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Photo: Supplied

Pop CultureOctober 17, 2020

Why the jigsaw puzzle is 2020’s greatest stress buster

Photo: Supplied
Photo: Supplied

Rebecca Wadey writes for Ensemble on the meditative pre-bed puzzle routine that has helped her through a messed-up year. 

My obsession with jigsaw puzzles started innocently enough, as most obsessions do. Initially it was a means to get off social media, and the inane scrolling one does discreetly while their family are watching yet another series of Brooklyn 99.

Of course, I could’ve spent the time folding washing or something similarly useful. But I’m nothing if not a realist. Besides, my husband had bought an old diner booth from the set of Ash vs Evil Dead and its firmly upright back and lip-edged table were crying out for a puzzle. So, I obliged. And I’ve never looked back.

It’s the place I best like to start my day, with a cup of matcha tea (I sneak down early, before the household wakes) and where I like to finish once the rest of the family are in bed.

We used to have a pet Pekin duck (RIP Gumboot) who lived with the chickens. After the chooks put themselves to bed each night she would sit outside the coop in quiet contemplation. It was her “that’s right, I’m not one of them” time. As the only woman in a household of boys I feel this way about my quiet pre-bed puzzle routine. It’s a reclaiming of my feminine energy.

Photos: Supplied

In the beginning of my puzzling career I encouraged my children to help me. Now I don’t want their grubby mitts anywhere near me when I’m in the zone (also the fights over the last piece became very intense and glaringly unfair as it’s obvious the last piece of the puzzle should ALWAYS belong to me).

The right puzzle speaks to me like poetry, an active meditation. I’ve never played the piano but sometimes, as my hands work their magic almost autonomous from my brain, I imagine myself as a concert pianist.

Puzzles also work as a tremendous metaphor for life. Some, like a 1,500-piece puzzle of a marble statue, have almost broken me. But they’ve taught me to break up what can seem an overwhelming problem into lots of smaller, manageable ones.

Methodically solving individual problems allows you to eventually see the big picture. With puzzles, and this is the part my children don’t get, you have to put in the mahi before you can claim the glory (my kids will watch me spend hours sorting pieces into colours and then grouping them by shape, before they just swoop in and carelessly place them).

Most importantly, puzzling has taught me never to give up and that I can achieve anything I set my mind to.

Sadly, not all puzzles are created equal. Well-meaning friends often gift me a puzzle and I obligingly begin it only to be filled quickly with regret. The pieces don’t click effortlessly together, you find yourself second guessing a placement or, even worse, when you try and remove an incorrect piece the edge of the knob peels up.

By far the best puzzle brand is Clementoni. Sure, they aren’t perfect (there was that time I had a puzzle with a missing piece) but the technology is far superior to anything else on the market.

Addendum: Don’t come at me with suggestions of a Wasgij. While I appreciate the craftship is good with these and they require an interesting discipline to complete, half the beauty of puzzling is in the aesthetics. And there’s nothing soothing about bright colours and bulbous cartoon faces.

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The cast of the Netflix’s Chicago 7, lead by Academy Award winner Eddie Redmayne. (Photo: Netflix)
The cast of the Netflix’s Chicago 7, lead by Academy Award winner Eddie Redmayne. (Photo: Netflix)

Pop CultureOctober 17, 2020

Review: Netflix’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 is Aaron Sorkin at his best

The cast of the Netflix’s Chicago 7, lead by Academy Award winner Eddie Redmayne. (Photo: Netflix)
The cast of the Netflix’s Chicago 7, lead by Academy Award winner Eddie Redmayne. (Photo: Netflix)

Our most verbose screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin, makes good on all his hype in just his second turn as director.

If I had to pick one of the best opening scenes of the past decade, I’d go with the scene that opens The Social Network. It’s an immediate evisceration of Mark Zuckerberg – and by proxy, every socially awkward man with more brains than charisma – by a fictional ex-girlfriend, one with no patience for him. It nearly renders the rest of the film unnecessary: we know everything we need to know about Zuckerberg, and why he made the cyberplague that is Facebook, from that one scene. And it’s all due to Sorkin’s incredible dialogue.

Sorkin is, give or take a pre-cancelled Woody Allen, the most audibly recognisable writer of his generation. From the very first line of dialogue, you know you’re listening to a Sorkin script, for better or worse. His characters volley lines of dialogue like they’re in the final match at Wimbledon, charged with enviable energy. Or at least it is when he’s on his game (see: The Social Network, Steve Jobs, most of the West Wing). When he’s not, his writing can be unbearably pompous, moving seemingly randomly along the spectrum of idealism versus cynicism and frankly, really goddamned boring (Studio 60, The Newsroom, The Newsroom again, just for posterity). 

However, even when he’s at his best, there’s one constant with Sorkin: he has the belief that a brilliant man (and it almost always is a man with him) can change the world with the strength of their words, their ideas, and their sheer will. This works when applied to men like Steve Jobs and, at a stretch, Mark Zuckerberg, but when put into the mouths of journalists and comedy writers, it can get tiresome. It’s why a project like The Trial of the Chicago 7 is a perfect fit for the guy. 

A group of protestors approaches cops in Netflix’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Photo: Netflix)

It’s a courtroom drama that focuses on the real-life, absolutely cooked trial of seven men in Chicago charged by the government with conspiracy and inciting riots. It’s an absolute rort, a way for the conservative government to shut down the leaders of countercultural protests around the Vietnam War and 1968 Democratic National Convention.

I’ll get this out of the way now: it’s good Sorkin, even great Sorkin. A courtroom drama, revolving around activism, is the perfect canvas for the writer to paint the big ideas and thoughts of men with broad strokes, and the dialogue here absolutely crackles, with a stacked ensemble of actors (including Eddie Redmayne, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Mark Rylance, Sacha Baron Cohen and a perpetually sitting Frank Langella) who devour their lines like free food at a fancy party. It’s such a huge cast that the actors only really get the chance to make vivid impressions rather than develop full characters, but it chugs along magnificently. Baron Cohen, in a rare dramatic turn (or a dramatic-with-punchlines turn) is especially strong here: he nails the weird charisma of an activist who can make people follow him, without ever understanding why. He also nails a manicure-on-a-chalkboard hybrid accent, a tall ask for any actor.

Mark Rylance, Michael Keaton and Ben Shenkmen in Netflix’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Photo: Netflix)

The best thing about the film, though, is how disarmingly relevant it is. Late in the piece, when the remaining members of the Seven are being prepared for the trial, it’s Hoffman who says, “It’s a revolution, you have to hurt somebody’s feelings.” The film, subtly but effectively, gets across the idea civility can often end up just being a pleasant cover for compliance, and even evil. From within the confines of the courtroom, we’re shown the vastly different costs of calm civility and rebellion: Redmayne’s Tom Hayden stands up in court to show respect to the judge because it’s “the right thing to do” while Yahya Abdul-Mateen II’s Bobby Seale, a black man roped into the trial for reasons unclear and corrupt, is literally bound and gagged for defending his constitutional rights. While civility can be cheap in the short term, it’ll cost you in the long run. Rebellion? It stings, but if you do it right, then you save others their pain. It’s a surprising political swerve for the writer, who has often been found stuffing progressive thoughts into the mouths of conservative men, winking at the audience as he does so, and it’s a welcome one, given the current climate of, well, fucking everything.

As with every Sorkin project, his best moments can be marred by his worst impulses. In this film, he mars the best scene – a harrowing crosscut between a late night trial prep session and a protest being violently shut down outside a Chicago restaurant – with a clunker of a line: “Am I the only one who sees what’s going on out there?” Sorkin is one of the most ostentatiously gifted writers of his generation, and he always wants to make sure that we get every point he’s making, every second of the time. 

It’s this impulse that makes his work energetic, but occasionally exhausting and less occasionally on-the-nose. But when the stuff is this good, you can understand why he does it. The most chilling moment in the film, bar none, is towards the end, when Judge Julius Hoffman (Frank Langella, embodying smug patriarchy brilliantly) commends the very civil, polite Tom Hayden for being the only one of the Seven not to be bordering on being in contempt of court. He says, “I truly believe that one day you will be a very productive part of the system.” It’s one of those first-scene-in-Social-Network moments: it sums up a film in one moment, like only Sorkin can.

You can watch The Trial of Chicago 7 on Netflix now.

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