The White Rose (Weiße Rose) Resistance Group

Monument to Die Weiße Rose resistance
movement, at the University of
Munich, Germany. Public Domain.

 

    So, a few months ago, I started building a timeline of WW2 events that I could connect each chapter of Biscuit to. When I could, I used resistance activities because they furthered an important theme of the book. Anyway, I came across the White Rose (Weiße Rose) resistance group at the University of Munich, and damn ... those were some courageous, heroic people.

    Anyway, Germany is definitely the villain of Biscuit (hard to write a book about a family with a Jewish background in WW2, where Germany doesn't look pretty bad. But, except for one particularly mean-spirited Wehrmacht soldier who tormented my grandmother just prior to the liberation, it's a boogieman-type villain, which doesn't leave much room for nuance. It doesn't help that most of Arthur and Roma's interactions were with Germans in enforcer-type roles. Soldiers at roadblocks. Gestapo investigating sabotage, soldiers chasing down illegal refugees.

So when I found opportunities to make the portrayal of Germany a little more nuanced, I took them. One was to use the White Rose group as part of my timeline, and the other was to have a German POW show genuine remorse for his actions, and also explain why he couldn't dodge the Wehrmacht draft, despite holding anti-Nazi beliefs.

    Back to the White Rose. One of the members was a young woman named Sophie Scholl. She and her brother Hans were executed by the Nazis for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets for the White Rose, but after her death in 1943, Germany has never forgotten her:

• They placed a bust of her in the Wahalla Memorial.
• There are streets and squares named for the Scholls all over Germany.
• In 2003, Sophie and Hans placed fourth in a poll of the most important Germans, beating out Einstein, Bach, Gutenberg, etc. If only the votes of young Germans had been counted, the Scholls would have placed first.
• There have been several German TV shows and movies telling the story.

The transcripts of the Scholls' interrogations resided in East German archives until the 1990s. After reunification, the transcripts came to light, and one filmmaker used those as primary sources, along with survivor testimony, to write the screenplay Sophie Scholl – The Final Days (Sophie Scholl – Die letzten Tage). The movie was released in 2005, was nominated for and won numerous awards, and I'm planning to watch it in a few weeks:

2026 Academy Awards Best Picture Nominee - Marty Supreme

 

• IMDB link: Marty Supreme
• Tagline: "Marty Mauser, a young man with a dream no one respects, goes to hell and back in pursuit of greatness."  
• My Best Picture Project

    To quote the god of movie critics, Roger Ebert, "I hated, hated, hated this movie."  I hated it so much that I quit watching halfway through. Oh, it ticks a lot of Best Picture boxes all right.  Fine acting, obviously good cinematography, lots of great old cars (it takes place in 1952), and good direction.  But the story begs the question, "Just how awful can a filmmaker make the protagonist without losing the audience?"  

    Too far, in this case. Marty is an odious, odious person.  The tagline is "Marty Mauser, a young man with a dream no one respects, goes to hell and back in pursuit of greatness," but it should be, "Marty Mauser, a fast-talking young asshole no one respects, goes to hell and back in pursuit of the hustle."

    As a woman, I'm hardly qualified to expound upon manhood (I tend to favor the idea that a "real man" is just another way to say a "grownup who is responsible, and attempts to be a good person"), but I'm comfortable saying that Marty isn't any sort of man that I can admire. He's nothing but a spoiled child, and while he's a world-class ping-pong player, he is also a hustler and a cheat who constantly whines about how unfairly he's treated.

    Ok, I did like the rather shocking scene when Marty's bathtub falls through the floor of a very, very cheap hotel, but even that was horrifying because the elderly mafioso in the room below gets hurt.  Just reading that last phrase makes me cringe, because my god, even the bystanders aren't innocent.

    I didn't like a single character in the movie.   Nearly everyone is a fast-talking liar, and the ones who aren't are cheaters or predators. And because I identified with literally no one, I couldn't get into the movie at all, and when I realized (about halfway through) that I didn't give a damn how it played out, I decided not to waste another 75 minutes of my time.

Seriously, given my background, you'd think I'd identify with a movie full of Jewish immigrants and a Holocaust survivor or two, but nope. I think the most admirable person in the movie is Koto Endo, the Japanese ping-pong player who won the British table tennis open in the first half.  He was a survivor of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, which left him permanently deaf.  And there are hints that Marty suspects Koto of cheating because of his foam paddle and Asian playing style, but given that Marty is a hustler, his opinion hardly matters.

(Pithy Reviews; and Rankings* out of 10 nominees):

1. Sinners (Southern gothic vampires sing the Blues; Cathy: 1, Chris: 1)
2. Bugonia (Alien-hunting conspiracy theorists; Cathy: 5, Chris: 2)
3. Train Dreams (Dreamy old logger survives ... life; Cathy: 2, Chris: 3)
4. One Battle After Another (Daddy-Daughter Revolution; Cathy: 4, Chris: 4)
5. F1: The Movie (Mesmerizing Top Gun for Formula 1 Fans; Cathy: 3, Chris: 5)
6. The Secret Agent (Strange, sweaty movie about life in fascist Brazil; Cathy: 6, Chris: 6)
7. Frankenstein (Monster-'splaning; Cathy: 8, Chris: 7)
8. Sentimental Value (Slow-paced movie about a family of actors; Cathy: 7, Chris: 8)

• Marty Supreme (Odious ping-pong hustler no one respects; Cathy/Chris: Did not finish)

• Hamnet (Cathy: x, Chris: x)

* Rankings can change.

2026 Academy Awards Best Picture Nominee - The Secret Agent

• IMDB link: The Secret Agent
• Tagline: "In 1977, a technology expert flees from a mysterious past and returns to his hometown of Recife in search of peace. He soon realizes that the city is far from being the refuge he seeks."
• My Best Picture Project

    What a weird and wonderful movie that is just full of sweaty hairy-chested Brazilian men, and if they button their shirts at all, they never do so past their sternums.  It was a lot of work to watch, though (as all foreign-language films are for me these days) since they require subtitles. It's my first Portuguese-language movie, and it was like watching a Spanish-language movie (lots of shared vocabulary), but ... not.

    It opens with a wonderfully absurd scene of a man in a yellow VW bug stopping for gasoline at a gas station with a corpse lying in the parking lot. The cops show up, but they are more interested in the man in the Volkswagen than in the corpse. The movie is mostly a drama, but with some darkly funny moments.

    It's visually beautiful and well-acted, but there are also lots of oddball themes, like Jaws, severed legs recovered from shark bellies, and just incredibly corrupt cops, businessmen, and assassins. 

    I was very confused, though, when a newspaper reported on a story about "the hairy leg", and then we see the severed leg from the shark hopping around, kicking people, mostly individuals engaging in public sex in a park.   Was it South American magical realism? Was it just an oddball, surreal moment? Was it folklore?  Turns out it was a literal (though surreal) embodiment of 1970s-era newspaper codespeak referring to police brutality, particularly against the gay community.

    Another odd moment was when the local police chief took Marcelo (the main character) to meet an elderly German man, to show off the man's scars. The policeman assumes the old man was a Wehrmacht soldier in WW2, and I, too, assumed he was a Nazi hiding out in Brazil, but it turns out the opposite is true. He was a Holocaust survivor, and the scars came not from being a soldier but from being the victim of those soldiers.   A cautionary moment warning us not to assume we know someone's past?

    The movie leaves many questions unanswered. What happened to Marcelo's mother?  What happened to the villain who destroyed Marcelo's life? Why are the people in modern-day Brazil researching him? (That may be obvious to someone who knows the culture better than I do, though.)

    The pacing is good, and it's a slow build from oddly normalized weirdness to a crescendo of satisfying violence that is worthy of a Quentin Tarantino movie.

(Pithy Reviews; and Rankings* out of 10 nominees):

1. Sinners (Southern gothic vampires sing the Blues; Cathy: 1, Chris: 1)
2. Bugonia (Alien-hunting conspiracy theorists; Cathy: 5, Chris: 2)
3. Train Dreams (Dreamy old logger survives ... life; Cathy: 2, Chris: 3)
4. One Battle After Another (Daddy-Daughter Revolution; Cathy: 4, Chris: 4)
5. F1: The Movie (Mesmerizing Top Gun for Formula 1 Fans; Cathy: 3, Chris: 5)
6. The Secret Agent (Strange, sweaty movie about life in fascist Brazil; Cathy: 6, Chris: 6)
7. Frankenstein (Monster-'splaning; Cathy: 8, Chris: 7)
8. Sentimental Value (Slow-paced movie about a family of actors; Cathy: 7, Chris: 8)

• Hamnet (Cathy: x, Chris: x)
• Marty Supreme (Cathy: x, Chris: x)

* Rankings can change.

The Skinwalker in the Closet - Chapter 1

Editor's foreword: I spent the day with my 9-year-old granddaughter yesterday, and we wrote the following story together. The creativity and story are entirely hers. I did the typing, some coaching, and implementation (like using details in different places to provide foreshadowing), and editing under her supervision.

Chapter 1: Is it real?  

    I had just arrived at Aunty Melissa’s house, and right away, I slipped quietly up the stairs to Rory’s room, but the lights were off, and the door was ajar.  The sound of talking was coming through the door.  I wasn’t sure if Rory was there or not, if that was her Furby.  

    I knocked, and the door swung open.  It was Bertie, the youngest of my cousins, and she had shoved the door all the way open.

    Bertie was standing in the doorway, and Drew and Rory were sitting on the bed with their eyes closed. 

    “If it touches you, you freeze,” Drew said. “But only if it touches your skin directly.”

    Lincoln was holding Rory’s camera, swiping through the camera roll. 

    “What are you doing?” I asked.

    “I’m looking to see if we got any pictures of the skinwalker.”

    “What’s a skinwalker?” I asked. That’s weird, I thought to myself.

    Rory said, “My brother thinks it’s living in his closet, and we don’t know what to do with it.”

    “Yeah, but is it a skinwalker?” I asked again. They hadn’t answered my question.

    There was a long pause. Finally, Rory said, “It’s the dead white skin of a person, but it can walk. Drew saw one moving in his closet last night.”

    “We are trying to investigate it,” Lincoln said. We snuck into Drew’s room and opened the closet door just a crack, and took pictures through the gap, and then quickly slammed the door closed again so it couldn’t get out.”

    I was still standing in the doorway when Drew jumped out of Rory’s bed, snatched the camera out of Lincoln’s hands, and ran past me into his room. He opened the closet door a little bit and started taking pictures.   Then he dropped the camera and backed away, and before he made it to Rory’s room, Drew froze in place. 

    Rory, Lincoln, Bertie, and I ran into the hallway and dragged Drew, who was rigid, back into Rory’s room. I ran into Drew’s room, picked up the camera, and threw the closet door wide open. I loved my cousins, but I wasn’t sure I believed in skinwalkers.  I stepped into the closet, and something grabbed my arm.  I gasped and yelled, “Guys, help me!”

    I tried to pull away, and my cousins ran into the room and grabbed my other arm and yanked hard, and it let go, and I fell to the floor.  My arm really hurt. I pushed up my sleeve and looked at where the skinwalker had grabbed me, and my arm was red and starting to bruise in the pattern of a hand. I could make out a thumb-shaped bruise and finger marks. 

    I started believing in skinwalkers that day.

--by Cathesa, edited by Cathy B. Weeks

Editor’s note: the thing in the closet may actually be a Windigo rather than a Skinwalker, but in the heat of a terrifying moment in a dark space, it can be hard to tell.

(Stay tuned for Chapter 2: The Labyrinth)

2026 Academy Awards Best Picture Nominee - Sentimental Value

• IMDB link: Sentimental Value
• Tagline: "An intimate exploration of family, memories, and the reconciliatory power of art."
• My Best Picture Project

    This was a difficult movie to review.  There was so much that was good about it, but the pacing was problematic enough that what could have been a great movie ended up merely OK.  The movie was about 2/3 in Norwegian and 1/3 in English, so we turned on subtitles.

    Let's start with the good:  The acting was great, really great.  I didn't know Stellan Skarsgård was such a good actor. I mean, I've always liked him, and in general, if he's in it, I'm probably going to like the movie. But in this, I felt he brought an amazing depth to his character, a washed-up elderly actor-turned-director who writes a beautiful script that captures all the regrets of a father who was neglectful, knows it, and regrets it, but doesn't know how to fix it.  There's a neat place where a young Gustav appears, and the filmmakers recycled footage from a movie Skarsgård made as a young man.

    The two young women who play his daughters, Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, do a lovely job capturing what it is to be the children of a neglectful artist parent, and the struggles they face with intimacy, trust, and anxiety. Elle Fanning does a great job playing an adopted daughter of sorts, hired by Gustav when his older daughter refuses.

    The cinematography was lovely, and I loved the house where the movie takes place (it's used as a framing device). There's a really cool montage toward the end of the movie, of the faces of the four main characters superimposed over one another, and I liked the movie-within-a-movie, and how the story weaves together scenes from their family history.  I also liked the rather dark Ikea joke which I will not spoil.

    I did like the ending, which shows the filming of the movie that Gustav has been trying to get made throughout the actual movie

    I like slow-paced movies that take their time and bring the audience for the ride, allowing the acting and scenery to take precedence over the action and special effects. But there's an extraordinarily fine line between interesting and boring when the movie's pacing is slow.  Unlike Train Dreams, which was slow-paced and kind of mesmerizing, this movie was slow-paced and a little boring. It wasn't without compelling scenes, but I did find myself glancing at the time more than I like.  The movie was like a long string of ellipses punctuated with exclamation points and question marks until ending on a high note: 

  .....?.....!.....!?......!.....""""

(Pithy Reviews; and Rankings* out of 10 nominees):

1. Sinners (Southern gothic vampires sing the Blues; Cathy: 1, Chris: 1)
2. Bugonia (Alien-hunting conspiracy theorists; Cathy: 5, Chris: 2)
3. Train Dreams (Dreamy old logger survives ... life; Cathy: 2, Chris: 3)
4. One Battle After Another (Daddy-Daughter Revolution; Cathy: 4, Chris: 4)
5. F1: The Movie (Mesmerizing Top Gun for Formula 1 Fans; Cathy: 3, Chris: 5)
6. Frankenstein (Monster-'splaning; Cathy: 7, Chris: 6)
7. Sentimental Value (Slow-paced movie about a family of actors; Cathy: 6, Chris: 7)

• Hamnet (Cathy: x, Chris: x)
• Marty Supreme (Cathy: x, Chris: x)
• The Secret Agent (Cathy: x, Chris: x)

* Rankings can change.

Banana brown sugar ice cream with peanut brittle chunks

    This was just such a revelation, I decided to share the glory that is fresh banana ice cream. It's wonderfully smooth and delicious, and tastes like bananas and not like yellow Laffy-Taffy. 

I adapted Dana Cree's Banana Ice Cream in Hello, My Name is Ice Cream, but used my own techniques and substituted brown sugar for regular sugar. I got the idea for the flavor from Ice Creams, sorbets, and Gelati: The Definitive Guide, but I didn't follow their recipe.

Ingredients:

• 4 very ripe bananas, peeled and cut into 1" chunks
• 2 cups cream
• 1 cup whole milk
• 6 egg yolks
• 1/4 cup liquid sugar (tapioca syrup, glucose, corn syrup)
• 3/4 cup dark brown sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1.5 cups of peanut brittle, broken into small pieces (see below for recipe)

Instructions:

1. Peel and slice the bananas and set aside.
2. Place cream, milk, yolks, and sugars in a saucepan with a cooking thermometer.
3. Stirring frequently/constantly, raise the custard to 175-180F. Remove from heat immediately upon reaching 180. 
4. Quickly add the banana chunks, and weigh them down with a plate or lid, to keep them submerged.
5. Cover and let steep for at least two hours, but up to overnight.  If leaving for more than 2-3 hours, place custard in the refrigerator after 2 hours.  Give custard a jiggle every so often.
6. Using a slotted spoon, remove the banana chunks, or pour custard through a mesh strainer.  Add vanilla and salt.
7. Freeze ice cream according to manufacturer's instructions. 
8. Add peanut brittle at the end of the churn.
9. Enjoy!

    Bananas: Once you remove them from the custard, you might consider making them into banana bread, or cut them smaller and add to pancakes.

    Peanut brittle: You can use any recipe that you like. Break enough of it into small pieces to make 1.5 cups. The remaining should be devoured because it's delicious when it's fresh.   I made a half recipe of Spruce Eats Old Fashioned Peanut Brittle. 

2026 Academy Awards Best Picture Nominee - One Battle After Another

• IMDB link: One Battle After Another
• Tagline: "When their evil enemy resurfaces after 16 years, a group of ex-revolutionaries reunite to rescue the daughter of one of their own."  
• My Best Picture Project

    At its heart, this movie is a really excellent action/chase movie with a lot of tension, great acting, and engaging characters, and I liked it wildly more than the last Leonardo DiCaprio movie I saw (Killers of the Flower Moon).  It's full of dark humor and is a wonderful thrill ride.

    But.

    It is not without flaws. The immigration theme is a thin veneer that forms a backdrop to the movie, but it's not well integrated into the story. You can swap out ICE agents for Zombies, tweak a few details, and it would work just as well.  Or you could use the story as the basis for another Ocean's Eleven movie (one in which things go really, really wrong).  Immigration is a theme, but it's not what it's about.  

    Because the ICE/Revolutionary conflict is just a backdrop, that theme ends up feeling kind of performative and shallow. And what is the message? If I had to guess, it's "Pro-ICErs are ruthless, evil, and violent, and Anti-ICErs are stupid, paranoid, and violent."  

    And boy, are they stupid at times. The protagonists take unbelievably stupid risks for no gain, usually for laughs (stopping for sex when they should be escaping, or monologuing while walking on countertops), but these things didn't feel like something revolutionaries would actually do.  I would imagine they are more businesslike.   Even worse, they rat out their friends just unbelievably easily, yet we are supposed to believe that a completely paranoid organization wouldn't practice information hygiene to protect against that?  Every person who is caught knows WAY more about their friends than they should, and they endanger each other repeatedly.

    

    One of my favorite characters was Col. Lockjaw, played by Sean Penn.  He did a fabulous job creating a character that was Inspector Javert (but without the heart) mixed with Norman Bates or perhaps Travis Bickle. He walks weirdly, is a racist who fetishizes black women, and he's just ... off.   He was too weird even for the movie's Klan group (in a delightfully sly, ironic moment, Lockjaw is awarded the Bedford Forrest prize for excellence). Another neat parallel: the movie's two main villains are both played by Jewish men, echoing the casting and the actors' intent in Casablanca.

    I want to call out three actors who played small but important roles.  The first was Kevin Tighe who played paramedic Roy DeSoto in Emergency!  In this, he played a delightfully cantankerous elderly grand-dragon-type character. The other was Eric Schweig, who played Uncas in Last of the Mohicans.  In One Battle, he played a far less noble character, a Native American bounty hunter who works for the very people who hold him in contempt.   The last one is James Raterman who plays the ICE interrogator throughout the movie. He isn't (usually) a professional actor. He is a security consultant and former Homeland Security Investigator. He did a great job portraying an entirely competent agent. His character wasn't the slightest bit clownish, and ended up being one of the most frightening because of it.

    Finally, a note about politics.  The movie-makers were careful not to tie the movie to any specific POTUS in either of its two time periods, fifteen years apart. It could take place during any presidency starting with George W. Bush (ICE was formed in 2003), but it ended up feeling a little mistimed, given the real-life ICE conflicts happening right now.  For 15 of the last 22 years, I've lived an hour outside the Twin Cities. I'm still in Minnesota, but a little farther away now, and the situation in Minneapolis is incredibly tense, no matter which side of the conflict you are on, and for me, seeing a movie that uses that tension for frivolous entertainment value is a bit like poking a bruise.  The movie was made and released before Operation Metro Surge, but it hit awfully close to home.

    So, yeah, I really liked the movie—it was funny, tense, fast-paced, well-acted, and utterly engaging—and I definitely recommend it.  But you should go into it understanding that it reflects current events more than you might like.

(Pithy Reviews; and Rankings* out of 10 nominees):

1. Sinners (Southern gothic vampires sing the Blues; Cathy: 1, Chris: 1)
2. Bugonia (Alien-hunting conspiracy theorists; Cathy: 5, Chris: 2)
3. Train Dreams (Dreamy old logger survives ... life; Cathy: 2, Chris: 3)
4. One Battle After Another (Daddy-Daughter Revolution; Cathy: 4, Chris: 4)
5. F1: The Movie (Mesmerizing Top Gun for Formula 1 Fans; Cathy: 3, Chris 5)
6. Frankenstein (Monster-'splaning; Cathy: 6, Chris: 6)

• Hamnet (Cathy: x, Chris: x)
• Marty Supreme (Cathy: x, Chris: x)
• The Secret Agent (Cathy: x, Chris: x)
• Sentimental Value (Cathy: x, Chris: x)

* Rankings can change.