Media Report

John Wick, series betrayals, and more!

Books:

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

After a long publishing drought this novel - novella really - by the author of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (a book I LOVED) emerged and I think the bottom line for me is I just really like the author’s writing regardless of the particulars of the story. I mean she absolutely has a grasp on story and character, but I wouldn’t say either of those are paramount in terms of my enjoyment of her books; rather it’s her complete immersion in the world she’s creating - tone, structure, plot, character, and sentence-level writing all kind of align. This book is no exception and, as with JS&MN, this book also edges into the fantastical without being in the fantasy genre. I won't spoil the plot - suffice it to say it's weird and you're trapped in the head of a narrator who doesn't understand the big picture at all though slowly comes to as the book progresses. This book is short enough that even if you're not into the overall story, it still serves as a good test bed if you haven’t read her before or, if you have and liked JS&MN, well you’ll likely enjoy this one too.

Can American Capitalism Survive? by Steven Pearlstein

Confession: this Janice is totally into the history and law around corporations because it’s so bizarre! I mean we create these non-human tax entities which we’re then forced to service in this thing called “employment” even if servicing them goes against our self-interest (24/7 water bottling in CA during a CA drought anyone?) and have to do things like go to court to force them to behave like the rest of us - aka the humans - do naturally. We Dr. Frankencitizens have constructed this very strange position where we need to protect ourselves from our dear monstrous C(o)r(p)eations before they, metaphorically (I hope), push us into a well while we’re happily plucking daisy petals after which they go off to explain to the courts how it was their right to do so and a court agrees and the rest of humans shrug as if, yeah, America’s inhabited by non-lawyered humans and heavily-lawyered Non-Human Things and we’re just getting shoved willy-nilly into wells now I guess, as opposed to, say, rewriting the terms of their existence in the tax code - only that won’t happen because the humans we elected to represent us actually represent them! We’re WEIRD!! So this nonfiction book is about the history of the very American free-wheeling laissez-faire style of capitalism; it’s something we take for granted (read: are enslaved by) but in some ways the invention of the LLC, in which people can band together with very few legal or financial requirements to form an eternal third party, was revolutionary as it turns out! If you fell asleep during that sentence, this book is not for you. However, I really enjoyed it as I knew nothing about the formation of the system which may or may not depending on your viewpoint be eating us alive right now. This book is history not economics and looks at how our system essentially forced corporations to be the greedy pigs they are or at least, by putting zero checks on greed, created the situation we're in now. The writing’s pretty breezy, it’s filled with factoids, and if you’re interested in this kind of thing a la moi you’ll likely really enjoy this book.

TV/Streaming:

Girls5Eva (Season 1):

This is yet another in the continuous stream of Tina Fey disappointments since 30 Rock (genius!) went off the air. The logline of this show sounds fun - a one-hit-wonder girl band reunites twenty years after they broke up to try to be a singing group again - but the execution is just so godawful because the writing team utterly fails to understand that what makes shows with OTT wacky characters work is a grounding in a relatable plot, Exhibit A being Ted Lasso which basically had nothing other than ridiculous unrealistic characters but managed to charm the pants off all of us because those characters were embedded in real conflict - the team needs to win; the team is being sabotaged; one character betrays another, etc. This is precisely what made 30 Rock so great and what makes this show (to hardly mention Kimmy Schmidt) so dreadful. As an example: the A-story of one episode revolves around the group AirBnB’ing in the Catskills and OMG the owner won't leave and the lead is too polite to get rid of the owner and imagine the hijinks. The B-Story is that another character has never made a salad. Do you need a minute to take that in and really inhale the whiff of writer-room desperation there? Those are ideas that shouldn't have made it past everyone placing their lunch orders with the PAs yet it's an entire episode. And as you can see from that brief description, the episode has nothing to do with achieving anything or wanting anything but rather with just some fake obstacles - and third party obstacles at that meaning it's not a conflict between our leads - being tossed into a plotless, characterless maw in the hopes of generating some entertainment. Additionally, are "the conventional one," "the ditz," (and really could casting Busy Phillips as your ditz possibly be more cliche and dull, like on top of it all, you’re leaning directly into type?), "the narcissist," and "the one who became a lesbian" - yes, that’s literally her entire character - really the best the team could come up with? Again, those characters feel like writing-room jumpstarters to get a conversation going but not in a million years the final product. Yet that's what's here. Dearest Tina, it doesn't matter how quippy, absurdist, or OTT your sense of humor is if there's no meaningful story to set it against - and you knew that at some point so please do whatever’s necessary to re-know it because - and I believe I speak for all of humanity here - we really all want something as awesomely hilarious as 30 Rock again. Well, this isn’t that sadly.

The Bureau (Seasons 1-5):

I feel I can't discuss this show without separating out its final season for reasons that will become apparent, thus...

The Bureau (Seasons 1-4):

Without doubt this modern-day French spy show is one of the best TV series I've ever seen in any genre. It's one of those shows that kind of starts you in the middle and doesn't explain much and just trusts that you'll sort it all out as you go and that never really stops which keeps it engaging across multiple seasons. The plots are intricate, stressful, and awesome; the characters have great life to them - and the actors are really great too - and the show has a sense of humor to it that helps balance its intensity. Each season has a satisfying ending while also setting up the next season, but what really makes this series such a cut above so many other series is the way it manages to ratchet up the tension with plot twists that seem utterly believable and impossible for the leads to squirm out of yet, if they do, it's always in a way that feels completely real and utterly in character. As you are no doubt aware from watching gazillions of other shows, that combo - plot twists dealt with in character - is really hard to pull off. Typically either the twist is weak but doable by the character or complex but the character is forced to change (like suddenly knowing some arcane tech fact or being an amazing kickboxer out of nowhere or, laziest of all, some deus ex machina arrives etc.) in order to solve it, and especially so in a show that has multiple and only somewhat overlapping narrative threads going on at once. I'm not going into the plots because they span four seasons and their complexity is part of the pleasure but I'll just say they're incredibly well-constructed the way Breaking Bad plots were well-constructed and set in today's world in a way that feels very real even though I'm assuming the writers just made stuff up. The show is in no rush to get anywhere, and you need to invest, especially in the early episodes, but it completely pays off your investment.

The Bureau (Season 5):

Well I may need to retract that last statement! Are you wondering how you take one of the most brilliant shows ever written and completely destroy it? Well what you, as showrunner, do is decide to hand off the final season to some random film director whose movie you liked but who's never written anything or worked on your show and then you literally don't even read or show up on set for the final two episodes of the season. And then discuss that with the NY Times so people will know you had nothing to do with it because, obviously (to this Janice at least), you were feeling the pressure of having to end a show so many people had lauded and you were too afraid of ending it badly so you let someone else do that for you instead - good job! Who knows, you might’ve wound up like Vince Gilligan who I’m sure felt the same pressure on Breaking Bad but delivered a satisfying ending; or you might’ve wound up like the Game of Thrones guys who got shredded for their ending. Instead, you’re getting this review of your personal choice rather some other review of your creative choice - how do you like that feeling, Mr. Original Showrunner! From the first 5 seconds - I can promise you Seasons 1-4 were NOT about prosthetic foot fucking (oooo, so edgy!) but that was essentially the opening of this season - to the truly abominably awful final episode this was some of the worst TV I've ever seen specifically because what came before was so awesome. The one thing the showrunner said in the article I read was that the mantra in the writer's room was never "reality" but rather "plausibility" and what made the show great to me was the character plausibility noted above. In prior seasons, the characters did things within the plot for plausible motives; in fact the entire show was based around a spy who betrayed everything for the woman he loved. We spent 4 previous seasons with the show teaching us how spies operate and how these specific people, constantly trying to be 10 steps ahead even when they turn out to get it wrong, operate. Then this final season threw all of that out as if it were irrelevant and basically went with "we'll just pretend our characters wouldn't think of it" despite the fact that the characters showed, multiple times over and over in the prior seasons, that thinking of “it” whatever “it” happened to be was their prime M.O. They were outsmarted or got things wrong, sure, but they were always on top of thinking through every possible outcome and trying to control for it, and this season just went “nah,” meaning it was the excellence of the prior seasons that made the flaws in this one so, to this Janice at least, kinda outright painful in a TVishly way.

Look, maybe you won't be as angry - betrayed I was betrayed! - at the final season as I was. Or maybe you can take advice that I would completely ignore which is watch the first four seasons and skip the last one. Or perhaps knowing it's bad will allow you to go in with lowered expectations and you'll wind up pleasantly surprised and think it's okay (it's not!). In any event, were it not for season 5, I'd unconditionally recommend this series. But with season 5 being what it is, well, watch at your own risk.

Movies:

Destroyer - This movie stars whispery ginger Nicole Kidman as a grizzled LA cop whose undercover op from years ago went bad and is now coming back to haunt her in the present tense. It’s a dark redemption story mostly about wondering whether Nicole is wearing a nose prosthetic (again - she likes those!) or if what’s happening around the eye area is some intriguing stapling or makeup situation or - does this qualify as redemption? - maybe it’s just where her face is at at this point on her filler and tightening journey. I mean I watched the whole thing but really you don't need anything beyond the logline to basically infer everything that happened in her past (undercover, drugs, gangs), everything that's going on in her present (investigating and hiding the investigation from fellow cops), the entire course of the movie (the gang leader re-emerges; she’s forced to face things in her past), the grimy noir-y tone/performance (depressed, guilty, impossible to get along with), and the overall dragginess of the plot and scenes. It not the worst thing I’ve seen but it feels kind of like literally everything of this ilk that I’ve ever seen with the sole distraction being whatever was happening with her face and even that got kinda boring at some point if you can believe it. So, yeah, blah.

John Wick (1-3) - Among the many of this series’ virtues is its graciousness in understanding that if it’s going to subject us to three films encompassing a dubiously-plotted world with progressively more incomprehensible rules, the very least it could do is a provide us with a mustachioed and scruffed Keanu Reeves, cheekbones chiseled to a degree that makes them weapons in their own right, hair finger-feathered and, despite all three films taking place entirely at night or in dark hallways, with a Pantene-level of shine and movement that defies all laws of both optics and particle physics, a smoldering glare of the sort one would expect of someone who cared enough about his appearance to carefully choose his notch-lapeled, nautical shouldered, 5-button vested suit before leaving his house - or, at some point, having it burn down entirely - in order to calmly murder hundreds while looking his absolute best, said murders usually - almost exclusively come to think of it - accomplished by holding one person down in order to shoot a bunch of other people before shooting the person he's holding and then repeating all that, though maybe with a delicate cut on his eyebrow from a random ricochet that only serves to add a layer of gravitas to the cheekbones, hair, eyes, suit, scruff, ‘stache, and weltenschaung. The plot, hmm. Something about assassins, a hotel, there are these coins, oh yeah he has a dog, and there’s some thing where in the hotel assassins are safe from other assassins and a whole slew of rules around all this and breaking those rules and people coming after people and I don’t know because I was too consumed with watching heads being blown off by a big slab of meat candy to really care - John Wick 4 can’t arrive soon enough as far as I’m concerned!