Books:
Dogs of War by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Well didn't this book turn out to be a totally frustrating, kinda rage-y disappointment that I forced myself to finish out of completion issues and not a desire to get to the end of this junk. Here's why I hated it: it betrayed me. It set itself up as being about these "bioform" techno-enhanced animals - dog, bear, bees, lizard - who are super smart and lethal and are leased out as military mercenaries and what happens when they break their programming to become independent players. That sounds like some kind of fun near-future sci-fi I thought. You know what's not fun? The author using that as setup to then blither on for like 80% of the book in court cases and PR battles for “bioform rights.” Yeah, the book is in fact not a popcorn sci-fi book but an insanely dull retread of ooo the future and what's considered “human” and “moral” but clearly not what’s considered “boring.” Ugh, it was just so dumb and disappointing. What happened to the military sci-fi book but with animals this thing was being sold as? Vanished. Other than this whole mission at the beginning, the book is basically the UN and dominance hierarchies and AI developing independent thought and just a load of not particularly well-written, unoriginal thoughts on, more or less, offering human dignity to bio-enhanced dogs. My hatred, thus, stemmed from marketing as if I'd wanted to read an ethics book about animal and AI rights, I certainly wouldn't have picked up an action SF book. I guess I can't really blame the author for writing what he wrote, but rather the way it was sold. Aaargh, avoid unless you're looking for some obvious pablum philosophy in a sci-fi package.
Tai-Pan by James Clavell
This is the second book (chronologically) in James Clavell's self-styled “Asian Saga,” the first being Shogun which I loved. They're all standalones, and this one is set in the mid-1800s right at the founding of Hong Kong as a British colony. It is, like Shogun, a huge amount of fun. The main story is about a Scotsman who's built up an enormous trading fortune and manipulated everyone he could to make Hong Kong - an otherwise mosquito-ridden useless rock - into the foundation for the British Empire's encroachment into Chinese trade. What I enjoyed about Shogun is present here as well which is that the characters are well-drawn and behave like real people while the author still manages to capture the oddness of the differing cultures in a different time. Underlying motives remain discernible because they’re the same as the ones we have today, e.g. loyalty, revenge, love, obligation, etc., but James Clavell is really good at putting those universal experiences in a context that’s deeply strange and thus deeply interesting, like what happens when family loyalty clashes with romantic love in the context of how Chinese families laid out power and gender dynamics in that era combined with how people of that era viewed race and interpersonal relationships. The book is basically a bigass potboiler - family drama, corporate sabotage, political maneuvering, fortunes lost then regained, etc. As with Shogun, the writing delivers what it's meant to in that the characters are fun, the action scenes are engrossing, it feels like all characters regardless of gender or race are given equal attention, and as far as doorstopper classy beach-reads go, this, as with Shogun, was thoroughly entertaining.
TV/Streaming:
Kevin Can Fuck Himself:
As can this show. I made it through 2 or 3 episodes of this POS before having to DNF for medical reasons, i.e. to prevent my entire being from transforming into a pure fountain of writer-rage. The basic premise of the show is “what if we saw life from the POV of the harried, put-upon, cliche blue-collar sitcom wife” and the way the show is structured is it intercuts between the world's unfunniest blue-collar Kevin James type sitcom (note the abject writer laziness of not even changing the title from Kevin in an effort to, I don’t know, make a wink-wink joke I guess) with some kind of (in its mind) thriller/drama as we see the wife suffering from the sexist abuse and getting to the breaking point due to her husband’s casually cruel treatment of her and deciding her only way out is to kill him. So among the endless list of crazy stupid things about this show is its complete and utter failure to explain, either in the sitcom or in the "drama" why the wife is doing anything she's doing. Why is she in the marriage? Why does everyone act like they’re trapped in the '80s? Why isn't she speaking up for herself? Why are the husband and all of his friends so consistently mean and uncaring? Why is her only solution to her problem to try murdering him? Why - and honestly this is where I was like you writers can go fuck yourselves and if I hadn't been so lazgry, I would’ve noted the name of the showrunner in order to avoid all future shows created by him/her/them - are we in a world (the present tense btw not the ‘80s/’90s) where (a) the lead character has to go to the library for internet access (um, nothing in the home? not even one of those new-fangled internet phone things?) where (b) she learns that it's not just ratty '60s homeless hippies who can O.D. on oxy as it turns out but normal White people like her husband too - this discovery becomes her murder plan. Honestly WTF?!? It is inconceivable not merely how anyone writes that on the page because surely that writer understands what it's saying about the character and world (and this was in the "drama" section so didn't even have the excuse of being in a deliberately unrealistic sitcom world though honestly even then) and how the eff did it make it past everyone else, like everyone at AMC for example? There are two options: 1, no one cares; 2, no one's competent; or I guess 3 options - both. I've railed about these sorts of problems in prior Media Reports and the reason this kind of thing makes me so crazy is because being intelligent about your work, caring about it enough to make it make sense, being self-aware enough to recognize when things aren't working and to turn to your team for help - or, if you're the executive, to send the writer back to the drawing board for a rethink after articulating notes about the problems you're seeing in the script and why they're not working (i.e. everything I wrote above but significantly less rudely) - is literally THE ENTIRE JOB OF BEING A PROFESSIONAL WRITER!! And let's be real here: it's not like the note I just gave is some obtuse and obscurely clever observation like my normal Janiceness, but is something anyone in high school or older would notice and the fact that it made it onto air or whatever we're calling it these days is honestly pretty gross.
Ganglands (Season 1):
So some Janice rec’ed this really well-done slow-burn crime show about a high-tech robbery team that inadvertently gets pulled in (for reasons I won't spoiler) to a war between rival drug gangs. What makes this show work is that it's not really in a rush to get you to the big payoffs but rather builds character and relationships such that when people do seemingly extreme things (vagueness due to not spoilering) it all seems grounded in character reality. In the way that shows like Breaking Bad or Gomorrah put the characters in extreme situations that feel both surprising and yet somehow inevitable, this show does as well. It is definitely a crime show - there are chases and shootings and plotting across every episode that leads up to a massive finale (though with a setup for a season 2 and knock wood there is one). What makes the show different and more fun that others of its ilk is that the robber gang isn't a murder/drug gang - they're into high-end high-payoff money, gold, stuff like that - which isn't to say they aren't highly efficient killers just that their bread and butter is their cleverness in setting up robberies and getting in and out efficiently and the way this skill gets applied when they're drawn into this other plot makes the show unique. In addition to not skimping on the action - it's pretty nonstop - the show doesn't skimp on character either and there are strong and complicated character relationships across the central POVs (primarily the robbers’, one of the drug gangs’, and a street kid gang that's also drawn in for reasons I won't spoiler). It's only 6 episodes and if you like your crime shows super violent, complex, and character-driven you'll likely find this one to be pretty engrossing. Thanks for the rec, Janice!
Movies:
Fear Street (Trilogy sorry "Collection") -
So some (other) Janice rec'ed this what I'm calling a horror miniseries because I basically treated it like 6 episodes rather than 3 movies but because they're technically movies, they will be reviewed in the movies section of Media Report period. The basic setup is there's a slasher loose in a town with a history of slashers and the investigation into and attempt to overturn a curse put on the town in pre-colonial America. The first movie is set in 1994, the second around 20 years before that, and the third back in the 1600s when the whole thing started. I think the idea here was to quote film archetypes (of sorts) like the 1994 one is in the vein of Scream, the '70s one (set at a summer camp) in the vein of '70s slasher movies and the third one is in the vein of well who knows. There are two - three if you're a Janice - essential problems with this "collection." The first is that they're atrociously written. There's so much dumb character and plot flab in them that they border on lethargic, and while in general Janice is very pro sleeping, that’s not exactly what I was hoping to get out of a horror film (though it’s not worst outcome either gotta say). There's not a lick of original thought, as unoriginal as me saying everything in these movies was by the numbers, though, relative to the film plot, that cliche borders on revolutionary. Nothing happens that you didn't see a mile off; the characters behave like idiots and, yeah, I'm aware the films are quoting a type of movie where people would do things like go off into the woods when they absolutely shouldn't go off into the woods, but really it just made the films dull because there was no twist on the cliche, no commentary on it, just... the cliche. Like the third one is about witch hunting in the 1600s and whatever Pilgrim-y Salem-y thing you think happened in that movie, absolutely did in the most boring way you can imagine - church and preachers and people with bonnets talking to each other in stilted English to wish each other, “Fine day, Goody Clement” and witch fever and all just endlessly dull. The second problem is that the movies got so mired down in quoting other movies and being boring that they ended up sidetracking what actually was the only interesting part of the films: unwrapping and trying to undo the curse that had been been placed on the town. When the movies focused on that - a present-tense story that was happening to the characters in the moment as they were venturing out into a slasher-filled world to try to unravel how it got that way and attempt to undo it - it was much more engaging and frankly if the 3 movies had been compressed into 1, I probably wouldn't be here complaining about it so much as it would've been just a dumb horror movie that quoted other movies. Unfortunately for me, that wasn't the case. Oh and the third problem was there literally wasn't a hot person to be seen within 400 square miles of that town regardless of time period which is TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE! Really, these are boring-bad not fun-bad and more irritating for being a squandered opportunity filled with never-hots. I was so fine with what I thought this collection - OMG it's unbearable to call it that without the quotes! - was going to be which was 3 tightly linked horror movies in which each one revealed more and more of what was really going on. Sadly no. Sigh.