taking notes from the riddler

When I sat down to watch The Batman in a movie theater last week, the last thing I expected was to fall in love with the Riddler’s Facetime expertise.

For those who don’t know, the Riddler is an iconic supervillain who incorporates puzzles and riddles into his nefarious schemes. In the 2022 Batman adaptation, he is played by Paul Dano, and for the majority of the movie, you don’t actually see him in person. He’s usually pictured on a TV, computer, or phone screen. At least once or twice, he makes threats and delivers his latest crafty riddle via video call.

Paul Dano’s Riddler has a very weird, silly voice. This is one of Mr Dano’s many creative choices that I’m obsessed with. I could not help giggling whenever he opened his mouth to speak. He talks low, slow, and wheezy, and then occasionally breaks into incoherent yelling. This is where his video call technique comes in. Whenever he Facetimes Batman, he widens his eyes as large as humanly possible (keep in mind that he’s wearing a mask, so you only see his eyes) and brings his face as close to the phone camera as he can, so his face takes up at least 85% of the phone screen.

This brand of villiany is quite revolutionary to me. This guy is supposed to be the scariest character in this three-hour movie, and one of his go-to moves is just being extremely good at Facetime. The man knows his angles! And anyone who’s ever Facetimed me knows that I too am famously good at Facetime angles and incoherent yelling. The Riddler turns out to be kind of an incel, but that aside… his Facetime technique is game-changing and I’m taking notes. Excellent work. (The movie was good too.)

Yes, this is what the Riddler looks like. Superhero movies are so odd.

I consider myself a reality TV connoisseur, but one show that has never been on my radar is The Mole, which ran for five seasons in the early 2000s. Two seasons of the show are currently on Netflix, and I impulsively watched the first season in two days.

In The Mole, ten contestants travel abroad and are tasked with a series of team challenges, collecting money every time they successfully complete a challenge. But wait! There’s a catch. One of these ten people is the mole: a producer plant whose sole purpose is to sabotage the nine (real) contestants so they win as little money as possible.

At the end of each episode, all contestants take a multiple-choice quiz about the mole. What is the mole’s gender? What did the mole eat for breakfast this morning? How did the mole behave in the challenge yesterday? The mole obviously knows the answers to all of these questions, so they get everything right by default. The contestant who gets the lowest score on this quiz in each episode is eliminated, or “executed,” as Anderson Cooper puts it. (Yes, young Anderson Cooper is the host of this show! He does a wonderful job and I wish he would host more reality TV!) In the last two episodes of season one, three players are left, and one of them is the mole. This is where things get very dicey! Between the two real contestants, whoever has a more accurate idea of the mole’s identity wins all the money that the contestants have won in the season’s challenges.

My favorite thing about The Mole is that viewers at home don’t know who the mole is either! The mole pretends to be a contestant in all of their direct-to-camera confessionals, so the viewers are completely kept in the dark. This show would be much less entertaining if the viewers knew the mole’s identity from the start, and I think the decision to keep viewers guessing until the end is what makes this show not good, but great. I look forward to seeing how seasons 2-5 take this show to new heights!

Influenced by both South Asian music and Western pop, Raveena’s latest album Asha’s Awakening is beautiful, cohesive, and so soothing that I fell asleep three separate times during my first listen. It didn’t help that the very last track is a 13-minute guided meditation. I want guided meditations in all albums now! Raveena’s a genius and a visionary. At the moment, my favorite song on the album is “Love Overgrown” and if you’ve never listened to Raveena before, I recommend her 2019 Tiny Desk Concert! It’s one of my all-time favorite Tiny Desks and it’s a perfect introduction to her music and overall energy. Now I’m tempted to write a blog entry about all my favorite Tiny Desks. Maybe someday!

Today’s post is one day early because tomorrow I’ll be posting about my Oscar predictions! Yes, it’s that time of year. Please keep an eye out for my predictions which are absolutely 100% guaranteed accurate.

This week, a fan-made game called BTS Heardle was released. The original Heardle is a game where you listen to the first few seconds of a song and try to figure out what it is. The twist in BTS Heardle is that you are first given one line of lyrics. If you can’t guess what the song is based on the lyric, you are then given the first second of the song, and so on. The game trended so aggressively on Twitter that even Billboard wrote an article about it! Honestly not sure if BTS themselves would be good at the game, considering they occasionally forget about their own songs. Ouch!

In other news, BTS has been wearing a suspicious amount of Nike lately, so rumors of an upcoming partnership with Nike have been swirling. I’ll leave you with a recent selfie of Namjoon wearing a Nike beanie. His parasocial gaze is spot-on as always.