reboot? A remake? A reimagining? A bit of all of the above.
Our reluctant hero is Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), a kamikaze pilot who, in the waning hours of the war, faked a plane malfunction to escape death. In a Godzilla film, the giant monsters typically carry the central political metaphor, but in Minus One, Koichi shoulders that burden on his tiny human frame. As a kamikaze pilot who survived the war, he returns to his neighborhood to find that little remains beyond rubble and a few surviving neighbors.
This is ground-level Godzilla storytelling: We see the events through the eyes of Koichi, his neighbors, and his co-workers, rather than through knowledgeable government leaders, superhuman soldiers, or Godzilla himself. As with any great kaiju film, we spend much of the film’s first half learning to care about these lovable folks just before their world gets obliterated by hundreds of tons of giant lizard.
Koichi is an unusually grim lead, even by the standards of the more somber early Godzilla films. He despises himself for his decision to bail on his kamikaze mission, and his neighbors, who’ve lost their homes and families, aren’t especially thrilled to see him either. Nonetheless, together they rebuild from bombed-out blocks to bivouacked shacks, and eventually to modest homes that cluster among the suburban Tokyo sprawl. Considering this a Godzilla movie, it’s like watching people rebuilding their lives with a giant box of dominoes.
Image: Toho
Minus One isn’t a period piece in aesthetic alone: The story itself feels like something preserved from the 1950s. Yamazaki steeps it in the melodrama of a classic historical epic. His characters are capital-R Romantic, constantly making bold proclamations and grand sacrifices, discussing heavy topics where modern characters would quip about shawarma.
Koichi and his companions debate the power of nonviolence, the value of self-preservation, and the unjust expectations governments put upon their populations in times of war. The latter point makes Godzilla Minus One a surprisingly potent pairing with Hayao Miyazaki’s animated semi-biopicThe Wind Rises, and a timely response to Japan’s current military buildup.
Of course, it’s precisely when Koichi and company begin to open their hearts and get their feet on the ground that Godzilla arrives. (Technically, he appears earlier in the film, but I’ll spare you the spoilers.) When Godzilla makes his first legitimate impression, he strikes like a 2023 version of the original Godzilla: the living manifestation of nuclear terror. His initial physical destruction is dwarfed by his heat ray, which, as shown in the trailer, leaves behind little more than a crater and a mushroom cloud.
Image: Toho
This is the moment in modern Godzilla movies where the heroes send in mechs, a rival kaiju, or some cutting-edge military aircraft. But Minus One, to its credit, sticks to the original formula, using historical reality to wave away any easy solutions. Most of Japan’s military has been decommissioned following its surrender to the U.S., its remaining warships sent away for disassembly. The U.S. government won’t help, either; its government is afraid to move weaponry into the region, which might provoke an anxious Soviet Union. So there’s only one group left to stop Godzilla: the civilian population. It’s a legitimately terrifying prospect — a group of average people versus a kaiju.
For those of us under the age of 70, conceptualizing Godzilla as a genuinely frightening horror monster can be a challenge. Hell, he appears in an upcoming children’s book that espouses the power of love. But in 1954, Godzilla terrified audiences across the globe, as a metaphor for nuclear weapons’ imprecise, passionless ability to level whole cities.
In its back half, Minus One recreates that style of terror with human stakes and an intensely political message. Yamazaki brings together the threads he carefully put in place: Koichi’s mental health, the barely rebuilt Japan, the absent government, the abandoned military, and, in true classic melodrama fashion, a love story. Then he pits them against an indifferent, catastrophic force.
Image: Toho
Is Godzilla the threat of nuclear weaponry? The temptation to respond to violence with greater violence? An indifferent American military in a period of national rebuild? The fact that Godzilla Minus One prompts these questions underscores what modern Godzilla media has been missing.
Don’t get me wrong; I’ve enjoyed the near-decade of Godzilla entertainment in America. But as someone who has Shin Godzilla at the top ofhis Godzilla tier list, who introduced his child to Mothra at far too young an age, and has a Hedorah anatomy poster sitting behind him at this very moment, this is the Godzilla I’ve been waiting for.
Godzilla films provide filmmakers a precious opportunity to tell political stories not just about individuals, but about communities, or even entire nations. And because Godzilla movies will always feature a kaiju destroying famous cities and landmarks like a toddler let loose in a Lego museum, people will show up. It’s a fantastic entertainment vessel for big ideas. For years now, Godzilla has been giving us plenty of sugar. But considering the state of the world, I’m glad he’s once again showing up with a bit of medicine, too.
Godzilla Minus One is streaming on Netflix, and is available for digital rental on Amazon, Vudu, and similar digital platforms.
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