The Tall Rob Report

2026/04/07

Cat Cafe Manager (Roost / Freedom, 2022)

Of course I had to play a game that focuses on running a cat cafe. That’s a no-brainer. The gameplay is simple and the story doesn’t do anything out of the ordinary. The writing can be funny at times, which goes a fairly long way in a game that can be quite repetitive. I can see playing it again to experiment more with the various style and decor options that are available for customizing your cafe. But first, cats!

You start with the inheritance of some land in a small town where your grandmother once lived. She was a cat lover and you are in charge of creating a cafe that caters to cats and also humans as a way of honoring her memory. Also, a grimalkin appears in a cat shrine near town and asks you to help restore this sacred clearing to its former glory. There are four statues in the shrine and if you thought maybe each of these would correspond to an area of the cafe that you can improve, you would be correct. When you earn “delight” points for meeting your customers’ needs, you can improve your cafe’s furniture, staffing level, menu, or style and decor. You can switch freely between these branching skill paths at any time, which allows for a great deal of customization as you work to make your grandma proud.

How you please your customers is simple: serve them the food or drink they want, talk to them, and allow them to play with certain cats. Each type of person has a different stereotyped personality and diet. The vagabonds enjoy water and sandwiches, the artists enjoy coffee and sweets, the punks like milkshakes and vegetables, the witches like tea and platters, the fisherfolk like cola and soups, and the tech bros like their fancy coffee drinks and complicated sandwiches. There’s more variety than that, but you get the point. Some cats appeal to these personalities more than others, so when the cats appear as strays by your front door, you can decide which ones to adopt.

At first, you’ll only have enough money to acquire a sink and serve water to vagabonds, but as the days go by and word of mouth spreads, you will be able to get a variety of appliances and ingredients to attract a wider variety of customers. Somehow, there’s no need for a dish machine… I said money above, but it’s a variety of objects that you trade to shop-owners in town. Each store takes a different kind of currency and each type of customer rewards you with one of those currencies. Gold, gems, materials, fish, and timber rule everything around me.

What it means for you as a proprietor is that you will have to direct your attention to punks if you want to expand the physical footprint of your cafe because they are the ones who pay in construction materials. Want to improve your menu? Better advertise to the witches who will pay you in gems that you can pay to the fisherman who runs the dry goods store so you have the recipes and ingredients you’ll need. There’s a constant process of seeking to balance the needs of the different customer types with your overall goals for your cafe. There were definitely times when I stopped advertising to some of my clientele because I didn’t need any more of their form of payment. I needed more recipes and more furniture, so it was all witches and tech bros for a good while in the mid-game.

You’ll be chasing the feeling of stasis every few days when it seems like you’ve struck equilibrium between the size of your cafe, the customers who arrive, the cats you have, the food you offer, and the workers you manage. In this way, the game has a compelling cycle. The game-days fly by quickly and any feeling of letting down your customers will soon pass. Each day, you can see your customers’ satisfaction levels, conveyed by a smiley face. You’ll also get a letter grade ranking based on what I am assuming is an average of their overall satisfaction.

If this process all sounds rather faceless and plain, then you need to consider that the larger point of the game is that you can adopt cats. I mean it’s right there in the title, so I don’t want to belabor it. You can eventually have up to nine different cats in your cafe at once. You may also have had others pass through on their way to a forever home out in the community. I think I fostered close to 15 cats in my time with the game. As mentioned previously, each cat has its own traits and skills (playfulness, bladder control, messiness, etc.) that will make it a good fit (or not) for what you are trying to achieve in your cafe. Late in the game, you will get certain lures to place in the strays’ food bowl that will attract special cats with unique attributes. I had a hard time deciding whether to keep these clearly beneficial bonus cats or part with the first few cats I’d adopted (and named after some of the actual cats in my life).

Unfortunately, these cats cannot talk to you. Only the grimalkin speaks, and only at specified points in the narrative. Otherwise, you can see how the story of the small town (and your cafe’s role in it) plays out by interacting with a few regulars. There are five specific visitors who are special enough to get a name and an avatar. As you get to know Bonner and Arwel and Mateo and Carla-lala and Finley, you will see how they may already have existing relationships that you are joining. Some of the fun in the writing shows up here. You get to choose how to support Finley in her music career and how to advise Bonner in a conflict (based on a simple misunderstanding) with his husband. Finley has a great line in comparing music to sauce that goes on the rice that is your brain. Music is amazing in that way, and it’s nice to share that moment with Finley. Arwel has a brusque personality fitting his punk personality but can also quip Dad jokes with the best of them, such as when he asks, “Which smart-ass decided the word litter should refer both to the thing they poop in and their kids?” I laughed.

I’ll be coming back to this game again for sure. I was so focused on foods in my original playthrough that I didn’t do a lot of intentional decorating. I am thinking of making different sections or rooms for each kind of customer, just to see how that goes. If there are any updates to the game, it would be nice to give your employees a place to sleep. You can purchase cat beds, litter boxes, and food bowls that your cats can use throughout the day and night. But, each night at 7:00 when the customers leave, your workers just stand around with vacant stares. They should be allowed to go home and rest! Or, if this is some kind of cult-like cat cafe where they spend the night at work after their shift, I will need to obtain beds for them. They can already make use of the food they prepare or the toilets I’ve installed. If the developer’s goal was to highlight the exploitation of restaurant work, then they certainly succeeded. Somehow I don’t think it was, and that nagging thought took me out of the pure joy of building a cute place for cats and humans to socialize each other.

2026/03/31

Das Lehrerzimmer [The Teachers’ Lounge] (İlker Çatak, if... Productions, 2023)

Here we have a fascinating film about teachers, students, schools, learning, and the truth.

When I started this project about teachers or teaching on the silver screen, I never wanted to cast judgments on a film for being closer to reality than another. That would be boring. I am mostly reacting to whatever elements of the film make me think about my experiences as a teacher and how the teacher appears as a full human being in the film. The shortsightedness of focusing on how closely the onscreen events adhere to my experiences would be most evident in a film such as Das Lehrerzimmer because of its German setting. Of course teaching in a different country would give rise to practices that I might not be familiar with. What a tedious analysis it would be if I just ran down the differences or departures from what I expected based on U.S. schooling. Hell, that wouldn’t even be analysis but cataloging. Boring either way.

Thankfully for both of us, this film addresses issues beyond education through the use of a school setting. The publisher’s description on the back of the box would have you think the film is about an idealistic, young teacher trying to find the culprit of a recent theft in her classroom. That’s only the beginning of the plot. There is a much bigger meditation here on what it means to reason from incomplete information. We’re first exposed to that idea in the daily warm-up that Frau Nowak (played by Leonie Benesch) gives to her students. She’s asking them to prove that 0.333… + 0.333… + 0.333… is equal to 1. One student points out that the solution is something like 0.999… and thus it never becomes 1. Another student disagrees by offering that 0.333… is equal to ⅓, so three of that number is equal to 1.

The question Frau Nowak asks her class after these competing perspectives clash on the chalkboard is key: Is this a proof or an assumption? The class doesn’t have the time to fully respond to that question. They seem confused by their teacher’s choice of terms, if not the math itself. I’ll note that I was confused about the age of the students at this point because this question seemed quite advanced for the apparent age of the students; we learn later that they are 11 or 12. This feeling of searching confusion continues through the rest of the film as the characters continue to contest what counts as evidence and the ethics of collecting it in the first place.

See, it’s not just the initial theft in Carla Nowak’s classroom that is at issue. After the administration botches an investigation into the theft of one student’s cash, Carla gets the idea that maybe it’s one of her colleagues who has sticky fingers. There’s a communal pay-what-you-can jar near the coffee machine in the teachers’ lounge and she sees another teacher shaking some coins out of it. She suspects foul play, so she sets up her wallet to be plainly visible on the back of her chair when she steps out of the lounge. She has also set her work laptop’s camera to record its field of vision, including the chair. Although the camera records the distinctive sleeve of an arm that reaches into her purse, Carla did not obtain the consent of anyone to record in the lounge.

The fallout from this (also) botched investigation contaminates relationships among the staff, especially when the nonconsensual nature of the recording becomes apparent. Carla had initially seemed to be a sympathetic victim, but now she seems to have entrapped another professional with her misguided scheme. Even though her evidence is clear about the thief’s identity, her method of obtaining it was unethical. This situation puts everyone in a difficult position, not the least of which is the child of the apparent thief who is also a student in Carla’s class. It’s not clear how to adequately resolve this issue as it escalates throughout the film.

We eventually learn that not only is Carla in her first year in the school, but also she is from Poland. Her lack of experience and outsider status causes other teachers to reprimand her for not involving the faculty union in the first place. She was too ambitious with her investigation and too trusting of her own students, they think. This aspect of Carla’s character is compelling as well. How schools absorb new teachers (regardless of their age or experience) is a fraught process. Everyone comes with their own hang-ups and ideas about what school is and how to do it. An organization like a union or faculty committee can try to mold a semblance of coherence around a process that can be challenging to navigate, but it is hard to have adults agree on a common vision for something as complex as schooling.

As with investigating a classroom theft, there is not always a simple approach to take. The delicate nature of interrogating children about their peers’ behavior can lead adults to lean into the power imbalance inherent in teaching. Sometimes adults might find it easier to create scapegoats or trust gut instincts when a more careful approach is needed. How to wrangle the truth in such situations is difficult and exposes the assumptions we all have about how the world should work from our vantage point. With Das Lehrerzimmer, İlker Çatak has done an excellent job of depicting the less-than-ideal circumstances we find ourselves in when negotiating proofs and assumptions in service of trying to reach the truth.

2026/03/24

Steve (Tim Mielants, Big Things Films, 2025)

Why I chose to watch this movie on the first day of my spring break is a mystery to me, too. I have been asking colleagues and friends about movies that center teachers’ daily lives (as laborers and as people) and one of them suggested Steve. It’s got Cillian Murphy, she said. He’s the headmaster, she said. It’s about a reform school for boys in England, she said. The boys have behavioral and emotional problems, she said. The look on her face as she said these words communicated that it would not be an easy, gentle watch. It was not.

I’d either misheard her or she did not say that the film is set in 1996. I had hoped a movie made in 2025 about teaching would have been set in that era, or at least one touched by the pandemic. Even so, its chaotic camerawork and pacing reflects plenty of what a teacher’s day is like, even if it doesn’t involve older adolescents who are in a boarding school setting. They do add a great deal of tension and excitement to the 24-hour period shown episodically in the film.

There are glimpses of what these boys could be like if they were featured in the fuller narrative of a short series based on the same source material (the novel Shy by Max Porter). The half-dozen of them who get enough screen time to be named have established beefs with each other and society at large. They each have an understanding with Steve (no last name is given, so he’s never Mr. Surname) as a more knowledgeable other in their lives. They are sick of him and his go-to phrases and prompts for reassuring or disciplining them in turn. There’s a comfort revealed in these interactions that could have been interesting if it were fleshed out across multiple days or weeks of time. For the purposes of communicating the sturm und drang of the boys’ lives and their resonating effects on their teachers, a short burst is enough.

Even so, there is still more going on in the day of the film that adds even more detail (i.e., stress) to the narrative. Our first view of Steve is from an interlaced video taken in the confessional format so familiar to documentaries and mockumentary sitcoms. The producers are trying to get him to speak about his job, yet his mind is elsewhere. Turns out there is a news crew at Stanton Wood that is creating a short segment on the school. Their program, Points West, runs as a packaged segment at the end of the nightly news. Initially, the camera people, producer, and presenter are trying to do their best to make an honest look at the school and the troubles its staff and students are facing. This does not remain the case, as they end up disregarding the requests from Steve and the other staffers to not film in certain areas or during certain times of day. They’re more of a nuisance than anything. Their presence helps break up he scenes and give more context for the boys and the staff; the confessional segments with “give me three words that describe you” or “what would 1996 you say to 1990 you?” prompts are interspersed between the classes and conflicts of the day in question.

Because this is a single film and not a series, there’s never a grand reveal where the viewers or the characters see the completed Points West segment. It’s simply more background noise for all involved at Stanton Wood. It’s “just one more thing” that is contributing to Steve’s on-the-job chemical abuse. The same goes for the conversation the staff has with two people who appear to be the managers of the trust that owns the property where the school is located. Turns out they are selling the land, so the school will shut down in December 1996, which is a few short months away. The immediate effects on Steve and the other staffers are uniformly negative, but we are never sure how the boys might have reacted to this news. One gets the feeling that it is simply too heavy a burden for the adults to bear, so they need time to process that trauma before sharing the news with the students. Again, this is “just one more thing,” but it is the sort of all-encompassing “thing” that makes going through the motions of teaching children into a soul-draining exercise for reasons that have nothing to do with the children at all (see also teaching during the polycrisis). Urie Bronfenbrenner might have said that this property sale is an example of a change in the exo-system affecting the meso-system and micro-systems for those in this school.

Steve is the title character, so he gets the most screen time, but his colleagues Amanda, Shola, Owen, and Jenny all play a role in each others’ lives. As expected, Tracey Ullman’s Amanda does the emotional labor for the staff during meetings, making sure that Steve is emotionally and physically regulated when they gather. As an aside, it seems like a blessing and a curse to have meetings that do not involve agenda items prepared in advance. There is a lot of planning that goes into making an effective meeting happen, but being so busy dealing with so many issues means there is not time to cobble together line items to discuss. Everyone is just in survival mode. Steve reveals this existential exasperation when he speaks voice memos into a personal voice recorder. He’s addressing himself in the third person and being quite hard on himself about all the things he has plans to do during the day. Anyone keeping track of all of these tasks will easily see that he falls short of his intentions, even as he takes the day as it comes.

Those voice memos and his negotiation of how best to address each new eventuality as it unfolds during the day are both very effective in reflecting how day-to-day concerns can easily overwhelm the executive functioning abilities of teachers. Students, of course, are still beginning to develop executive functioning at this age, so having a more knowledgeable other be not the most helpful model of managing actions, emotions, and thoughts makes for a challenging learning environment. Sometimes surviving the day is all you can do. There’s an effective scene toward the end of the film where Steve returns home to his wife and daughters and his wife (she is not named) rhetorically asks him “Another tough one?” as he is covered in dried mud and has dead, exhausted eyes.

Steve represents a telling case, if not a representative one. Most teachers are not dealing with all of the overlapping layers of stress and pressure that we see in the film. This seems to have been a particularly bad day for us to have seen Steve at work. Even if Bronfenbrenner’s layers of structure are not visible or made manifest all the time, they are nevertheless part of teachers’ and students’ lives. In the days, the moments, when we have to reckon with the existence of these structures, the compounding stress brought on by that awareness can be debilitating. Steve does an excellent job of making those structures visible and, in this particular case, apparently immutable.

2026/03/17

Election (Alexander Payne, MTV Productions, 1999)

After considering the idea for a few years, I figured I’d execute it. This entry is part of what I hope will be a long-running series of reviews of movies that are set at schools and focus on teachers as characters instead of caricatures. The source of this idea is a comment from one of my high school teachers who referenced Election as a rare example of a movie that examines the humanity or complexity of a teacher’s inner life instead of reducing them to a mere punchline. If this introduction sounds familiar, it’s because I referenced it when writing about Teachers in late 2024.

The difference between watching Teachers for the first time and watching Election for the first time is that the latter was just a movie I saw when I was in high school, while Teachers was an off-hand suggestion from a professor in my English Education graduate program. I came to Teachers with the intention of learning from it how not to conduct myself as an educator. For Election, I was just a dumb teenager looking for a funny movie.

Now that I’ve watched it at least three times, and have spent most of my working life in schools or other settings related to K-12 education in the United States, I feel more informed about addressing how it depicts a teacher’s daily life.

The beginning of the movie involves a repulsive comment from one of the teachers about the student he is sexually abusing. It’s said in an extreme close-up shot with each word enunciated sickeningly. This comment and the wider plot arc it is part of is meant to establish the importance of morals (or is it ethics?) in a one’s life. That teacher is fired after the the administration learns about his behavior. The rest of the film focuses on the student (Tracy Flick, played by Reese Witherspoon) running for student body president while a friend of the abuser (Jim McAllister, played by Matthew Broderick) attempts to sabotage her campaign because he finds her persistent try-hard persona annoying.

Look, I never said this kind of movie had to make teachers into exemplar human beings. I am not holding up either of the white male teachers (and yes most of the characters in the film are white) as models of pedagogical or personal renown. The actions of Flick’s abuser are reprehensible and both McAllister and the principal deal with them appropriately and swiftly, without much of any guilt over punishing a colleague they’ve been friendly with to that point. McAllister’s turn toward vindictiveness is a little harder to understand, which is why he is not a character that is a source of our sympathy. Surely, a more enlightened way of assisting a student in Flick’s position would be to support her emotionally, academically, and socially as she processes her trauma. Given that those elements are an afterthought, Election is a time capsule of how trivially society treated child sexual abuse in the ‘90s. One would think a similar movie set in 2026 would be more invested in exploring Flick’s perspective instead of focusing on the various ways McAllister destroys his life.

As this movie is about McAllister as much as it is Flick, his misdeeds are the focus of most of our time. We see Flick at home with her mother a few times, but all we get of her inner life is that she appears to be as dedicated to scholastic greatness as McAllister suspects. Her father is dead and she wants to achieve all that she can in high school and beyond. McAllister, positioned as the more reasonable or relatable teacher, in contrast to Flick’s abuser, is a little more entertaining to watch unravel. He’s unable to conceive a child with his wife, Diane (played by Molly Hagan) and starts to lust after his former colleague’s recently divorced wife (Linda Novotny, played by Delaney Driscoll). These desires spiral out of control in a darkly comic fashion, complete with a swollen eye from a bee sting that helps McAllister to appear all the more pathetic. When he returns home after the next school day, Diane and Linda are there on the couch waiting for him to realize the gravity of the mistake he made. He’s left to spend the night alone at the hotel where he’d once planned an afternoon tryst with Linda before his misdeeds caught up with him.

The framing of McAllister as the protagonist is delightful when his world collapses. He’s so self-centered at undermining Flick that he doesn’t see how all the threads of his life are connected. Teachers learn that their capacity for with-it-ness (basically executive functioning) is an important part of their success in the classroom. We see very little of McAllister’s actual teaching, so it’s not possible to give a fair assessment of his with-it-ness in the classroom. However, it is very clear that he is unaware of how other people may have actions or agency that conflict with his own. The janitor who sees him miss the trash can when throwing away an old box of Chinese food ends up being his undoing. He bluntly suggests that Linda and he get a hotel room, so when she later plays along with the offer, he takes it at face value. He sees his colleague destroy his career and a child’s life through sexual violence but thinks he’s not going to have the same problem with his own schemes. It may not be the point of film, but a message that comes through loud and clear is that McAllister is oblivious to the lives and intentions of everyone else he meets. He gets his deserved consequences (job loss, divorce, relocation), but he might never realize he is the one that caused all of those problems. One hopes that actual teachers are not so clueless and careless about their conduct in the real world. We at least have one more example we can point to of what we don’t want to be like.