My Favorite Things This Week

🖐 The Friday High Five #125

I am on vacation this week, so this is a stripped-down—but still fully operational—version of the High 5. Basically all the recommendations and none of the navel-gazing. Enjoy.

Business in the front

Classic Nintendo Games

Vibe: Somehow just as fun 30+ years later.

This past weekend, the Pierce clan gathered in Northern Michigan for our annual family summer get-together. Itinerary typically includes 18 holes of golf, chilling pool side, movies in the evening, fantasy football deliberations, too much food and not enough sleep.

My brother and I have historically brought a video game system of some kind for these weekends. Not because we can’t go 2 days without playing. Well, that’s actually how it started 20 years ago. But these days we do it because it’s a rare chance to game side-by-side, as we did growing up. This typically meant packing a bulky system, controllers, and a bunch of games, all of which required its own suitcase.

The last couple of times I’ve just brought a Raspberry Pi that’s the size of a pack of cigarettes and a couple of controllers. The device is loaded with dozens of classic ROMs. Our menu last weekend included:

• Tecmo Super Bowl: The greatest football game and one of the best NES games period. He beat me 2 out of 3. We’ll be rematching in August.

• Contra: We beat the game in about 30 minutes thanks to the legendary cheat code. Even then, we were taken to our final continue. Still holds up. Would absolutely play again.

• Golf: A sentimental favorite. Surprisingly difficult but fun. I was victorious.

• Dr. Mario (briefly): We never really played this growing up, and didn’t really enjoy it now.

• Super Dodgeball: This game is hilarious. We both played as China the first time and were thus evenly matched. Second game, he picked Russia and I was India. It was at this point that we realized the teams have wildly different health bars. His Russians were maxed out, like 20 health bars. My best Indian had 5. I still won. Seeing someone’s soul leave their body after getting blasted through one end of the screen and out the other will never get old.

Ghosted

Apple TV

Vibe: What if Captain America was actually a dweeb?

Chris Evans plays a mild-mannered closeted horticulturist who falls for a secretive woman who’s a CIA super spy (Ana de Armas). After one glorious night together, he decides to stalk her follow her to Paris because she’s not returning his texts. That’s the setup. Evans also gets to participate in the butt-kicking, I guess because he still looks like Captain America.

Ghosted is a cute movie. Though the highlight was a Sebastian Stan cameo in which he plays Bucky Barnes.

Jurassic World Dominion

Universal Pictures

Vibe: You’ve seen this 4-5 times now.

I put off watching the third movie of the Chris Pratt Jurassic Park trilogy because I universally heard it was not good. But with a new movie hitting theaters—this one starring Scarlett Johansson—I thought it was time to give Dominion a try, on the off-chance the new film relied on some vital bit of connective tissue. I think about how these movies inner-relate more than the people working on them.

And you know what—I didn’t hate Dominion. I actually enjoyed it.

I’ve written previously about how hype often derails my enjoyment of something. The inverse is also true: Chances are, if I’ve heard a movie is bad, I’ll enjoy it. My expectations are so low I’m almost guaranteed to be pleasantly surprised.

Dominion acts as a kind of Jurassic Park: Generations, as it unites the cast of the original film with Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard. Cheap nostalgia play, totally worked. Sadly, if you’ve seen one of these movies, you’ve seen them all. Though the first sequel—The Lost World—is criminally underrated, and not just because it includes Vince Vaughn.

Universal Pictures

Goodbye, Chris Pratt, dino-rangler. The idea that he could command Raptors with a steady gaze and a firm hand is the most ridiculous thing in a series based entirely upon ridiculous things. I regularly try to use this move on my cat when she’s in a wrestling mood.

She attacks every time. No way Pratt survives one movie.

The Day of the Jackal

Peacock

Vibe: The best (only?) reason to pick up Peacock is absolutely worth it.

The Day of the Jackal is based on a 1971 novel of the same name. The book has been on my TBR forever, but I never got around to it because I’ve yet to read a political thriller in which the writing didn’t feel like the weak link; I get a bit high brow when it comes to prose. So you could correctly say this has been on my radar for years, and now that I’ve seen the Peacock adaptation, I feel little reason to revisit the source material.

What a show.

The adaptation brings the story into the modern era, and casts Eddie Redmayne as the titular assassin. Redmayne is perfect as someone detached enough to make assassination a believable profession. When it comes to completing a job, Redmayne follows Palpatine’s motto: Do not hesitate. Show no mercy.

But there’s also just enough humanity in Redmayne’s portrayal to keep you hooked. This isn’t the Terminator or, even, Agent 47. He didn’t choose this life. It chose him. The Good Guys also aren’t actually all that good, which further muddies the waters.

I haven’t felt this conflicted about rooting for a villain since Baron Zemo danced into my heart.

A Day on the Water

Vibe: The simple life is the best life.

I took time off this week for some much-needed R&R. I was ready for a break from the routine, and also from reality. No matter how much I refresh the page, the news doesn’t get better. Only one thing left: Time to unplug.

My wife and I discovered kayaking about 10 years ago, and have made it a priority to get out on the water every summer since. Few things are more relaxing than drifting down a river with only the very loose objective of reaching the end, eventually but with no great hurry.

I’ve been wanting to rebrand this newsletter for a while, and have spent hours brainstorming alternative names. I thought I might ponder the problem on the river. Instead, all intentionality faded, replaced by birdsong, the sun on my back, the gentle splash of oars, the burn in my muscles. At one point, in a stunningly-wide section of the river, we sidled our kayaks beside each other and drifted for 30 minutes, chatting about nothing, looking around. It was the lazy river but without random old guys in Speedos.

Afterwards, we celebrated with drinks from McDonald’s and cantina chicken tacos from Taco Bell. Yes, we hit two separate drive-throughs in a row. Why not? We were on vacation and had nowhere else to be. We could spend time frivolously.

Great day. Best in a long time.